A GIRL TO THE RESCUE
On shore the gale seemed a stiff and dangerous blow. At sea, even with a stanch deck under one's feet, the wind proved to have passed the hurricane mark long since. The captain of the Seamew felt that the elements had conspired bitterly to assail his schooner. Before they were a mile beyond the end of the Hollis breakwater, Tunis knew that he had the fight of his seagoing experience on his hands.
When they were fairly out of the semi-shelter of the point behind which Hollis lay, Tunis and his two companions realized very quickly just what they had to contend with. They had spread a handbreadth of mainsail, but the jib was blown out of the boltropes by one big swoop of wind and carried down to leeward, looking like a giant's shirt.
"Still feel that tug to sta'bbo'd," grumbled Horry. "Just like—"
"Belay that!" commanded Tunis. "I begin to believe that's bad luck, anyway. If you hadn't got on to that tack when we first put the schooner into commission, those Portygees wouldn't have even remembered the Marlin B. And that schooner thousands of miles away from these seas!"
"I cal'late 'Rion Latham would have found something else to harp on then," said Zebedee. "He was bound to ruin you if he could."
Quickly the gale increased instead of abating, and it was utterly impossible for the trio to get topsails on her. She needed the pull of upper canvas if she was to tack properly for the mouth of the channel into Big Wreck Cove.
They fought for two hours to bring this much-desired object to pass, hoping for a lull or a shifting of the gale which might aid them. The yellow sands of Wreckers' Head were plainly in view all that time. To give up the attempt and run before the gale was a folly of which Tunis Latham had no intention of being guilty if it could possibly be avoided. Manned as she was, the schooner might never be worked back to a landfall if they did so.
The keen old eyes of Horace Newbegin first spied the thing which promised hope. From his station at the wheel he shouted something which the younger men did not catch, but his pointing arm drew their gaze shoreward.
Coming out from the Head was an open boat. Four figures pulled at the oars while another held the steering sweep. The daring crew was heading the boat straight on for the pitching schooner!
"The coast guard!" the old man was now heard to shout. "God bless them fellers!"
But Tunis knew it was not the lifeboat from the distant station. He knew the boat, if he could not at first identify those who manned it. It was an old lifeboat that had been stored in a shed below John-Ed Williams' place, and these men attempting their rescue were some of the neighbors from Wreckers' Head.
They came on steadily, the steersman standing at his post and handling the long oar as though it was a feather's weight. His huge figure soon identified him. It was Captain John Dunn, who, like Ira Ball, had left the sea, and he had left his right forearm, too, because of some accident somewhere on the other side of the globe. But with the steel hook screwed to its stump and the good hand remaining to him, Captain Dunn handled that steering oar with more skill than most other men with two good hands could have done.
How the four at the oars pulled the heavy boat! Tunis sought to identify them as well. He saw John-Ed Williams—in a place at last where he was forced to keep up his end, though he was notably a lazy man. Ben Brewster had the oar directly behind John-Ed.
The third figure Tunis could not identify—not at once. The man at the bow oar was Marvin Pike, who pulled a splendid stroke. So did that unknown oarsman. They were all bravely tugging at the heavy oars. Tunis had faith in them.
Zebedee suddenly plunged across the pitching deck and reached the rail where Tunis stood. Discipline—at least seagoing etiquette—had been somewhat in abeyance aboard the Seamew during the last few hours. Zeb caught the skipper by the arm.
"See her?" he bawled into the ear of the surprised Tunis.
"What's that?"
"See her hair? It's a girl! As I'm a living sinner, it's a girl! Pulling number three oar, Captain Latham! Did you ever?"
Clinging to a stay, the captain of the Seamew flung himself far over the rail as the schooner chanced to roll. He could look down into the approaching lifeboat. He saw the loosened, dark locks of the girl who was pulling at number three oar. On the very heels of Zeb's words the captain was confident of the girl's identity.
"Sheila!"
His voice could not have reached her ear because of the rush and roar of the wind and sea, but, as though in answer to his shout, the girl glanced back and up, over her shoulder. For a moment Tunis got a flash of the face he so dearly loved.
What a woman she was! She lacked no more in courage than she did in beauty and sweetness of disposition. What other girl along all this coast—even one born of the Cape strain—would have dared take an oar in that lifeboat in face of such dire peril as this?
"Good Lord, Cap'n Latham!" shrieked Zeb. "That's Miss Bostwick!"
Tunis straightened up, squared his shoulders, and looked at Zebedee proudly. He wanted Zeb to know—he wanted the whole world to know, if he could spread the news abroad—that the girl pulling number three oar was the girl he loved, and was going to marry!
An hour later the Seamew, her topsails drawing full and her lower canvas properly handled, drove on like the bird she was through the channel into the cove, trailing the old lifeboat behind her. The skipper had taken the wheel himself, but that "tug to sta'bbo'd" did not disturb his equanimity as it sometimes did Horry's.
Sheila, muffled in oilskins and sea boots, but with her wet hair flowing over her shoulders, stood beside the skipper. No matter how satisfied and confident Tunis might appear, the girl was still in an uncertain state of mind.
"And so," she said to him anxiously, "I do not know what to tell them. Cap'n Ira seemed so poorly and so unhappy. And he says Aunt Prue is almost ill.
"But it was Cap'n Ira who told me what to do when we saw the Seamew in danger; how to get the men together and how to launch the boat! Oh, it was wonderful! He was not too overcome to be practical and realize your need, Tunis."
"Trust Cap'n Ira," agreed the young man. "And what other girl could have done what you did, Sheila? Hear what Cap'n John Dunn says? You ought to be a sailor's daughter. I can tell him you are going to be a sailor's wife."
"No, no! Oh, Tunis! It can't—"
"No 'can't' in the dictionary," interrupted the captain of the Seamew. "You and I are going to have one big talk, Sheila, after I take you up home."
"Up home?" she repeated.
"You are going back to Cap'n Ira's. You know you are. That other girl has beat it for Boston, you say, and there's not a living reason why you shouldn't return to the Balls. Besides, they need you. I could see that with half an eye when I went away the other morning. The old man hobbling around the barn trying to catch an old hen was a sight to make the angels weep."
"Poor, poor Cap'n Ira!" she murmured.
"And poor Aunt Prudence—and poor me!" exclaimed Tunis. "What do you think is going to happen to me? If you go away, I shall have to sell all I own in the world and follow you."
"Tunis!" she cried, almost in fear. "You wouldn't."
"I certainly would. I am going to have you, one way or another. Nobody else shall get you, Sheila. And you can't go far enough or fast enough to lose me."
"Don't!" she said faintly. "You cannot be in earnest. Do you know what it means if you and I have any association whatsoever? Oh! I thought this was all over—that you would not tear open the wound—"
"I don't mean to hurt you, Sheila," he said softly. But he was smiling. "I have got something to tell you that will, I believe, put an entirely different complexion on your affairs."
"What—what can you mean?" she burst out. "Oh, tell me!"
"I'll tell you a little of it now. Just enough to keep you from thinking I am crazy. The rest I will not tell you save in the Balls' sitting room before Cap'n Ira and Aunt Prue."
"Tunis!" she murmured with clasped hands.
"Yesterday I spent two hours in the manager's office of Hoskin & Marl's. They have been looking for you for more than six months. Naturally, there was no record of you after you left that—that school when your time was out. They didn't seem to guess you'd have got work in that Seller's place."
"What do you mean? What did they want me for?" gasped the girl.
"Near as I could find out from the old gentleman who seemed to be in charge there at the store, they wanted to find you to beg your pardon. He cried, that manager did. He broke down and cried like a baby—especially after I had told him a few things that had happened to you, and some things that might have happened if you hadn't found such good friends in Cap'n Ira and Prudence. That's right. He was all broke up."
The girl stood before him, straight as a reed. She rocked with the pitching of the schooner, but it seemed as though her feet were glued to the planks. She could not have fallen!
"They—they know—"
"They know they sent to jail the wrong girl. The woman that stole the goods is dead, and before she died she wrote 'em all about it from the sanitarium where the firm sent her. They are sending you papers signed by the judge, the prosecuting attorney, even the pawnbroker and the store detective, and—and a lot of other folks. Why, Sheila, you are fully exonerated."
She began suddenly to weep, the great tears raining down her face, although she still stood erect and kept her gaze fixed upon him.
"Six months! As long as I have been down here! Oh, Tunis! While we were making up our plot on that bench on Boston Common and planning to lie to these dear, good people down here—and everybody; while we were beginning this coil of deceit and trouble, I might have gone back there to the store and found all this out. And—and I would never have needed to lie and deceive as I have done."
"Huh! Yes. I cal'late that's so, Sheila," he said. "But how about me? Where would I have come in, if you had found out that your name had been cleared and Hoskin & Marl were anxious to do well by you? Seems to me, Sheila, there must be some compensation in that thought. There is for me, at any rate."
She flashed him a look then that cleaved its way to Tunis Latham's very soul. His tale did not remove from her heart all its burden. She was still penitent for the falsehood she had told in direct words to Cap'n Ira and Prudence about her first meeting with Tunis. But that prevarication, at least, had been for no purpose of self gain.
And so Sheila looked at her lover for just that passing moment with all the passion which filled her heart for him. Had Tunis not been steering the Seamew through a pretty tortuous channel at just that moment there is no knowing what he would have done—spurred by Sheila's look!