gain for----"

"We isn't drowned yet."

"Yet!" Rowl exclaimed. "No--not yet! We've a minute or so for
prayers!"

Tommy Lark laughed.

"I'll get under way now," said he. "I'm not so very much afraid o'
failin'."

* * * * *

There was no melodrama in the situation. It was a commonplace peril of
the coast; it was a reasonable endeavor. It was thrilling, to be
sure--the conjunction of a living peril with the emergency of the
message. Yet the dusk and sweeping drizzle of rain, the vanishing
lights of Scalawag Harbor, the interruption of the lane of water, the
mounting seas, their declivities flecked with a path of treacherous
ice, all were familiar realities to Tommy Lark and Sandy Rowl.
Moreover, a telegram was not a letter. It was an urgent message. It
imposed upon a man's conscience the obligation to speed it. It should
be delivered with determined expedition. Elsewhere, in a rural
community, for example, a good neighbor would not hesitate to harness
his horse on a similar errand and travel a deep road of a dark night
in the fall of the year; nor, with the snow falling thick, would he
confront a midnight trudge to his neighbor's house with any louder
complaint than a fretful growl.

It was in this spirit, after all, touched with an intimate solicitude
which his love for Elizabeth Luke aroused, that Tommy Lark had
undertaken the passage of Scalawag Run. The maid was ill--her message
should be sped. As he paused on the brink of the lane, however,
waiting for the ice to lie flat in the trough, poised for the spring
to the first pan, a curious apprehension for the safety of Sandy Rowl
took hold of him, and he delayed his start.

"Sandy," said he, "you be careful o' yourself."

"I will that!" Sandy declared. He grinned. "You've no need t' warn me,
Tommy," he added.

"If aught should go amiss with you," Tommy explained, "'twould be
wonderful hard--on Elizabeth."

Sandy Rowl caught the honest truth and unselfishness of the warning in
Tommy Lark's voice.

"I thanks you, Tommy," said he. "'Twas well spoken."

"Oh, you owes me no thanks," Tommy replied simply. "I'd not have the
maid grieved for all the world."

"I'll tell her that you said so."

Tommy was startled.

"You speak, Sandy," said he in gloomy foreboding, "as though I had
come near t' my death."

"We've both come near t' death."

"Ay--maybe. Well--no matter."

"'Tis a despairful thing to say."

"I'm not carin' v