“Here’s a rope,” said Aunt Stanshy.
“Yes, yes!” exclaimed Charlie, “and we will pull him in.”
“We might do that, or at least help,” said Aunt Stanshy, laughing.
“Yesh—hic—pull him in,” said the man in the dock.
“We will fasten the rope about you, friend, and they’ll draw on it, and perhaps you could hold on to it and draw yourself up, and I will shove you behind. Now, all, a good try!”
Will was now shoving, Aunt Stanshy and Charlie hauling, while the man tried to grasp the sides of the steps; and so, out of the slime and the mist and the night, up into the light, and then into Aunt Stanshy’s barn, came the face of—old Tim Tyler!
“Horrors!” said Aunt Stanshy, startled by this unexpected sight of the second mud-turtle. Her face wore, indeed, a look of horror at first, and then the expression changed to one of pity.
Over the door-sill he crawled, and then looking up, he said, in a drunken, but abashed, humiliated way, “Stanshy, is it you? Real—hic—sorry to trouble—hic—you.”
Aunt Stanshy made no audible reply, but stood looking away as if into distant years. She was recalling the words uttered by Tim long ago, when he vowed that he would see himself “a-drownin’ in that dock first afore he’d ask a favor of her.” “He has come up to his word,” she said to herself, and then she bowed her troubled face.
“Well, now,” said Will, looking round with a worried face, “what next?”