With hands to the falls and feet against the ship's side, Cadogan climbed to the deck where he had left his coat. He found it kicked to one side and trampled upon. But the little photograph was still there--in the inside pocket.
He took off his cap, the cap of the drowned man, while he kissed the little photograph. "Coming, coming, oh, coming!" he murmured.
"Have you room for a passenger?" came in a man's voice from the dark.
Cadogan whirled. "Passenger? Passenger! I've fought and schemed and--Oh!"
It was Lavis, and, clinging to his hand, was somebody in a man's long ulster.
"It's the woman--you remember her?--who passed her baby boy into the boat so that he would be saved."
"A few minutes ago I found her. She was weeping for her baby. I asked her why she should be weeping now that her baby was safe, and she answered me: 'But who will be there to give him the breast when he wakes?'"
Cadogan rested his left hand, with the fingers clinched around the cap, on the ship's rail.
"If Christ on earth were to be with us once more," went on Lavis softly, "would he not say again: 'Greater love hath no man than this'? 'Who will be there to give him the breast when he wakes?'--and she about to die. Have you room for her as a passenger on your raft?"
Cadogan unloosed the fingers of the hand on the rail. The cap dropped into the sea.
"She shall be the one," he said presently.
In the rosy flush of a beautiful dawn a lone woman on a tiny raft drifted down to her crying baby and gave him suck.
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Transcriber's Notes: Minor changes have been made to make spelling and | |punctuation consistent throughout the work. Italics have been replaced | |with "_"(underline). Instances of ligature "oe" have been replaced with| |simple "oe". | +-----------------------------------------------------------------------+
End of Project Gutenberg's Sonnie-Boy's People, by James B. Connolly