“What a funny name for a boat!” exclaimed Crullers.
“She was named before I got her, by a skipper out of Noank, down on the Connecticut coast. Pretty light she was, too, and frisky in a gale. Tom and I could haul her close, but I didn’t let her out to any of the summer folks. Cats and flaties are the best for them, and then they can’t drown unless they jump overboard. But, anyway, this day I had been on duty down at the Point all night, and it was late before I got home. It was in September, and we’d had a regular run of nor’westers with thunder storms and general equinoctial cut-ups. Most of the summer folks had gone home except a few down at the hotel, and while I was on duty they persuaded Tom they could sail the Three Widows. And they didn’t know when to stop.” The Captain paused to let this part of his narrative sink deeply into the memories of his listeners.
“They sailed clear out around the Point, and when the big sea hit her just outside the channel in the open, she keeled over like a pasteboard box. We’d seen them by that time. Billy Clewen, the keeper at the station, sings out to us, and we got the boat out. There were five aboard, three lads and two of their sisters. Three went down while we were getting to them, two boys and a girl.” The Captain cleared his throat, and before he continued he looked out over the bay for a minute to where a lone star had lighted its signal fire in the eastern sky. “The last one of the lads managed to get his sister where she could get a grip on the centerboard, and the two of them clung until we took them off.”
“And the rest?” asked Polly, softly.
“That’s what I’m telling you. There wasn’t any rest left. None of them could swim an inch, and they went down. And that night their fathers and mothers came down along the Sickle yonder, and they walked the beach with us men, walked hour after hour, and sometimes the women folks would break down and cry. I found one of the lads myself, and brought him back to his mother, and while my heart sympathized with her, my common sense asked why in tunket she hadn’t taught the lad to swim and manage a boat right before she’d let him come nigh salt water. There won’t be any boys or girls that I have dealings with go into it till they can swim like a tommycod. That’s all. To-morrow at ten.”
“We’ll be ready, Captain Carey,” Polly promised. After the captain and Nancy had gone, the girls were rather subdued for a while, thinking over the Captain’s words, and as they stood out on the porch after supper, and looked seaward, they thought of what that night’s vigil along the lonely shore must have been, waiting for the bodies of the loved ones to be washed up by the waves.
It was strangely quiet away out there on the little island. They could hear the running feet of the surf along the shore, and its steady break against the rocks up at the Knob. The darkness seemed to fold itself around them like a tangible presence, but it brought no sense of fear, rather of peace and restfulness.
Over on the bay shore there were plenty of lights to keep them company. As Ted said, the hotel looked like a Mississippi steamboat with its triple rows of bright lights. Far out on the end of the Sickle, they could see the Point light blinking like some great eye.
“Oh, look, Polly,” cried Isabel. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
Polly leaned on the veranda railing and nodded absently, her eyes half closed like the Captain’s, as she watched the bay.