Slipping and crashing down the hillside, he came to the beach and thudded over the sands in his wooden shoes. When he reached Paimpol the boats were already moored. A crowd had gathered, and Michel could see confusedly that sailors were carrying someone on a stretcher from the strange boat.
A cheer went up from the crowd. Michel, dodging under elbows, squirmed his way nimbly to the inner circle. He could see a form wrapped in blankets on the stretcher, around which the men were pressing eagerly.
‘Is it a rescue?’ he asked, for such things often happened.
‘Hello, old pal!’ cried a familiar voice, and Michel stood speechless. The darkness seemed to fall from him, and the world to become real again, all his broken courage coming back to him.
‘Hello, Uncle Ives!’ he cried, his voice high with excitement. ‘I didn’t believe you were dead.’ And then all at once he knew how terribly afraid he had been. ‘But Grandmother did,’ he continued. His chin quivered, and great tears fell on the wharf.
‘Look here, Michel,’ said Uncle Ives softly, ‘you cut ahead and tell her there’s nothing the matter with me but a broken leg.’
And so Michel was the swift forerunner of the triumphant procession that wound from the landing to the Karadoc cottage.
No one heard a word of Uncle Ives’s story that night. Grandmother sent them all to bed earlier than usual, and closed the door on eager neighbors. But the next day in the sunny garden, where bees bobbed in and out of the honeysuckle, they heard of the dark night when the Jeanot had gone down in a crash of wind and foam, and of the miracle by which Uncle Ives, clinging to an empty salt keg, had been drawn away from the rocks by the ebbing tide. He had been unconscious when a fishing boat had picked him up the next day, and one leg was broken from a blow of which he knew nothing. The fishing boat was bound to Honfleur on the French Coast, but had changed its course to bring the wounded man home. The dear ship Jeanot was mourned with many tears. Devoutly Michel and Josef carved a model of her, and rigged it. They took it to the little gray church by the sea, where, with innumerable others, it hangs in the dim shadows of the roof, a thank-offering for the safe return of Uncle Ives.
THE END
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