University of Virginia Library

24. CHAPTER XXIV.
DRAGGING.

YES, God is indeed more merciful than man. There
are many things worse than death. There is a
fold where no wolves enter; a country where a loving
heart shall not find its own love turned into poison;
a place where the wicked cease from troubling—yes,
even in this heretical day, let us be orthodox enough to believe
that there is a land where no Smith Westcotts ever come.

There are many cases in which it were better to die. It
is easy enough to say it before it comes. Albert Charlton had
said—how many times!—that he would rather see Katy dead
than married to Westcott. But, now that Katy was indeed dead,
how did he feel?

Charlton and Gray had paddled hard with crooked limbs, the
boat was unmanageable, and they could with difficulty keep her
in her course. As they neared the capsized boat, they saw that
the raft had taken the people from it, and Albert heard the
voice—there could be no mistake as to the voice, weak and shivering
as it was—of Isa Marlay, calling to him from the raft:

“We are all safe. Go and save Katy and——him!”

“There they air!” said Gray, pointing to two heads just
visible above the water. “Pull away, by thunder!” And the
two half-exhausted young men swung the boat round, and
rowed. How they longed for the good oars that had sent the
“Pirate's Bride” driving through the water that afternoon!
How they grudged the time spent in righting her when she
veered to right or left! At last they heard Katy's voice cry out,
“Brother Albert!”

“O God!” groaned Charlton, and bent himself to his oar
again.

“Alb——” The last cry was half-drowned in the water, and
when the boat, with half-a-dozen more strokes, reached the place
where Westcott was, so that he was able to seize the side, there
was no Kate to be seen. Without waiting to lift the exhausted
swimmer into the boat, Charlton and Gray dived. But the water
was twenty feet deep, the divers were utterly out of breath with
rowing, and their diving was of no avail. They kept trying
until long after all hope had died out of their hearts. At last
Charlton climbed back into the boat, and sat down. Then Gray
got in. Westcott was so numb and exhausted from staying in
the water so long that he could not get in, but he held to the
boat desperately, and begged them to help him.

“Help him in,” said Charlton to Gray. “I can't.”

“I'd like to help him out ef he wuz in, mighty well. I can't
kill a drownin' man, but blamed ef I gin him a leetle finger of
help. I'd jest as soon help a painter outen the water when I
know'd he'd swaller the fust man he come to.”

But Charlton got up and reached a hand to the sinking
Westcott. He shut his eyes while he pulled him in, and was
almost sorry he had saved him. Let us not be too hard on Albert.

He was in the first agony of having reached a hand to
save little Katy and missed her. To come so near that you
might have succeeded by straining a nerve a little more somewhere—that
is bitterest of all. If Westcott had only held on a
minute!

It was with difficulty that Albert and Gray rowed to the
shore, where Plausaby met them, and persuaded them to change
their clothes. They were both soon on the shore again, where
large fires were blazing, and the old boat that had failed to
save little Katy alive, was now in use to recover her body.
There is no more hopeless and melancholy work than dragging
for the body of a drowned person. The drag moves over the
bottom; the man who holds the rope, watching for the faintest
sensation of resistance in the muscles of his arm, at last feels
something drawing against the drag, calls to the oarsmen to stop
rowing, lets the line slip through his fingers till the boat's momentum
is a little spent, lest he should lose his hold, then he
draws on his line gently, and while the boat drifts back, he
reverently, as becomes one handling the dead, brings the drag
to the surface, and finds that its hooks have brought up nothing
but water-weeds, or a waterlogged bough. And when at last,
after hours of anxious work, the drag brings the lifeless body to
the surface, the disappointment is bitterest of all. For all the
time you have seemed to be seeking the drowned person, and
now at last you have got—what?

It was about eleven o'clock when they first began to drag.
Albert had a sort of vague looking for something, a superstitious
feeling that by some sort of a miracle Katy would yet be
found alive. It is the hardest work the imagination has to do—
this realizing that one who has lived by us will never more

be with us. It is hard to project a future for ourselves, into which
one who has filled a large share of our thought and affection
shall never come. And so there lingers a blind hope, a hopeless
hope of something that shall make unreal that which our
impotent imaginations refuse to accept as real. It is a means by
which nature parries a sudden blow.

Charlton walked up and down the shore, and wished he
might take the drag-line into his own hands; but the mistaken
kindness of our friends refuses us permission to do for our
own dead, when doing anything would be a relief, and when
doing for the dead would be the best possible utterance to
the hopeless love which we call grief.

Mrs. Plausaby, weak and vain though she was, was full of
natural affection. Her love for Albert was checked a little
by her feeling that there was no perfect sympathy between
him and her. But upon Katy she had lavished all her
mother's love. People are apt to think that a love which is
not intelligent is not real; there could be no greater mistake.
And the very smallness of the area covered by Mrs. Plausaby's
mind made her grief for Kate all the more passionate. Katy
occupied Albert's mind jointly with Miss Minorkey, with
ambition, with benevolence, with science, with literature, and
with the great Philanthropinum that was to be built and to
revolutionize the world by helping it on toward its “goal.”
But the interests that shared Mrs. Plausaby's thoughts along
with Katy were very few. Of Albert she thought, and of
her husband. But she gave the chief place to Katy and her
own appearance. And so when the blow had come it was
a severe one. At midnight, Albert went back to try to
comfort his mother, and received patiently all her weeping

upbraidings of him for letting his sister go in the boat, he
might have known it was not safe. And then he hastened back
again to the water, and watched the men in the boat still
dragging without result. Everybody on the shore knew just
where the “Lady of the Lake” had capsized, and if accurate
information, plentifully given, could have helped to find the
bodies, it would soon have been accomplished. The only
difficulty was that this accurate information was very conflicting,
no two of the positive eye-witnesses being able to
agree. So there was much shouting along shore, and many
directions given, but all the searching for a long time proved
vain. All the shouting people hushed their shouting, and
spoke in whispers whenever Albert came near. To most
men there is nothing more reverend than grief. At half-past
two o'clock, the man who held the rope felt a strange thrill,
a sense of having touched one of the bodies. He drew up
his drag, and one of the hooks held a piece of a black silk
cape. When three or four more essays had been made, the
body itself was brought to the surface, and the boat turned
toward the shore. There was no more shouting of directions
now, not a single loud word was spoken, the oarsman rowed
with a steady funereal rhythm, while Ben Towle, who had held
the drag-rope, now held half out of water the recovered
corpse. Albert leaned forward anxiously to see the face of
Katy, but it was Jane Downing, the girl who was drowned
first. Her father took the body in his arms, drew it out on
shore, and wept over it in a quiet fashion for a while. Then
strong and friendly neighbors lifted it, and bore it before him
to his house, while the man followed in a dumb grief.

Then the dragging for Katy was resumed; but as there

was much more doubt in regard to the place where she went
down than there was about the place of the accident, the search
was more difficult and protracted. George Gray never left Albert
for a moment. George wanted to take the drag-rope himself,
but a feeling that he was eccentric, if not insane, kept those
in charge of the boat from giving it to him.

When Sunday morning came, Katy's body had not yet been
found, and the whole village flocked to the lake shore. These
were the first deaths in Metropolisville, and the catastrophe was
so sudden and tragic that it stirred the entire village in an extraordinary
manner. All through that cloudy Sunday forenoon,
in a weary waiting, Charlton sat on the bank of Diamond Lake.

“Mr. Charlton,” said Gray, “git me into that air boat and I'll
git done with this. I've watched them fellers go round the place
tell I can't stan' it no longer.”

The next time the boat faced toward the place where Charlton
stood he beckoned to them, and the boat came to the shore.

“Let Mr. Gray row a few times, won't you?” whispered
Albert. “I think he knows the place.”

With that deference always paid to a man in grief, the man
who had the oars surrendered them to the Hoosier Poet, who
rowed gently and carefully toward the place where he and Albert
had dived for Katy the night before. The quick instinct of the
trapper stood him in good stead now. The perception and
memory of locality and direction are developed to a degree that
seems all but supernatural in a man who lives a trapper's life.

“Now, watch out!” said Gray to the man with the rope, as
they passed what he thought to be the place. But the drag did
not touch anything. Gray then went round and pulled at right
angles across his former course, saying again, “Now, watch

out!” as they passed the same spot. The man who held the
rope advised him to turn a little to the right, but Gray stuck to
his own infallible instinct, and crossed and re-crossed the same
point six times without success.

“You see,” he remarked, “you kin come awful closte to a
thing in the water and not tech it. We ha'n't missed six foot
nary time we passed thar. It may take right smart rowin' to
do it yet. But when you miss a mark a-tryin' at it, you don't
gain nothin' by shootin' wild. Now, watch out!”

And just at that moment the drag caught but did not hold.
Gray noticed it, but neither man said a word. The Inhabitant
turned the boat round and pulled slowly back over the same
place. The drag caught, and Gray lifted his oars. The man
with the rope, who had suddenly got a great reverence for Gray's
skill, willingly allowed him to draw in the line. The Poet did
so cautiously and tremblingly. When the body came above the
water, he had all he could do to keep from fainting. He gently
took hold of the arms and said to his companion, “Pull away
now.” And with his own wild, longing, desolate heart full of
grief, Gray held to the little form and drew her through the
water. Despite his grief, the Poet was glad to be the one who
should bring her ashore. He held her now, if only her dead
body, and his unselfish love found a melancholy recompense.
Albert would have chosen him of all men for the office.

Poor little Kate! In that dread moment when she found
herself sinking to her cold bed among the water-weeds, she had,
failing all other support, clasped her left hand with her right and
gone down to darkness. And as she went, so now came her lifeless
body. The right hand clasped tightly the four little white
fingers of the left.

Poor little Kate! How white as pearl her face was, turned
up toward that Sabbath sky! There was not a spot upon it.
The dreaded leeches had done their work.

She, whom everybody had called sweet, looked sweeter now
than ever. Death had been kind to the child at the last, and
had stroked away every trace of terror, and of the short anguish
she had suffered when she felt herself cast off by the craven
soul she trusted. What might the long anguish have been had
she lived!