The distracted mother, to enforce obedience, added gestures to cries. The scared child, further agitated by these demonstrations, entirely lost self-control. His posture caused the unstable trough to topple over and the lad was plunged into the flood. The frothing mouth of a wave swallowed him. No; his doom was not sealed; taught by instinct or by pluck, the little fellow had the presence of mind to save himself by clinging to the capsized canoe. He held on tenaciously, drifting like a part of the treacherous log. Burr's skiff was in full chase a few rods in the wake. The mother watched the race, breathless, numb, with all-seeing eye. Her hands gripped the oaken bar fastened across that end of the ferryboat which was farthest out in the river and she stretched forward head and body, heedless of the down-tumbling mass of her loosened hair, reckless of everything but the fate of her boy. Her strained gaze kept focussed on the precious drift. Dominick wept aloud.
"What shall we do? What shall we do? Oh, if papa were only here!"
"Hush! Don't cry. Don't speak. What could your father do? Pray with all your soul; pray to Heaven that Colonel Burr may save your brother."
The aching eyes measured the diminishing distance between the two boats. It seemed to the mother possible, for nothing is impossible to faith, that by the sheer force of her projected will she might hold the child back from death. Even while she solaced her dread with this fancy the gliding log slipped free from the lad's tired fingers, and again the woman watching from the ferry gave up hope. She shuddered, closed her eyes, and pressed her forehead hard against the oak railing.
"O my God, my God! our darling is gone!"
At this crisis Dominick believed he saw what his mother, bowed and blinded, did not see—a miracle working. Pantingly he cried out "Mamma!" The only response to his call was a moan and the despairing words, "Drowned! My baby is drowned!"
"No! No! Look, mother! See there! Colonel Burr won't let Harman sink! Look! He has him by the arm, he has pulled him into the skiff. It did good to pray."
Burr, acting as any man would have done under the circumstances, having rescued the child without danger to himself and with little difficulty, was a demi-god in the estimation of the Blennerhassett family. Little Harman's misadventure, the enforced long swimming in rough water, the two duckings and their disagreeable effects on throat and lungs, left him in a wretched condition, but by no means in need of a coffin. His teeth chattered, his hands were blue, he whimpered, but when Burr landed him high, if not dry, on a bed of gravel at the river's margin, the drenched youngster mustered heroism enough to comfort his mother by piping out the assurance, "I'm all right."
"Thank God you are, my sweet pet, and thank Colonel Burr for saving you," sobbed Madam Blennerhassett, while she gathered the shivering young one into her bosom, and almost extinguished the life that was left in him with tears and fondlings.
Burr took off his coat, and wrapped it about the protesting infant, and carried him home, a feat as glorious, in the mother's mind, as his historic exploit of bearing Montgomery's body from the battlefield. Dry clothing, doses of cordial, vigorous chafing of body and limbs, by many loving hands, soon brought the patient "round." By the time his father came home, soon after the rescue, the urchin declared he was "well" and would rather upset again in the river than be rubbed and hugged any more.