"I'd not chance it again for——"
"We isn't drowned yet."
"Yet!" Rowl exclaimed. "No—not yet! We've a minute or so for prayers!"
Tommy Lark laughed.
"I'll get under way now," said he. "I'm not so very much afraid o' failin'."
There was no melodrama in the situation. It was a commonplace peril of the coast; it was a reasonable endeavor. It was thrilling, to be sure—the conjunction of a living peril with the emergency of the message. Yet the dusk and sweeping drizzle of rain, the vanishing lights of Scalawag Harbor, the interruption of the lane of water, the mounting seas, their declivities flecked with a path of treacherous ice, all were familiar realities to Tommy Lark and Sandy Rowl. Moreover, a telegram was not a letter. It was an urgent message. It imposed upon a man's conscience the obligation to speed it. It should be delivered with determined expedition. Elsewhere, in a rural community, for example, a good neighbor would not hesitate to harness his horse on a similar errand and travel a deep road of a dark night in the fall of the year; nor, with the snow falling thick, would he confront a midnight trudge to his neighbor's house with any louder complaint than a fretful growl.
It was in this spirit, after all, touched with an intimate solicitude which his love for Elizabeth Luke aroused, that Tommy Lark had undertaken the passage of Scalawag Run. The maid was ill—her message should be sped. As he paused on the brink of the lane, however, waiting for the ice to lie flat in the trough, poised for the spring to the first pan, a curious apprehension for the safety of Sandy Rowl took hold of him, and he delayed his start.
"Sandy," said he, "you be careful o' yourself."
"I will that!" Sandy declared. He grinned. "You've no need t' warn me, Tommy," he added.
"If aught should go amiss with you," Tommy explained, "'twould be wonderful hard—on Elizabeth."