Democratic Sentinel, Volume 20, Number 28, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 17 July 1896 — A LOYAL LOVE [ARTICLE+ILLUSTRATION]

A LOYAL LOVE

CHAPTER 111. “It sounds like ‘Help!’ Dame Kezia,” exclaimed the young man, whose quick ears had first caught the distant sound, and who now thrust aside his books, and started to his feet “Something must have happened down dale.” “Let a be! let a be!” grumbled the woman to whom he spoke, looking up from some household task in a remote corner. “It is hay-harvest time now, and so many rambling lads about.” But at this juncture a shadow darkened the door, and into the house-place of the lonely dwelling—one of those houses plainly built of dry stone, of which we see so many in the north of England and in the southern counties few or none —burst a panting runner. “Captain!” cried out the breathless messenger of ill; “Captain—why—Mr. Don—wherever’s Captain Jedson and the rest?” “Not back yet from Whitby way,” answered the woman who was called Kezia peering at the newcomer. “My uncle, Captain Obadiah, sent us word by noon In a letter by John Anderson, the Hull carrier. There’s none here but me and my nursling, our Don, and won’t be till to-morrow.” The young man who had been the first to hear the distant cry, and the first to speak, now came forward from where he had been seated beside the long rough table littered with books and manuscripts. “Anything wrong, Joe?” he asked. “None here but thee, Mr. Don!” the boy said, mournfully; “then It’s all up wi’ them, poor souls! all the seven. I got free, but they are trapped like so many mice, to smother and drown; for who is to ' draw them out of the Soldiers’ Slough, quagged as they are, Mr. Don? and all along of Rufus Crouch being so venturesome. Not that I’d blame him now, poor chap!” “It was an ill day when the prospector, that red-haired Rufus Crouch, ever came in among us jet hunters!” was Kezia’s comment. “He’d better have stuck to Australia and his gold-digging than ” “Hush, dame!” said the young man, who had been addressed as Mr. Don, and who was singularly handsome. He was perhaps a couple of years older than the bringer of the news—say, twenty years of age—with dark-brown hair that curled naturally round his handsome head, with bold, bright eyes, and a face that in a woman would have been called beautiful. Joe Nixon’s tale was soon told. He had been one of the party detached from the main band of jet hunters, and influenced, if not actually commanded, by Rufus Crouch, the ex-Australian gold-digger. They had lit upon “signs,” in the shape of fragments of buried jet, lately uncovered by the effects of a strong northwester, and a troubled sea, which had made Rufus, always over-sanguine, feel confident that a great booty was to be won before tide rise between the Gannet Rocks and the Soldiers’ Slough; so they had all ventured out with pick and shovel, and had actually found some jet, but had been driven by the incoming sea from the Gannet Rocks, and, finally, had become “quagged” in the dangerous quicksand that lay but an arrow flight away, Joe Nixon alone having the power of escape. “Soldiers’ Slough; that means a winding sheet, drawn high, but no coffin nor Christian rites,” remarked Dame Kezia with a shudder. "If Uncle Obad had been here ” “I vish he were. But we must do our best, though the chance is a bad one,” answered the young man, cheerily, as he snatched his cap and caught up a long iron-tipped fen pole that stood propped against a rafter. “Come along, Joe.” “Don’t be hazardous, Don, my dove!” exclaimed the woman, in some alarm. “You dear old Kezia!” rejoined the young man, laughingly. "Would you make a milksop and a landsman of me of a sudden? No, no; a jet hunter must never call in vain with a mate at hand.” And he sallied forth, with Joe at his heels. The dale into which Don and his follower emerged was one of the stoniest and narrowest of those valleys which cleave the coast of a portion of North Yorkshire, but there opened out unexpectedly fertile dells and lateral valleys, where farm houses of gray stone stood among apple trees, and where there were meadows in the deep grass of which the fat kine browsed peacefully. Just then haymaking was in full progress, and in a large field, on Farmer Thorpe’s land, some "quarter of a mile away, many workers of both sexes were gathered. They stood, leaning on Jheir rakes and forks, staringly, when Don burst into the midst of them, with Joe Nixon at his heels. “Lads,” exclaimed the young man, eagerly, “I want strong arms and true hearts to go along with me on an errand of mercy. Seven poor creatures, jet seekers, like myself, are in mortal peril hard by, quagged In the Soldiers’ Slough—the terror of our shore. Come, then, and come quickly. Captain Jedson is away at Whitby. There’s not a jet hunter here save Joe and me. For the credit of Yorkshire, for the honor of Beckdale, I hope, lads, you’ll not refuse me, when the lives of Christian men and women hang trembling by a thread.” Then arose a turmoil of mingled voices in dispute. Farmer Thorpe himself, a notorious curmudgeon, anxious to save his fine crop of hay, as the saying is, without a shower, and quite callous to sentiment, was very much opposed to any wholesale desertion of their work on the part of his hired men. Luckily, however, o more generous spirit animated the bulk of those present. Forks and rakes were flung aside, and a general move was made toward the beach. On their way shoreward Don called a halt in front of another farm silent and deserted now, since the hay had been stacked. “Mr. Fletcher,” he said to the stooping, sturdy old yeoman who stood on his worn doorstep, “you have a lot of boards about there beside your barn, and two old rickcloths; these, if you would grant us the loan of them in saving the lives of those quagged in the Soldiers’ Slough, would be worth much to us. I will be responsible for the value of any we may use.” “And how if you lose yourself, lad, and don’t come back with the things or the brass?” hesitatingly demanded the senior. “In that case it is to Obadiah, your neighbor, and our captain, that you must look for payment,” replied Don, cheerily. “May we have them, old friend?” - “Ay, ay!” grumbled the farmer, “but have a care, have a care, my bairn. There’ll be moist eyes in more houses than one If ye come not back.”

BY J. BERWICK HARWOOD.

And without further remonstrance, he saw planks and rick-cloths seized upon and borne away beachward. The lower end of the dale once reached and the sand-hills crossed, there could be seen the black, serrated line of the half-sunken Gannet Rocks, around which the wavelets rippled. The tide was coming in, but there was not a breath of wind, and the sea was like a mill pond. Some arrowshot or so away was a brown, shining something that looked like an ugly patch on the pure whiteness of the spreading sands, and toward the outer edge of which, nearest to the Gannet Roc*.s, appeared certain dark specks—human beings, clearly, and in sore need. “On, on!” cried Don, bounding forward, and at a run his followers cleared the stretch of flat beach which intervened between them and a low sand-bank, seamed with jagged rocks at the landward edge of the famous quicksand. “There they are all, as yet!” exclaimed Joe Nixon. ‘That's Rufus, nighest to the Gannets, with one hand on the black stone,"and those two nearer are Annie Shaw and old Peterson. But we’ve no time to lose, Mr. Don, for see now the Slough is alive; and that means mischief.” And indeed the hideous surface of the slimy quicksand seemed to heave and slowly quiver, as if some sleeping monster were breathing and stirring restlessly beneath. “Help! for pity’s sake, help!” called out the shrill, girlish voice of Annie Shaw, her face white and pinched with fear. Don gave orders promptly and cheerfully, and by his directions the boards were laid down one beyond another, so as to form a sort of floating bridge, and over this trembling pathway he himself cautiously advanced, followed at some little distance by Joe Nixon, a coil of rope in his hand. To save Annie Shaw and gray-haired Mark Peterson was a work comparatively easy, because they were so near and not very deeply engulfed as yet But this task performed, and the two first foundlings of the lost flock being brought to land, Don braced himself for the far more arduous duty that remained. There were yet five fellow-creatures to be brought in, while the tide was rising, and the heaving and shaking of the quicksand, as if the hidden monster beneath were stirring in her lair, grew momentarily more perceptible. “Don has got the first of them by the hand—a woman, that is. How she clings to him, poor thing! Ellen—Ellen Watson, that’s her name, of Thirsk, sister to Ralph Watson, that’s away with the jet hunters; very respectably brought up both,” chimed in a well-informed bystander. “Well done, Mr. Don! and well done, Joe, and Dick, and Larry from Ireland!” was the general verdict, as Ellen Watson, was pushed, dragged and hustled along the shaking pathway* of reeling planks safe to shore. Then a second victim—a lad this time—was snatched from the tenacious grip of the cruel quicksand. Next it was a married man with children at home, and whose wife stood weeping on the beach. Then another stripling was saved; and with this last act of salvage it seemed as if the good work must end, for already a thin white line of streaky tide-foam had reached the broad shoulders of Rufus Crouch, as he held on with desperate tenacity to the black rock. “It can’t be done!” he bawled out, using his outspread hands as a speaking-trum-pet, a patriarch of the beach. “Take an old sailor’s advice, Mr. Don, and get back to shore.” “Not alone,” answered Don, cheerily, but in a voice that rank like a trumpetcall. The deed was done, and the fifth sufferer dragged forth from the jaws of the devouring monster of the seashore. “Hurrah for Mr. Don—our Don! Hurrah, lads!” roared out the old fishing skipper, Threpham, who was regarded as an oracle of the beach. “Heart of a lion, ay, and strength of a lion, too, young as he is, to have brought seven of the poor things to shore this day against all odds!” “My blessing, and the blessing of my little ones, that but for you would be fatherless, be with you always, Mr. Don,” said one of the women, sobbing. “How shall we ever thank you enough, sir—l and my man, and Annie and Mark and the lads and Rufus Crouch?” “Mates must help mates, dame; and Christians, Christians,” lightly returned the young man who has been called Don. “Come lads, let us give the farmer back his planks, and the blue-jackets their ropes, with thanks for the use of them, and there will be an end of it.”

CHAPTER IV.

“Glad to see you, Don. I am more than glad, my old friend, not only to hear your praises on all men’s lips, but to see my favorite pupil safe and sound after the risk of yesterday.” It was not often that the Rector of Woodburn made a speech so complimentary, or, indeed, indulged in speech-making at all. He was a kind man, as well as a learned one. As such, and having leisure enough, he had good-naturedly undertaken to assist young Don, the adopted child of his eccentric neiglmor, old Obadiah Jedson, in his studies, and the young man was always welcome at Woodburn Parsonage whenever the roving nature of a jet hunter’s calling permitted him to pass an hour or two in the clergyman’s wellstocked library. On this particular morning both Mr. and Mrs. Langton, with their orphaned charge, Miss Mowbray, were in the garden, and the open carriage, with its pair of pretty white ponies, stood ready before the ivied porch. “Indeed, Mr. Don, we are proud of you; and from all I hear we have reason to be proud,” said kindly, motherly Mrs. Langton, with her beaming smile, while Miss Mowbray, who was perhaps a year younger than himself, and very pretty, timidly held out her little gloved hand and said hesitatingly, but with tears in her bright eyes, “We thought of you—so much—yesterday, and of your great courage, and the lives you saved from that terrible danger.” Gently, and almost with reverence, Don took the little hand for a moment in his, while his handsome face flushed crimson. “You are too kind to me,” he said, with manly modesty. “Any one of the fishers, any one of the dalesmen, would have done his best, I am sure, in such a case.” Then some other words were said, and then Mrs. Langton and her young charge stepped into the carriage, and were borne away, nodding a kind farewell to Don. There stood the young man, with his books under his arm, listening, or seeming to listen, to his friend and patron, but in truth quite unconscious of the drift of the latter’s discourse. It was the first time that Violet Mowbray’s tiny hand had touched his; it was the first time that he

had seen those lovely eyes of hers dimmed by tears, and those tears called forth by his peril, by his daring, by the lives that he had saved from the jaws of death. Don may be excused if he was for the moment an inattentive listener to the Reverend Samuel Langton. Violet Mowbray’s father, Major Mowbray, had died in India, and within a few months his wife, quite young, had followed him to the grave. Violet—who, like most delicate, and indeed European, children, had been sent early to Europe to escape the heavy, sultry heats and rainy seasons of the Madras Presidency—had been left fatherless and motherless at an early age. She was eighteen now, and within a month or two of her nineteenth birthday, and of the small income —it was but four hundred a year—that she had become heiress to so sadly, a considerable part had been al’owed to accumulate, at compound interest; so that, as her guardian was wont to declare, the girl was, for a young lady, almost rich. That Don should have admired Violet, seeing her often, as he necessaaly did—since he was a frequent and welcome guest at the parsonage, where Mr. Langton esteemed the young jet seeker as the best and quickest pupil that he had ever helped along the rugged road to learning —is perhaps not wonderful. See him —Don —now, as he slowly walks away, his books under his arm, down the winding road that leads to the shore, the lesson of the day over. He is thinking less of Mr. Langton and his kindness than of the witchery of those gray eyes that belong to Violet Mowbray. These young people had often met, but very slight had been the actual intercourse between them. The inequality of their condition forbade all familiarity. Don, though a bright, gallant lad, beloved by all, was a mere jet hunter —a foundling—a nobody; Miss Mowbray, though not rich, was a lady born, and between her and the waif of the seashore there seemed to exist a social gulf, impassable. Youth is proverbially hopeful; but even in Don’s eyes the difference of rank seemed one too great to be surmounted. “I have loved her since I knew what love meant”—such were his muttered words, as he descended the winding road; “but I know that she is as far out of my reach as are the stars that shine down upon me. What am I? Only a jet seeker; only the adopted son of a kindly, eccentric man. Perhaps, if the mystery that hangs over my birth were but cleared up—but no! I must be patient, and hide my heart’s dearest wishes, even from her, under a cold bearing. It would be base indeed to presume on Mr. Langton’s sim< pie kindness.” (To be continued.!