Chapter VII.
ADRIFT IN A DORY.
For a long time Olly could see the boys by the light of their camp-fire, excepting when the tops of the rolling billows hid them from view.
Although too far off at any time to recognize his friends, he made out snatches of the song then in vogue in his neighborhood; and he believed the camping party to be Frog-End boys who had come to the beach for kelp.
Sometimes they passed between him and the fire; and finally they stood or crouched around it, as the wavering flames died down to a bright-red glow on the shore. To see them so near and so happy—it seemed to him that everybody was happy who was not paddling desperately in a frail skiff, against a relentless wind—to hear them singing and shouting, so wholly unconscious of him in his distress, was intolerable agony.
"Oh, why can't they hear?" he exclaimed, in a voice to the last degree hoarse with calling for help. "Why couldn't they look this way once? Now it is too late!"
He was by that time greatly exhausted; for when not signaling and calling, he had been making frantic efforts to paddle the dory against the wind. At first he had used the oar-handle, but he found it wholly ineffectual. Then he had torn up one of the thwarts, but it was too short and too clumsy for his purpose; and though for a time he seemed to make headway, the distance from the shore was steadily increasing.
If he could have held the boat in its course, as with a pair of oars, he might have made progress even with that unwieldly paddle. But he lost time and strength in shifting it from side to side; and, spite of all he could do, the wind and the waves would now and then give the light, veering skiff a turn, and he would suddenly find himself paddling out to sea! However, those efforts prevented him from being blown speedily out of sight of land. And when the boys on the beach, after due preparation, stuck their ears of green corn on the sharpened ends of sticks and roasted them in the fire, he still kept the little group in view. He had no doubt that they were cooking their supper. No wonder he wept with despair at the contrast of that cheerful scene with his own terrible situation!
The fire faded to a red eye of burning coals; all other objects grew indistinct, excepting the black outline of the woods against the soft evening red of a rift in the sky, and one pure star brightening in those ethereal depths. Another starry beam, which he could plainly discern, but which was too low down for a star, Olly knew must be a light in one of the upper windows of the boarding-house.