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Scarcely had he felt the grate of sand when with a powerful shove he sent his canoe back, and almost in the same instant Pierre's rifle leveled menacingly shoreward. Drawn up high and dry on the sand-bar were the two canoes.
It was a small triumph, but intoxication breeds easy laughter. I had been drinking deep that morning of a sparkling happiness more disturbing than any wine. We sent the canoes shoreward into the curve where the reeds lay. The stiff green withes rattled against our canoes like hail, and gave warning of our approach for a half mile distant. I nodded my inner approval.
The seamen gained heart, once safely quit of their dangerous rifles, and followed the old fellow's lead, until the business of fire-fighting drove from their minds the fear of flying missiles from shoreward.
The boy was at once taken on board and rated as a seaman; and the later adventures of the trip are here given as he reported them on his return with the ship some months later. The mist continued thicker and thicker for a time, and when it suddenly furled itself away, they found themselves on an unknown coast, with the wind driving them shoreward.
And all the while his gills were blowing out and frothing, and purring, and his lidless eyes looked into mine, until, nauseated and trembling, I dragged myself back to the beach, where already the pretty nurse alternately wrung her hands and her petticoats in ornamental despair. Beyond the cove, Halyard was bobbing up and down, afloat in his invalid's chair, trying to steer shoreward.
During the second awful shoreward heave of the Atlantic a scene occurred off New York Bay that made the stoutest nerves quiver. A great crowd had collected on the Highlands of the Navesink to watch the ingress of the tidal wave. Suddenly, afar off, the smoke of an approaching ocean liner was seen. It needed but a glance to show that she was struggling with tremendous surges.
A Northeast gale off Hatteras: immense gray combers, five to the mile, charging shoreward, occasionally breaking, again lifting their heads too high in the effort, truncated as by a knife, and the liquid apex shattered to spray; an expanse of leaden sky showing between the rain-squalls, across which heavy background rushed the darker scud and storm-clouds; a passenger-steamer rolling helplessly in the trough, and a square-rigged vessel, hove to on the port tack, two miles to windward of the steamer, and drifting south toward the storm-center.
Manned as she was, the schooner might never be worked back to a landfall if they did so. The keen old eyes of Horace Newbegin first spied the thing which promised hope. From his station at the wheel he shouted something which the younger men did not catch, but his pointing arm drew their gaze shoreward. Coming out from the Head was an open boat.
The circle of their advance looked somehow like the surge shoreward of a great wave, and the similarity was heightened by the nodding glimpses of the light eagles' feathers in their hair. The run across the honey-combed plain was hazardous even to Indian ponies and three went down kicking, one after the other. Two of the riders lay stunned. The third sat up and began to rub his knee.
Then, with the unreasoned impetuousness of a charging bull, he turned and flung shoreward down the pier. The cripple, groaning still, crawled to Simpson's feet and sat there. "Pauvre garçon!" repeated Simpson dully. "Pauvre garçon!" Suddenly the boy stopped groaning, swung Simpson's kit-bag on his shoulder, and sidled up the pier.
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