As they went along, the health officer asked Humphreys for the address of the injured boy’s father.
“We’ll send him a telegram,” he said. “Then he’ll probably come out to look for the sloop, too. You say she had no lights burning? Hum! That makes it so much harder to find her.”
They stopped at the office of the press association, down at the pier, and the operator sent the message to Lockport, following it with a brief story of the accident to the main office up in the city. Then they stepped aboard the tug, the lines were cast off, and the search for the Agnes T. began.
What that night was to Humphreys, and to Cap’n Dan, who, on receipt of the telegram, had hired the only tug in Lockport and started out to find his son, only they could tell. Calculating on the direction of the wind, and the set of the tides, the two tugs cruised about until the day began to break along the eastern horizon.
Working gradually to the eastward, backward and forward on long stretches, the tugs gradually, as if by a common instinct, drew together. By the time the dawn had broken, and Humphrey could make out the other tug, he told the health officer she was from Lockport, and that probably Cap’n Dan was aboard her.
He stepped outside the pilot house, with a pair of binoculars in his hand, and, as he did so, he noticed a man do the same thing on the other boat.
Putting the glasses to his eyes, a glance told him that it was Young Dan’s father. Humphreys swung his arm over his head, and then saw the captain turn and speak to the man in the pilot house. A moment later, just as the tug headed for the health officer’s boat, the captain of the latter, who had been scanning the horizon, gave a start, and cried out: “There she is!” Pointing off to the eastward, he twirled the spokes over, gave a pull on the jingle bell, and whistled down the tube to the engineer to “give her all the steam she could carry.”
The eyes of every one on the two boats turned in the direction in which the quarantine tug was headed, and then the sound of the jingle bell on the Lockport boat came across the water.
Head and head, they raced to the eastward, smoke pouring from their funnels, and a broad wave of foaming water piled up before their bows. The light was now strong enough for them to make out the Agnes T., aground on the long, sandy beach at the eastern end of the harbor.
As she lay with her bow buried in the sand, and listed over by the weight of the outswung boom and the wreck of the topmast, the sloop made a tragic picture in itself. The cold, gray light of the dawn fell down and around the Agnes T., making her stand out against the steel-blue water and the pale sand hills, looming large against this background until her proportions seemed gigantic.