“You must be still just half a minute, you know,” he admonished her, and they found themselves laughing into each other’s eyes.
“I ought to go and get my own things,” she said. “Brrr!”
He took off his arctic cap and dropped it on the blonde head. “Now will you be good!” he said.
They seemed to be the only people on the Los Angeles to know a moment’s intermission in the stark suspense of hanging over the ship’s side waiting for the blessed moment that should see them, by aid of flood and steam, floated off the bar.
At last! the throbbing modified by a new motion. Slowly the ship swayed fore and aft with a faint see-sawing effect. A great cheer, “She’s off!” was cut short by the excitement of watching how the boast was being made good. Ten seconds’ breathless waiting for that final pull out of the mud-trap, while idle muscles grew taut as though to help the ship in her labor, and then slowly, unwillingly, relaxed. Despair fell upon the crowd as the Los Angeles grounded again more firmly than before. In vain her engines pulled and throbbed, breathing into the delicate dawn-flushed air inky bursts of smoke.
Some one called out, “She’s canted to starboard,” and another described the dilemma as “a righteous judgment for the overloading.”
“If we’re stuck here because there’s so many of us aboard, we can get off for the same reason.” Gedge’s “brilliant idear” was that the people should be massed for’ard, and then, upon a signal, should tear as hard as legs could carry them to the other end of the ship. The sudden shifting of “ballast” would work the keel free. The game was entered into with immense spirit. Any one who, from a balloon, could have looked down on the scampering horde would have taken the scene for one of frenetic lunacy. Whether by such an effect as Gedge anticipated, or by some other agency, just once the tall mast swayed like some strong-rooted pine in a passing breeze. The people shrieked with triumph, and tore madly back again from stem to stern. But they and the engines and the foaming water might rage as they would. “The keel’s grown fast to the bottom of the ocean,” Hildegarde whispered.
Louis turned and looked into the face that was so close to his own. “Never mind—” he began.
“I am never-minding.” She smiled back into his grave eyes.