(FROM “SNUG HARBOR,” 1883.)
[¹] Copyright, Lee & Shepard.
TARBOARD your helm! hard a-starboard!” shouted Dory Dornwood, as he put the helm of the “Goldwing” to port in order to avoid a collision with a steam launch which lay dead ahead of the schooner.
“Keep off! you will sink me!” cried a young man in a sloop-boat, which lay exactly in the course of the steam launch. “That’s just what I mean to do, if you don’t come about,” yelled a man at the wheel of the steamer. “Why didn’t you stop when I called to you?”
“Keep off, or you will be into me!” screamed the skipper of the sloop, whose tones and manner indicated that he was very much terrified at the situation.
And he had reason enough to be alarmed. It was plain, from his management of his boat, that he was but an indifferent boatman; and probably he did not know what to do in the emergency. Dory had noticed the sloop coming up the lake with the steam launch astern of her. The latter had run ahead of the sloop, and had come about, it now appeared, for the purpose of intercepting her.
When the skipper of the sloop realized the intention of the helmsman of the steamer, he put his helm to port; but he was too late. The sharp bow of the launch struck the frail craft amidships, and cut through her as though she had been made of cardboard.
The sloop filled instantly, and, a moment later, the young man in her was struggling on the surface of the water. The boat was heavily ballasted, and she went down like a lump of lead. It was soon clear to Dory that the skipper could not swim, for he screamed as though the end of all things had come.
Very likely it would have been the end of all things to him, if Dory had not come about with the “Goldwing,” and stood over the place where the young man was vainly beating the water with his feet and hands. With no great difficulty the skipper of the “Goldwing,” who was an aquatic bird of the first water, pulled in the victim of the catastrophe, in spite of the apparent efforts of the sufferer to prevent him from doing so.