"Let me see your revolver," said Albert.
Gray handed it to him, and Charlton examined it a minute, and then, with a sudden resolution, he got to his feet, ran forward a few paces, and hurled the pistol with all his might into the lake.
"Don't let us commit murder," he said, turning round and meeting the excited eyes of the half-insane poet.
"Well, maybe you're right, but I'll be hanged ef I think it's hardly far and squar and gentlemanly to wet a feller's catridges that-a-way."
"I had to," said Albert, trembling. "If I hadn't, you or I would have been a murderer before morning."
"Maybe so, but they ain't nothin else to be done. Ef you don't let me kill the devil, why, then the devil will pack your sister off, and that's the end on't."
The moon shone out, and still the boat went sailing up and down the lake, and still the party in the boat laughed and talked and sang merry songs, and still Charlton walked up and down the shore, though almost all the rest of the spectators had gone, and the Poet sat down in helpless dejection. And still Smith Westcott sat and talked to Katy. What he said need not be told: how, while all the rest laughed and sang, the Privileged Infant was serious; and how he appealed to Katy's sympathies by threatening to jump off into the lake; and how he told her that they must be married, and have it all over at once. Then, when it was all over, Albert wouldn't feel bad about it any more. Brothers never did. When he and Albert should get to be brothers-in-law, they'd get on splendidly. By George! Some such talk as this he had as they sailed up and down the lake. Just what it was will never be known, whether he planned an elopement that very night, or on Sunday night, or on the night which they must pass in Red Owl Landing, nobody knows. Isabel Marlay, who saw all, was sure that Smith had carried all his points. He had convinced the sweet and trusting Katy that an immediate marriage would be best for Brother Albert as well as for themselves.
And as the boat sailed on, tacking to and fro, even the pilot got over his anxiety at the overloading which had taken place when Westcott got in. The old tar said to Towle that she carried herself beautifully.
Five minutes after he made the remark, while Westcott was talking to Katy, and playfully holding his fingers in the water as he leaned over the gunwale that almost dipped, there came a flaw in the wind, and the little boat, having too much canvas and too much loading, careened suddenly and capsized.
There was a long, broken, mingled, discordant shriek as of a dozen voices on different keys uttering cries of terror and despair. There was the confusion of one person falling over another; there was the wild grasping for support, the seizing of each other's garments and arms, the undefined and undefinable struggle of the first desperate minute after a boat has capsized, the scream that dies to a gurgle in the water and then breaks out afresh, louder and sharper than before, and then is suddenly smothered into a gurgle again. There were all these things, there was an alarm on the shore, a rush of people, and then there came stillness, and those minutes of desperate waiting, in which the drowning people cling to rigging and boat, and test the problem of human endurance. It is a race between the endurance of frightened, chilled, drowning people, and the stupid lack of presence of mind of those on shore. All the inmates of the boat got hold of something, and for a minute all their heads were out of water. Their eyes were so near to the water, that not even the most self-possessed of them could see what exertions were being made by people on shore to help them. Thus they clung a minute, no one saying anything, when Jane Downing, who held to the rigging at some distance from the boat, paralyzed by fear, let go, and slowly sank out of sight, saying never a word as she went down, but looking with beseeching eyes at the rest, who turned away as the water closed over her, and held on more tenaciously than ever, and wondered whether help ever would reach them. And this was only at the close of the first minute. There were twenty-nine other minutes before help came.