Tess of the Storm Country

And, silently, as a spectral fleet, the boats lapped their way back, edging the shore carefully.

* * * * * Far into the night Satisfied Longman and the tired mother waited for their boy.

"He'll show up to break'us," soothed the father; but the mother trembled with terror. It was the first evening Ezra had missed the netting, and he had never been from home for a whole night.

As day after day passed, it was noised about the settlement that Ezra Longman had run away, some saying that he had been seen upon a line of canal boats going to Albany. The mother watched each hour for some word from him. Then, with a sorrowful expression in the faded eyes, she said to Myra: "If Ezy had had any edication, he'd 'a' writ. He'll be a-comin' home some of these days."

After that, the fisherman's hut carried along its usual routine--while a boy in the city was wrestling with fever, and the head of the law school hung upon his muttered words with avidity.

* * * * * "You think he is very ill, Tess?" Teola asked, early one evening in September, when she and Tessibel were alone in the Skinner hut. Tess came forward to the wooden box, holding in her hand the frying-pan filled with bacon fat, and gazed down upon the baby Dan, contemplating the wee old-man face thoughtfully.

"He air sick! He air a look on him what air on Myry's brat--kind of sickly. That air because he has so many lines in his face, and he air so little," she finished, wrinkling the sun-tanned cheeks and shrugging her shoulders almost disdainfully.

Teola knelt down, and slipped one slender arm under the dark head. These two girls had been drawn together during the past few weeks by a tie stronger than death. It had brought Frederick nearer to the squatter, and little did Teola realize that, had it not been for her handsome brother, her secret would have been discovered long before. It was of him she was thinking as she bent over the fire-scarred babe on this stormy September night in the fisherman's hut.

"I may not be able to come down to-morrow, Tessibel," she said, looking up into the serious face, "because my brother is coming home early in the morning."

The frying-pan fell to the floor; the fat spattered and ran across the broken, tilted boards until it congealed into rounded miniature mountains. Teola turned a puzzled face toward the fishermaid, but there was nothing about the girl to tell her why the accident had happened, for Tessibel, grappling with a huge cloth, was wiping the floor furiously.