The Rising of the Tide: The Story of Sabinsport

by Ida M. Tarbell

He had followed a call. It had led him to Durazzo, and now, as if to mock his faith, he saw the enemy ready to sweep him into the sea as it had the people his daughter had befriended, and for whom he was willing to say now that she had died.

And then the impossible happened. Three days after his arrival, a Red Cross official, who had been particularly interested in his case, hastily summoned him to headquarters. A party of five men and two women, disguised as Albanian peasants, had just reached Durazzo. Such groups were common in those days. One of the men in this party—a man on crutches, a Serbian, claimed that a woman whom they carried with them in a rude hammock was an American. He had begged them to cable at once to Reuben Cowder of Sabinsport, U. S. A., telling him his daughter was alive. He had asked for a nurse, and one had been sent to their lodgings. The Serbian had not been told that the man whom he sought was in all probability at that moment in Durazzo.

The Red Cross official said he felt certain, from the passports and papers that the man carried, there could be no doubt of the identity of the woman, but he did not want to raise any false hopes. Mr. Cowder must await the nurse’s report before trying to see the girl. If she were as weak as the Serbian claimed, the shock of seeing him might be bad for her. A guide would conduct him to her lodgings. And this arranged, the over-worked, horror-fed, shock-proof Red Cross unit stopped for an instant to wonder and to rejoice over the amazing incident, and then turned back again to snatch what human drift it could from the flood of misery flowing through its hands, never again even to remember the names of the father and daughter so miraculously reunited.

Reuben Cowder never knew how he reached the wretched inn in which the little party had found shelter. Seeing him reeling and running through the street, one might have thought him demented, but dementia was too familiar in Durazzo in those days to cause remark. Nikola Petrovitch, meeting him at the door, shrank from his outstretched hands as if they were those of a ghost. In all his imaginings of what might happen to hasten the day when he could put his precious charge still alive into her father’s care, he had never dreamed of this. Reuben Cowder here! Shaking his hands—begging for the truth—Was Nancy alive? Could he see her?

Nikola Petrovitch had no squeamish notions about joy killing; also he knew better than nurse or doctor the spirit and the courage of the woman for whose life he had dared every danger that nature and man in their most murderous moods devise. He took Reuben Cowder by the hand and led him straight into the narrow stone-floored chamber where Nancy Cowder lay, and he took the astonished nurse by the arm and led her out. He was right, for a half hour later, when Reuben Cowder called back the nurse, the first color that had tinged the girl’s cheeks in weeks was on them, and every day that followed, in spite of the difficulties and dangers in getting away from Durazzo, and the discomforts of the passage across the Adriatic on the crowded steamer, Nancy Cowder grew stronger. She would get well, she told her father confidently. These brave people who had brought her safe to Durazzo should not have risked themselves for nothing. And as for her father, never, never again would she leave him.

But getting well was to be a slow, slow process. They took her to a nook in the French Mediterranean, and there for months she lay, regaining little by little her all but exhausted vitality. Reuben Cowder stayed at her side, and Nikola Petrovitch was sent back to Sabinsport and to his family.

It was from Nikola that Sabinsport learned more of the heroism of Nancy and the devotion of her Serbian rescuers than Reuben Cowder himself ever knew. Her parting with her friends had not been an accident, as they had led him to believe. It had been a chance deliberately taken by Nikola when Nancy, worn out by her long year’s work, had totally collapsed after a few days of the terrible sights and hardships of the retreat. They had found her one morning burning with fever and babbling nonsense. It was then that Nikola had asserted himself. Give him a bullock and a cart and the food they could spare, send one of the Serbian women with him, and he would take her to a place he knew in the mountains which the Austrians would never find. When she was fit to move he would get her to a seaport or send her father word how to find her. And the group of terrified girls, knowing that death was almost certain in the rout in which they found themselves, believing this a chance, consented, yet in their hearts they never thought to see her again.

There was more hope of escape in Nikola’s undertaking than they had realized. Already the Serbian soldiers had begun to break into bands, seeking hiding places little likely to be disturbed for months at least, and it was one of these bands that, coming on Nikola and his charges two days after they had started into the mountains, volunteered to act as a guard.

No one ever will know with what tenderness and devotion these rough soldiers, flying for their lives, cared for the delirious girl. The cart had to be abandoned, but from the coarse blankets they carried they rigged up a rough hammock, and for days took turns in carrying it. The spot they sought, and finally reached, was a tiny hamlet, hidden in a cleft of a mountain—a group of huts, a few women and children, a few goats and bullocks and sheep—all huddled together for the winter. They only too gladly welcomed the party, for if they brought tragic news, the soldiers had stout hearts and willing hands, and put hope again into the abandoned groups.

The guest house of the Zadruga, the one important family in the hamlet, was set aside for Nancy, and into it went every comfort that the community afforded—their homespun rugs, their homespun “tchilms”—hangings, some of which would have done credit to a Persian weaver—covered the walls. Homespun linen furnished her bed, native embroideries were spread over every piece of furniture. She had been an angel of mercy to their men; she had left her home to aid them—all they had was here.