"It's nearly eleven o'clock," she said. "It's beyond endurance! I wish I hadn't started."
"Well, we can turn around any time," remarked the boatman mildly. "But she won't do better than eight miles an hour at the outside. You can play that bet to win."
Miss Chalmers devoted to the boatman a swift and stormy glance. He irritated her even more than his atrocious boat. The easy, almost familiar style of his speech was something to which she was unaccustomed—from the lips of common persons. It seemed to her that he assumed a position of equality.
A boatman—a grimy-handed, hatless, whiskered boatman! A person who hired out!
She set her jaws tightly and resumed her unsatisfying study of the river. Her dignity checked upon her lips a withering rebuke.
More islands were passed and the channel widened somewhat. The passenger observed with growing annoyance that there were fewer lights ashore. The summer folks were going to bed. High time, she thought; she was tired herself.
Nearly half an hour more elapsed, enlivened only by an astonishingly swift movement on the part of the steersman, who uncoiled himself like a spring, flung himself forward, and rescued, with a long and lean arm, the grip that belonged to his passenger just as it was about to slide quietly from the narrow deck into the hospitable St. Lawrence. Unceremoniously he jammed it into a safer place under the gunwale. Then he resumed his lolling posture at the tiller. Miss Chalmers made no comment.
Then, after a little, the rhythmical wheeze of the engine was supplanted by a series of irregular choking gasps, then a sharp popping at broken intervals, and then—silence.
The boatman sat up lazily, reached for the lantern, and held it close to the machinery. The launch carried her momentum for a minute, then swung broadside to the current and drifted contentedly. Miss Chalmers bit her lip.
Very deliberately the boatman studied the engine, poking the lantern about and, when it failed to illuminate dark recesses, lighting the stump of candle. Then he spun the fly-wheel.