The joy of being found and safe was quickly obscured by the news of Frank’s loss, which Captain Green and he together bore to Hallock Point, having left Mrs. Dobson safe at home on the way with Josh to guard her—although I’m quite sure no eye would have suspected that the brown house was in the Lane that night.
The dawn came at last, but the fog was not gone. It seemed denser than ever; boats went down the harbor and outside, but came back only too soon, to say that it was of no use, nothing could be done,—clear weather could alone solve the mystery.
If the day was long on the shore, it was yet longer to the lad in the boat. He rowed aimlessly; as dinner time came he looked at the fish, a few of which lay in the boat, and wondered if he could eat raw fish. He varied his rowing with sitting afloat and shouting. He shouted and shouted, until he had changed the monotony by calling “Father,” and “Mother,” and “Kate,” and “Harry,” and every name of boy or man it seemed to him that he had ever known; and not one, of all the number, would give answer to his great beseeching.
As the day when on the cold increased, and the great sea beneath him rolled in a sullen swell that grew with the cold. At length Frank knew that another night was gathering on the face of the waters. All the hope that with so many sails on the Sound, one must come out of the mist, somewhere, to meet him, died out.
Poor Frank! he burst into a passion of tears. He felt forgotten, neglected. It seemed to him that somebody might at least have tried to find him. If it had been Kate now, and he had been on shore, why, he would have had boats, as thick as berries, out looking for her.
Frank’s tears made him colder than ever. He took up a fish for the first time and looked at it. With fast numbing fingers he scraped with his knife a few scales and cut a bit of the fish, but he could not eat it, or the deepening swells sickened him, and he cast it into the sea.
It is useless to follow Frank through the night. He prayed with all his heart, feeling that no one but God could come to his aid. He made solemn promises to his Maker; at last he said that he would trust Him whether he lived and was saved, or whether he died alone in the boat. Frank meant to do just what he had promised. The mist was drenching him now more than ever; he tried to row, but his hands refused to hold the oars and one oar fell from his grasp into the sea. With a despairing clutch he tried to recover it, but it floated off on the swell and he could not get the boat around to the rescue; so it went off, as the great world had done, with all its light and warmth and food. Why, that pretty room of his own in the house at Hallock Point seemed, as he thought of it, like the loveliest place on earth, and oh! to hear Kate say “Dear Bub!” once more, what joy that would be. How Frank remembered the loving touch of his mother, tucking him into bed long ago. Frank seemed to remember every sweet and pleasant thing that ever had happened to him, and with equal power he recalled all his own bitter selfishness, and saw it, for the very first time, in its true light.
But how cold it was growing, and the billows were heaving the little boat up and down in a helpless kind of toss that was pitiful to think of. The second night and nobody to find him!
Frank was too cold to care much more. He shivered and cried again and tucked himself into a little roll down in the boat, and soon grew to be unconscious of all that was passing. All night the tiny boat went up and down on the sea. At midnight the fog lifted and the stars shone down, but Frank had suffered too much to know it. At day-dawn a gale began to blow and still the little cold bundle of boy lay in the Clover and knew not that the day had come, nor the gale, nor that a schooner had seen what was supposed to be a boat adrift and was bearing down to pick it up.
When Frank knew anything more, he was lying on a captain’s bed, in a captain’s cabin, with strange faces looking on; and there was a cup of hot soup at his lips, and somebody was urging him to “drink it.”