Love and Skates/Chapter XI
- Chapter XI. Cap’n Ambuster’s Skiff.
It was a busy afternoon at the Dunderbunk Foundry.
The Superintendent had come back with his pocket full of orders. Everybody, from the Czar of Russia to the President of the Guano Republic, was in the market for machinery. Crisis was gone by. Prosperity was come. The world was all ready to move, and only waited for a fresh supply of wheels, cranks, side-levers, walking-beams, and other such muscular creatures of iron, to push and tug and swing and revolve and set Progress a-going.
Dunderbunk was to have its full share in supplying the demand. It was well understood by this time that the iron Wade made was as stanch as the man who made it. Dunderbunk, therefore, Head and Hands, must despatch.
So it was a busy afternoon at the industrious Foundry. The men bestirred themselves. The furnaces rumbled. The engine thumped. The drums in the finishing-shop hummed merrily their lively song of labor. The four trip-hammers — two bull-headed, two calf-headed — champed, like carnivorous maws, upon red bars of iron, and over their banquet they roared the big-toned music of the trip-hammer chorus, —
- “Now then! hit hard!
- Strike while Iron’s hot. Life’s short. Art’s long.”
By this massive refrain, ringing in at intervals above the ceaseless buzz, murmur, and clang throughout the buildings, every man’s work was mightily nerved and inspired. Everybody liked to hear the sturdy song of these grim vocalists; and whenever they struck in, each solo or duo or quatuor of men, playing Anvil Chorus, quickened time, and all the action and rumor of the busy opera went on more cheerily and lustily. So work kept astir like play.
An hour before sunset, Bill Tarbox stepped into Wade’s office. Even oily and begrimed, Bill could be recognized as a favored lover. He looked more a man than ever before.
“I forgot to mention,” says the foreman, “that Cap’n Ambuster was in, this morning, to see you. He says, that, if the river’s clear enough for him to get away from our dock, he’ll go down to the City to-morrow, and offers to take freight cheap. We might put that new walking-beam, we’ve just rough-finished for the ‘Union,’ aboard of him.”
“Yes, — if he is sure to go to-morrow. It will not do to delay. The owners complained to me yesterday that the ‘Union’ was in a bad way for want of its new machinery. Tell your brother-in-law to come here, Bill.”
Tarbox looked sheepishly pleased, and summoned Perry Purtett.
“Run down, Perry,” said Wade, “to the ‘Ambuster,’ and ask Captain Isaac to step up here a moment. Tell him I have some freight to send by him.”
Perry moved through the Foundry with his usual jaunty step, left his dignity at the door, and ran off to the dock.
The weather had grown fitful. Heavy clouds whirled over, trailing snow-flurries. Rarely the sun found a cleft in the black canopy to shoot a ray through and remind the world that he was still in his place and ready to shine when he was wanted.
Master Perry had a furlong to go before he reached the dock. He crossed the stream, kept unfrozen by the warm influences of the Foundry. He ran through a little dell hedged on each side by dull green cedars. It was severely cold now, and our young friend condescended to prance and jump over the ice-skimmed puddles to keep his blood in motion.
The little rusty, pudgy steamboat lay at the down-stream side of the Foundry wharf. Her name was so long and her paddle-box so short, that the painter, beginning with ambitious large letters, had been compelled to abbreviate the last syllable. Her title read thus: —
- I. AMBUSTer.
Certainly a formidable inscription for a steamboat!
When she hove in sight, Perry halted, resumed his stately demeanor, and embarked as if he were a Doge entering a Bucentaur to wed a Sea.
There was nobody on deck to witness the arrival and salute the magnifico.
Perry looked in at the Cap’n’s office. He beheld a three-legged stool, a hacked desk, an inky steel-pen, an inkless inkstand; but no Cap’n Ambuster.
Perry inspected the Cap’n’s state-room. There was a cracked looking-glass, into which he looked; a hair-brush suspended by the glass, which he used; a lair of blankets in a berth, which he had no present use for; and a smell of musty boots, which nobody with a nose could help smelling. Still no Captain Ambuster, nor any of his crew.
Search in the unsavory kitchen revealed no cook, coiled up in a corner, suffering nightmares for the last greasy dinner he had brewed in his frying-pan. There were no deck hands bundled into their bunks. Perry rapped on the chain-box and inquired if anybody was within, and nobody answering, he had to ventriloquize a negative.
The engine-room, too, was vacant, and quite as unsavory as the other dens on board. Perry patronized the engine by a pull or two at the valves, and continued his tour of inspection.
The Ambuster’s skiff, lying on her forward deck, seemed to entertain him vastly.
“Jolly!” says Perry. And so it was a jolly boat in the literal, not the technical sense.
“The three wise men of Gotham went to sea in a bowl; and here’s the identical craft,” says Perry.
He gave the chubby little machine a push with his foot. It rolled and wallowed about grotesquely. When it was still again, it looked so comic, lying contentedly on its fat side like a pudgy baby, that Perry had a roar of laughter, which, like other laughter to one’s self, did not sound very merry, particularly as the north-wind was howling ominously, and the broken ice, on its downward way, was whispering and moaning and talking on in a most mysterious and inarticulate manner.
“Those sheets of ice would crunch up this skiff, as pigs do a punkin,” thinks Perry.
And with this thought in his head he looked out on the river, and fancied the foolish little vessel cast loose and buffeting helplessly about in the ice.
He had been so busy until now, in prying about the steamboat and making up his mind that Captain and men had all gone off for a comfortable supper on shore, that his eyes had not wandered toward the stream.
Now his glance began to follow the course of the icy current. He wondered where all this supply of cakes came from, and how many of them would escape the stems of ferry-boats below and get safe to sea.
All at once, as he looked lazily along the lazy files of ice, his eyes caught a black object drifting on a fragment in a wide way of open water opposite Skerrett’s Point, a mile distant.
Perry’s heart stopped beating. He uttered a little gasping cry. He sprang ashore, not at all like a Doge quitting a Bucentaur. He tore back to the Foundry, dashing through the puddles, and, never stopping to pick up his cap, burst in upon Wade and Bill Tarbox in the office.
The boy was splashed from head to foot with red mud. His light hair, blown wildly about, made his ashy face seem paler. He stood panting.
His dumb terror brought back to Wade’s mind all the bad omens of the morning.
“Speak!” said he, seizing Perry fiercely by the shoulder.
The uproar of the Works seemed to hush for an instant, while the lad stammered faintly, —
“There’s somebody carried off in the ice by Skerrett’s Point. It looks like a woman. And there’s nobody to help.”