“No, I was not,” interrupted Harry.
“What then?”
“Really, you frightened it all out of my head. Let me think!”
“O, I know!” joyfully cried Kate, clapping her palms. “There was the mast—there always is a mast or a smoke-stack, or something to climb. This is it: the monkeys leaped from the plank to the mast, and ran up to the top of it and waved the dolls—all dressed in white, you see, with long, long sashes, that would float a good ways, you know; and somebody in a boat way off, on—on—the horizon’s edge”—Kate felt proud after saying “horizon’s edge,” and was greatly mortified at hearing from under the bedclothes a smothered laugh.
“I should like to know what you are laughing at,” she said, with sudden gravity, slipping down from the bed, to Harry’s most comfortable relief.
“I didn’t mean to laugh; really and truly I did not,” said Harry, moving up his bandage the least mite in the world, as he afterward admitted to Mrs. Dobson. “But how could I help it; it is so like a girl. Now my mast, if it had floated at all, would have lain down on the water just like any other big stick; but yours you could make stand up and sail around, just as easy!”
“O, never mind!” said Kate, immensely relieved on finding out that Harry was not laughing at her attempt at fine effect, “that’s nothing! all sorts of impossible things do happen.”
“Doll’s sash ribbons soaked in salt water don’t make very good signals, anywhere, I don’t believe,” said Harry. “I think we might manage that part better.”
“But we can’t stop, don’t you see,” said Kate hurriedly, “to be so very careful about everything. Nobody ever does when there’s a poor fellow on a last plank, floating on the wide ocean; they just try to get him off and into a boat as quick as ever they can, and rub him up, and give him something to eat, and everything, particularly” (Kate couldn’t get over that word very fast) “when the man is such a dear, good, nice man, like Captain Dobson.”
Now Josh, hearing the animated voices in Mrs. Dobson’s bedroom, had opened the door a bit with his nose, without attracting any notice; and as the dear old lady, her thoughts busy with the past, was carrying a pail of water into the kitchen, Kate’s last words fell full upon her ears. She dropped the pail, being too much startled to put it quite in its place, and with flushed face, tearful eyes, and trembling tones, appeared to the children, saying, “Tell me quick! don’t wait a bit! is there any news of Captain Dobson?”