“I think, sir, before two hours are over, the cutter will have to anchor.”
“You do not mean to say, Master Eau-douce, you would anchor on a lee shore in a gale of wind?”
“If I would save my vessel, that is exactly what I would do, Master Cap.”
“Whe-e-e-w!--this is fresh water, with a vengeance! Hark'e, young man, I've been a seafaring animal, boy and man, forty-one years, and I never yet heard of such a thing. I'd throw my ground-tackle overboard before I would be guilty of so lubberly an act!”
“That is what we do on this lake,” modestly replied Jasper, “when we are hard pressed. I daresay we might do better, had we been better taught.”
“That you might, indeed! No; no man induces me to commit such a sin against my own bringing up. I should never dare show my face inside of Sandy Hook again, had I committed so know-nothing an exploit. Why, Pathfinder, here, has more seamanship in him than that comes to. You can go below again, Master Eau-douce.”
Jasper quietly bowed and withdrew; still, as he passed down the ladder, the spectators observed that he cast a lingering anxious look at the horizon to windward and the land to leeward, and then disappeared with concern strongly expressed in every lineament of his face.
His still refuted quirks he still repeats; New-raised objections with new quibbles meets, Till sinking in the quicksand he defends, He dies disputing, and the contest ends. COWPER.
As the soldier's wife was sick in her berth, Mabel Dunham was the only person in the outer cabin when Jasper returned to it; for, by an act of grace in the Sergeant, he had been permitted to resume his proper place in this part of the vessel. We should be ascribing too much simplicity of character to our heroine, if we said that she had felt no distrust of the young man in consequence of his arrest; but we should also be doing injustice to her warmth of feeling and generosity of disposition, if we did not add, that this distrust was insignificant and transient. As he now took his seat near her, his whole countenance clouded with the uneasiness he felt concerning the situation of the cutter, everything like suspicion was banished from her mind, and she saw in him only an injured man.
“You let this affair weigh too heavily on your mind, Jasper,” said she eagerly, or with that forgetfulness of self with which the youthful of her sex are wont to betray their feelings when a strong and generous interest has attained the ascendency; “no one who knows you can, or does, believe you guilty. Pathfinder says he will pledge his life for you.”