If Joseph Stagg had obeyed the precept of his little niece on this particular afternoon and had been “looking up,” instead of having his nose in the big ledger, making out monthly statements, he might have discovered the coming storm in season to withdraw his permission to Chet to take Carolyn May out on the ice.
It was always dark enough in the little back office in winter for the hardware dealer to have a lamp burning. So he did not notice the snow flurry that had taken Sunrise Cove in its arms until he chanced to walk out to the front of the store for needed exercise.
“I declare to man, it’s snowing!” muttered Joseph Stagg. “Thought we’d got through with that for this season.”
He opened the store door. There was a chill, clammy wind, and the snow was damp and packed quickly under foot. The street was already well covered, and the snow stuck to the awning frames and the fronts of the buildings across the way.
“Hum! If that Chet Gormley were here now, he might be of some use for once,” thought Mr. Stagg. 225 “But, of course, he never is here when I want him. He could clean this walk before folks get all balled up walking on it.”
Suddenly he bethought him of the errand that had taken the boy away from the store. Not at once was the hardware merchant startled by the thought; but he cast a critical glance skyward, trying to measure the downfall of snow.
“He’ll be coming back—with Hannah’s Car’lyn. Of course, he isn’t rattle-brained enough to take her out on the ice when it’s snowing like this.”
“Hey, Stagg!” shouted a shopkeeper from over the way, who had likewise come to the door, “did you hear that?”
“Hear what?” asked Joseph Stagg, puzzled.
“There she goes again! That’s ice, old man. She’s breaking up. We’ll have spring with us in no time now. I told Scofield this morning he could begin to load that schooner of his. The ice is going out of the cove.”
The reverberating crash that had startled Chet Gormley had startled Joseph Stagg as well.
“My goodness!” gasped the hardware dealer, and he started instantly away from the store, bareheaded as he was, without locking the door behind him—something he had never done before, since he had established himself in business on the main street of Sunrise Cove.
Just why he ran he could scarcely have explained. Of course, the children had not gone out in this snowstorm! 226 Mrs. Gormley—little sense as he believed the seamstress possessed—would not have allowed them to venture.
Yet, why had Chet not returned? Mr. Stagg knew very well that the ungainly boy was no shirk. Having been sent home for the particular purpose of taking Carolyn May out on her sled, he would have done that, or returned immediately to the store. Although prone to find fault with Chet Gormley, the hardware dealer recognised his good qualities as certainly as anybody did.
He quickened his pace. He was running—slipping and sliding over the wet snow—when he turned into the street on which his store boy and his widowed mother lived.
The cottage was a little, boxlike place, and one had to climb steps to get to it. Mrs. Gormley saw him coming from the windows of the tiny front room which served her as parlour and workroom combined. The seamstress tottered to the door and opened it wide, clinging to it for support.
“Oh, oh, Mr. Stagg! What’s happened now?” she gasped. “I hope poor Chet ain’t done nothin’ that he shouldn’t ha’ done. I’m sure he tries to do his very best. If he’s done anything——”
“Where is he?” Joseph Stagg managed to say. “Where—where is he?” repeated the widow. “Oh, do come in, Mr. Stagg. It’s snowin’, ain’t it?”
Mr. Stagg plunged into the little house, head down, and belligerent. 227
“Where’s that plagued boy?” he demanded again. “Don’t tell me he’s taken Hannah’s Car’lyn out on the cove in this storm!”
“But—but you told him he could!” wailed the widow.
“What if I did? I didn’t know ’twas going to snow like this, did I?”
“But it wasn’t snowin’ when they went,” said Mrs. Gormley, plucking up some little spirit. “I’m sure it wasn’t Chetwood’s fault. Oh, dear!”
“Woman,” groaned Joseph Stagg, “it doesn’t matter whose fault it is—or if it’s anybody’s fault. The mischief’s done. The ice is breaking up. It’s drifting out of the inlet. You can hear it—if you’d stop talking long enough.” This was rather unfair on Mr. Stagg’s part, for he was certainly doing more talking than anybody else.
Just at this moment an unexpected voice broke into the discussion. There was a second woman—she had been sitting by the window—in Mrs. Gormley’s front room.
“Are you positive they went out on the cove to slide, Mrs. Gormley?”
“Oh, yes, I be, Mandy,” answered the seamstress. “Chet said he was goin’ there, and what Chet says he’ll do, he always does.”
“Then the ice has broken away and they have been carried out into the lake,” groaned Mr. Stagg.
Mandy Parlow came quickly to the little hall.
“Perhaps not, Joseph,” she said, speaking directly 228 to the hardware dealer. “It may be the storm. It snows so fast they would easily get turned around—be unable to find the shore.”
Another reverberating crash echoed from the cove. Mrs. Gormley wrung her hands.
“Oh, my Chet! Oh, my Chet!” she wailed. “He’ll be drowned!”
“He won’t be, if he’s got any sense,” snapped Mr. Stagg. “I’ll get some men and we’ll go after them.”
“Call the dog, Joseph Stagg. Call the dog,” advised Miss Amanda.
“Heh? Didn’t Prince go with ’em?”
“Oh, yes, he did,” wailed Mrs. Gormley.
“Call the dog, just the same,” repeated Amanda Parlow. “Prince will hear you and bark.”
“God bless you! So he will,” cried Mr. Stagg. “You’ve got more sense than any of us, Mandy.”
“And I’ll have the chapel bell rung,” she said.
“Huh! what’s that for?”
“The wind will carry the sound out across the cove. That boy, Chet, will recognise the sound of the bell and it will give him an idea of where home is.”
“You do beat all!” exclaimed Joseph Stagg, starting to leave the house.
But Amanda stayed him for a moment.
“Find a cap of Chet’s, Mrs. Gormley,” she commanded. “Don’t you see Mr. Stagg has no hat? He’ll catch his death of cold.” 229
“Why, I never thought!” He turned to speak directly to Miss Amanda, but she had gone back into the room and was putting on her outer wraps. Mrs. Gormley, red-eyed and weeping, brought the cap.
“Don’t—don’t be too hard on poor Chet, sir,” she sobbed. “He ain’t to blame.”
“Of course he isn’t,” admitted the hardware dealer heartily. “And I’m sure he’ll look out for Hannah’s Car’lyn—he and the dog.”
He plunged down the steps and kept on down the hill to the waterfront. There was an eating-place here where the waterside characters congregated, and Mr. Stagg put his head in at the door.
“Some of you fellers come out with me on the ice and look for a little girl—and a boy and a dog,” said Mr. Stagg. “Like enough, they’re lost in this storm. And the ice is going out.”
“I seen ’em when they went down,” said one man, jumping up with alacrity. “Haven’t they come back yet?”
“No.”
“Snow come down and blinded ’em,” said another.
“Do you reckon the spring freshet’s re’lly due yet?” propounded a third man.
“Don’t matter whether she be or not, Rightchild,” growled one of the other men. “The kids ought to be home, ’stead o’ out on that punky ice.”
They all rushed out of the eating-house and down to the nearest dock. Even the cook went, for he chanced to know Carolyn May. 230
“And let me tell you, she’s one rare little kid,” he declared, out of Mr. Stagg’s hearing. “How she come to be related to that hard-as-nails Joe Stagg is a puzzler.”
The hardware dealer might deserve this title in ordinary times, but this was one occasion when he plainly displayed emotion.
Hannah’s Car’lyn, the little child he had learned to love, was somewhere on the ice in the driving storm. He would have rushed blindly out on the rotten ice, barehanded and alone, had the others not halted him.
“Hold on! We want a peavy or two—them’s the best tools,” said one of the men.
“And a couple of lanterns,” said another.
Joseph Stagg stood on the dock and shouted at the top of his voice:
“Prince! Prince! Prince!”
The wind must have carried his voice a long way out across the cove, but there was no reply.
Then, suddenly, the clear silver tone of a bell rang out. Its pitch carried through the storm startlingly clear.
“Hullo! what’s the chapel bell tolling for?” demanded the man who had suggested the lanterns.
“The boy will hear that!” cried another. “If he isn’t an idiot, he’ll follow the sound of the chapel bell.”
“Ya-as,” said the cook, “if the ice ain’t opened up ’twixt him an’ the shore.” 231
There was a movement out in the cove. One field of ice crashed against another. Mr. Stagg stifled a moan and was one of the first to climb down to the level of the ice.
“Have a care, Joe,” somebody warned him. “This snow on the ice will mask the holes and fissures something scandalous.”
But Joseph Stagg was reckless of his own safety. He started out into the snow, shouting again:
“Prince! Prince! Here, boy! Here, boy!”
There was no answering bark. The ice cracked and shuddered and the gale slapped the snow against the searchers more fiercely than before. Had they been facing the wind, the snow would fairly have blinded them.
“And that’s what’s happened to the boy,” declared one of the men. “Don’t you see? He’s got to face it to get back to town.”
“Then he is drifted with it,” said Mr. Stagg hopelessly.
“Say, he’ll know which is the right way! Hear that bell?” rejoined another. “You can hear the chapel bell when you’re beating into the cove with the wind dead against you. I know, for I’ve been there.”
“Me, too,” agreed another.
The clanging of the chapel bell was a comforting sound. Joseph Stagg did not know that, unable to find the sexton, Amanda Parlow had forced the church door and was tugging at the rough rope herself. 232
Back and forth she rang the iron clapper, and it was no uncertain note that clanged across the storm-driven cove that afternoon. It was not work to which Carolyn May’s “pretty lady” was used. Her shoulders soon ached and the palms of her hands were raw and bleeding. But she continued to toll the bell without a moment’s surcease.
She did not know how much that resonant sound might mean to those out on the ice—to the little girl and the boy who might have no other means of locating the shore, to the men who were searching for the lost ones; for they, too, might be lost in the storm.
The axle of the old bell groaned and shrieked at each revolution. Miss Amanda pulled on the rope desperately. She did not think to put her foot in the loop of the rope to aid her in this work. With the power of her arms and shoulders alone she brought the music from the throat of the bell. Every stroke was a shock that racked her body terribly. She dared not leave the rope for a minute while she called from the door for help.
She hoped the sexton would come, wondering who was so steadily pulling the bell rope. Stroke followed stroke. The axle shrieked—and she could have done the same with pain had she not set her teeth in her lip and put forth every atom of will power she possessed to keep to the work and stifle her agony.
On and on, till her brain swam, and her breath 233 came chokingly from her lungs. Once she missed the stroke, her strength seeming to desert her for the moment. Frantically she clawed at the rope again and pulled down on it with renewed desperation.
“I will! I will!” she gasped.
Why? For the sake of the little child that she, too, had learned to love?
Perhaps. And, yet, it was not the flowerlike face of little Carolyn May that Amanda Parlow saw continually before her eyes as she tugged on the bell rope with bleeding hands.
Going out into the storm, out on the treacherous ice, was a figure that she had watched during the long years from behind the curtains of her front room. It was the most familiar figure in the world to her.
She had seen it change from a youthful, willowy shape to a solid, substantial, middle-aged figure during these years. She had seen it aging before its time. No wonder she could visualise it now so plainly out there on the ice.
“Joe! Joe!” she muttered each time that she bore down on the bell rope, and the iron tongue shouted the word for her, far across the snow-blotted cove.