At last came the day wherein the final trial-trip should be made. The pumps built by Mr. Doolittle, but not according to order, had failed once, but new ones had been supplied, and everything seemed propitious. David and Ezra, with their mother in the boat, rowed once more to Poverty Island. “On the morrow the great venture should begin,” they said.
The time was mid-October. The forests had wrapped the cooling coast in warmth of coloring that was soft and many-hued as the shawls of Cashmere, while the sun-made fringe of goldenrod fell along the shores of river and island and sea.
Mrs. Bushnell’s heart beat proudly above the fond affection that could not suppress a shiver, as the Turtle was pushed into the stream. She could not help seeing that David made a line fast from the seine-house to his boat ere he went down. They watched many minutes to see him rise to the surface, but he did not.
“Mother,” said Ezra, “the pump for forcing water out when he wants to rise don’t work, and we must pull him in. He feared it.”
As he spoke the words he laid hold on the line, and began gently to draw on it.
“Hurry! hurry! do!” cried Mrs. Bushnell, seizing the same line close to the water’s edge, and drawing on it with all her strength. She was vexed that Ezra had not told her the danger in the beginning, and she “knew very well that 96 SHE would not have stood there and let David die of suffocation, in that horrid, brass-topped coffin!”
“Hold, mother!” cried Ezra; “pull gently, or the line may part on some barnacled rock if it gets caught.”
Nevertheless, Mrs. Bushnell pulled in as fast as she could.
The tide was sweeping up the river, and a shark, in hard chase after a school of menhaden, swam steadily up, with fin out of water.