THE WATERMELON TIDE.
BY EARLE TRACY.
The great still tide that comes from the Gulf when no one is expecting it reached up through the marshes one summer night, and spread itself over the banks of the bayou, and found numberless things in places of safety, and when it was ready to go out again it took them along.
Among its discoveries was a schooner-load of watermelons, about which Captain Lazare and the boss of the big farm had disagreed so radically that the melons had been left in a pile on the landing to wait for other transport. The tide charged itself with them, and when morning broke they were on their way to New Orleans.
Bascom had been tossing in his sleep as the little Mystery did when the tide went in one direction along Potosi Channel and the wind went in the other. With the first glimmer of light he was up and down at the beach.
"Me, but it's been high," he gasped, coming up from his first plunge and leaning back in the water as if it were a steamer-chair. "It would be beautiful to run out with in the Mystery—an' me goin' to pick figs all day in them dumb ole trees! I wish the canning factory would bust!"
Bascom was ready for the hardest kind of work at sea, but things on shore were unutterably lifeless to him, and how Captain Tony could have contracted to sell his figs instead of letting the birds take care of them was past Bascom's understanding.
While he was floating and thinking mournfully of the figs, one of the watermelons struck him softly on the cheek. He bounded clear out of the water with fright, and as he made for shore another melon came up under him and sent him pelting through the shoals. He was not followed, and when he felt grass under his feet, and realized that he had fled shoreward for safety and that he had not been hurt at all, he felt very queer.
"If they was popusses they'd be a-splashin'," he reasoned; "an' if they was sharks they'd have eaten me—least-ways they wouldn't have been so polite about lettin' me excuse myse'f. I wonder what they is?"