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Updated: June 15, 2025
"We shall send her down her chosen path in a boat. Peters will load the dingey with ballast, while you and I will lay Dolores out as well as we may. Bring me that grating, Pearse. We will speed her in the dress she loved. Her soul would sicken at a suffocating winding sheet. Hurry, for the sun is half gone!"
"What fellows?" asked Perry, puzzled, as Cas pulled the dingey alongside the cruiser. "Why, Bert and Wink and the rest of them." "Haven't seen 'em." "Haven't? Where'd you get the boat, then?" "What boat?" "That one! The one you're in! Say, are you dippy?" "This is our boat and I got it " "Your boat nothing! That's our boat, you silly chump! Think I don't know our own tender?"
I got a boat's crew together, and away we went in that deadly smother. An hour's row and we got within hail of the derelict as one of the crew said, 'feelin' as if the immortal life was jerked out of us. The dingey lay there on the glassy surface, not a sign of life about her. Yet I had, as I said, seen something waved. The water didn't even lap its sides. It was ghostly, I can tell you.
The dingey, with its human freight, was smoothly lowered to the water's edge, and rowed swiftly away, the captain, standing straight and tall in the stern, turning back to touch his cap with a smile, as the cheers resounded, but his eyes were upon two young faces who forgot to wave handkerchiefs, even, so absorbed were they to catch his slightest glance.
Five or six men, drenched from head to foot, swearing and grumbling; with faces pinched with cold, all lowering with the same expression of anger and resentment and shining whitely at him out of the confusion. He saw the emptying seats, the shipped oars, the name Peregrine in black letters upon the white paint of the dingey; and she?... she was not there!
I spoke, and they got more courage. I stood up in the boat, but could see nothing in the dingey. I gave a sign to go on, and soon we were alongside. In the bottom of the dingey lay a man, apparently dead, wearing the clothes of a convict. One of the crew gave a grunt of disgust, the others said nothing.
In another minute the dingey was back on its davits, the anchor up, and we were under way. Poor captain! Within a week he became used to Le Mire's sudden whims. At San Diego we went ashore.
That left the dingey for Willy and the cook. I glanced at Willy. "Which would you rather chance?" I asked him, "the dingey or the duck boat?" "The dingey," said he quickly, and we both knew the cork-like quality of this stubby craft. "Very well," said I. "Call John, when the word comes to go." "Aren't you going with us?" asked Helena now, suddenly, approaching me.
Swiftly they worked, these men who had cause to remember the departed siren without great love, and they placed her, secured to a grating, across the thwarts of the dingey, to which the grating was in turn secured.
The bells again jangled as she got more speed and as the anchor came home. Our search-light swept a wide arc along the foot of Natchez Hill, as our bows circled about and headed down the great river. And now we picked in full view, hardly sixty fathoms distant, the dingey, pulled furiously toward us.
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