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Updated: May 15, 2025
Barrels, hen-coops, portable settees, and life-preservers do not adorn the cabin, as they should; and, roving wildly to and fro, my eye sees no ray of hope till it falls upon a plump old lady, devoutly reading in the cabin Bible, and a voluminous night-cap. I remember that, at the swimming school, fat girls always floated best, and in an instant my plan is laid.
It is a large fur-handled hunting knife like Corkey in its style. Corkey peers down on deck. The wood-choppers are fastening life-preservers about their bodies. Whether they be crying or shouting, cannot be told. He sees human forms hurrying past the cabin window, and there is reflected the yellow, wooden, ribby thing which he knows to be a life-preserver. It is a cheering thing in such a moment.
Men were now appearing in life-preservers, and hovering impatiently in the vicinity of the lifeboat davits, but he heard no orders for manning the boats and he was distinctly aware of the engines still going.
Then the crowd scattered, and a moment later the turnout, with a twist, struck the water and went over sideways, plunging old Filbury and William Philander into the stream. "My, what a dive!" "Everybody to the rescue!" "Somebody get some life-preservers!" So the cries arose as the students ran from every direction and lined the bank of the river, which, at this point, was but a few feet deep.
He began anywhere: you put some question to him, made some suggestive observation: instead of answering this, or decidedly setting out towards answer of it, he would accumulate formidable apparatus, logical swim-bladders, transcendental life-preservers and other precautionary and vehiculatory gear, for setting out; perhaps did at last get under way, but was swiftly solicited, turned aside by the glance of some radiant new game on this hand or that, into new courses; and ever into new; and before long into all the Universe, where it was uncertain what game you would catch, or whether any.
I slowly cocked my revolver, doubting my senses, for each time one of the invaders reached the deck he sprang into the air with the long, thrilling cry of pain that had awakened me, and with another bound was on the bulwarks and over the side of the launch, clinging to the railing. With each cry, Baboo's mocking voice came out, shrill and exultant, from behind a pile of life-preservers.
Portia was the first to realize the extent of the catastrophe, and in a short while chairs and life-preservers and tables everything that could float had been tossed into the sea to the struggling immortals therein.
He looked at the rubber coats and the life-preservers, then said, with a matter-of-fact drawl, "Well, you fellows must have come by the river!" After talking awhile he asked: "What do you call yourselves?" This question would identify him as an old-time Westerner if we did not already know it.
Wood wreckage of all descriptions, acres of furniture, broken, split, blistered, discolored, swollen; piles of carpets, rugs, towels, bed-linen, stained, faded, shrunken, torn; files of swollen mattresses, pillows, cushions, life-preservers; heaps of table-silver and kitchen-ware tarnished and rusty; mounds of china and glass; mountains of tinned goods, barrels boxes, books, suit-cases, leather bags; trunks and trunks and more trunks and still more trunks; for, mainly, the trunks had saved themselves.
I am positive about this, for after we received word of the loss of Brown we talked it over and I recalled the conversation. He impressed me as thinking we exaggerated the dangers of the river. He made a memorandum of things I said. I think he also talked with Hillers, and I have no doubt the latter told him to take life-preservers.
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