'Smiles': A Rose of the Cumberlands

by Eliot H. Robinson

In the moments which had passed unmarked by him in his absorption, the whole western sky had become overcast and blackened by the vaporous army of invasion, whose forecoursing streams of cavalry skirmishers were already high over his head. The earth had lost its laughing colors, and seemed to lie cowering, with its head covered with a dull mantle, and the sea had accepted the challenge of the storm clouds and was beginning to leap forward in swirling, gloomy waves.

With a strong steady pull on the tiller, Donald brought the little craft around in a sweeping curve and headed into the wind, which had suddenly become chill and moist. The boat tilted sharply, and a dash of spray leaped the bow and, changing back to water, ran down the leeward side of the cockpit. A drop of rain splashed on his bared forearm, and then another and another. Through the dark, serried clouds came a dagger thrust of fire, to be followed by a distant detonation which bore his heart back to the shuddering fields of France.

The new picture was impressed on his mind as on the sensitized film of a camera, and simultaneously the action of distant figures were registered upon it. Toiling up the steep bank to the cottage was a marionette made recognizable as Muriel by a tiny dash of red at the waist and on the head. For an instant he wondered if Smiles and his little namesake had already reached the house. Then he caught sight of them, still on the beach. There was fully a quarter of a mile of water between him and the shore, but the distance was being cut down bravely by the race-about, whose specialty was going to windward in a blow. Steadied by her racing keel, she cut through the waves like a knife.

The child, a mere gray dot, was apparently fleeing as fast as his sturdy little legs could carry him from the pursuing girl.

In spite of his bitterness of soul, Donald's lips curved into a smile as they formed the words, "Ah, the battle is on, once more. Rose has insisted that they hurry up to the house and Don has said, 'I won't.' Jerusalem, look at him kite it!"

At that instant a tremulous curtain of light was let down from heaven, momentarily, and the two tiny figures were disclosed as clear as by day. He saw the baby dodging adroitly under Smiles' outstretched arms, and heading out onto the narrow pier, to which was attached a float for rowboats.

"He's got his 'mad' up," thought the man, as he veered off a point so as to get a better view. "He isn't afraid of thunder, lightning or of rain—or anything else, and it would be just like him to run right off the ... Great God in heaven, he's done it!" he shouted aloud and sprang to his feet, and almost lost his grip on the straining tiller. Even as he had been thinking, the light had grown again, and he saw the child, halfway down the pier, with a rebellious jerk tear himself loose from the clutching grasp on his blouse, lose his balance, stumble and roll from the incline into the now surging water.

The Water Witch luffed sharply, and her sail snapped with a report like a pistol shot. Without taking his horrified gaze from the unreal picture which the ghastly lightning illumined, Donald instinctively steadied the boat, and, with his powerful body strained forward as though he were urging the craft to greater effort. "God, God, God." The words came through his clenched teeth, half prayer, half curse at the Fate which held him helpless to act—and the wind snatched them from his lips and bore them away, shrieking in malicious madness.

The darkness fell, blotting out the scene. Then the lightning flared again, and, in the brief white second that it lasted, he saw Rose climb onto a bench against the railing of the pier, and leap into the water.

"God, she can't swim a stroke," groaned the man, as he pounded his left hand against the gunwale until the blood came through the abraded skin. Plunged in darkness again, the man, whom Rose had called unimaginative, suffered all the untold agony of soul which had been hers during the moment in which she had been forced to make up her mind and carry out the act, only his anguish was the more intense, for hers was the quick action and his the forced inaction of a man bound to a stake, within full sight of a tragedy being enacted upon a loved one. The distance between the boat and shore was not so great but that he could see everything that was occurring; but, with the wind dead ahead and blowing viciously, he might as well have been in another world for aught that he could do.