Page:St. Nicholas, vol. 40.1 (1912-1913).djvu/724

490 that frantic and vehement mother that nothing better could be commanded of him. Dodging logs and wrecks and rooted trees, the boat went surging down the flood, while the woman sat stiffly erect in the stern, her face white, her eyes staring far ahead.

“The other mother had the deeper and more immediate cause for anguish. Coming to the bank where she had left her cub in the tree, she found the bank caved in, and tree and cub together vanished. Unlike the baby’s mother, she could swim; but she knew that she could run faster and farther. In stoic silence, but with a look of piteous anxiety in her eyes, she started on a gallop down the half-drowned shores, clambering through the heaps of debris, and swimming the deep, still inlets where the flood had backed up into the valleys of the tributary brooks.

“At last, with laboring lungs and pounding heart, she came out upon a low, bare bluff over-looking the flood, and saw, not a hundred yards out, the raft with its two little passengers asleep. She saw her cub, lying curled up with his head in the baby’s arms, his black fur mixed with the baby’s yellow locks. Her first thought was that he was dead—that the baby had killed him and was carrying him off. With a roar of pain and vengeful fury, she rushed down the bluff and hurled herself into the water.

“Not till then did she notice that a boat was approaching the raft, a boat with two human beings in it. It was very much nearer the raft than she was, and traveling very much faster than she could swim. Her savage heart went near to bursting with rage and fear. She knew those beings in the boat could have but one object, the slaughter, or, at least, the theft, of her little one. She swam frantically, her great muscles heaving as she shouldered the waves apart. But in that race she was hopelessly beaten from the first.

“The boat reached the raft, bumped hard upon it, and the baby’s mother leaped out, while the man, with his boat-hook, held the two craft close together. The woman, thrusting the cub angrily aside, clutched the baby to her breast, sobbing over her, and threatening to punish her when she got her home for giving so much trouble. The baby did not seem in the least disturbed by these threats, to which the man in the boat was listening with a grin, but when her mother started to carry her to the boat, she reached out her arms rebelliously for the cub.

“‘Won't go wivout my Teddy bear,’ she announced, with tearful decision.

“‘Ye’d better git a move on, Mrs. Murdoch,’ admonished the man in the boat. ‘Here ’s the old b’ar comin’ after her young un, an’ I ’ve a notion she ain’t exackly ca’m.’

“The woman hesitated. She was willing enough to indulge the baby’s whim, the more so as she felt in her heart that it was in some respects her fault that the raft had got away. She measured the distance to that formidable black head, cleaving the water some thirty yards away.

“‘Well,’ said she, ‘we may as well take the little varmint along, if Baby wants him.’ And she stepped over to pick up the now shrinking and anxious cub.

“‘You quit that, an’ git into the boat, quick!’ ordered the man, in a voice of curt authority. The woman whipped round and stared at him in amazement. She was accustomed to having people defer to her; and Jim Simmons, in particular, she had always considered such a mild-mannered man.

“‘Git in!’ reiterated the man, in a voice that she found herself obeying in spite of herself.

“‘D’ ye want to see Baby et up afore yo’r eyes?’ he continued sternly, hiding a grin beneath the sandy droop of his big mustaches. And with the baby kicking and wailing, and stretching out her arms to the all-unheeding cub, he rowed rapidly away, just as the old bear dragged herself up on the raft.

“Then Mrs. Murdoch’s wrath found words, and she let it flow forth while the man listened as indifferently as if it had been the whistling of the wind. At last she stopped.

“‘Anything more to say, ma’am?’ he asked politely.

“Mrs. Murdoch answered with a curt ‘No.’

“‘Then all I hev’ to say,’ he went on, ‘is, that to my mind mothers has rights. That there b’ar ’s a mother, an’ she ’s got feelin’s, like you, an’ she ’s come after her young un, like you,—an’ I was n’t a-goin’ to see her robbed of him.’”