“It couldn’t throw a line strong enough. The strain of the cable, when the latter came to be dragged through the water, would snap it immediately.”
“More’s the pity,” answered Mullen, as if reluctantly abandoning a scheme, which he would have liked to have seen tried for its novelty, at least, “for I see we’ll have to give the thing up.”
“Give it up!” cried the Major.
“Yes!”
“Can’t a man swim off, as I proposed?”
Mullen shook his head.
“I’m not so sure,” stoutly said Major Gordon.
“It would be tempting death.”
The men had been eagerly listening to this conversation. The scheme of Major Gordon, to judge by the expression of their faces, had filled them with not less admiration than it had Mullen. The Major now turned to each countenance in succession, to see if any listener thought more favorably than Mullen of the feasibility of swimming off with a line. But the scrutiny was in vain.
“Think of the women,” he said, addressing the group, and hoping yet to move some one. “Have you no wives or daughters? Have none of you mothers? There is one lady there whose gray hairs ought to remind you of a mother. Would you stand idly here if your own was in such extremity? Have none of you sisters? That young, delicate-looking creature there should appeal to your hearts.”