I now positively decided that the next day I would leave this island, where people flew off at such disagreeable tangents; but as I was here on invitation, I could not go away without taking leave of my hostess. Accordingly, in the evening Walkirk and I went up to the house.
The Sand Lady was manifestly grieved when she heard of our intended departure, and her brother was quite demonstrative in his expressions of regret; even the Shell Man, who had discovered in Walkirk some tastes similar to his own, demurred at our going. The Person, however, made no allusion to the subject, and gave us, indeed, as little of her society as she apparently did of her thoughts.
In order not to produce the impression that I was running after Mother Anastasia, as Walkirk had put it, I announced that we should continue our cruise for an indefinite time. I was sorry to leave these good people, but to stay with that mocking enigma of a woman was impossible. She had possessed herself, in the most crafty and unwarrantable manner, of information which she had no right to receive and I had no right to give, and then contemptuously laughed in my face. My weakness may have deserved the contempt, but that made no difference in my opinion of the woman who had inflicted it upon me. I was glad, when we bade good-night and farewell to the little party, that the Person was not present.
But early the next morning, just as we were hoisting sail on our boat, this lady appeared, walking rapidly down to our beach. She was dressed in a light morning costume, with some sort of a gauzy fabric thrown over her head, and if I had not hated her so thoroughly I should have considered her a very picturesque and attractive figure.
"I am glad I am in time," she called out. "I don\'t want you to go away with too bad an opinion of me, and I came to say that what you have confided to me is just as safe with me as it would be with anybody else. Do you think you can believe that if you try?"
It was impossible for me to make any answer to this woman, but I took off my hat and bowed. The sail filled, and we glided away.
Walkirk was not in good spirits. It was plain enough that he liked the Tangent Island and wanted to stay; and he had good reason, for he had found pleasant company, and this could not always be said to be the case when sailing in a small boat or camping out with me. My intention was to sail to a town on the mainland, some thirty miles distant, there leave our boat, and take a train for Arden. This, I considered, was sacrificing to appearances as much time as I could allow.
But the breeze was light and fitful, and we made but little progress, and about the middle of the forenoon a fog came slowly creeping up from the sea. It grew thicker and heavier, until in an hour or two we were completely shut out from all view of the world about us. There was now no wind. Our sail hung damp and flabby; moisture, silence, and obscurity were upon us.
The rest of the day we sat doleful, waiting for the fog to lift and the wind to rise. My fear was that we might drift out to sea or upon some awkward shoals; for, though everything else was still, the tide would move us. What Walkirk feared, if anything, I do not know, but he kept up a good heart, and rigged a lantern some little distance aloft, which, he said, might possibly keep vessels from running into us. He also performed, at intervals, upon a cornet which he had brought with him. This was a very wise thing to do, but, for some reason or other, such music, in a fog, depressed my spirits; however, as it seemed quite suitable to the condition of my affairs I did not interfere, and the notes of Bonnie Doon or My Old Kentucky Home continued to be soaked into the fog.
Night came on; the fog still enveloped us, and the situation became darker. We had our supper, and I turned in, with the understanding that at midnight I was to take the watch, and let Walkirk sleep. It was of no use to make ourselves any more uncomfortable than need be.
It was between two and three o\'clock when I was called to go on watch; and after I had been sitting in the stern smoking and thinking for an hour or more, I noticed that the light on the mast had gone out. It was, however, growing lighter, and, fancying that the fog was thinner, I trusted to the coming of the day and a breeze, and made no attempt to take down and refill the lantern.
Not long after this my attention was attracted by something which appeared like the nucleus of a dark cloud forming in the air, a short distance above the water, and not far away on our port quarter. Rapidly the cloud grew bigger and blacker. It moved toward us, and in a few moments, before I had time to collect my thoughts and arouse Walkirk, it was almost upon us, and then I saw that it was the stern of a vessel, looming high above my head.
I gave a wild shout; Walkirk dashed out of his bunk; there was a call from above; then I felt a shock, and our boat keeled over on her starboard side. In a moment, however, she receded from the other vessel, and righted herself. I do not know that Walkirk had ever read in a book what he ought to do in such an emergency, but he seized a boat hook and pushed our boat away from the larger vessel.
"That\'s right!" cried a voice from above. "I\'ll heave ye a line. Keep her off till we have drifted past ye, and then I\'ll haul ye in."
Slowly the larger vessel, which was not very large, but which drifted faster than our little boat, floated past us, until we were in tow at her bow. We could now see the form of a man leaning over the rail of the vessel, and he called out to us to know if we were damaged, and if we wanted to come aboard. I was about to reply that we were all right, and would remain where we were, when Walkirk uttered an exclamation.
"We are taking in water by the bucketful," said he; "our side has been stove in."
"Impossible!" I exclaimed. "We were not struck with enough force for that."
But examination proved that he was correct. One or more of our planks had been broken just below the water line and our boat was filling, though not rapidly.
"Stoved in, eh?" shouted the voice from above. "Well, ye needn\'t sink. I\'ll haul yer bowline taut, and I\'ll heave ye another to make fast to yer stern. That\'ll keep yer little craft afloat until ye can unlade her; and the quicker ye get yer traps up here the better, if ye don\'t want \'em soaked."
Acting upon these suggestions, Walkirk and I went vigorously to work, and passed up our belongings as rapidly as possible to the man above, who, by leaning over the rails, could easily reach them. When everything movable had been taken out of our boat, the man let down a ladder and I climbed on board the larger vessel, after which he came down to our boat, detached the boom, gaff, and sail, and unshipped the mast; all of which we afterwards hoisted on board his vessel by means of a block and tackle.
"Now, then," said our new companion, "ye\'re safe, and yer boat can capsize if it\'s a mind to, but it can\'t sink; and when it\'s better daylight, and Abner\'s on deck, perhaps we\'ll rig out a couple of spars and haul her up at the stern; but there\'s time enough to settle all that. And now I\'d like to know how ye came to be driftin\' around here with no light out."
I explained, but added I had not seen any light on his vessel.
"Well," said the man, looking upward, "that light\'s out, and ten to one it was out when we run inter ye. I\'spect Abner didn\'t calkerlate for fillin\' it for day work and night work too."
The speaker was a grizzled man, middle-aged, and rather too plump for a sailor. He had a genial, good-natured countenance, and so far as I could see was the only occupant of the vessel.
His craft was truly a peculiar one. It was sloop-rigged, and on the after part of the deck, occupying about one third of the length of the vessel, was a structure resembling a small one-storied house, which rose high above the rest of the deck, like the poop of an old-fashioned man-of-war. In the gable end of this house, which faced upon the deck, there was a window and a door. The boom of the mast was rigged high enough to allow it to sweep over the roof.
"I reckon you gents think this is a queer kind of a craft," said the man, with a grin of pleasure at our evident curiosity; "and if ye think that, ye are about right, for there isn\'t jist such another one as far as I know. This is a floating grocery, and I am captain of the sloop or keeper of the store, jist as it happens. In that house there is a good stock of flour, sugar, feed, trimmings, notions, and small dry goods, with some tinware and pottery, and a lot of other things which you commonly find in a country grocery store. I have got the trade of about half the families in this bay; all of them on the islands, and a good many of them on the mainland, especially sech as has piers of their own. I have regular days for touching at all the different p\'ints; and it is a mighty nice thing, I can tell ye, to have yer grocery store come round to ye instead of yer having to go to it, especially if ye live on an island or out in the country."
Walkirk and I were very much interested in this floating grocery store, which was an entirely novel thing to us, and we asked a good many questions about it.
"There\'s only me and Abner aboard," said the grocer-skipper, "but that\'s enough, for we do a good deal more anchorin\' than sailin\'. Abner, he\'s head clerk, and don\'t pretend to be no sailor at all; but he lays a hold of anythin\' I tell him to, and that\'s all I ask of him in the sailorin\' line. But he is first class behind the counter, I can tell ye, and in keepin\' the books I couldn\'t find nobody like Abner,—not in this State. Now it may strike ye, gents, that I am not much of a sailor neither, to be driftin\' about here at night in this fog instead of anchorin\' and tootin\' a foghorn; but ye see, I did anchor in the fore part of the night, and after Abner had gone to his bunk—we don\'t keep regular watches, but kinder divide the night between us, when we are out on the bay, which isn\'t common, for we like to tie up at night, and do our sailin\' in the daytime—it struck me that as the tide was runnin\' out we might as well let it take us to Simpson\'s Bar, which, if ye don\'t know this bay, is a big shallow place, where there is always water enough for us, bein\' a good deal on the flat-bottomed order, but where almost any steamin\' craft at low tide would stick in the mud before they could run into us. So thinks I, If we want to get on in the direction of Widder Kinley\'s (whose is the last house I serve down the bay), and to feel safe besides, we had better up anchor, and I upped it. But I had ought to remem............