 | Life in the open air |  |
LOVE AND SKATES.
1. CHAPTER I.
A KNOT AND A MAN TO CUT IT.
Consternation! Consternation in the back office
of Benjamin Brummage, Esq., banker in Wall
Street.
Yesterday down came Mr. Superintendent
Whiffler, from Dunderbunk, up the North River,
to say, that, “unless something be done, at once,
the Dunderbunk Foundry and Iron-Works must
wind up.” President Brummage forthwith convoked
his Directors. And here they sat around
the green table, forlorn as the guests at a Barmecide
feast.
Well they might be forlorn! It was the rosy
summer solstice, the longest and fairest day of all
the year. But rose-color and sunshine had fled
from Wall Street. Noisy Crisis towing black
Panic, as a puffing steam-tug drags a three-decker
cocked and primed for destruction, had suddenly
sailed in upon Credit.
As all the green inch-worms vanish on the tenth
of every June, so on the tenth of that June all the
it were not. Everybody and everything was ready
to fail. If the hindmost brick went, down would
go the whole file.
There were ten Directors of the Dunderbunk
Foundry.
Now, not seldom, of a Board of ten Directors,
five are wise and five are foolish: five wise, who
bag all the Company's funds in salaries and
commissions for indorsing its paper; five foolish,
who get no salaries, no commissions, no dividends,
— nothing, indeed, but abuse from the stockholders,
and the reputation of thieves. That is to
say, five of the ten are pickpockets; the other five,
pockets to be picked.
It happened that the Dunderbunk Directors
were all honest and foolish but one. He, John
Churm, honest and wise, was off at the West, with
his Herculean shoulders at the wheels of a deadlocked
railroad. These honest fellows did not
wish Dunderbunk to fail for several reasons. First,
it was not pleasant to lose their investment. Second,
one important failure might betray Credit to
Crisis with Panic at its heels, whereupon every investment
would be in danger. Third, what would
become of their Directorial reputations? From
President Brummage down, each of these gentlemen
was one of the pockets to be picked in a great
many companies. Each was of the first Wall-Street
fashion, invited to lend his name and take
stock in every new enterprise. Any one of them
toga made of the newspaper advertisements
of boards in which his name proudly figured. If
Dunderbunk failed, the toga was torn, and might
presently go to rags beyond repair. The first rent
would inaugurate universal rupture. How to
avoid this disaster? — that was the question.
“State the case, Mr. Superintendent Whiffler,”
said President Brummage, in his pompous manner,
with its pomp a little collapsed, pro tempore.
Inefficient Whiffler whimpered out his story.
The confessions of an impotent executive are
sorry stuff to read. Whiffler's long, dismal complaint
shall not be repeated. He had taken a prosperous
concern, had carried on things in his own
way, and now failure was inevitable. He had
bought raw material lavishly, and worked it badly
into half-ripe material, which nobody wanted to
buy. He was in arrears to his hands. He had tried
to bully them, when they asked for their money.
They had insulted him, and threatened to knock
off work, unless they were paid at once. “A set
of horrid ruffians,” Whiffler said, — “and his life
would n't be safe many days among them.”
“Withdraw, if you please, Mr. Superintendent,”
President Brummage requested. “The Board will
discuss measures of relief.”
The more they discussed, the more consternation.
Nobody said anything to the purpose, except Mr.
Sam Gwelp, his late father's lubberly son and successor.
“Blast!” said he; “we shall have to let it
slide!”
Into this assembly of imbeciles unexpectedly entered
Mr. John Churm. He had set his Western
railroad trains rolling, and was just returned to
town. Now he was ready to put those Herculean
shoulders at any other bemired and rickety no-go-cart.
Mr. Churm was not accustomed to be a Director
in feeble companies. He came into Dunderbunk
recently as executor of his friend Damer, a year
ago bored to death by a silly wife.
Churm's bristly aspect and incisive manner made
him a sharp contrast to Brummage. The latter
personage was flabby in flesh, and the oppressively
civil counter-jumper style of his youth had grown
naturally into a deportment of most imposing pomposity.
The Tenth Director listened to the President's
recitative of their difficulties, chorused by the
Board.
“Gentlemen,” said Director Churm, “you want
two things. The first is Money!”
He pronounced this cabalistic word with such
magic power, that all the air seemed instantly filled
with a cheerful flight of gold American eagles, each
carrying a double eagle on its back and a silver
dollar in its claws; and all the soil of America
seemed to sprout with coin, as after a shower a
meadow sprouts with the yellow buds of the dandelion.
“Money! yes, Money!” murmured the Directors.
It seemed a word of good omen, now.
“The second thing,” resumed the new-comer,
“is a Man!”
The Directors looked at each other and did not
see such a being.
“The actual Superintendent of Dunderbunk is
a dunderhead,” said Churm.
“Pun!” cried Sam Gwelp, waking up from a
snooze.
Several of the Directors, thus instructed, started
a complimentary laugh.
“Order, gentlemen! Orrderr!” said the President,
severely, rapping with a paper-cutter.
“We must have a Man, not a Whiffler!”
Churm continued. “And I have one in my eye.”
Everybody examined his eye.
“Would you be so good as to name him?” said
Old Brummage, timidly.
He wanted to see a Man, but feared the strange
creature might be dangerous.
“Richard Wade,” says Churm.
They did not know him. The name sounded
forcible.
“He has been in California,” the nominator
said.
A shudder ran around the green table. They
seemed to see a frowzy desperado, shaggy as a
bison, in a red shirt and jackboots, hung about the
waist with an assortment of six-shooters and bowie-knives,
mustangs, monte-banks, and lynch-law.
“We must get Wade,” Churm says, with authority.
“He knows Iron by heart. He can
handle Men. I will back him with my blank
check, to any amount, to his order.”
Here a murmur of applause, swelling to a cheer,
burst from the Directors.
Everybody knew that the Geological Bank
deemed Churm's deposits the fundamental stratum
of its wealth. They lay there in the vaults, like
underlying granite. When hot times came, they
boiled up in a mountain to buttress the world.
Churm's blank check seemed to wave in the air
like an oriflamme of victory. Its payee might
come from Botany Bay; he might wear his beard
to his knees, and his belt stuck full of howitzers
and boomerangs; he might have been repeatedly
hung by Vigilance Committees, and as often cut
down and revived by galvanism; but brandishing
that check, good for anything less than a million,
every Director in Wall Street was his slave, his
friend, and his brother.
“Let us vote Mr. Wade in by acclamation,”
cried the Directors.
“But, gentlemen,” Churm interposed, “if I give
him my blank check, he must have carte blanche,
and no one to interfere in his management.”
Every Director, from President Brummage down,
drew a long face at this condition.
It was one of their great privileges to potter in
“Just as you please,” Churm continued. “I
name a competent man, a gentleman and fine fellow.
I back him with all the cash he wants. But
he must have his own way. Now take him, or
leave him!”
Such despotic talk had never been heard before
in that Directors' Room. They relucted a moment.
But they thought of their togas of advertisements
in danger. The blank check shook its blandishments
before their eyes.
“We take him,” they said, and Richard Wade
was the new Superintendent unanimously.
“He shall be at Dunderbunk to take hold to-morrow
morning,” said Churm, and went off to
notify him.
Upon this, Consternation sailed out of the hearts
of Brummage and associates.
They lunched with good appetites over the
green table, and the President confidently remarked,
—
“I don't believe there is going to be much of a
crisis, after all.”
2. CHAPTER II.
BARRACKS FOR THE HERO.
Wade packed his kit, and took the Hudson
River train for Dunderbunk the same afternoon.
He swallowed his dust, he gasped for his fresh
air, he wept over his cinders, he refused his “lozengers,”
he was admired by all the pretty girls
and detested by all the puny men in the train, and
in good time got down at his station.
He stopped on the platform to survey the land-and
water-privileges of his new abode.
“The June sunshine is unequalled,” he soliloquized,
“the river is splendid, the hills are pretty,
and the Highlands, north, respectable; but the village
has gone to seed. Place and people look lazy,
vicious, and ashamed. I suppose those chimneys
are my Foundry. The smoke rises as if the furnaces
were ill-fed and weak in the lungs. Nothing,
I can see, looks alive, except that queer little
steamboat coming in, — the `I. Ambuster,' — jolly
name for a boat!”
Wade left his traps at the station, and walked
through the village. All the gilding of a golden
sunset of June could not make it anything but
commonplace. It would be forlorn on a gray day,
and utterly dismal in a storm.
“I must look up a civilized house to lodge in,”
thought the stranger. “I cannot possibly camp at
heaven.”
Presently our explorer found a neat, white, two-story,
home-like abode on the upper street, overlooking
the river.
“This promises,” he thought. “Here are roses
on the porch, a piano, or at least a melodeon, by
the parlor-window, and they are insured in the
Mutual, as the Mutual's plate announces. Now,
if that nice-looking person in black I see setting
a table in the back-room is a widow, I will camp
here.”
Perry Purtett was the name on the door, and opposite
the sign of an omnium-gatherum country-store
hinted that Perry was deceased. The hint
was a broad one. Wade read, “Ringdove, Successor
to late P. Purtett.”
“It 's worth a try to get in here out of the pagan
barbarism around. I 'll propose — as a lodger
— to the widow.”
So said Wade, and rang the bell under the roses.
A pretty, slim, delicate, fair-haired maiden answered.
“This explains the roses and the melodeon,”
thought Wade, and asked, “Can I see your
mother?”
Mamma came. “Mild, timid, accustomed to
depend on the late Perry, and wants a friend,”
Wade analyzed, while he bowed. He proposed
himself as a lodger.
“I did n't know it was talked of generally,”
that we felt lonesome, Mr. Purtett bein' gone, and
if the new minister —”
Here she paused. The cut of Wade's jib was
unclerical. He did not stoop, like a new minister.
He was not pallid, meagre, and clad in unwhole
some black, like the same. His bronzed face was
frank and bold and unfamiliar with speculations on
Original Sin or Total Depravity.
“I am not the new minister,” said Wade, smiling
slightly over his moustache; “but a new Superintendent
for the Foundry.”
“Mr. Whiffler is goin'?” exclaimed Mrs. Purtett.
She looked at her daughter, who gave a little
sob and ran out of the room.
“What makes my daughter Belle feel bad,” says
the widow, “is, that she had a friend, — well, it
is n't too much to say that they was as good as
engaged, — and he was foreman of the Foundry
finishin'-shop. But somehow Whiffler spoilt him,
just as he spoils everything he touches; and last
winter, when Belle was away, William Tarbox —
that 's his name, and his head is runnin' over with
inventions — took to spreein' and liquor, and got
ashamed of himself, and let down from a foreman
to a hand, and is all the while lettin' down lower.”
The widow's heart thus opened, Wade walked
in as consoler. This also opened the lodgings to
him. He was presently installed in the large and
small front-rooms up-stairs, unpacking his traps,
and making himself permanently at home.
Superintendent Whiffler came over, by and by,
to see his successor. He did not like his looks.
The new man should have looked mean or weak or
rascally, to suit the outgoer.
“How long do you expect to stay?” asks
Whiffler, with a half-sneer, watching Wade hanging
a map and a print vis-à-vis.
“Until the men and I, or the Company and I,
cannot pull together.”
“I 'll give you a week to quarrel with both, and
another to see the whole concern go to everlasting
smash. And now, if you 're ready, I 'll go over
the accounts with you and prove it.”
Whiffler himself, insolent, cowardly, and a humbug,
if not a swindler, was enough, Wade thought,
to account for any failure. But he did not mention
this conviction.
3. CHAPTER III.
HOW TO BEHEAD A HYDRA!
At ten next morning, Whiffler handed over the
safe-key to Wade, and departed to ruin some other
property, if he could get one to ruin. Wade
walked with him to the gate.
“I 'm glad to be out of a sinking ship,” said
the ex-boss. “The Works will go down, sure as
shooting. And I think myself well out of the
swearing, drinking set of infernal ruffians. Foremen
are just as bad as hands. I never felt safe of
my life with 'em.”
“A bad lot, are they?” mused Wade, as he
returned to the office. “I must give them a little
sharp talk by way of Inaugural.”
He had the bell tapped and the men called together
in the main building.
Much work was still going on in an inefficient,
unsystematic way.
While hot fires were roaring in the great furnaces,
smoke rose from the dusty beds where
Titanic castings were cooling. Great cranes, manacled
with heavy chains, stood over the furnace-doors,
ready to lift steaming jorums of melted
metal, and pour out, hot and hot, for the moulds to
swallow.
Raw material in big heaps lay about, waiting
for the fire to ripen it. Here was a stack of long,
rough, rusty pigs, clumsy as the shillelahs of the
Anakim. There was a pile of short, thick masses,
lying higgledy-piggledy, stuff from the neighboring
mines, which needed to be crossed with foreign
stock before it could be of much use in civilization.
Here, too, was raw material organized: a fly-wheel,
large enough to keep the knobbiest of
asteroids revolving without a wabble; a cross-head,
cross-tail, and piston-rod, to help a great sea-going
steamer breast the waves; a light walking-beam,
to whirl the paddles of a fast boat on the
to be put together and vivified by steam and
they would go at their work with a will.
From the black rafters overhead hung the heavy
folds of a dim atmosphere, half dust, half smoke.
A dozen sunbeams, forcing their way through the
grimy panes of the grimy upper windows, found
this compound quite palpable and solid, and they
moulded out of it a series of golden bars set side
by side aloft, like the pipes of an organ out of its
perpendicular.
Wade grew indignant, as he looked about him
and saw so much good stuff and good force wasting
for want of a little will and skill to train the
force and manage the stuff. He abhorred bankruptcy
and chaos.
“All they want here is a head,” he thought.
He shook his own. The brain within was well
developed with healthy exercise. It filled its case,
and did not rattle like a withered kernel, or sound
soft like a rotten one. It was a vigorous, muscular
brain. The owner felt that he could trust it for an
effort, as he could his lungs for a shout, his legs for
a leap, or his fist for a knock-down argument.
At the tap of the bell, the “bad lot” of men
came together. They numbered more than two
hundred, though the Foundry was working short.
They had been notified that “that gonoph of a
Whiffler was kicked out, and a new feller was in,
who looked cranky enough, and wanted to see 'em
and tell 'em whether he was a damn' fool or
not.”
So all hands collected from the different parts of
the Foundry to see the head.
They came up with easy and somewhat swaggering
bearing, — a good many roughs, with here
and there a ruffian. Several, as they approached,
swung and tossed, for mere overplus of strength,
the sledges with which they had been tapping
at the bald shiny pates of their anvils. Several
wielded their long pokers like lances.
Grimy chaps, all with their faces streaked, like
Blackfeet in their war-paint. Their hairy chests
showed, where some men parade elaborate shirt-bosoms.
Some had their sleeves pushed up to the
elbow to exhibit their compact flexors and extensors.
Some had rolled their flannel up to the
shoulder, above the bulging muscles of the upper
arm. They wore aprons tied about the neck, like
the bibs of our childhood, — or about the waist,
like the coquettish articles which young housewives
affect. But there was no coquetry in these
great flaps of leather or canvas, and they were
besmeared and rust-stained quite beyond any bib
that ever suffered under bread-and-molasses or mudpie
treatment.
They lounged and swaggered up, and stood at
ease, not without rough grace, in a sinuous line,
coiled and knotted like a snake.
Ten feet back stood the new Hercules who was
to take down that Hydra's two hundred crests of
insubordination.
They inspected him, and he them as coolly. He
good, bad, or on the fence, — and marked each so
that he would know him among a myriad.
The Hands faced the Head. It was a question
whether the two hundred or the one would be
master in Dunderbunk.
Which was boss? An old question. It has to
be settled whenever a new man claims power, and
there is always a struggle until it is fought out by
main force of brain or muscle.
Wade had made up his mind on this subject. He
waited a moment until the men were still. He was
a Saxon six-footer of thirty. He stood easily on
his pins, as if he had eyed men and facts before.
His mouth looked firm, his brow freighted, his nose
clipper, — that the hands could see. But clipper
noses are not always backed by a stout hull.
Seemingly freighted brows sometimes carry nothing
but ballast and dunnage. The firmness may be all
in the moustache, while the mouth hides beneath,
a mere silly slit. All which the hands knew.
Wade began, short and sharp as a trip-hammer,
when it has a bar to shape.
“I 'm the new Superintendent. Richard Wade
is my name. I rang the bell because I wanted to
see you and have you see me. You know as well
as I do that these Works are in a bad way. They
can't stay so. They must come up and pay you
regular wages and the Company profits. Every
man of you has got to be here on the spot when the
bell strikes, and up to the mark in his work. You
out rotten iron, — stuff that any honest shop would
be ashamed of. Now there 's to be a new leaf
turned over here. You 're to be paid on the nail;
but you 've got to earn your money. I won't have
any idlers or shirkers or rebels about me. I shall
work hard myself, and every man of you will, or
he leaves the shop. Now, if anybody has a complaint
to make, I 'll hear him before you all.”
The men were evidently impressed with Wade's
Inaugural. It meant something. But they were
not to be put down so easily, after long misrule.
There began to be a whisper, —
“B'il in, Bill Tarbox! and talk up to him!”
Presently Bill shouldered forward and faced the
new ruler.
Since Bill took to drink and degradation, he
had been the but-end of riot and revolt at the
Foundry. He had had his own way with Whiffler.
He did not like to abdicate and give in to this new
chap without testing him.
In a better mood, Bill would have liked Wade's
looks and words; but to-day he had a sore head,
a sour face, and a bitter heart, from last night's
spree. And then he had heard — it was as well
known already in Dunderbunk as if the town-crier
had cried it — that Wade was lodging at Mrs.
Purtett's, where poor Bill was excluded. So Bill
stepped forward as spokesman of the ruffianly element,
and the immoral force gathered behind and
backed him heavily.
Tarbox, too, was a Saxon six-footer of thirty.
But he had sagged one inch for want of self-respect.
He had spoilt his color and dyed his moustache.
He wore foxy-black pantaloons tucked into
red-topped boots, with the name of the maker on
a gilt shield. His red-flannel shirt was open at
the neck and caught with a black handkerchief.
His damaged tile was in permanent crape for the
late lamented Poole.
“We allow,” says Bill, in a tone half-way between
Lablache's De profundis and a burglar's
bull-dog's snarl, “that we 've did our work as
good as need to be did. We 'xpect we know our
rights. We ha'n't ben treated fair, and I 'm
damned if we 're go'n' to stan' it.”
“Stop!” says Wade. “No swearing in this
shop!”
“Who the Devil is go'n' to stop it?” growled
Tarbox.
“I am. Do you step back now, and let some
one come out who can talk like a gentleman!”
“I 'm damned if I stir till I 've had my say
out,” says Bill, shaking himself up and looking
dangerous.
“Go back!”
Wade moved close to him, also looking dangerous.
“Don't tech me!” Bill threatened, squaring
off.
He was not quick enough. Wade knocked him
down flat on a heap of moulding-sand. The hat in
mourning for Poole found its place in a puddle.
Bill did not like the new Emperor's method of
given him enough.
He jumped up from his soft bed and made a
vicious rush at Wade. But he was damaged by
evil courses. He was fighting against law and
order, on the side of wrong and bad manners.
The same fist met him again, and heavier.
Up went his heels! Down went his head! It
struck the ragged edge of a fresh casting, and
there he lay stunned and bleeding on his hard
black pillow.
“Ring the bell to go to work!” said Wade, in
a tone that made the ringer jump. “Now, men,
take hold and do your duty and everything will go
smooth!”
The bell clanged in. The line looked at its prostrate
champion, then at the new boss standing
there, cool and brave, and not afraid of a regiment
of sledge-hammers.
They wanted an Executive. They wanted to be
well governed, as all men do. They wanted disorder
out and order in. The new man looked like
a man, talked fair, hit hard. Why not all hands
give in with a good grace and go to work like
honest fellows?
The line broke up. The hands went off to their
duty. And there was never any more insubordination
at Dunderbunk.
This was June.
Skates in the next chapter.
Love in good time afterward shall glide upon
the scene.
4. CHAPTER IV.
A CHRISTMAS GIFT.
The pioneer sunbeam of next Christmas morning
rattled over the Dunderbunk hills, flashed into
Richard Wade's eyes, waked him, and was off,
ricochetting across the black ice of the river.
Wade jumped up, electrified and jubilant. He
had gone to bed feeling quite too despondent for
so healthy a fellow. Christmas Eve, the time of
family meetings, reminded him how lonely he was.
He had not a relative in the world, except two
little nieces, — one as tall as his knee, the other
almost up to his waist; and them he had safely
bestowed in a nook of New England, to gain wit
and virtues as they gained inches.
“I have had a stern and lonely life,” thought
Wade, as he blew out his candle last night, “and
what has it profited me?”
Perhaps the pioneer sunbeam answered this question
with a truism, not always as applicable as in
this case, — “A brave, able, self-respecting manhood
is fair profit for any man's first thirty years
of life.”
But, answered or not, the question troubled
Wade no more. He shot out of bed in tip-top
spirits; shouted “Merry Christmas!” at the rising
disk of the sun; looked over the black ice; thrilled
with the thought of a long holiday for skating;
clothes, singing, “Ah, non giunge!” as he slid into
them.
Presently, glancing from his south window, he
observed several matinal smokes rising from the
chimneys of a country-house a mile away, on a
slope fronting the river.
“Peter Skerrett must be back from Europe at
last,” he thought. “I hope he is as fine a fellow
as he was ten years ago. I hope marriage has not
made him a muff, and wealth a weakling.”
Wade went down to breakfast with an heroic appetite.
His “Merry Christmas” to Mrs. Purtett
was followed up by a ravished kiss and the gift of
a silver butter-knife. The good widow did not
know which to be most charmed with. The butter-knife
was genuine, shining, solid silver, with her
initials, M. B. P., Martha Bilsby Purtett, given in
luxuriant flourishes; but then the kiss had such a
fine twang, such an exhilarating titillation! The
late Perry's kisses, from first to last, had wanted
point. They were, as the Spanish proverb would
put it, unsavory as unsalted eggs, for want of a
moustache. The widow now perceived, with mild
regret, how much she had missed when she married
“a man all shaven and shorn.” Her cheek, still
fair, though forty, flushed with novel delight, and
she appreciated her lodger more than ever.
Wade's salutation to Belle Purtett was more distant.
There must be a little friendly reserve between
a handsome young man and a pretty young
in the same house. They were on the most
cordial terms, however; and her gift — of course
embroidered slippers — and his to her — of course
“The Illustrated Poets,” in Turkey morocco —
were exchanged with tender good-will on both
sides.
“We shall meet on the ice, Miss Belle,” said
Wade. “It is a day of a thousand for skating.”
“Mr. Ringdove says you are a famous skater,”
Belle rejoined. “He saw you on the river yesterday
evening.”
“Yes; Tarbox and I were practising to exhibit
to-day; but I could not do much with my dull old
skates.”
Wade breakfasted deliberately, as a holiday
morning allowed, and then walked down to the
Foundry. There would be no work done to-day,
except by a small gang keeping up the fires. The
Superintendent wished only to give his First Semi-Annual
Report an hour's polishing, before he joined
all Dunderbunk on the ice.
It was a halcyon day, worthy of its motto,
“Peace on earth, good-will to men.” The air was
electric, the sun overflowing with jolly shine, the
river smooth and sheeny from the hither bank to
the snowy mountains opposite.
“I wish I were Rembrandt, to paint this grand
shadowy interior,” thought Wade, as he entered
the silent, deserted Foundry. “With the gleam
of the snow in my eyes, it looks deliciously warm
opus,' — the pot boils, — I cannot stop to see
the picturesque.”
He opened his office, took his Report and began
to complete it with,s,;s, and.s in the right
places.
All at once the bell of the Works rang out loud
and clear. Presently the Superintendent became
aware of a tramp and a bustle in the building.
By and by came a tap at the office-door.
“Come in,” said Wade, and, enter young Perry
Purtett.
Perry was a boy of fifteen, with hair the color of
fresh sawdust, white eyebrows, and an uncommonly
wide-awake look. Ringdove, his father's successor,
could never teach Perry the smirk, the grace,
and the seductiveness of the counter, so the boy
had found his place in the finishing-shop of the
Foundry.
“Some of the hands would like to see you for
half a jiff, Mr. Wade,” said he. “Will you come
along, if you please?”
There was a good deal of easy swagger about
Perry, as there is always in boys and men whose
business is to watch the lunging of steam-engines.
Wade followed him. Perry led the way with a
jaunty air that said, —
“Room here! Out of the way, you lubberly
bits of cast-iron! Be careful, now, you big derricks,
or I 'll walk right over you! Room now for
Me and My suite!”
This pompous usher conducted the Superintendent
to the very spot in the main room of the Works
where, six months before, the Inaugural had been
pronounced and the first Veto spoken and enacted.
And there, as six months before, stood the Hands
awaiting their Head. But the aprons, the red
shirts, and the grime of working-days were off, and
the whole were in holiday rig, — as black and
smooth and shiny from top to toe as the members
of a Congress of Undertakers.
Wade, following in the wake of Perry, took his
stand facing the rank, and waited to see what he
was summoned for. He had not long to wait.
To the front stepped Mr. William Tarbox, foreman
of the finishing-shop, no longer a bhoy, but an
erect, fine-looking fellow, with no nitrate in his
moustache, and his hat permanently out of mourning
for the late Mr. Poole.
“Gentlemen,” said Bill, “I move that this meeting
organize by appointing Mr. Smith Wheelwright
Chairman. As many as are in favor of this motion,
please to say, `Ay.'”
“Ay!” said the crowd, very loud and big.
And then every man looked at his neighbor, a little
abashed, as if he himself had made all the noise.
“This is a free country,” continues Bill. “Every
woter has a right to a fair shake. Contrary
minds, `No.'”
No contrary minds. The crowd uttered a great
silence. Every man looked at his neighbor, surprised
to find how well they agreed.
“Unanimous!” Tarbox pronounced. “No fractious
minorities here, to block the wheels of legislation!”
The crowd burst into a roar at this significant
remark, and, again abashed, dropped portcullis on
its laughter, cutting off the flanks and tail of the
sound.
“Mr. Purtett, will you please conduct the Chairman
to the Chair,” says Bill, very stately.
“Make way here!” cried Perry, with the manner
of a man seven feet high. “Step out now, Mr.
Chairman!”
He took a big, grizzled, docile-looking fellow
patronizingly by the arm, led him forward, and
chaired him on a large cylinder-head, in the rough,
just hatched out of its mould.
“Bang away with that, and sing out `Silence!'”
says the knowing boy, handing Wheelwright an
iron bolt, and taking his place beside him, as
prompter.
The docile Chairman obeyed. At his breaking
silence by hooting “Silence!” the audience had
another mighty bobtailed laugh.
“Say, `Will some honorable member state the
object of this meeting?'” whispered the prompter.
“Will some honorable mumbler state the subject
of this 'ere meetin'?” says Chair, a little bashful
and confused.
Bill Tarbox advanced, and, with a formal bow,
began, —
“Mr. Chairman —”
“Say, `Mr. Tarbox has the floor,'” piped Perry.
“Mr. Tarbox has the floor,” diapasoned the
Chair.
“Mr. Chairman and Gentlemen —” Bill began,
and stopped.
“Say, `Proceed, Sir!'” suggested Perry, which
the senior did, magnifying the boy's whisper a
dozen times.
Again Bill began and stopped.
“Boys,” said he, dropping grandiloquence,
“when I accepted the office of Orator of the
Day at our primary, and promised to bring forward
our Resolutions in honor of Mr. Wade with
my best speech, I did n't think I was going to
have such a head of steam on that the walves
would get stuck and the piston jammed and I
could n't say a word.
“But,” he continued, warming up, “when I
think of the Indian powwow we had in this very
spot six months ago, — and what a mean bloat I
was, going to the stub-tail dogs with my hat over
my eyes, — and what a hard lot we were all round,
livin' on nothing but argee whiskey, and rampin'
off on benders, instead of makin' good iron, — and
how the Works was flat broke, — and how Dunderbunk
was full of women crying over their husbands
and mothers ashamed of their sons, — boys, when
I think how things was, and see how they are, and
look at Mr. Wade standing there like a —”
Bill hesitated for a comparison.
“Like a thousand of brick,” Perry Purtett suggested,
sotto voce.
The Chairman took this as a hint to himself.
“Like a thousand of brick,” he said, with the
voice of a Stentor.
Here the audience roared and cheered, and the
Orator got a fresh start.
“When you came, Mr. Wade,” he resumed,
“we was about sick of putty-heads and sneaks
that did n't know enough or did n't dare to make
us stand round and bone in. You walked in, b'ilin'
over with grit. You took hold as if you belonged
here. You made things jump like a two-headed
tarrier. All we wanted was a live man, to say,
`Here, boys, all together now! You 've got your
stint, and I 've got mine. I 'm boss in this shop,
— but I can't do the first thing, unless every man
pulls his pound. Now, then, my hand is on the
throttle, grease the wheels, oil the walves, poke
the fires, hook on, and let 's yank her through with
a will!'”
At this figure the meeting showed a tendency to
cheer. “Silence!” Perry sternly suggested. “Silence!”
repeated the Chair.
“Then,” continued the Orator, “you was n't
one of the uneasy kind, always fussin' and cussin'
round. You was n't always spyin' to see we
did n't take home a cross-tail or a hundred-weight
of cast-iron in our pants' pockets, or go to swiggin'
hot metal out of the ladles on the sly.”
Here an enormous laugh requited Bill's joke.
Perry prompted, the Chair banged with his bolt
and cried, “Order!”
“Well, now, boys,” Tarbox went on, “what has
come of having one of the right sort to be boss?
Why, this. The Works go ahead, stiddy as the
North River. We work full time and full-handed.
We turn out stuff that no shop needs to be ashamed
of. Wages is on the nail. We have a good time
generally. How is that, boys, — Mr. Chairman
and Gentlemen?”
“That 's so!” from everybody.
“And there 's something better yet,” Bill resumed.
“Dunderbunk used to be full of crying
women. They 've stopped crying now.”
Here the whole assemblage, Chairman and all,
burst into an irrepressible cheer.
“But I 'm making my speech as long as a lightning-rod,”
said the speaker. “I 'll put on the
brakes, short. I guess Mr. Wade understands
pretty well, now, how we feel; and if he don't,
here it all is in shape, in this document, with
`Whereas' at the top and `Resolved' entered
along down in five places. Mr. Purtett, will you
hand the Resolutions to the Superintendent?”
Perry advanced and did his office loftily, much
to the amusement of Wade and the workmen.
“Now,” Bill resumed, “we wanted, besides, to
make you a little gift, Mr. Wade, to remember the
day by. So we got up a subscription, and every
man put in his dime. Here 's the present, — hand
'em over, Perry!
“There, Sir, is The Best Pair of Skates to be
had in York City, made for work, and no nonsense
you, one for all, and hope you 'll like 'em and beat
the world skating, as you do in all the things
we 've knowed you try.
“Now, boys,” Bill perorated, “before I retire
to the shades of private life, I motion we give
Three Cheers — regular Toplifters — for Richard
Wade!”
“Hurrah! Wade and Good Government!”
“Hurrah! Wade and Prosperity!” “Hurrah!
Wade and the Women's Tears Dry!”
Cheers like the shout of Achilles! Wielding
sledges is good for the bellows, it appears. Toplifters!
Why, the smoky black rafters overhead
had to tug hard to hold the roof on. Hurrah!
From every corner of the vast building came back
rattling echoes. The Works, the machinery, the
furnaces, the stuff, all had their voice to add to the
verdict.
Magnificent music! and our Anglo-Saxon is the
only race in the world civilized enough to join in
singing it. We are the only hurrahing people, —
the only brood hatched in a “Hurrah's nest.”
Silence restored, the Chairman, prompted by
Perry, said, “Gentlemen, Mr. Wade has the floor
for a few remarks.”
Of course Wade had to speak, and did. He
would not have been an American in America
else. But his heart was too full to say more than
a few hearty and earnest words of good feeling.
“Now, men,” he closed, “I want to get away
look; so I 'll end by proposing three cheers for
Smith Wheelwright, our Chairman, three for our
Orator, Tarbox, three for Old Dunderbunk, —
Works, Men, Women, and Children; and one big
cheer for Old Father Iron, as rousing a cheer as
ever was roared.”
So they gave their three times three with enormous
enthusiasm. The roof shook, the furnaces
rattled, Perry Purtett banged with the Chairman's
hammer, the great echoes thundered through the
Foundry.
And when they ended with one gigantic cheer
for IRON, tough and true, the weapon, the tool,
and the engine of all civilization, — it seemed as
if the uproar would never cease until Father Iron
himself heard the call in his smithy away under
the magnetic pole, and came clanking up, to return
thanks in person.
5. CHAPTER V.
SKATING AS A FINE ART.
Of all the plays that are played by this playful
world on its play-days, there is no play like Skating.
To prepare a board for the moves of this game
Art, a stage for the entrechats and pirouettes of its
graceful adepts, Zero, magical artificer, had been,
for the last two nights, sliding at full speed up
and down the North River.
We have heard of Midas, whose touch made
gold, and of the virgin under whose feet sprang
roses; but Zero's heels and toes were armed with
more precious influences. They left a diamond
way, where they slid, — a hundred and fifty miles
of diamond, half a mile wide and six inches thick.
Diamond can only reflect sunlight; ice can contain
it. Zero's product, finer even than diamond,
was filled — at the rate of a million to the square
foot — with bubbles immeasurably little, and yet
every one big enough to comprise the entire sun
in small, but without alteration or abridgment.
When the sun rose, each of these wonderful cells
was ready to catch the tip of a sunbeam and house
it in a shining abode.
Besides this, Zero had inlaid its work, all along
shore, with exquisite marquetry of leaves, brown
and evergreen, of sprays and twigs, reeds and
grasses. No parquet in any palace from Fontainebleau
to St. Petersburg could show such delicate
patterns, or could gleam so brightly, though polished
with all the wax in Christendom.
On this fine pavement, all the way from Cohoes
to Spuyten Duyvil, Jubilee was sliding without
friction, the Christmas morning of these adventures.
Navigation was closed. Navigators had leisure.
The sloops and schooners were frozen in along
shore, the tugs and barges were laid up in basins,
the floating palaces were down at New York, deodorizing
their bar-rooms, regilding their bridal
chambers, and enlarging their spittoon accommodations
alow and aloft, for next summer. All the
population was out on the ice, skating, sliding,
sledding, slipping, tumbling, to its heart's content.
One person out of every Dunderbunk family was
of course at home, roasting Christmas turkey.
The rest were already at high jinks on Zero's
Christmas present, when Wade and the men came
down from the meeting.
Wade buckled on his new skates in a jiffy. He
stamped to settle himself, and then flung off half a
dozen circles on the right leg, half a dozen with
the left, and the same with either leg backwards.
The ice, traced with these white peripheries,
showed like a blackboard where a school has been
chalking diagrams of Euclid, to point at with the
“slow unyielding finger” of demonstration.
“Hurrah!” cries Wade, halting in front of the
men, who, some on the Foundry wharf, some on
the deck of our first acquaintance at Dunderbunk,
the tug “I. Ambuster,” were putting on their
skates or watching him. “Hurrah! the skates
are perfection! Are you ready, Bill?”
“Yes,” says Tarbox, whizzing off rings, as exact
as Giotto's autograph.
“Now, then,” Wade said, “we 'll give Dunderbunk
a laugh, as we practised last night.”
They got under full headway, Wade backwards,
Bill forwards, holding hands. When they were
near enough to the merry throng out in the stream,
both dropped into a sitting posture, with the left
knee bent, and each with his right leg stretched
out parallel to the ice and fitting compactly by the
other man's leg. In this queer figure they rushed
through the laughing crowd.
Then all Dunderbunk formed a ring, agog for a
grand show of
Skating as a Fine Art.
The world loves to see Great Artists, and expects
them to do their duty.
It is hard to treat of this Fine Art by the Art of
Fine Writing. Its eloquent motions must be seen.
To skate Fine Art, you must have a Body and a
Soul, each of the First Order; otherwise you will
never get out of coarse art and skating in one syllable.
So much for yourself, the motive power.
And your machinery, — your smooth-bottomed rockers,
the same shape stem and stern, — this must be
as perfect as the man it moves, and who moves it.
Now suppose you wish to skate so that the critics
will say, “See! this athlete does his work as
Church paints, as Darley draws, as Palmer chisels,
as Whittier strikes the lyre, and Longfellow the
dulcimer; he is as terse as Emerson, as clever as
Holmes, as graceful as Curtis; he is as calm as
he is Garibaldi, he is Kit Carson, he is Blondin; he
is as complete as the steamboat Metropolis, as
Steers's yacht, as Singer's sewing-machine, as Colt's
revolver, as the steam-plough, as Civilization.”
You wish to be so ranked among the people and
things that lead the age; — consider the qualities
you must have, and while you consider, keep your
eye on Richard Wade, for he has them all in perfection.
First, — of your physical qualities. You must
have lungs, not bellows; and an active heart, not
an assortment of sluggish auricles and ventricles.
You must have legs, not shanks. Their shape is
unimportant, except that they must not interfere at
the knee. You must have muscles, not flabbiness;
sinews like wire; nerves like sunbeams; and a thin
layer of flesh to cushion the gable-ends, where you
will strike, if you tumble, — which, once for all be it
said, you must never do. You must be all momentum,
and no inertia. You must be one part grace,
one force, one agility, and the rest caoutchouc, Manilla
hemp, and watch-spring. Your machine, your
body, must be thoroughly obedient. It must go
just so far and no farther. You have got to be as
unerring as a planet holding its own, emphatically,
between forces centripetal and centrifugal. Your
aplomb must be as absolute as the pounce of a
falcon.
So much for a few of the physical qualities necessary
to be a Great Artist in Skating. See Wade,
how he shows them!
Now for the moral and intellectual. Pluck is the
first; — it always is the first quality. Then enthusiasm.
Then patience. Then pertinacity. Then
a fine æsthetic faculty, — in short, good taste.
Then an orderly and submissive mind, that can consent
to act in accordance with the laws of Art.
Circumstances, too, must have been reasonably favorable.
That well-known sceptic, the King of
tropical Bantam, could not skate, because he had
never seen ice and doubted even the existence of
solid water. Widdrington, after the Battle of
Chevy Chace, could not have skated, because he
had no legs, — poor fellow!
But granted the ice and the legs, then if you begin
in the elastic days of youth, when cold does not
sting, tumbles do not bruise, and duckings do not
wet; if you have pluck and ardor enough to try
everything; if you work slowly ahead and stick to
it; if you have good taste and a lively invention;
if you are a man, and not a lubber; — then, in fine,
you may become a Great Skater, just as with equal
power and equal pains you may put your grip on
any kind of Greatness.
The technology of skating is imperfect. Few of
the great feats, the Big Things, have admitted
names. If I attempted to catalogue Wade's
achievements, this chapter might become an unintelligible
rhapsody. A sheet of paper and a penpoint
cannot supply the place of a sheet of ice and
a skate-edge. Geometry must have its diagrams,
Anatomy its corpus to carve. Skating also refuses
Art, and cannot be expressed in a formula.
Skating has its Little Go, its Great Go, its Baccalaureate,
its M. A., its F. S. D. (Doctor of Frantic
Skipping), its A. G. D. (Doctor of Airy Gliding),
its N. T. D. (Doctor of No Tumbles), and
finally its highest degree, U. P. (Unapproachable
Podographer).
Wade was U. P.
There were a hundred of Dunderbunkers who
had passed their Little Go and could skate forward
and backward easily. A half-hundred, perhaps,
were through the Great Go; these could do outer
edge freely. A dozen had taken the Baccalaureate,
and were proudly repeating the pirouettes and
spread-eagles of that degree. A few could cross
their feet, on the edge, forward and backward, and
shift edge on the same foot, and so were Magistri
Artis.
Wade, U. P., added to these an indefinite list
of combinations and fresh contrivances. He spun
spirals slow, and spirals neck or nothing. He pivoted
on one toe, with the other foot cutting rings,
inner and outer edge, forward and back. He
skated on one foot better than the M. A.s could on
both. He ran on his toes; he slid on his heels;
he cut up shines like a sunbeam on a bender; he
swung, light as if he could fly, if he pleased, like
a wing-footed Mercury; he glided as if will, not
muscle, moved him; he tore about in frenzies; his
pivotal leg stood firm, his balance leg flapped like
whirling backward as he went, over a platoon of
boys laid flat on the ice; — the last boy winced,
and thought he was amputated; but Wade flew
over, and the boy still holds together as well as
most boys. Besides this, he could write his name,
with a flourish at the end, like the rubrica of a
Spanish hidalgo. He could podograph any letter,
and multitudes of ingenious curlicues which might
pass for the alphabets of the unknown tongues.
He could not tumble.
It was Fine Art.
Bill Tarbox sometimes pressed the champion
hard. But Bill stopped just short of Fine Art, in
High Artisanship.
How Dunderbunk cheered this wondrous display!
How delighted the whole population was
to believe they possessed the best skater on the
North River! How they struggled to imitate!
How they tumbled, some on their backs, some on
their faces, some with dignity like the dying
Cæsar, some rebelliously like a cat thrown out of
a garret, some limp as an ancient acrobate! How
they laughed at themselves and at each other!
“It 's all in the new skates,” says Wade,
apologizing for his unapproachable power and
finish.
“It 's suthin' in the man,” says Smith Wheelwright.
“Now chase me, everybody,” said Wade.
And, for a quarter of an hour, he dodged the
be touched by pretty Belle Purtett, rosiest of
all the Dunderbunk bevy of rosy maidens on the
ice.
“He rayther beats Bosting,” says Captain Isaac
Ambuster to Smith Wheelwright. “It 's so cold
there that they can skate all the year round; but
he beats them, all the same.”
The Captain was sitting in a queer little bowl of
a skiff on the deck of his tug, and rocking it like
a cradle, as he talked.
“Bosting 's always hard to beat in anything,”
rejoined the ex-Chairman. “But if Bosting is to
be beat, here 's the man to do it.”
And now, perhaps, gentle reader, you think I
have said enough in behalf of a limited fraternity,
the Skaters.
The next chapter, then, shall take up the cause
of the Lovers, a more numerous body, and we will
see whether True Love, which never makes
“smooth running,” can help its progress by a
skate-blade.
6. CHAPTER VI.
“GO NOT, HAPPY DAY, TILL THE MAIDEN YIELDS.”
Christmas noon at Dunderbunk. Every skater
was in galloping glee, — as the electric air, and
the sparkling sun, and the glinting ice had a right
to expect that they all should be.
Belle Purtett, skating simply and well, had
never looked so pretty and graceful. So thought
Bill Tarbox.
He had not spoken to her, nor she to him, for
more than six months. The poor fellow was
ashamed of himself and penitent for his past bad
courses. And so, though he longed to have his
old flame recognize him again, and though he was
bitterly jealous and miserably afraid he should
lose her, he had kept away and consumed his heart
like a true despairing lover.
But to-day Bill was a lion, only second to Wade,
the unapproachable lion-in-chief. Bill was reinstated
in public esteem, and had won back his
standing in the Foundry. He had to-day made a
speech which Perry Purtett gave everybody to
understand “none of Senator Bill Seward's could
hold the tallow to.” Getting up the meeting and
presenting Wade with the skates was Bill's own
scheme, and it had turned out an eminent success.
Everything began to look bright to him. His past
life drifted out of his mind like the rowdy tales he
used to read in the Sunday newspapers.
He had watched Belle Purtett all the morning,
and saw that she distinguished nobody with her
smiles, not even that coq du village, Ringdove.
He also observed that she was furtively watching
him.
By and by she sailed out of the crowd, and went
off a little way to practise.
“Now,” said he to himself, “sail in, Bill Tarbox!”
Belle heard the sharp strokes of a powerful
skater coming after her. Her heart divined who
this might be. She sped away like the swift Camilla,
and her modest drapery showed just enough
and “ne quid nimis” of her ankles.
Bill admired the grace and the ankles immensely.
But his hopes sank a little at the flight, — for he
thought she perceived his chase and meant to drop
him. Bill had not had a classical education, and
knew nothing of Galatea in the Eclogue, — how
she did not hide, until she saw her swain was looking
fondly after.
“She wants to get away,” he thought. “But
she sha'n't, — no, not if I have to follow her to
Albany.”
He struck out mightily. Presently the swift
Camilla let herself be overtaken.
“Good morning, Miss Purtett.” (Dogged air.)
“Good morning, Mr. Tarbox.” (Taken-by-surprise
air.)
“I 've been admiring your skating,” says Bill,
trying to be cool.
“Have you?” rejoins Belle, very cool and distant.
“Have you been long on the ice?” he inquired,
hypocritically.
“I came on two hours ago with Mr. Ringdove
and the girls,” returned she, with a twinkle which
said, “Take that, Sir, for pretending you did not
see me.”
“You 've seen Mr. Wade skate, then,” Bill said,
ignoring Ringdove.
“Yes; is n't it splendid?” Belle replied, kindling.
“Tip-top!”
“But then he does everything better than anybody.”
“So he does!” Bill said, — true to his friend,
and yet beginning to be jealous of this enthusiasm.
It was not the first time he had been jealous of
Wade; but he had quelled his fears, like a good
fellow.
Belle perceived Bill's jealousy, and could have
cried for joy. She had known as little of her once
lover's heart as he of hers. She only knew that
he stopped coming to see her when he fell, and had
not renewed his visits now that he was risen again.
If she had not been charmingly ruddy with the
brisk air and exercise, she would have betrayed
her pleasure at Bill's jealousy with a fine blush.
The sense of recovered power made her wish to
use it again. She must tease him a little. So she
continued, as they skated on in good rhythm, —
“Mother and I would n't know what to do without
Mr. Wade. We like him so much,” — said
ardently.
What Bill feared was true, then, he thought.
Wade, noble fellow, worthy to win any woman's
heart, had fascinated his landlady's daughter.
“I don't wonder you like him,” said he. “He
deserves it.”
Belle was touched by her old lover's forlorn
tone.
“He does indeed,” she said. “He has helped
and taught us all so much. He has taken such
good care of Perry. And then” — here she gave
her companion a little look and a little smile —
“he speaks so kindly of you, Mr. Tarbox.”
Smile, look, and words electrified Bill. He gave
such a spring on his skates that he shot far ahead
of the lady. He brought himself back with a
sharp turn.
“He has done kinder than he can speak,” says
Bill. “He has made a man of me again, Miss
Belle.”
“I know it. It makes me very happy to hear
you able to say so of yourself.” She spoke gravely.
“Very happy” — about anything that concerned
him? Bill had to work off his over-joy at this by
an exuberant flourish. He whisked about Belle, —
outer edge backward. She stopped to admire.
He finished by describing on the virgin ice, before
her, the letters B. P., in his neatest style of podography,
— easy letters to make, luckily.
“Beautiful!” exclaimed Belle. “What are those
letters? Oh! B. P.! What do they stand for?”
“Guess!”
“I 'm so dull,” said she, looking bright as a
diamond. “Let me think! B. P.? British
Poets, perhaps.”
“Try nearer home!”
“What are you likely to be thinking of that
begins with B. P.? — O, I know! Boiler Plates!”
She looked at him, — innocent as a lamb. Bill
looked at her, delighted with her little coquetry.
A woman without coquetry is insipid as a rose
without scent, as Champagne without bubbles, or
as corned beef without mustard.
“It 's something I 'm thinking of most of the
time,” says he; “but I hope it 's softer than
Boiler Plates. B. P. stands for Miss Isabella
Purtett.”
“Oh!” says Belle, and she skated on in silence.
“You came down with Alonzo Ringdove?”
Bill asked, suddenly, aware of another pang after
a moment of peace.
“He came with me and his sisters,” she replied.
Yes; poor Ringdove had dressed himself in his
shiniest black, put on his brightest patent-leather
boots, with his new swan-necked skates newly
strapped over them, and wore his new dove-colored
overcoat with the long skirts, on purpose to be
lovely in the eyes of Belle on this occasion. Alas,
in vain!”
“Mr. Ringdove is a great friend of yours, is
n't he?”
“If you ever came to see me now, you would
know who my friends are, Mr. Tarbox.”
“Would you be my friend again, if I came, Miss
Belle?”
“Again? I have always been so, — always,
Bill.”
“Well, then, something more than my friend, —
now that I am trying to be worthy of more,
Belle?”
“What more can I be?” she said, softly.
“My wife.”
She curved to the right. He followed. To the
left. He was not to be shaken off.
“Will you promise me not to say walves instead
of valves, Bill?” she said, looking pretty and
saucy as could be. “I know, to say W for V is
fashionable in the iron business; but I don't like
it.”
“What a thing a woman is to dodge!” says
Bill. “Suppose I told you that men brought up
inside of boilers, hammering on the inside against
twenty hammering like Wulcans on the outside,
get their ears so dumfounded that they can't tell
whether they are saying valves or walves, wice or
virtue, — suppose I told you that, — what would
you say, Belle?”
“Perhaps I 'd say that you pronounce virtue so
well, and act it so sincerely, that I can't make any
objection to your other words. If you 'd asked me
to be your vife, Bill, I might have said I did n't
understand; but wife I do understand, and I
say —”
She nodded, and tried to skate off. Bill stuck
close to her side.
“Is this true, Belle?” he said, almost doubtfully.
“True as truth!”
She put out her hand. He took it, and they
skated on together,— hearts beating to the rhythm
of their movements. The uproar and merriment
of the village came only faintly to them. It
seemed as if all Nature was hushed to listen to
their plighted troth, their words of love renewed,
more earnest for long suppression. The beautiful
ice spread before them, like their life to come, a
pathway untouched by any sorrowful or weary
footstep. The blue sky was cloudless. The keen
air stirred the pulses like the vapor of frozen
wine. The benignant mountains westward kindly
surveyed the happy pair, and the sun seemed created
to warm and cheer them.
“And you forgive me, Belle?” said the lover.
“I feel as if I had only gone bad to make me know
how much better going right is.”
“I always knew you would find it out. I never
stopped hoping and praying for it.”
“That must have been what brought Mr. Wade
here.”
“Oh, I did hate him so, Bill, when I heard of
something that happened between you and him!
I thought him a brute and a tyrant. I never could
get over it, until he told mother that you were the
best machinist he ever knew, and would some time
grow to be a great inventor.”
“I 'm glad you hated him. I suffered rattle-snakes
and collapsed flues for fear you 'd go and
love him.”
“My affections were engaged,” she said with
simple seriousness.
“Oh, if I 'd only thought so long ago! How
lovely you are!” exclaims Bill, in an ecstasy.
“And how refined! And how good! God bless
you!”
He made up such a wishful mouth, — so wishful
for one of the pleasurable duties of mouths, that
Belle blushed, laughed, and looked down, and as
she did so saw that one of her straps was trailing.
“Please fix it, Bill,” she said, stopping and
kneeling.
Bill also knelt, and his wishful mouth immediately
took its chance.
A manly smack and sweet little feminine chirp
sounded as their lips met.
Boom! twanging gay as the first tap of a marriage-bell,
a loud crack in the ice rang musically
for leagues up and down the river. “Bravo!” it
seemed to say. “Well done; Bill Tarbox! Try
again!” Which the happy fellow did, and the
happy maiden permitted.
“Now,” said Bill, “let us go and hug Mr.
Wade!”
“What! Both of us?” Belle protested. “Mr.
Tarbox, I am ashamed of you!”
7. CHAPTER VII.
WADE DOWN.
The hugging of Wade by the happy pair had to
be done metaphorically, since it was done in the
sight of all Dunderbunk.
He had divined a happy result, when he missed
Bill Tarbox from the arena, and saw him a furlong
away, hand in hand with his reconciled sweetheart.
“I envy you, Bill,” said he, “almost too much
to put proper fervor into my congratulations.”
“Your time will come,” the foreman rejoined.
And says Belle, “I am sure there is a lady skating
somewhere, and only waiting for you to follow
her.”
“I don't see her,” Wade replied, looking with a
mock-grave face up and down and athwart the
river. “When you 've all gone to dinner, I 'll
prospect ten miles up and down, and try to find a
good matrimonial claim that 's not taken.”
“You will not come up to dinner?” Belle asked.
“I can hardly afford to make two bites of a holiday,”
said Wade. “I 've sent Perry up for a
luncheon. Here he comes with it. So I cede
my quarter of your pie, Miss Belle, to a better
fellow.”
“Oh!” cries Perry, coming up and bowing elaborately.
“Mr. and Mrs. Tarbox, I believe. Ah,
yes! Well, I will mention it up at Albany. I am
Perry dashed off, followed by a score of Dunderbunk
boys, organized by him as the Purtett Guards,
and taught to salute him as Generalissimo with military
honors.
So many hundreds of turkeys, done to a turn,
now began to have an effect upon the atmosphere.
Few odors are more subtile and pervading than
this, and few more appetizing. Indeed, there is
said to be an odd fellow, a strictly American gourmand,
in New York, who sits from noon to dusk
on Christmas-Day up in a tall steeple, merely
to catch the aroma of roast-turkey floating over
the city, — and much good, it is said, it does
him.
Hard skating is nearly as effective to whet
hunger as this gentleman's expedient. When the
spicy breezes began to blow soft as those of Ceylon's
isle over the river and every whiff talked
Turkey, the population of Dunderbunk listened to
the wooing and began to follow its several noses —
snubs, beaks, blunts, sharps, piquants, dominants,
fines, bulgies, and bifids — on the way to the several
households which those noses adorned or defaced.
Prosperous Dunderbunk had a Dinner, yes,
a Dinner, that day, and Richard Wade was gratefully
remembered by many over-fed foundry-men
and their over-fed families.
Wade had not had half skating enough.
“I 'll time myself down to Skerrett's Point,” he
hemlocks.”
The Point was on the property of Peter Skerrett,
Wade's friend and college comrade of ten years
gone. Peter had been an absentee in Europe, and
smokes from his chimneys this morning had confirmed
to Wade's eyes the rumor of his return.
Skerrett's Point was a mile below the Foundry.
Our hero did his mile under three minutes. How
many seconds under, I will not say. I do not wish
to make other fellows unhappy.
The Point was a favorite spot of Wade's. Many
a twilight of last summer, tired with his fagging
at the Works to make good the evil of Whiffler's
rule, he had lain there on the rocks under the hemlocks,
breathing the spicy methyl they poured into
the air. After his day's hard fight, in the dust and
heat of the Foundry, with anarchy and unthrift, he
used to take the quiet restoratives of Nature, until
the murmur and fragrance of the woods, the cool
wind, and the soothing loiter of the shining stream
had purged him from the fevers of his task.
To this old haunt he skated, and kindling a little
fire, as an old campaigner loves to do, he sat down
and lunched heartily on Mrs. Purtett's cold leg, —
cannibal thought! — on the cold leg of Mrs. Purtett's
yesterday's turkey. Then lighting his weed,
— dear ally of the lonely, — the Superintendent
began to think of his foreman's bliss, and to long
for something similar on his own plane.
“I hope the wish is father to its fulfillment,” he
Such a halcyon day I may not have again in all my
life, and I ought to make the best of it, with my
New Skates.”
So he dashed off, and filled the little cove above
the Point with a labyrinth of curves and flourishes.
When that bit of crystal tablet was well covered,
the podographer sighed for a new sheet to
inscribe his intricate rubricas upon. Why not
write more stanzas of the poetry of motion on the
ice below the Point? Why not?
Braced by his lunch on the brown fibre of good
Mrs. Purtett's cold drumstick and thigh, Wade
was now in fine trim. The air was more glittering
and electric than ever. It was triumph and victory
and pæan in action to go flashing along over
this footing, smoother than polished marble and
sheenier than first-water gems.
Wade felt the high exhilaration of pure blood
galloping through a body alive from top to toe.
The rhythm of his movement was like music
to him.
The Point ended in a sharp promontory. Just
before he came abreast of it, Wade under mighty
headway flung into his favorite corkscrew spiral on
one foot, and went whirling dizzily along, round
and round, in a straight line.
At the dizziest moment, he was suddenly aware
of a figure, also turning the Point at full speed, and
rushing to a collision.
He jerked aside to avoid it. He could not look
in the ice. He fell violently, and lay like a
dead man.
His New Skates, Testimonial of Merit, seem to
have served him a shabby trick.
8. CHAPTER VIII.
TÊTE-À-TÊTE.
Seeing Wade lie there motionless, the lady —
Took off her spectacles, blew her great red nose,
and stiffly drew near.
Spectacles! Nose! No, — the latter feature of
hers had never become acquainted with the former;
and there was as little stiffness as nasal redness
about her.
A fresh start, then, — and this time accuracy!
Appalled by the loud thump of the stranger's
skull upon the chief river of the State of New
York, the lady — it was a young lady whom Wade
had tumbled to avoid — turned, saw a human being
lying motionless, and swept gracefully toward him,
like a Good Samaritan, on the outer edge. It was
not her fault, but her destiny, that she had to be
graceful even under these tragic circumstances.
“Dead!” she thought. “Is he dead?”
The appalling thump had cracked the ice, and
inside with brains to resist a blow.
She shuddered, as she swooped about toward
this possible corpse. It might be that he was
killed, and half the fault hers. No wonder her fine
color, shining in the right parts of an admirably
drawn face, all disappeared instantly.
But she evidently was not frightened. She halted,
kneeled, looked curiously at the stranger, and
then proceeded, in a perfectly cool and self-possessed
way, to pick him up.
A solid fellow, heavy to lift in his present lumpish
condition of dead-weight! She had to tug
mightily to get him up into a sitting position.
When he was raised, all the backbone seemed gone
from his spine, and it took the whole force of her
vigorous arms to sustain him.
The effort was enough to account for the return
of her color. It came rushing back splendidly.
Cheeks, forehead, everything but nose, blushed.
The hard work of lifting so much avoirdupois, and
possibly, also, the novelty of supporting so much
handsome fellow, intensified all her hues. Her
eyes — blue, or that shade even more faithful than
blue — deepened; and her pale golden hair grew
several carats — not carrots — brighter.
She was repaid for her active sympathy at once
by discovering that this big, awkward thing was
not a dead, but only a stunned body. It had an
ugly bump and a bleeding cut on its manly skull,
but otherwise was quite an agreeable object to
brow Nature had written `Gentleman.'”
As this young lady had never had a fair, steady
stare at a stunned hero before, she seized her advantage.
She had hitherto been distant with the
other sex. She had no brother. Not one of her
male cousins had ever ventured near enough to
get those cousinly privileges that timid cousins
sigh for and plucky cousins take, if they are worth
taking.
Wade's impressive face, though for the moment
blind as a statue's, also seized its advantage and
stared at her intently, with a pained and pleading
look, new to those resolute features.
Wade was entirely unconscious of the great hit
he had made by his tumble: plump into the arms
of this heroine! There were fellows extant who
would have suffered any imaginable amputation,
any conceivable mauling, any fling from the apex
of anything into the lowest deeps of anywhere,
for the honor he was now enjoying.
But all he knew was that his skull was a beehive
in an uproar, and that one lobe of his brain was
struggling to swarm off. His legs and arms felt as
if they belonged to another man, and a very limp
one at that. A ton of cast-iron seemed to be pressing
his eyelids down, and a trickle of red-hot metal
flowed from his cut forehead.
“I shall have to scream,” thought the lady, after
an instant of anxious waiting, “if he does not revive.
I cannot leave him to go for help.”
Not a prude, you see. A prude would have had
cheap scruples about compromising herself by taking
a man in her arms. Not a vulgar person, who
would have required the stranger to be properly
recommended by somebody who came over in the
Mayflower, before she helped him. Not a feeble-minded
damsel, who, if she had not fainted, would
have fled away, gasping and in tears. No timidity
or prudery or underbred doubts about this thorough
creature. She knew she was in her right womanly
place, and she meant to stay there.
But she began to need help, possibly a lancet,
possibly a pocket-pistol, possibly hot blankets, possibly
somebody to knead these lifeless lungs and
pommel this flaccid body, until circulation was restored.
Just as she was making up her mind to scream,
Wade stirred. He began to tingle as if a familiar
of the Inquisition were slapping him all over
with fine-toothed currycombs. He became half
conscious of a woman supporting him. In a stammering
and intoxicated voice he murmured, —
And kissed the place to make it well?
My —”
He opened his eyes. It was not his mother; for
she was long since deceased. Nor was this nonmother
kissing the place.
In fact, abashed at the blind eyes suddenly unclosing
so near her, she was on the point of letting
her burden drop. When dead men come to life in
the place,” young ladies, however independent of
conventions, may well grow uneasy.
But the stranger, though alive, was evidently in
a molluscous, invertebrate condition. He could
not sustain himself. She still held him up, a little
more at arm's-length, and all at once the reaction
from extreme anxiety brought a gush of tears to
her eyes.
“Don't cry,” says Wade, vaguely, and still only
half conscious. “I promise never to do so again.”
At this, said with a childlike earnestness, the lady
smiled.
“Don't scalp me,” Wade continued, in the same
tone. “Squaws never scalp.”
He raised his hand to his bleeding forehead.
She laughed outright at his queer plaintive tone
and the new class he had placed her in.
Her laugh and his own movement brought Wade
fully to himself. She perceived that his look was
transferring her from the order of scalping squaws
to her proper place as a beautiful young woman of
the highest civilization, not smeared with vermilion,
but blushing celestial rosy.
“Thank you,” said Wade. “I can sit up now
without assistance.” And he regretted profoundly
that good breeding obliged him to say so.
She withdrew her arms. He rested on the ice, —
posture of the Dying Gladiator. She made an effort
to be cool and distant as usual; but it would
not do. This weak mighty man still interested
him.
He made a feeble attempt to wipe away the drops
of blood from his forehead with his handkerchief.
“Let me be your surgeon!” said she.
She produced her own folded handkerchief, —
M. D. were the initials in the corner, — and neatly
and tenderly turbaned him.
Wade submitted with delight to this treatment.
A tumble with such trimmings was luxury indeed.
“Who would not break his head,” he thought,
“to have these delicate fingers plying about him,
and this pure, noble face so close to his? What
a queenly indifferent manner she has! What a
calm brow! What honest eyes! What a firm
nose! What equable cheeks! What a grand indignant
mouth! Not a bit afraid of me! She
feels that I am a gentleman and will not presume.”
“There!” said she, drawing back. “Is that
comfortable?”
“Luxury!” he ejaculated with fervor.
“I am afraid I am to blame for your terrible fall.”
“No, — my own clumsiness and that oar-blade
are in fault.”
“If you feel well enough to be left alone, I will
skate off and call my friends.”
“Please do not leave me quite yet!” says
Wade, entirely satisfied with the tête-à-tête.
“Ah! here comes Mr. Skerrett round the
Point!” she said, — and sprang up, looking a little
guilty.
9. CHAPTER IX.
LOVE IN THE FIRST DEGREE.
Peter Skerrett came sailing round the purple
rocks of his Point, skating like a man who has
been in the South of Europe for two winters.
He was decidedly Anglicized in his whiskers,
coat, and shoes. Otherwise he in all respects repeated
his well-known ancestor, Skerrett of the
Revolution; whose two portraits — 1. A ruddy
hero in regimentals, in Gilbert Stuart's early
brandy-and-water manner; 2. A rosy sage in senatorials,
in Stuart's later claret-and-water manner
— hang in his descendant's dining-room.
Peter's first look was a provokingly significant
one at the confused and blushing young lady. Secondly
he inspected the Dying Gladiator on the ice.
“Have you been tilting at this gentleman,
Mary?” he asked, in the voice of a cheerful,
friendly fellow. “Why! Hullo. Hooray! It 's
Wade, Richard Wade, Dick Wade! Don't look,
Miss Mary, while I give him the grips of all the
secret societies we belonged to in College.”
Mary, however, did look on, pleased and amused,
while Peter plumped down on the ice, shook his
friend's hand, and examined him as if he were fine
crockery, spilt and perhaps shattered.
“It 's not a case of trepanning, Dick, my boy?”
said he.
“No,” said the other. “I tumbled in trying to
dodge this lady. The ice thought my face ought
to be scratched, because I had been scratching its
face without mercy. My wits were knocked out
of me; but they are tired of secession, and pleading
to be let in again.”
“Keep some of them out for our sake! We
must have you at our commonplace level. Well,
Miss Mary, I suppose this is the first time you
have had the sensation of breaking a man's head.
You generally hit lower.” Peter tapped his heart.
“I 'm all right now, thanks to my surgeon,”
says Wade. “Give me a lift, Peter.” He pulled
up and clung to his friend.
“You 're the vine and I 'm the lamp-post,”
Skerrett said. “Mary, do you know what a
pocket-pistol is?”
“I have seen such weapons concealed about the
persons of modern warriors.”
“There 's one in my overcoat-pocket, with a cup
at the but and a cork at the muzzle. Skate off
now, like an angel, and get it. Bring Fanny, too.
She is restorative.”
“Are you alive enough to admire that, Dick?”
he continued, as she skimmed away.
“It would put a soul under the ribs of Death.”
“I venerate that young woman,” says Peter.
“You see what a beauty she is, and just as unspoiled
as this ice. Unspoiled beauties are rarer
than rocs' eggs.”
“She has a singularly true face,” Wade replied,
thing in man or woman.”
“Yes, truth makes that nuisance, beauty, tolerable.”
“You did not do me the honor to present me.”
“I saw you had gone a great way beyond that,
my boy. Have you not her initials in cambric on
your brow? Not M. T., which would n't apply;
but M. D.”
“Mary —?”
“Damer.”
“I like the name,” says Wade, repeating it.
“It sounds simple and thorough-bred.”
“Just what she is. One of the nine simple-hearted
and thorough-bred girls on this continent.”
“Nine?”
“Is that too many? Three, then. That 's one
in ten millions. The exact proportion of Poets,
Painters, Orators, Statesmen, and all other Great
Artists. Well, — three or nine, — Mary Damer is
one of them. She never saw fear or jealousy, or
knowingly allowed an ignoble thought or an ungentle
word or an ungraceful act in herself. Her
atmosphere does not tolerate flirtation. You must
find out for yourself how much genius she has and
has not. But I will say this, — that I think of puns
two a minute faster when I 'm with her. Therefore
she must be magnetic, and that is the first charm
in a woman.”
Wade laughed. “You have not lost your powers
of analysis, Peter. But talking of this heroine,
except apropos of punning.”
“Come up and dine, and we 'll fire away personal
histories, broadside for broadside! I 've been
looking in vain for a worthy hero to set vis-à-vis to
my fair kinswoman. But stop! perhaps you have
a Christmas turkey at home, with a wife opposite,
and a brace of boys waiting for drumsticks.”
“No, — my boys, like cherubs, await their own
drumsticks. They 're not born, and I 'm not married.”
“I thought you looked incomplete and abnormal.
Well, I will show you a model wife, — and here
she comes!”
Here they came, the two ladies, gliding round
the Point, with draperies floating as artlessly artful
as the robes of Raphael's Hours, or a Pompeian
Bacchante. For want of classic vase or patera, Miss
Damer brandished Peter Skerrett's pocket-pistol.
Fanny Skerrett gave her hand cordially to Wade,
and looked a little anxiously at his pale face.
“Now, M. D.,” says Peter, “you have been
surgeon, you shall be doctor and dose our patient.
Now, then, —
Quicken his eyes with mountain-dew,
That Styx, the detested,
No more he may view.'”
“Thanks, Hebe!”
Io pæan, I cry!
The whiskey of the Immortals
Forbids me to die.”
“We effeminate women of the nineteenth century
are afraid of broken heads,” said Fanny.
“But Mary Damer seems quite to enjoy your accident,
Mr. Wade, as an adventure.”
Miss Damer certainly did seem gay and exhilarated.
“I enjoy it,” said Wade. “I perceive that I
fell on my feet, when I fell on my crown. I tumbled
among old friends, and I hope among new
ones.”
“I have been waiting to claim my place among
your old friends,” Mrs. Skerrett said, “ever since
Peter told me you were one of his models.”
She delivered this little speech with a caressing
manner which totally fascinated Wade.
Nothing was ever so absolutely pretty as Mrs.
Peter Skerrett. Her complete prettiness left nothing
to be desired.
“Never,” thought Wade, “did I see such a
compact little casket of perfections. Every feature
is thoroughly well done and none intrusively superior.
Her little nose is a combination of all the
amiabilities. Her black eyes sparkle with fun and
mischief and wit, all playing over deep tenderness
below. Her hair ripples itself full of gleams and
shadows. The same coquetry of Nature that rippled
her hair has dinted her cheeks with shifting
dimples. Every time she smiles — and she smiles
as if sixty an hour were not half-allowance — a
dimple slides into view and vanishes like a dot in
a flow of sunny water. And, O Peter Skerrett! if
envy you that latent kiss of a mouth.”
“You need not say it, Wade, — your broken
head exempts you from the business of compliments,”
said Peter; “but I see you think my wife
perfection. You 'll think so the more, the more
you know her.”
“Stop, Peter,” said she, “or I shall have to
hide behind the superior charms of Mary Damer.”
Miss Damer certainly was a woman of a grander
order. You might pull at the bells or knock at
the knockers and be introduced into the boudoirs
of all the houses, villas, seats, chateaus,
and palaces in Christendom without seeing such
another. She belonged distinctly to the Northern
races, — the “brave and true and tender” women.
There was, indeed, a trace of hauteur
and imperiousness in her look and manner; but
it did not ill become her distinguished figure
and face. Wade, however, remembered her sweet
earnestness when she was playing leech to his
wound, and chose to take that mood as her dominant
one.
“She must have been desperately annoyed with
bores and boobies,” he thought. “I do not wonder
she protects herself by distance. I am afraid
I shall never get within her lines again, — not
even if I should try slow and regular approaches,
and bombard her with bouquets for a twelve-month.”
“But, Wade,” says Peter, “all this time you
to be wrecked on the hospitable shores of my
Point.”
“I live here. I am chief cook and confectioner
where you see the smoking top of that tall chimney
up-stream.”
“Why, of course! What a dolt I was, not to
think of you, when Churm told us an Athlete, a
Brave, a Sage, and a Gentleman was the Superintendent
of Dunderbunk; but said we must find
his name out for ourselves. You remember, Mary.
Miss Damer is Mr. Churm's ward.”
She acknowledged with a cool bow that she did
remember her guardian's character of Wade.
“You do not say, Peter,” says Mrs. Skerrett,
with a bright little look at the other lady, “why
Mr. Churm was so mysterious about Mr. Wade.”
“Miss Damer shall tell us,” Peter rejoined, repeating
his wife's look of merry significance.
She looked somewhat teased. Wade could divine
easily the meaning of this little mischievous
talk. His friend Churm had no doubt puffed him
furiously.
“All this time,” said Miss Damer, evading a
reply, “we are neglecting our skating privileges.”
“Peter and I have a few grains of humanity in
our souls,” Fanny said. “We should blush to
sail away from Mr. Wade, while he carries the
quarantine flag at his pale cheeks.”
“I am almost ruddy again,” says Wade. “Your
potion, Miss Damer, has completed the work of
“Whereupon the post changes to a teetotum,”
Peter said, and spun off in an eccentric, ending in
a tumble.
“I must have a share in your restoration, Mr.
Wade,” Fanny claimed. “I see you need a second
dose of medicine. Hand me the flask, Mary-What
shall I pour from this magic bottle? juice of
Rhine, blood of Burgundy, fire of Spain, bubble
of Rheims, beeswing of Oporto, honey of Cyprus,
nectar, or whiskey? Whiskey is vulgar, but the
proper thing, on the whole, for these occasions. I
prescribe it.” And she gave him another little
draught to imbibe.
He took it kindly, for her sake, — and not alone
for that, but for its own respectable sake. His recovery
was complete. His head, to be sure, sang
a little still, and ached not a little. Some fellows
would have gone on the sick list with such a wound.
Perhaps he would, if he had had a trouble to dodge.
But here instead was a pleasure to follow. So he
began to move about slowly, watching the ladies.
Fanny was a novice in the Art, and this was her
first day this winter. She skated timidly, holding
Peter very tightly. She went into the dearest little
panics for fear of tumbles, and uttered the most
musical screams and laughs. And if she succeeded
in taking a few brave strokes and finished with a
neat slide, she pleaded for a verdict of “Well
done!” with such an appealing smile and such a
and applauded heartily.
Miss Damer skated as became her free and vigorous
character. She had passed her Little Go as a
scholar, and was now steadily winning her way
through the list of achievements, before given, toward
the Great Go. To-day she was at work at
small circles backward. Presently she wound off
a series of perfectly neat ones, and, looking up,
pleased with her prowess, caught Wade's admiring
eye. At this she smiled and gave an arch little
womanly nod of self-approval, which also demanded
masculine sympathy before it was quite a perfect
emotion.
With this charming gesture, the alert feather in
her Amazonian hat nodded, too, as if it admired its
lovely mistress.
Wade was thrilled. “Brava!” he cried, in answer
to the part of her look which asked sympathy;
and then, in reply to the implied challenge,
he forgot his hurt and his shock, and struck into
the same figure.
He tried not to surpass his fair exemplar too cruelly.
But he did his peripheries well enough to get
a repetition of the captivating nod and a Bravo!
from the lady.
“Bravo!” said she. “But do not tax your
strength too soon.”
She began to feel that she was expressing too
much interest in the stranger. It was a new sensation
for her to care whether men fell or got up.
a trifle ashamed of it. In either case, she did
not wish to show that it was in her heart. The
consciousness of concealment flushed her damask
cheek.
It was a damask cheek. All her hues were cool
and pearly; while Wade, Saxon too, had hot golden
tints in his hair and moustache, and his color,
now returning, was good strong red with plenty of
bronze in it.
“Thank you,” he replied. “My force has all
come back. You have electrified me.”
A civil nothing; but meaning managed to get
into his tone and look, whether he would or not.
Which he perceiving, on his part began to feel
guilty.
Of what crime?
Of the very same crime as hers, — the most ancient
and most pardonable crime of youth and
maiden, — that sweet and guiltless crime of love in
the first degree.
So, without troubling themselves to analyze their
feelings, they found a piquant pleasure in skating
together, — she in admiring his tours de force, and
he in instructing her.
“Look, Peter!” said Mrs. Skerrett, pointing to
the other pair skating, he on the backward roll, she
on the forward, with hands crossed and locked; —
such contacts are permitted in skating, as in dancing.
“Your hero and my heroine have dropped
into an intimacy.”
“None but the Plucky deserve the Pretty,” says
Peter.
“But he seems to be such a fine fellow, — suppose
she should n't —”
The pretty face looked anxious.
“Suppose he should n't,” Peter on the masculine
behalf returned.
“He cannot help it: Mary is so noble, — and so
charming, when she does not disdain to be.”
“I do not believe she can help it. She cannot
disdain Wade. He carries too many guns for that.
He is just as fine as she is. He was a hero when I
first knew him. His face does not show an atom
of change; and you know what Mr. Churm told us
of his chivalric deeds elsewhere, and how he tamed
and reformed Dunderbunk. He is crystal grit, as
crystalline and gritty as he can be.”
“Grit seems to be your symbol of the highest
qualities. It certainly is a better thing in man
than in ice-cream. But, Peter, suppose this should
be a true love and should not run smooth?”
“What consequence is the smooth running, so
long as there is strong running and a final getting
in neck and neck at the winning-post?”
“But,” still pleaded the anxious soul, — having
no anxieties of her own, she was always suffering
for others, — “he seems to be such a fine fellow!
and she is so hard to win!”
“Am I a fine fellow?”
“No, — horrid!”
“The truth, — or I let you tumble.”
“Well, upon compulsion, I admit that you are.”
“Then being a fine fellow does not diminish the
said fellow's chances of being blessed with a wife
quite superfine.”
“If I thought you were personal, Peter, I should
object to the mercantile adjective. `Superfine,'
indeed!”
“I am personal. I withdraw the obnoxious
phrase, and substitute transcendent. No, Fanny
dear, I read Wade's experience in my own. I do
not feel very much concerned about him. He is
big enough to take care of himself. A man who
is sincere, self-possessed, and steady does not get
into miseries with beautiful Amazons like our
friend. He knows too much to try to make his
love run up hill; but let it once get started, rough
running gives it vim. Wade will love like a deluge,
when he sees that he may, and I 'd advise
obstacles to stand off.”
“It was pretty, Peter, to see cold Mary Damer
so gentle and almost tender.”
“I always have loved to see the first beginnings
of what looks like love, since I saw ours.”
“Ours,” she said, — “it seems like yesterday.”
And then together they recalled that fair picture
against its dark ground of sorrow, and so went
on refreshing the emotions of that time until Fanny
smiling said, —
“There must be something magical in skates,
for here we are talking sentimentally like a pair of
young lovers.”
“Health and love are cause and effect,” says
Peter, sententiously.
Meanwhile Wade had been fast skating into the
good graces of his companion. Perhaps the rap
on his head had deranged him. He certainly tossed
himself about in a reckless and insane way. Still
he justified his conduct by never tumbling again,
and by inventing new devices with bewildering
rapidity.
This pair were not at all sentimental. Indeed,
their talk was quite technical: all about rings and
edges, and heel and toe, — what skates are best,
and who best use them. There is an immense
amount of sympathy to be exchanged on such
topics, and it was somewhat significant that they
avoided other themes where they might not sympathize
so thoroughly. The negative part of a
conversation is often as important as its positive.
So the four entertained themselves finely, sometimes
as a quartette, sometimes as two duos with
proper changes of partners, until the clear west
began to grow golden and the clear east pink with
sunset.
“It is a pity to go,” said Peter Skerrett.
“Everything here is perfection and Fine Art; but
we must not be unfaithful to dinner. Dinner
would have a right to punish us, if we did not
encourage its efforts to be Fine Art also.”
“Now, Mr. Wade,” Fanny commanded, “your
most heroic series of exploits, to close this heroic
day.”
He nimbly dashed through his list. The ice was
traced with a labyrinth of involuted convolutions.
Wade's last turn brought him to the very spot
of his tumble.
“Ah!” said he. “Here is the oar that tripped
me, with `Wade, his mark,' gashed into it. If I
had not this” — he touched Miss Damer's handkerchief
— “for a souvenir, I think I would dig up
the oar and carry it home.”
“Let it melt out and float away in the spring,”
Mary said. “It may be a perch for a sea-gull or
a buoy for a drowning man.”
Here, if this were a long story instead of a short
one, might be given a description of Peter Skerrett's
house and the menu of Mrs. Skerrett's
dinner. Peter and his wife had both been to great
pillory dinners, ad nauseam, and learnt what to
avoid. How not to be bored is the object of all
civilization, and the Skerretts had discovered the
methods.
I must dismiss the dinner and the evening,
stamped with the general epithet, Perfection.
“You will join us again to-morrow on the river,”
said Mrs. Skerrett, as Wade rose to go.
“To-morrow I go to town to report to my Directors.”
“Then next day.”
“Next day, with pleasure.”
Wade departed and marked this halcyon day
with white chalk, as the whitest, brightest, sweetest
of his life.
10. CHAPTER X.
FOREBODINGS.
Jubilation! Jubilation now, instead of Consternation,
in the office of Mr. Benjamin Brummage in
Wall Street.
President Brummage had convoked his Directors
to hear the First Semiannual Report of the new
Superintendent and Dictator of Dunderbunk.
And there they sat around the green table, no
longer forlorn and dreading a failure, but all chuckling
with satisfaction over their prosperity.
They were a happy and hilarious family now, —
so hilarious that the President was obliged to be
always rapping to Orderr with his paper-knife.
Every one of these gentlemen was proud of himself
as a Director of so successful a Company.
The Dunderbunk advertisement might now consider
itself as permanent in the newspapers, and
the Treasurer had very unnecessarily inserted the
notice of a dividend, which everybody knew of
already.
When Mr. Churm was not by, they all claimed
the honor of having discovered Wade, or at least
of having been the first to appreciate him.
They all invited him to dinner, — the others at
their houses, Sam Gwelp at his club.
They had not yet begun to wax fat and kick.
They still remembered the panic of last summer.
confidence in Wade, approved of his system,
forced upon him an increase of salary, and
began to talk of “launching out” and doubling
their capital. In short, they behaved as Directors
do when all is serene.
Churm and Wade had a hearty laugh over the
absurdities of the Board and all their vague propositions.
“Dunderbunk,” said Churm, “was a company
started on a sentimental basis, as many others are.”
“Mr. Brummage fell in love with pig-iron?”
“Precisely. He had been a dry-goods jobber,
risen from a retailer somewhere in the country.
He felt a certain lack of dignity in his work. He
wanted to deal in something more masculine than
lace and ribbons. He read a sentimental article
on Iron in the `Journal of Commerce': how Iron
held the world together; how it was nerve and
sinew; how it was ductile and malleable and other
things that sounded big; how without Iron civilization
would stop, and New-Zealanders hunt rats
among the ruins of London; how anybody who
would make two tons of Iron grow where one
grew before was a benefactor to the human race
greater than Alexander, Cæsar, or Napoleon; and
so on, — you know the eloquent style. Brummage's
soul was fired. He determined to be
greater than the three heroes named. He was
oozing with unoccupied capital. He went about
among the other rich jobbers, with the newspaper
determined to be great Iron-Kings, — magnificent
thought! They wanted to read in the newspapers,
`If all the iron rails made at the Dunderbunk
Works in the last six months were put together in
a straight line, they would reach twice round our
terraqueous globe and seventy-three miles two
rails over.' So on that poetic foundation they
started the concern.”
Wade laughed. “But how did you happen to
be with them?”
“Oh! my friend Damer sold them the land for
the shop and took stock in payment. I came into
the Board as his executor. Did I never tell you
so before?”
“No.”
“Well, then, be informed that it was in Miss
Damer's behalf that you knocked down Friend
Tarbox, and so got your skates for saving her
property. It 's quite a romance already, Richard,
my boy! and I suppose you feel immensely bored
that you had to come down and meet us old chaps,
instead of tumbling at her feet on the ice again to-day.”
“A tumble in this wet day would be a cold bath
to romance.”
The Gulf Stream had sent up a warm spoil-sport
rain that morning. It did not stop, but poured
furiously the whole day.
From Cohoes to Spuyten Duyvil, on both sides
of the river, all the skaters swore at the weather,
of heaven were opened in Noah's time. The
skateresses did not swear, but savagely said, “It
is too bad,” — and so it was.
Wade, loaded with the blessings of his Directors,
took the train next morning for Dunderbunk.
The weather was still mild and drizzly, but
promised to clear. As the train rattled along by
the river, Wade could see that the thin ice was
breaking up everywhere. In mid-stream a procession
of blocks was steadily drifting along. Unless
Zero came sliding down again pretty soon
from Boreal regions, the sheets that filled the coves
and clung to the shores would also sail away southward,
and the whole Hudson be left clear as in mid-summer.
At Yonkers a down train ranged by the side of
Wade's train, and, looking out he saw Mr. and
Mrs. Skerrett alighting.
He jumped down, rather surprised, to speak to
them.
“We have just been telegraphed here,” said
Peter, gravely. “The son of a widow, a friend of
ours, was drowned this morning in the soft ice of
the river. He was a pet of mine, poor fellow! and
the mother depends upon me for advice. We have
come down to say a kind word. Why won't you
report us to the ladies at my house, and say we
shall not be at home until the evening train?
They do not know the cause of our journey except
that it is a sad one.”
“Perhaps Mr. Wade will carve their turkey for
them at dinner, Peter,” Fanny suggested.
“Do, Wade! and keep their spirits up. Dinner
's at six.”
Here the engine whistled. Wade promised to
“shine substitute” at his friend's board, and took
his place again. The train galloped away.
Peter and his wife exchanged a bright look over
the fortunate incident of this meeting, and went on
their kind way to carry sympathy and such consolation
as might be to the widow.
The train galloped northward. Until now, the
beat of its wheels, like the click of an enormous
metronome, had kept time to jubilant measures
singing in Wade's brain. He was hurrying back,
exhilarated with success, to the presence of a
woman whose smile was finer exhilaration than any
number of votes of confidence, passed unanimously
by any number of conclaves of overjoyed Directors,
and signed by Brummage after Brummage, with
the signature of a capitalist in a flurry of delight
at a ten per cent dividend.
But into this joyous mood of Wade's the thought
of death suddenly intruded. He could not keep a
picture of death and drowning out of his mind. As
the train sprang along and opened gloomy breadth
after breadth of the leaden river, clogged with slow-drifting
files of ice-blocks, he found himself staring
across the dreary waste and forever fancying some
one sinking there, helpless and alone.
He seemed to see a brave, bright-eyed, ruddy
the weakened ice. Suddenly the ice gives way, the
little figure sinks, rises, clutches desperately at a
fragment, struggles a moment, is borne along in the
relentless flow of the chilly water, stares in vain
shoreward, and so sinks again with a look of
agony, and is gone.
But whenever this inevitable picture grew before
Wade's eyes, as the drowning figure of his fancy
vanished, it suddenly changed features, and presented
the face of Mary Damer, perishing beyond
succor.
Of course he knew that this was but a morbid
vision. Yet that it came at all, and that it so agonized
him, proved the force of his new feeling.
He had not analyzed it before. This thought of
death became its touchstone.
Men like Wade, strong, healthy, earnest, concentrated,
straightforward, isolated, judge men and
women as friends or foes at once and once for all.
He had recognized in Mary Damer from the first a
heart as true, whole, noble, and healthy as his own.
A fine instinct had told him that she was waiting
for her hero, as he was for his heroine.
So he suddenly loved her. And yet not suddenly;
for all his life, and all his lesser forgotten or
discarded passions, had been training him for this
master one.
He suddenly and strongly loved her; and yet it
had only been a beautiful bewilderment of uncomprehended
delight, until this haunting vision of her
Then he perceived what would be lost to him, if
she were lost.
The thought of Death placed itself between him
and Love. If the love had been merely a pretty
remembrance of a charming woman, he might have
dismissed his fancied drowning scene with a little
emotion of regret. Now, the fancy was an agony.
He had too much power over himself to entertain
it long. But the grisly thought came uninvited,
returned undesired, and no resolute Avaunt,
even backed by that magic wand, a cigar, availed
to banish it wholly.
The sky cleared cold at eleven o'clock. A sharp
wind drew through the Highlands. As the train
rattled round the curve below the tunnel through
Skerrett's Point, Wade could see his skating course
of Christmas-Day with the ladies. Firm ice, glazed
smooth by the sudden chill after the rain, filled the
Cove and stretched beyond the Point into the river.
It was treacherous stuff, beautiful to the eyes of
a skater, but sure to be weak, and likely to break
up any moment and join the deliberate headlong
drift of the masses in mid-current.
Wade almost dreaded lest his vision should suddenly
realize itself, and he should see his enthusiastic
companion of the other day sailing gracefully
along to certain death.
Nothing living, however, was in sight, except
here and there a crow, skipping about in the floating
ice.
The lover was greatly relieved. He could now
forewarn the lady against the peril he had imagined.
The train in a moment dropped him at Dunderbunk.
He hurried to the Foundry and wrote a note to
Mrs. Damer.
“Mr. Wade presents his compliments to Mrs.
Damer, and has the honor to inform her that Mr.
Skerrett has nominated him carver to the ladies to-day
in their host's place.
“Mr. Wade hopes that Miss Damer will excuse
him from his engagement to skate with her this
afternoon. The ice is dangerous, and Miss Damer
should on no account venture upon it.”
Perry Purtett was the bearer of this billet. He
swaggered into Peter Skerrett's hall, and dreadfully
alarmed the fresh-imported Englishman who answered
the bell, by ordering him in a severe tone, —
“Hurry up now, White Cravat, with that answer!
I 'm wanted down to the Works. Steam don't
bile when I 'm off; and the fly-wheel will never
buzz another turn, unless I 'm there to motion it
to move on.”
Mrs. Damer's gracious reply informed Wade
“that she should be charmed to see him at dinner,
etc., and would not fail to transmit his kind warning
to Miss Damer, when she returned from her
drive to make calls.”
But when Miss Damer returned in the afternoon,
her mother was taking a gentle nap over the violet,
indigo, blue, green, yellow, orange, red stripes of a
gorgeous Afghan she was knitting. The daughter
without Fanny Skerrett. Mr. Wade did not come
at the appointed hour. Mary was not willing to
say to herself how much she regretted his absence.
Had he forgotten the appointment?
No, — that was a thought not to be tolerated.
“A gentleman does not forget,” she thought.
And she had a thorough confidence, besides, that
this gentleman was very willing to remember.
She read a little, fitfully, sang fitfully, moved
about the house uneasily; and at last, when it grew
late, and she was bored and Wade did not arrive,
she pronounced to herself that he had been detained
in town.
This point settled, she took her skates, put on
her pretty Amazonian hat with its alert feather,
and went down to waste her beauty and grace on
the ice, unattended and alone.
11. CHAPTER XI.
CAP'N AMBUSTER'S SKIFF.
It was a busy afternoon at the Dunderbunk
Foundry.
The Superintendent had come back with his
pocket full of orders. Everybody, from the Czar
of Russia to the President of the Guano Republic,
by. Prosperity was come. The world was all
ready to move, and only waited for a fresh supply
of wheels, cranks, side-levers, walking-beams, and
other such muscular creatures of iron, to push
and tug and swing and revolve and set Progress
a-going.
Dunderbunk was to have its full share in supplying
the demand. It was well understood by this
time that the iron Wade made was as stanch as the
man who made it. Dunderbunk, therefore, Head
and Hands, must despatch.
So it was a busy afternoon at the industrious
Foundry. The men bestirred themselves. The
furnaces rumbled. The engine thumped. The
drums in the finishing-shop hummed merrily their
lively song of labor. The four trip-hammers —
two bull-headed, two calf-headed — champed, like
carnivorous maws, upon red bars of iron, and over
their banquet they roared the big-toned music of
the trip-hammer chorus, —
Strike while Iron 's hot. Life 's short. Art 's long.”
By this massive refrain, ringing in at intervals
above the ceaseless buzz, murmur, and clang
throughout the buildings, every man's work was
mightily nerved and inspired. Everybody liked to
hear the sturdy song of these grim vocalists; and
whenever they struck in, each solo or duo or quatuor
of men, playing Anvil Chorus, quickened time,
and all the action and rumor of the busy opera
astir like play.
An hour before sunset, Bill Tarbox stepped into
Wade's office. Even oily and begrimed, Bill could
be recognized as a favored lover. He looked more
a man than ever before.
“I forgot to mention,” says the foreman, “that
Cap'n Ambuster was in, this morning, to see you.
He says, that, if the river 's clear enough for him
to get away from our dock, he 'll go down to the
City to-morrow, and offers to take freight cheap.
We might put that new walking-beam, we 've just
rough-finished for the `Union,' aboard of him.”
“Yes, — if he is sure to go to-morrow. It will
not do to delay. The owners complained to me
yesterday that the `Union' was in a bad way for
want of its new machinery. Tell your brother-in-law
to come here, Bill.”
Tarbox looked sheepishly pleased, and summoned
Perry Purtett.
“Run down, Perry,” said Wade, “to the `Ambuster,'
and ask Captain Isaac to step up here a
moment. Tell him I have some freight to send by
him.”
Perry moved through the Foundry with his usual
jaunty step, left his dignity at the door, and ran
off to the dock.
The weather had grown fitful. Heavy clouds
whirled over, trailing snow-flurries. Rarely the
sun found a cleft in the black canopy to shoot
a ray through and remind the world that he was
was wanted.
Master Perry had a furlong to go before he reached
the dock. He crossed the stream, kept unfrozen
by the warm influences of the Foundry. He ran
through a little dell hedged on each side by dull
green cedars. It was severely cold now, and our
young friend condescended to prance and jump
over the ice-skimmed puddles to keep his blood in
motion.
The little rusty, pudgy steamboat lay at the
down-stream side of the Foundry wharf. Her
name was so long and her paddle-box so short,
that the painter, beginning with ambitious large
letters, had been compelled to abbreviate the last
syllable. Her title read thus: —
I. AMBUSTer.
Certainly a formidable inscription for a steamboat!
When she hove in sight, Perry halted, resumed
his stately demeanor, and embarked as if he were a
Doge entering a Bucentaur to wed a Sea.
There was nobody on deck to witness the arrival
and salute the magnifico.
Perry looked in at the Cap'n's office. He beheld
a three-legged stool, a hacked desk, an inky steel-pen,
an inkless inkstand; but no Cap'n Ambuster.
Perry inspected the Cap'n's state-room. There
was a cracked looking-glass, into which he looked;
a hair-brush suspended by the glass, which he
used; a lair of blankets in a berth, which he had
which nobody with a nose could help smelling.
Still no Captain Ambuster, nor any of his crew.
Search in the unsavory kitchen revealed no cook,
coiled up in a corner, suffering nightmares for the
last greasy dinner he had brewed in his frying-pan.
There were no deck hands bundled into
their bunks. Perry rapped on the chain-box and
inquired if anybody was within, and nobody answering,
he had to ventriloquize a negative.
The engine-room, too, was vacant, and quite as
unsavory as the other dens on board. Perry patronized
the engine by a pull or two at the valves,
and continued his tour of inspection.
The Ambuster's skiff, lying on her forward deck,
seemed to entertain him vastly.
“Jolly!” says Perry. And so it was a jolly
boat in the literal, not the technical sense.
“The three wise men of Gotham went to sea in
a bowl; and here 's the identical craft,” says
Perry.
He gave the chubby little machine a push with
his foot. It rolled and wallowed about grotesquely.
When it was still again, it looked so comic, lying
contentedly on its fat side like a pudgy baby, that
Perry had a roar of laughter, which, like other
laughter to one's self, did not sound very merry,
particularly as the north-wind was howling ominously,
and the broken ice, on its downward way,
was whispering and moaning and talking on in a
most mysterious and inarticulate manner.
“Those sheets of ice would crunch up this skiff,
as pigs do a punkin,” thinks Perry.
And with this thought in his head he looked out
on the river, and fancied the foolish little vessel
cast loose and buffeting helplessly about in the
ice.
He had been so busy until now, in prying about
the steamboat and making up his mind that Captain
and men had all gone off for a comfortable supper
on shore, that his eyes had not wandered toward
the stream.
Now his glance began to follow the course of
the icy current. He wondered where all this supply
of cakes came from, and how many of them
would escape the stems of ferry-boats below and
get safe to sea.
All at once, as he looked lazily along the lazy
files of ice, his eyes caught a black object drifting
on a fragment in a wide way of open water opposite
Skerrett's Point, a mile distant.
Perry's heart stopped beating. He uttered a
little gasping cry. He sprang ashore, not at all
like a Doge quitting a Bucentaur. He tore back
to the Foundry, dashing through the puddles, and,
never stopping to pick up his cap, burst in upon
Wade and Bill Tarbox in the office.
The boy was splashed from head to foot with
red mud. His light hair, blown wildly about,
made his ashy face seem paler. He stood panting.
His dumb terror brought back to Wade's mind
all the bad omens of the morning.
“Speak!” said he, seizing Perry fiercely by the
shoulder.
The uproar of the Works seemed to hush for an
instant, while the lad stammered faintly, —
“There 's somebody carried off in the ice by
Skerrett's Point. It looks like a woman. And
there 's nobody to help.”
12. CHAPTER XII.
IN THE ICE.
“Help! help!” shouted the four trip-hammers,
bursting in like a magnified echo of the boy's last
word. “Help! help!” all the humming wheels
and drums repeated more plaintively.
Wade made for the river.
This was the moment all his manhood had been
training and saving for. For this he had kept
sound and brave from his youth up.
As he ran, he felt that the only chance of instant
help was in that queer little bowl-shaped skiff of
the “Ambuster.”
He had never been conscious that he had observed
it; but the image had lain latent in his mind,
biding its time. It might be ten, twenty precious
moments before another boat could be found. This
one was on the spot to do its duty at once.
“Somebody carried off, — perhaps a woman,”
Wade thought. “Not — No, she would not neglect
my warning! Whoever it is, we must save
her from this dreadful death!”
He sprang on board the little steamboat. She
was swaying uneasily at her moorings, as the ice
crowded along and hammered against her stem.
Wade stared from her deck down the river, with all
his life at his eyes.
More than a mile away, below the hemlock-crested
point, was the dark object Perry had seen,
still stirring along the edges of the floating ice. A
broad avenue of leaden-green water wrinkled by
the cold wind separated the field where this figure
was moving from the shore. Dark object and its
footing of gray ice were drifting deliberately farther
and farther away.
For one instant Wade thought that the terrible
dread in his heart would paralyze him. But in that
one moment, while his blood stopped flowing and
his nerves failed, Bill Tarbox overtook him and was
there by his side.
“I brought your cap,” says Bill, “and our two
coats.”
Wade put on his cap mechanically. This little
action calmed him.
“Bill,” said he, “I 'm afraid it is a woman, — a
dear friend of mine, — a very dear friend.”
Bill, a lover, understood the tone.
“We 'll take care of her between us,” he said.
The two turned at once to the little tub of a
boat.
Oars? Yes, — slung under the thwarts, — a
pair of short sculls, worn and split, but with work
in them still. There they hung ready, — and a
rusty boat-hook, besides.
“Find the thole-pins, Bill, while I cut a plug
for her bottom out of this broomstick,” Wade said.
This was done in a moment. Bill threw in the
coats.
“Now, together!”
They lifted the skiff to the gangway. Wade
jumped down on the ice and received her carefully.
They ran her along, as far as they could go, and
launched her in the sludge.
“Take the sculls, Bill. I 'll work the boat-hook
in the bow.”
Nothing more was said. They thrust out with
their crazy little craft into the thick of the ice-flood.
Bill, amidships, dug with his sculls in
among the huddled cakes. It was clumsy pulling.
Now this oar and now that would be thrown out.
He could never get a full stroke.
Wade in the bow could do better. He jammed
the blocks aside with his boat-hook. He dragged
the skiff forward. He steered through the little
open ways of water.
Sometimes they came to a broad sheet of solid
ice. Then it was “Out with her, Bill!” and they
were both out and sliding their bowl so quick over,
that they had not time to go through the rotten
surface. This was drowning business; but neither
could be spared to drown yet.
In the leads of clear water, the oarsman got
brave pulls and sent the boat on mightily. Then
again in the thick porridge of brash ice they lost
headway, or were baffled and stopped among the
cakes. Slow work, slow and painful; and for many
minutes they seemed to gain nothing upon the
steady flow of the merciless current.
A frail craft for such a voyage, this queer little
half-pumpkin! A frail and leaky shell. She bent
and cracked from stem to stern among the nipping
masses. Water oozed in through her dry seams.
Any moment a rougher touch or a sharper edge
might cut her through. But that was a risk they
had accepted. They did not take time to think of
it, nor to listen to the crunching and crackling
of the hungry ice around. They urged straight
on, steadily, eagerly, coolly, spending and saving
strength.
Not one moment to lose! The shattering of
broad sheets of ice around them was a warning of
what might happen to the frail support of their
chase. One thrust of the boat-hook sometimes
cleft a cake that to the eye seemed stout enough
to bear a heavier weight than a woman's.
Not one moment to spare! The dark figure,
now drifted far below the hemlocks of the Point,
no longer stirred. It seemed to have sunk upon
the ice and to be resting there weary and helpless,
one one side a wide way of lurid water, on the
other half a mile of moving desolation.
Far to go, and no time to waste!
“Give way, Bill! Give way!”
“Ay, ay!”
Both spoke in low tones, hardly louder than the
whisper of the ice around them.
By this time hundreds from the Foundry and the
village were swarming upon the wharf and the
steamboat.
“A hundred tar-barrels would n't git up my
steam in time to do any good,” says Cap'n Ambuster.
“If them two in my skiff don't overhaul
the man, he 's gone.”
“You 're sure it 's a man?” says Smith Wheelwright.
“Take a squint through my glass. I 'm dreffully
afeard it 's a gal; but suthin' 's got into my eye,
so I can't see.”
Suthin' had got into the old fellow's eye, —
suthin' saline and acrid, — namely, a tear.
“It 's a woman,” says Wheelwright, — and
suthin' of the same kind blinded him also.
Almost sunset now. But the air was suddenly
filled with perplexing snow-dust from a heavy
squall. A white curtain dropped between the
anxious watchers on the wharf and the boatmen.
The same white curtain hid the dark floating object
from its pursuers. There was nothing in sight
to steer by, now.
Wade steered by his last glimpse, — by the current,
— by the rush of the roaring wind, — by instinct.
How merciful that in such a moment a man is
into action, intense as life.
It was bitterly cold. A swash of ice-water filled
the bottom of the skiff. She was low enough down
without that. They could not stop to bail, and the
miniature icebergs they passed began to look significantly
over the gunwale. Which would come
to the point of foundering first, the boat or the
little floe it aimed for?
Bitterly cold! The snow hardly melted upon
Tarbox's bare hands. His fingers stiffened to the
oars; but there was life in them still, and still he
did his work, and never turned to see how the
steersman was doing his.
A flight of crows came sailing with the snow-squall.
They alighted all about on the hummocks,
and curiously watched the two men battling to save
life. One black impish bird, more malignant or
more sympathetic than his fellows, ventured to
poise on the skiff's stern!
Bill hissed off this third passenger. The crow
rose on its toes, let the boat slide away from under
him, and followed croaking dismal good wishes.
The last sunbeams were now cutting in everywhere.
The thick snow-flurry was like a luminous
cloud. Suddenly it drew aside.
The industrious skiff had steered so well and
made such headway, that there, a hundred yards
away, safe still, not gone, thank God! was the woman
they sought.
A dusky mass flung together on a waning rood
of ice, — Wade could see nothing more.
Weary or benumbed, or sick with pure forlornness
and despair, she had drooped down and
showed no sign of life.
The great wind shook the river. Her waning
rood of ice narrowed, foot by foot, like an unthrifty
man's heritage. Inch by inch its edges
wore away, until the little space that half sustained
the dark heap was no bigger than a coffin-lid.
Help, now! — now, men, if you are to save!
Thrust, Richard Wade, with your boat-hook! Pull,
Bill, till your oars snap! Out with your last frenzies
of vigor! For the little raft of ice, even that
has crumbled beneath its burden, and she sinks, —
sinks, with succor close at hand!
Sinks! No, — she rises and floats again.
She clasps something that holds her head just
above water. But the unmannerly ice has buffeted
her hat off. The fragments toss it about, — that
pretty Amazonian hat, with its alert feather, all
drooping and draggled. Her fair hair and pure
forehead are uncovered for an astonished sunbeam
to alight upon.
“It is my love, my life, Bill! Give way, once
more!”
“Way enough! Steady! Sit where you are,
Bill, and trim boat, while I lift her out. We cannot
risk capsizing.”
He raised her carefully, tenderly, with his strong
arms.
A bit of wood had buoyed her up for that last
moment. It was a broken oar with a deep fresh
gash in it.
Wade knew his mark, — the cut of his own
skate-iron. This busy oar was still resolved to
play its part in the drama.
The round little skiff just bore the third person
without sinking.
Wade laid Mary Damer against the thwart. She
would not let go her buoy. He unclasped her
stiffened hands. This friendly touch found its way
to her heart. She opened her eyes and knew him.
“The ice shall not carry off her hat to frighten
some mother, down stream,” says Bill Tarbox,
catching it.
All these proceedings Cap'n Ambuster's spy-glass
announced to Dunderbunk.
“They 're h'istin' her up. They 've slumped
her into the skiff. They 're puttin' for shore.
Hooray!”
Pity a spy-glass cannot shoot cheers a mile and
a half!
Perry Purtett instantly led a stampede of half
Dunderbunk along the railroad-track to learn who
it was and all about it.
All about it was, that Miss Damer was safe, and
not dangerously frozen, — and that Wade and Tarbox
had carried her up the hill to her mother at
Peter Skerrett's.
Missing the heroes in chief, Dunderbunk made a
hero of Cap'n Ambuster's skiff. It was transported
back on the shoulders of the crowd in triumphal
procession. Perry Purtett carried round the hat
for a contribution to new paint it, new rib it, new
— indeed, to make a new vessel of the brave little
bowl.
“I 'm afeard,” says Cap'n Ambuster, “that,
when I git a harnsome new skiff, I shall want a
harnsome new steamboat, and then the boat will go
to cruisin' round for a harnsome new Cap'n.”
And now for the end of this story.
Healthy love-stories always end in happy marriages.
So ends this story, begun as to its love portion
by the little romance of a tumble, and continued
by the bigger romance of a rescue.
Of course there were incidents enough to fill a
volume, obstacles enough to fill a volume, and development
of character enough to fill a tome thick
as “Webster's Unabridged,” before the happy end
of the beginning of the Wade-Damer joint history.
But we can safely take for granted that, the lover
being true and manly, and the lady true and womanly,
and both possessed of the high moral qualities
necessary to artistic skating, they will go on
understanding each other better, until they are as
one as two can be.
Masculine reader, attend to the moral of this
tale: —
Skate well, be a hero, bravely deserve the fair,
prove your deserts by your deeds, find your “perfect
woman nobly planned to warm, to comfort, and
command,” catch her when found, and you are
Blest.
Reader of the gentler sex, likewise attend:—
All the essential blessings of life accompany a
true heart and a good complexion. Skate vigorously;
then your heart will beat true, your cheeks
will bloom, your appointed lover will see your beautiful
soul shining through your beautiful face, he
will tell you so, and after sufficient circumlocution
he will Pop, you will accept, and your lives will
glide sweetly as skating on virgin ice to silver
music.
| Life in the open air | |