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However, we did not subject them to the experiment. Instead, we suddenly reversed our engine; Gadabout tried to stop in time; the ladies tried to look pleasant; the Commodore tried to shun over-expressive speech. There, just ahead, was a row of close-set pilings, blocking the stream from shore to shore.
"Look! Look!" cried one of a carriage-full of hatless girls in white muslins. "There's a houseboat. How in the world did it get in here?" And we rather wondered ourselves. It was midday when we tied Gadabout to the pilings beside the bridge, and the weather was hot and sultry. So, we deferred until evening the long walk across the island.
She also claims kinship with the Randolphs and the Reeveses of Virginia, and a collateral and remote connection with the Byrds. When we returned to the steamer pier after our visit at Westover, we found quite a wind on the river and the houseboat fretfully bumping the pilings.
The trees were ancient dogwoods, with a single huge willow for extra shade. There was a small pier extending into the creek, and from the rotted pilings next to it, Rick saw that the original pier had been much larger. A white barn stood at a short distance from the house. A barn of that size, Rick thought, meant a pretty substantial farm. He searched for signs of life and saw none.
It was caught among the pilings of a boat-landing several hundred feet farther down the tide. A thin, sluggish stream of blood followed it like a clue, and, when he was dragged up upon the bank, gushed out terribly from a wound near his temple. He had seized, in falling, Umè-ko's lacquered geta, and his fingers could not be unclasped.
"He wants something out of the bed, dear," Lorna whispered to me; "see what it is, upon your side, there." I followed the bent of his poor shrunken hand, and sought among the pilings; and there I felt something hard and sharp, and drew it forth and gave it to him. It flashed, like the spray of a fountain upon us, in the dark winter of the room.
The water had risen so high that we could not get out of our pens; so, climbing into the bath-rooms above, we held on to the bow and stern lines of our boats, endeavoring to keep them from being dashed to pieces against the pilings of the pier.
A broad doorway, with a sliding door that now stood open, gave ingress. The boat had now almost lost headway. Anina nosed its bow into this doorway, and grasping one of the pilings near at hand, brought it to rest. Mercer, at a signal from her, climbed cautiously to his feet, still holding the little light-ray cylinder in his hand. "What's that in there?" he whispered.
Following this for a few hundred yards, we found ourselves at last beside the bridge we long had sought. Standing on the upper deck, we could look down stream to the place where our houseboat had been stopped by the row of pilings. We had practically circumnavigated the island. While making Gadabout fast to some convenient pilings, we heard gay voices and the rumble of wheels on the bridge.
As it fell upon the wharf, the line attached to it was hauled in hand over hand; and though the grapnel started to come along with it, sliding and hopping over the pier, soon one of its points found a crack or a nail or a knot-hole to get hold of; and the houseboat was readily drawn up and made fast to the pilings. The boxes aboard, our lines were cast off and Gadabout moved on up the James.
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