A NAMELESS HAVEN.

Now, all night long those two floated. For hours there was but a step between them and death; but death kept its distance. The boat, like some treacherous, living thing, whose cruelty had been appeased in that angry overturn, was pacified now, and seemed resolved to protect the remnant of its charge. It rode lightly over crest after crest. They bailed it out as well as they could, and disposed carefully the odds and ends left in it—a shawl, a bottle, a soaked bundle of clothing—poor relics, terribly eloquent. They fought away the chill and misery of their situation as well as Philip’s energy could devise, and not unsuccessfully. Before long he took the tiller in the darkness, and with straining eyes and tense nerves aided the boat to weather the subsiding seas.

They could not talk much—a few sentences here and there, and then long silence. Gerald[150] was exhausted, and besides that his shoulder had suffered a severe wrench. He lay on his back in the bottom of the boat, staring into the gloom; for the moon had gone, and only a shimmer in the atmosphere marked where she sulked, far up above. The lad set his teeth, to keep from crying out with pain and with the dreadfulness of a situation so novel to a boy reared like a hot-house plant.

“I wonder if we will ever get out of this alive?” he thought every now and then. But he answered Philip’s solicitous questions as to his welfare with a tone that nobly feigned ease and hope. Gulping and struggling down any thing like a sob, his prompt “Yes, Philip,” or “No, Philip,” was the only sound that carried any comfort to Touchtone’s heart. “There is no use in asking questions,” he said to himself. “Philip don’t know anymore about what is before us than I do, and I guess he hates to have to tell me so.”

By and by the dragging daylight began to whiten the air. The ocean gradually paled from inkiness to lead-color, and from lead-color to streaked gray, and the gray to a yeasty milk. The dashing waves had given place to a rolling[151] swell on which the boat was lifted, but ever seemed urged forward—whither? Dawn advanced. But such a dawn and such a day! For when the latter had fairly come the fog hung closer than ever. Hour by hour passed with no reasonable gain in the light. Whether the sun was on the one side or the other, before or behind, no man could have told. They were ever surrounded by a dirty greenish haze that made their faces more wan, and that mixed sea and air into one elastic wall, which moved with them as they moved and closed about them as they slid helplessly onward into it.

With the lessening of his strength and the rolling of the boat Gerald became deathly sick. Philip could do little for that. His own arms were stiff; every now and then a chill ran down his body that boded future discomfort if they were not soon delivered from this present one. But he kept to his post. Thanks to his determination, the boat met wave and crest with less and less motion and no mishap, and he said to himself, as he glanced at Gerald’s despairing face, that he “was good for a whole day’s steering, if need be, and a great deal beyond that.” Fortunately, it was not[152] cold, though the stormy chilliness made the early air sharp. In silence, except for a word from Touchtone or a sigh from Gerald, who lay in the bottom of the boat with his eyes closed, they moved onward whither waves and current might shape their sluggard’s course.

Suddenly, about noon, Gerald sat up and declared he felt better. He seemed to have awakened from a stupor of weariness and sickness that had been on him.

“Let me take the tiller,” he pleaded. “Indeed I can, just as well as you. You must be used up.”

“Used up steering nowhere, and with hardly any sea running?” returned Philip, continuing to smile, not a little relieved to see color returned into his protégé’s face, and with something like the usual tone to his voice. “Not a bit! I’m glad if you’re able to move about again, though I must say you’ve not much occasion to do that at present. Sit down there. See how the waves have gone down. O, we’re going to get along bravely presently. You’ll see!”

“But which way are we going?”

“Well, that I can’t positively inform you,”[153] Philip replied, trying to treat lightly the most important worry that now pressed on him, “but no great distance from land, I’m somehow inclined to think. A steamer, or something, may pick us up any hour.”

“But perhaps every hour we are slipping out to sea all the farther?”

“Let us hope not. O, no! I’m sure not such bad luck as that. I—I don’t think, Gerald,” he added more seriously, “that you and I have been—carried through last night—to be put in worse trouble much longer. Keep up a good heart, like the brave fellow you are! We have water and biscuit enough for the time we shall need them, I’m sure.” And he remembered gratefully Captain Widgins and poor Eversham’s forethought. “We’re drifting along the coast somewhere; we shall know before long.”

“O, it has been terrible!” exclaimed Gerald, piteously. “If we only knew any thing of the others on the steamer—or about papa, or what the people on shore think about us—or how any thing is to end for us!”

“We’ll know all that in good time, depend on it.”

He spoke confidently; but the uncertainty[154] of how “any thing was to end” for them was indeed a mighty weight.

“The main thing will soon be to get word to your father as soon as we can. Newspaper accounts will make him believe—well, almost any thing. Doesn’t it seem about a hundred years to you since two or three days ago?” he went on, as conversationally as he could. “That funny adventure in the train—our stopping with Mr. Hilliard—last night’s excitement? We can’t say we haven’t had a good deal crowded in, since we bid Mr. Marcy and the Ossokosee good-bye, can we? Or that we haven’t had enough of a story to tell your father when we get safe and sound to Halifax?”

“I shall be glad to find out sometime what made the explosion,” said Gerald, easing his position, and already decidedly more tranquil.

“So shall I. They kept it from us as long as they could, didn’t they?”

“You did from me, I know,” Gerald answered. He gave Philip a grateful look. “You wanted to keep me from being frightened. O, I know. I sort of suspected that. How awfully good and—thoughtful—”

[155]

“Very, very, very,” Philip replied, dryly. “I wish my goodness and my thoughtfulness together had gone as far as keeping you and me safe in New York, instead of taking the Old Province.”

“But—then—then,” said Gerald, eagerly, “we couldn’t have any such story to tell people for the rest of our lives—if we get through this part of it all right. I guess we will. I’m sure we will. Philip”—he suddenly changed his tone—“what was that quarrel, just before we put off last night, between some man—a gentleman, I think—and the captain? Don’t you remember? He said his son was with us. You spoke to Mr. Eversham, too.”

“It was a mistake,” Philip quickly responded. &ldqu............