“Now, I _can_ advise you,” said the Captain definitely. “It won’t do at all to trust river-side rats. You might be robbed and murdered for your watch or the change in your purse. I am not acquainted with that swamper,--I speak from precedent. And how can you judge if the shack is above water now,--or whether it has been blown by the hurricane down the river?”
“Still, the yawl _is_ overloaded,” said Floyd-Rosney, with a trifle of malice. He was bent on exploiting the situation to his own commanding credit, and the proposition, reiterated anew, to withdraw for a different course, nettled his troublous and sensitive pride.
The next man who stepped into the yawl was the one who had advanced this divergent theory, and Floyd-Rosney flashed a glance of triumph at his wife, who still stood with the child in her arms at the warped rail of the promenade deck. She was pale, anxious, doubtful, in no frame of mind to furnish her wonted plaudits, the incense of wifely flatteries on which his vanity lived. These others had admired his initiative, had gladly adopted his plans, were looking to him with a unanimity of subservience that had quite restored the tone of his wonted arrogance. He could ill brook to see her with that discouraged questioning in her face, gazing forth over the forbidding gray water, letting first one, then another pass her to a place in the yawl. She should have been the first to board it,--to show her faith by her works.
He approached her with a rebuking question.
“Why do you lug that child around, Paula?” he demanded. “He will break your back.” He stepped forward, as if to lift the little fellow from her arms, but she precipitately moved a pace backward. Paula’s grisly thoughts were of the dungeon, the trap of the warped stateroom,--whence the boy was liberated by a stranger, while his father, unthinking and unnoting, was absorbed in his own complacence, in his busy and arrogant pose. No,--she would not let the child go again, she would hold him in her arms if his weight broke every bone in her body till they were all in safety.
“I don’t want to risk that yawl,” she said querulously. “I think the Captain knows best,--he has had such long experience. The yawl looks tricky, and the water is fearful. We ought to take to the yawl as a last resort, when the steamer can’t house us. That is always the custom. It is only in cases of absolute necessity that the yawl is used.”