Chapter V: Launching the Dory

"Just the time to take a little row," thought Olly Burdeen, as he strolled about, looking sometimes admiringly at his new clothes and the gay watch-guard, and sometimes casting wistful glances at the sea.

He knew the thrilling pleasure of crossing and recrossing the breakers in a good boat, and rocking on the swells outside.

"I believe I'll try it once," he said. "Maybe I can see the yacht around the point."

The point was a rocky arm of the shore which shut off the ocean view on the north-east, the direction from which the Susette was expected. But the little harbor it would have to enter was a deep cove in the broken coast at the other end of the beach, a quarter of a mile away.

"It can't possibly come in without my seeing it in season," thought Olly, with a glance at the watch, which he took from his pocket and opened and shut again with a sort of guilty joy, for the twentieth time.

There were a couple of dories drawn up above high-water mark; and he knew where a pair of old battered oars were hidden under a row of bathing-houses close by. He drew them out and threw them on the sand. Then he looked at the seaweed in his way,--little windrows of it littering the beach, and dark masses rolling in the surf. The tide had been going out about three hours.

"I can get through that easily enough," he said.

He dragged the lightest of the dories down to the water's edge, and put in the oars. He knew just how it should be launched, and understood the necessity of sending it straight across the breakers, and of never, by any chance, letting them strike it sidewise.

Placing himself at the upper end, he waited for a good wave, and pushed the boat into it,--running with it until his feet were almost in the water, then holding it firmly until another wave lifted it. Just as that was subsiding, he gave the dory another push, leaped in at the same time, caught up the oars, and had them in the rowlocks and in the water just as the third wave came.

So far, so good. He had done the same thing many times before, and had never met with an accident. Two or three sturdy strokes, and he would have been safe outside the rollers. But at a critical moment he paused to look at a few spatters of water on his new clothes; and on the instant one of his oars caught in a whirling tangle of kelp.

The boat was going out swiftly in one direction; the billow that bore the kelp was rushing in with tremendous force in the other. No one knows the power of a wave, who has not felt it at some such crisis. What happened was over so quickly that Olly himself could not have explained it. A brief struggle, a terrible wrench, a buffet in the breast and face from the end of an oar,--and he was lying on his back in the dory with his heels above the thwarts.

For a few seconds he lay there, half stunned by the blow and the fall. His breath seemed to have been quite knocked out of his body. It did not take him long to recover it, however, and to reverse the positions of his head and his heels. When he did so, he found the boat swinging around broadside to the breakers, with one threatening at that very moment to overwhelm it.

Instinctively he seized an oar and pulled with all his might to head the dory to the wave. He succeeded, and sent it careening safely over it and the next great swell, and so out to sea.

But it was at the expense of the oar. It was an old one, much worn by the friction of the rowlocks, and his last stroke broke it short off at the weak point. The paddle-end fell overboard, and only the handle remained in his hand.

He then turned to look for the other oar, and found that he had lost it at the time of his tumble. He could see it going over on a breaker, several rods behind him. For now the wind took the dory, and was wafting it away almost as rapidly as if it carried a sail.

He tried paddling with the stub that remained in his hand, but made so little headway with it that he began to be seriously alarmed. He had been sufficiently startled by his accident and the danger of an overturn in the rollers; but he now saw himself in face of an unforeseen peril.

He at first thought he would jump overboard and swim to the beach; but even then he remembered his clothes, which a wetting might ruin--to say nothing of Mr. Hatville's watch.

There was, besides, another danger. The kelp! He was a good swimmer; but could he ever make his way through breakers in which such fields of sea-weed tossed and rolled?

The night was shutting down with gathering clouds. The wind struck the skiff with a force he had not felt under the lee of the woods. Not a human being was in sight, nor a boat--only two or three distant sails on the horizon.

"Oh, the yacht! Where is the yacht?" he cried aloud, gazing eagerly around the point of rocks, the view beyond which was rapidly opening as he drifted out to sea.

A little while before, he would have been sorry enough to have had the Susette come in before he had time to land and run back to the boarding-house with the borrowed watch; but now he wished for nothing so devoutly as that it might come along and pick him up--so much worse things might happen than the discovery of the time-piece in his possession.

But no yacht hove in sight. The glory had faded out of the sky. The sea darkened; the wind increased. He shouted for help, though with little hope of making himself heard.

There were only women at the boarding-house, and even if his voice reached them, it must have sounded so faint and far away as to attract no especial attention. But the upper windows were visible over the sand-hills. Perhaps somebody, perhaps Amy Canfield herself, was gazing from them.

In that hope he swung his hat with frantic gestures of distress, still screaming for help, as he drifted away on the darkening waters.

(_To be continued._)

GEORGE WASHINGTON.

[_An Historical Biography._]

BY HORACE E. SCUDDER.