Crullers was ahead, and did not seem to hear her, and just as she felt sure they would pass safely, she saw Crullers deliberately stand up in her rocking, unsteady little craft, with her two arms thrust to the shoulders through a couple of ring buoys, and another held fast in her hands. Her round, good-tempered face was blanched white, as she turned towards Polly.
“I’m going to jump, Polly!” she called out shakily.
“Don’t you dare to!” Polly cried, but her words had no effect. They were right in the path of the Portland, and under her great bow. The Captain was shouting something to them, as he leaned out over the bridge. Bells seemed to be ringing, and the rails were lined with tense, startled faces. Polly could hear some women screaming up on deck. The engines had stopped on the big boat, and she was drifting easily with the incoming tide towards the inlet. It seemed in that second of time as if everybody on the steamer was shouting out something different as Crullers jumped into the water.
There was hardly any sea on. The bay was beautiful in the soft golden glow before sunset. The tide had turned, and was coming in in long easy swells like the waves from the wake of a steamer. It seemed to Polly afterwards, when she looked back to that time, as if she saw everything in the visible universe in those few seconds. The big boat standing off, and booming, booming at them distractedly; Crullers’ little catboat, righting itself gallantly after her jump, and starting off on its own hook towards the Point; Crullers herself, looking so comical in spite of the tragic danger, with the ring buoys around her arms like a new fashion in sleeve puffs, and the third one hugged to her breast as she slipped under the water; and most vivid of all, perhaps, the Life Saving Station, where they evidently had been seen, for somebody was running back up the beach towards the low white building.
Then suddenly she saw Crullers’ taffy-colored pigtails, lank and drenched, and her face dripping and deathlike, as she came up. It seemed the easiest and most natural thing in the world to lean over and catch hold of the pigtails. Polly never thought of doing anything else, but as she did so, and Crullers caught hold of the Tidy Jane and was helped and pulled over into its cockpit, a great, swelling cheer went up from the decks of the Portland, and the captain swung off his cap in salute to the little Commodore of the Yacht Club, as she tumbled her drenched mate on the locker, and went back to steering.
The Jane came about handsomely, and the engines on the steamer started to throb. Then Polly glanced up, with one of her rare, frank smiles that won her so many friends, and waved her hand back to all the faces that seemed to smile at her, and at the big, burly Maine captain, who laughed as he shouted down to her:
“Well done, mate, well done!”
CHAPTER XIII
POLLY’S “CURRENT EVENTS”
“Put it down in the log book, Kate, under the head of current events,” Polly said that night, as she sat beside Crullers’ couch, and they all discussed the rescue. “And don’t say heroism again. It wasn’t anything of the kind. It was just plain common sense.”