“Sara! Sara Davenport! you’re too daring! He--they--might attack us. Let’s row off and land at a little distance, upon another part of the bar! Upon my word! he does look ugly--wicked. I--I’m ‘creepy’ all over--positively. He seems bent on holding the fort--the sand-bar!” Arline’s voice shook upon a moist rainbow of excitement.
“Yes, they’ve had it all to themselves too long, but:
“‘Ils ne l’aurout plus...!’”
Was it that a New England seal disliked to hear himself challenged in the defiant chant which an old Frenchwoman had flung after retreating Germans--to have his reign upon the milk-white bar--the heaven of the low-water sands--disputed? Or was it that, after all, his grinning pep was only surface spice--that whatever savage courage still remained in him for battles with his own tribe, had been reduced by persecution to arrant cowardice in man’s direction, was not proof against the slow, complacent advance, inch by inch, onto the bar, of an old red, wooden settler, vibrant from stem to stern with the quivers and gasps of a dozen wildly excited girls?
Whatever the reason--perhaps the sands on which his blubbery brain had rested alone knew--whatever the reason, swiftly, suddenly, he threw the switch, as it were, the lightning-switch, when the nosing old camp-boat was only twenty yards from him, signaling to the three other big seals, the ladies of his family, his marbled wives.
Lightning-like, they responded, making a kangaroo dash for the water--led by their grinning lord--so quick that in the sunlight their briny, oily hair-coats seemed phosphorescent.
But it was a day when strange, covert methods of warfare were in vogue.
Perhaps, even lying out at low tide upon the dry sands of the Ipswich Bar, the big, brooding old dog-seal had seen strange fish-like structures--gray and black--rising afar off from ocean’s depths, and from them had taken a hint.
At all events, no U-boat, yet, ever equalled the surprising swiftness with which he played submarine--took it upon himself to play submarine.
Whether it was blind fear or baffled fury, creaming to blunder, in that old blubber-head of his, he dove right under the boat, instead of dodging by it!