The storm had abated, but muttering peals of thunder and spasmodic flashes of lightning showed that it was still hovering about the vicinity. The rain fell in torrents, but Ralph was already so thoroughly soaked that this caused him but small inconvenience. His thoughts were centered on the treachery of the other survivors. The least they might have done, he mused, would have been to await his coming on shore. Then they could have taken counsel together and decided upon their next move.
The strain of the night had told upon the boy. He felt nervous, irritable and chilled. Even La Rue’s fate, much as it had bothered him at first (rascal though the man was), now held little of interest for him. His sole idea was to find some place of shelter, and then he would sleep—and sleep, till nature was recuperated.
It was no light task that the boy had performed. Few persons but those who knew the river could have imagined the tireless skill and vigilance necessary, if a craft, once caught in the vortex of a St. Lawrence storm, was to be kept from disaster.
The trust imposed in him Ralph had loyally carried out while opportunity served. It was through no fault of his that, caught in a swirling eddy with an inexperienced engineer to answer his signals, the River Swallow lay helpless.
And yet Ralph was not weak enough to blame anybody but himself. He saw now, and all too clearly, that it had been an error of judgment for him to send both Harry Ware and Percy Simmons ashore at Piquetville. With even one of them to aid him, he might have been able to stand off the rascals who wanted to gain possession of the River Swallow till aid of some sort arrived.
All these thoughts, and many others, surged through his mind as, brain-sick, footsore and wet to the skin, he stood on the beach and looked at the dark hulk on the waters which he knew was the River Swallow. Ralph had never, in all his adventurous times, felt so much like quitting as he did right then and there.
He ran over in memory other predicaments in which he had been placed: The ruined mission from which he had had to escape by a swaying rope from a tower that rose a hundred feet above the solid ground; the terrible trap into which the boys had fallen in the Northwest, and from which they had escaped only by a desperate leap across a boiling, swirling river, ultimately to seek refuge on a drifting log. Once more he recollected their experiences in the Canadian Rockies; the dread moment when the bear almost had them in his grasp at the entrance to the subterranean cavern.
But all these paled into insignificance in his mind beside the present situation.
In all the predicaments which his excited mind had hastily recalled it was either his life or his companion’s that was at stake. Now, however, in addition to the personal equation, the salvation of a fine craft—the River Swallow—depended upon his grit and enterprise.
“Well, there’s no use standing here,” he said to himself, as he listened to the rumbling of the storm dying away in the distance.