Then, in a flash of recollection, she heard Roderick's voice:
"And Mulcahy will meet you on the eight-o'clock train."
"Rod meant the train that leaves Saint Louis at eight in the morning! Not this afternoon train. How could I make such a blunder! He does not look for me to reach Grafton till to-morrow."
"If that bail could reach camp to-night, they could ship it up and start to cutting immediately. It would mean seven or eight hours more of working time. But how to take it there!"
"There's a man yonder who owns a gasolene-launch," ventured the agent. "It's a crazy, battered tub, but maybe----"
Marian looked out at the night: the black, sullen river; the ranks of willows swaying in the heavy wind; the thunder that told of approaching storm.
"Call that man over, please. Yes, I shall risk the trip up-river. That bail shall reach camp to-night."
Marian put down the gallon tin with which she had bailed steadily, and looked at her watch.
The steersman gave a weary yawn and turned back to his wheel. Inwardly Marian echoed his discouraged word. It seemed to her that she had crouched for years in the stern of the crazy little motor-boat. Rain and spray had drenched her to the skin. She ached in every half-frozen bone. Yet she sat, wide awake and alert, watching her pilot keenly.
He was a poor helmsman, she thought. However, an expert would have found trouble in taking an overloaded launch up-stream against that swollen current and in pitch darkness. Worse, the weight of the heavy dredge-bail weighed the launch down almost to water level. Every tiny wave splashed over the gunwale. Marian bailed on mechanically.
She had had hard work to bribe the owner to risk the trip up-stream. The men at Grafton had warned her, moreover, that she was running a narrow chance of swamping the launch, and thus of losing her precious piece of machinery, to say nothing of the danger to her own life. But all Marian's old timidity had fled, forgotten. Nothing else mattered if just she might serve her brother in his supreme need.
Through these four dreary hours the old commodore's quaint, frank words had echoed in her mind. And the commodore had been right, she owned, with a quiver of shame. Always, since their mud-pie days, Rod had done his part by her in full measure, generously, lovingly. Never, until these last days, had she even realized what doing her own part by Roderick might mean.