Cruise of the Dolphin | Page 8

was nearly spent, we were too cold to sleep. Once
I sunk into a troubled doze, when I seemed to hear Charley Marden's
parting words, only it was the Sea that said them. After that I threw off
the drowsiness whenever it threatened to overcome me.
Fred Langdon was the earliest to discover a filmy, luminous streak in
the sky, the first glimmering of sunrise.
"Look, it is nearly daybreak!"
While we were following the direction of his finger, a sound of distant
oars fell upon our ears.
We listened breathlessly; and as the dip of the blades became more
audible, we discerned two foggy lights, like will-o'-the-wisps, floating
on the river.

Running down to the water's edge, we hailed the boats with all our
might. The call was heard, for the oars rested a moment in the
row-locks, and then pulled in towards the island.
It was two boats from the town, in the foremost of which we could now
make out the figures of Captain Nutter and Binny Wallace's father. We
shrunk back on seeing him.
"Thank God!" cried Mr. Wallace fervently, as he leaped from the
wherry without waiting for the bow to touch the beach.
But when he saw only three boys standing on the sands, his eye
wandered restlessly about in quest of the fourth; then a deadly pallor
overspread his features.
Our story was soon told. A solemn silence fell upon the crowd of rough
boatmen gathered round, interrupted only by a stifled sob form one
poor old man who stood apart from the rest.
The sea was still running too high for any small boat to venture out; so
it was arranged that the wherry should take us back to town, leaving the
yawl, with a picked crew, to hug the island until daybreak, and then set
forth in search of the Dolphin.
Though it was barely sunrise when we reached town, there were a great
many persons assembled at the landing eager for intelligence from
missing boats. Two picnic parties had started down river the day before,
just previous to the gale, and nothing had been heard of them. It turned
out that the pleasure-seekers saw their danger in time, and ran ashore
on one of the least exposed islands, where they passed the night.
Shortly after our own arrival they appeared off Rivermouth, much to
the joy of their friends, in two shattered, dismasted boats.
The excitement over, I was in a forlorn state, physically and mentally.
Captain Nutter put me to bed between hot blankets, and sent Kitty
Collins for the doctor. I was wandering in my mind, and fancied myself
still on Sandpeep Island: now we were building our brick stove to cook
the chowder, and, in my delirium, I laughed aloud and shouted to my
comrades; now the sky darkened, and the squall struck the island; now
I gave orders to Wallace how to manage the boat, and now I cried
because the rain was pouring in on me through the holes in the tent.
Towards evening a high fever set in, and it was many days before my
grandfather deemed it prudent to tell me that the Dolphin had been
found, floating keel upwards, four miles southeast of Mackerel Reef.

Poor little Binny Wallace! How strange it seemed, when I went to
school again, to see that empty seat in the fifth row! How gloomy the
playground was, lacking the sunshine of his gentle, sensitive face! One
day a folded sheet slipped from my algebra: it was the last note he ever
wrote me. I could not read it for the tears.
What a pang shot across my heart the afternoon it was whispered
through the town that a body had been washed ashore at Grave
Point--the place where we bathed! We bathed there no more! How well
I remember the funeral, and what a piteous sight it was afterwards to
see his familiar name on a small headstone in the Old South
Burying-Ground!
Poor little Binny Wallace! Always the same to me. The rest of us have
grown up into hard, worldly men, fighting the fight of life; but you are
forever young, and gentle, and pure; a part of my own childhood that
time cannot wither; always a little boy, always poor little Binny
Wallace!

End of Project Gutenberg Etext of The Cruise of the Dolphin, by
Aldrich

Cruise of the Dolphin

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