"Oh, boy, boy!" she cried, with a little heart-broken catch in her voice; "some of them must have gone down with her! Can you believe that the _Osprey_ got them all?" And then, with the sweet lips trembling: "I did my best, Kenneth; my very best: and--it wasn't--good enough!"
She was putting the catboat up into the wind, and Griswold stumbled forward to get the broader outlook. Suddenly he called back to her.
"Port!--port your helm hard! there's a man in a life-belt--he's just out of reach. Hold her there--steady--steady!" He had thrown himself flat, face down, on the half-deck forward and was clutching at something in the heaving seas. "I've got him!" he cried, and a moment later he was working his way aft, holding the man's face out of water.
It asked for their united strength to get the gray-haired, heavy-bodied victim of the capsize over the _Clytie's_ rail. They had to bring the life-belt too; the old man's fingers were sunk into it with a dying grip that could not be broken. At first Griswold was too much preoccupied and shocked to recognize the drawn face with its hard-lined mouth and long upper lip. When he did recognize it the gripping fear was at his heart--the fear that makes a cruel coward of the hunted thing in all nature.
What might have happened if he had been alone; if Margery, taking her place at the tiller and busying herself swiftly in getting the catboat under way again, had not been looking on; he dared not think. And that other frightful thought he put away, fighting against it madly as a condemned man might push the cup of hemlock from his lips. Forcibly breaking the drowned one's hold upon the life-belt, he fell to work energetically, resorting to the first-aid expedients for the reviving of the drowned as he had learned them in his boyhood. Once, only, he flung a word over his shoulder at Margery as he fought for the old man's life. "Make for the nearest landing where we can get a doctor!" he commanded; and then, in a passion of gratitude: "O God, I thank thee that I am not a murderer!--he's coming back! he's breathing again!"
A little later he was able to leave off the first-aid arm-pumpings and chest-pressings; to straighten the limp and sprawling limbs, and to dive into the cuddy cabin, under Margery's directions, for blankets and rugs. When all was done that could be done, and he had propped the blanket-swathed body with the cushions so that the crash and plunge of the pitching catboat would be minimized for the sufferer, he went aft to sit beside the helmswoman, who was getting the final wave-leap of speed out of the little vessel.