The tide was still so low that she had difficulty in shoving off her flat-bottomed dory which Captain Andy had put at the service of the girls, but the feat was accomplished at last, at the cost of wet ankles.
“Never mind! I’ll change when I get back. I couldn’t have a row after dinner; it’s going to ‘rain pitchforks,’” the girl had told herself as she finally took her seat in the boat. “It’s breezing up for a good hard blow, too—sou’westerly squall, maybe—a mighty bad squall when it blows off the Sugarloaf, over a hundred acres of tall sand-hills, so Captain Andy says. I sha’n’t go out far! But I love the sea when it gets an angry rake on”—again mentally quoting the captain. “I like to feel myself mistress of it in a boat—I suppose that’s my great-grandfather coming alive in me!”
It would have been so much better if this one of her dead and gone relatives who seemed to have been a power could have “come alive” outside her, to smooth her way and steer her girlish course, so the rower thought, and rowed on thinking about him, his adventures on the deep, his life-saving achievements when he rescued the shipwrecked crews of other vessels. In high school she had read about Ulysses—hero of the greatest poem of antiquity—who was represented as being such a strong-hearted sailor, but Ulysses played second fiddle to her great-grandfather in her youthful imagination.
Thinking of the latter now, of the gallant shoulders in the blue coat, the dimpled chin, the hair and eyes so like her own, as everybody said—thinking of these as depicted in the old miniature which she had left locked in her desk in the Deering Mansion for safety—lent a glamor to the hard, short sea, wildly tipped with foam, that was springing up about her boat.
It might well be termed the sea, that part of the tidal river on which she was vaguely rowing, for the sand-bar at the river’s mouth where the breakers combed and foamed and the brown, sandy point called the Neck, on which those breakers threw their white bonnets aloft, was less than a mile away.
And what Jessica did not realize while she spun romances about that sailor-ancestor of hers and while she felt the daring drop of sea-blood inherited from him revel in her veins, was that the strong sou’westerly wind blowing offshore, gaining tremendous force as it drove across the hundred acres of pale sand-hills that made up the Sugarloaf Peninsula, was sweeping her steadily down nearer to where the white fangs of those breakers were set in the brown throat of the Neck.
She felt comfortably safe, for the water upon which she had launched her boat, and, indeed, for nearly half a mile offshore where she was aimlessly rowing about, though choppy and white-capped, was not dangerously rough, not so rough but that she could turn back and land again when she chose, for the Sugarloaf sand-dunes whose highest peak rose to two hundred feet above sea-level acted as a windbreak, so that the tremendous, ever-increasing force of the squally gusts only struck outside that half-mile belt of comparative calmness.
How hard they hit when they did strike, lashing the middle of the river into a whirlpool, angered by the tide which had just turned and was feebly opposing them, the dreaming Morning-Glory, exulting in being mistress of them and of her boat, did not know.
She never meant to be foolhardy. She knew that to obey that stringent point of the Camp Fire Law: “Hold on to Health!” she must not only care for her body and steer clear of sickness when she could, but that over and above that, far more important still, she must avoid unnecessary and aimless danger, for in the latter case, nine times out of ten, she would imperil not her own life alone, but some other life more mature and in the world’s estimate more valuable—as has sadly happened once among Camp Fire ranks—a life that might be nobly given in trying to save her.
In what followed she was largely the victim of ignorance—because the word-pictures to which she had listened, painting squalls upon the tidal river near its mouth, fell so short of the reality—and of the absence of Captain Andy who had taken a party of other campers up the river in his motor-boat, as well as of her desire to work off, in rowing, the grieving depression which had clung to her on the beach.