is, the
schooner dodged the danger of the ledges by the skin of her barnacled
bottom, spun frothing up the cove in the yeast of the waves, bumped
half a dozen times as though searching suitable spot for
self-immolation, and at last, finding a bed of white sand, flattened
herself upon it with a racket of demolition--the squall of drawing
spikes her death-wail, the boom of water under her bursting deck her
grunt of dissolution.

The compelling impulse that drives men to close personal contact in
times of danger had assembled all the crew of the schooner upon the
poop, the distracted Imogene in the centre. She wore the trappings
of servitude--the rude harness in which she had labored to draw up
the buckets of dirt on Cod Lead, the straps to which the tackle had
been fastened to hoist her on board the _Dobson_.

When the deck went out from under them, the elephant was the biggest
thing left in reach.

And as she went sturdily swimming off, trunk elevated above the
surges, the desperate crew of the _Dobson_ grabbed at straps and
dangling traces and went, too, towing behind her. Imogene could reach
the air with the end of her uplifted trunk. The men submerged at her
side gasped and strangled, but clung with the death-grip of drowning
men; and when at last she found bottom and dragged herself up the
beach with the waves beating at her, she carried them all, salvaged
from the sea in a fashion so marvellous that Cap'n Aaron Sproul, first
on his legs, had no voice left with which to express his sentiments.

He staggered around to the front of the panting animal and solemnly
seized her trunk and waggled it in earnest hand-shake.

"You're a dumb animile," he muttered, "and you prob'ly can't have
any idea of what I'm meanin' or sayin'. But I want to say to you,
man to elephant, that I wouldn't swap your hind-tail--which don't
seem to be of any use, anyway--for the whole Smyrna fire company.
I'm sayin' to you, frank and outspoken, that I was mad when you first
come aboard. I ask your pardon. Of course, you don't understand that.
But my mind is freer. Your name ought to be changed to Proverdunce,
and the United States Government ought to give you a medal bigger'n
a pie-plate."

He turned and bent a disgusted stare on the gasping men dimly outlined
in the gloom.

"I'd throw you back again," he snapped, "if it wa'n't for givin' the
Atlantic Ocean the colic."

One by one they staggered up from the beach grass, revolved dizzily