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Updated: May 22, 2025
Gadabout passed through the narrow opening without a stop, though carrying twigs and bright leaves away with her. We ran the next straight stretch of the creek, and at the bend came upon another island. Here shoals and cypress stumps quite blocked the channel. In a good, old landlubberly manner we hitched Gadabout to a tree and waited to see if the rising tide would make a way for us.
It happened that the surgeon of McQuestion, who was something of a gadabout, was up on a gossip, and between them they proceeded to repair Leclere, "Merci, non," said he. "Do you fix firs' de dog. To die? NON. Eet is not good. Becos' heem Ah mus' yet break. Dat fo' w'at he mus' not die."
As we moved slowly into the creek it was between banks in strange and attractive contrast. The bank to port was low and covered with a marsh forest of cypresses. It was a dark and gloomy forest, but the spell of its sombre depths drew our eyes quite as often as the cheerfuller charm of the woodland on the other side; and so was equally responsible for the zigzag course that Gadabout was taking.
Kindly overlooking this error of a fellow navigator, the Commodore patiently spent considerable of the beautiful summer evening in getting Gadabout turned around; and then again bore down upon the schooner. This time her being in the wrong place did not seem to matter; for we reached her all right, and there probably was no place along that side where we did not remove more or less paint.
Indeed, for a while, her closest associates were conservative in forecasting on that point. But that was for another reason. The boat was of extremely light draft. At first, in making landings we were forced to leave it pretty much to Gadabout as to which side of the pier she was to come up on, and which end first, and with how much of a bump.
Then, crossing slowly over her anchor and turning to head the other way, Gadabout rose once more higher and higher, as the night wore on and as the great recurring swell rolled landward again the waters of the sea.
Next day, bustling about with making all things shipshape, we could scarcely realize that we were actually getting under way again. But when our mooring-lines were hauled in, Gadabout backed away from her old friend, the bridge, swung around in the narrow marsh-channel, and soon carried us from Back River out into the James.
Letters and papers and packages and magazines were welcomed aboard. Comfortably we settled down for an evening of catching up with the world. Next morning Gadabout made an uneventful run down the stream, anchored just within the mouth of the creek, and sent Henry off into the country foraging. Of course certain provisioning arrangements followed Gadabout from harbour to harbour.
Still we lingered in Eppes Creek, and soon we could not do otherwise than linger; for we wakened one morning to find the stream frozen over, and Gadabout presenting the incongruous spectacle of a houseboat fast in the ice. All that day and the next the coldness held; and the ice and the tide battled along the creek with crackings and roarings and, now and then, reports like pistol shots.
Indeed it was found unpleasantly near. The houseboat had stranded on a safe, level shoal, but almost on the edge of a steep declivity leading down into twelve feet of water. We felt that if Gadabout had to go aground, she at least might have done it a little farther away from precipitous channel banks.
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