Page:The New Penelope.djvu/141

 hunter did not stand upon ceremony, nor hesitate to invade the sleeper's privacy, but marched up to the settee, his ragged old blanket-coat dripping tiny streams from every separate tatter, and proceeded at once roughly to arouse the drunken man by a prolonged and vigorous shaking.

"Wha'er want? Lemme 'lone," grumbled Smiley, only dimly conscious of what was being said or done to him.

"Get up, I say. Get up, you fool! and come along home. Your wife is needin' ye. Go home and take care of her and the boy. Come along—d'ye hear?"

But the sleeper's brain was impervious to sound or sense. He only muttered, in a drowsy whisper, "Lemme 'lone," a few times, and went off into a deeper stupor than before.

"You miserable cuss," snarled Chillis, in his wrath, "be d——d to you, then! Drink yerself to death, ef you want to—the sooner the better;" and, with this parting adjuration, and an extra shake, the old mountain man, who had drank barrels of alcohol himself with comparative immunity from harm, turned his back upon this younger degenerate victim of modern whisky, and strode out of the room and the house, without stopping to reply to the renewed entreaties of his friends to remain and "make a night of it."

Making directly for the wharf, where his boat was moored, half filled with water, he hastily bailed it out, pushed off, and, dropping the oars into the row-locks, bent to the work before him; for the tide was already beginning to run up, and the course he had to take brought him dead against it for the first two or three miles, after which the tide would be with him, and, if there should not be too much sea, the labor of impelling the boat would be materially lessened.

The lookout from a small boat was an ugly one at three o'clock of this rainy December afternoon. A dense, cold fog had been rolling in from the sea for the last half hour, and the wind was rising with the tide. Under the shelter of the hills at the foot of which Astoria nestled, the wind did not make itself felt; but once past "The Point," and in the