The Red Book Magazine/Volume 14/Number 2/The Island of Hope

by Edwin Balmer

 

The ISLAND of HOPE

A STORY

By Edwin Balmer

I

WE had followed the fall of our fathoming lines faithfully—recklessly; and for five weeks we had slipped, uncaring, from all touch with other men. Land, we had left long before; and we had lost the last shred of sail or smoke, which spoke other ships, those five long weeks behind, when we first had fetched our four thousand six hundred fathoms and found that our deepest deep-sea sounding lines had struck but the shallow shelf of the mighty ocean-valley lower and beyond.

South and still south and on between parallels scarcely plotted upon our charts, we drifted with the smooth, seductive sweep of those summer seas. Five thousand fathoms then, we found—the deepest recorded; yet we spliced our longest sounding lines and let them down again. So, just before the last drum was drained of its wire, the weight touched; and as we measured, we knew that at last we floated above the very valley of the world—a valley below the sea into which the land’s greatest mountain ranges could be dropped and leave the sea still an ocean above the highest peaks.

We sounded again, of course; but now the bottom could only shelve shallower. Our work was done.

The naturalists and the men of the deep-sea fish-commissions who had come with us, still lifted in their nets and buckets the blue fish-smelling lumps of life, burst and blown out from their own inner pressures before they could be drawn within a thousand yards of our sea’s shining surface. But for the naturalists, too, their work was done; and they joined us in equal jubilation upon the deck where we all sat together lazily at last, and watched the crew furl the sails which had served to keep us upon our slow courses for the last long weeks. And below now, in the silence, we could hear the tumbling in the bunkers and the rattle of the coal-hoists as the stokers shoveled and steam began again to fill our boilers to hurry our triumphant return to the civilization and the societies of science which had sent us out.

“But what human good has a thing of yours done?”

Bassett, our skipper, tried to bring us back to our senses disgustfully. It was his first voyage with a deep-sea survey and fish party; and never, he iterated to us in pathetic pity, had he brought back to port less than we were giving him with which to return.

“Every skipper’s known since Columbus”—Bassett was a little vague as to precisely what seas the Great Skipper had explored—“that there was a safe six fathoms in all these parts,” he swept his hands inclusively about. “That’s enough to satisfy any shipmaster, aint it? Say, any ship that’d need your soundings,” he struck our proud survey charts hopelessly, “to steer by would look foolish putting into port, wouldn’t it? You'd all far better—

“And you,” he turned to our brothers of the deep-sea fish commissions as he fancied he had finished us, “with all your bottlin’ and picklin’, have you a fish in any of your bottles which—why yourselves would eat? Have ye—”

We laughed and pulled him to us and took turns explaining to him the unmatchable values and beauties of our work—the search of science for science’s sake, the unselfishness of such knowledge, the awakening of the imagination and the mind, the better understanding of our world, and the incentive it carried to—

“To what?” he checked us then flatly. “To more such foolishness!” he answered, unconsoled, as he stared suddenly out to his surface of our sea. “No, gentlemen, I’d never have said it, but you asked me my opinion; and I say, it’s no human good—this fooling far under the sea. There is still enough on the surface for—”

But he had checked himself now suddenly and we saw that he was squinting his eyes, as he focused them, toward something which showed upon the surface far out under the glare of the sun.

“Mate!” He made a quick trumpet of his hands and hailed the bridge. “Mate! What’s that afloat of us abeam south by a bit west? My glass and make it out, can you?”

“A log, sir, I make it! Two logs with a patch of yellow sail above them, sir!” The hail came back as the skipper screwed his own glass to his eye. “And I make out a man, I think, sir, a man with—”

“I make him myself now!” the skipper acknowledged as he stared. And, “That’s very well!” he approved as, under the mate’s orders, the ship began to swerve. The bells were clanging in our engine-room and we could feel the screws push a little more insistently as the object abeam swung, apparently, as we swerved and crept to the bow till it stopped dead ahead.

“It’s a man”—the skipper handed his glasses to us—“with a coat and pants and a shirt, too, I think, on a log catamaran with a sail.”

“In this part of the sea?” we demanded, incredulously.

“You wont make him out well now,” Bassett answered. “He’s stopped jumping and showing himself now. He knows, of course, we’ve seen him.”

He watched us and the object at which we stood staring; then smiled, with a sudden impulse, at our Chief who was arguing with him the moment before.

“You were trying to tell me a minute back, sir,” he said, “how arousin’ and incentin’ all what you’ve been finding under the sea is. This, sir,” he nodded ahead to the approaching logs, “is the first thing we’ve found on top or looked for since we sailed. What will any of you lay me, there wont be more to rouse a man and send him on, from that man on those logs on the top, than from all you've found on the bottom? And what'll you lay me you wont, all of you, want to tell what that man, living on the top with his logs, found, before you'll tell what you’ve been pulling up with all your wires and drums and buckets and machines?”

“We'll lay you,” we all boasted in turn; and laughed and “laid” with our Chief, as he put down the glass, the stake we named. For the Chief did not bet.

We were drawing rapidly upon the logs with the yellow grass sail, and presently drew up, with reversing engines, beside it.

The logs, as I have said, formed a rude catamaran. The larger of the two logs had been hollowed, clearly by some slow fire till char was formed and scraped away when the wood was burnt again and again scraped, and so on till it made the rude body of a boat. The outside of the log had been shaped, too, into some semblance of a boat by the same painful slow-burning and char-scraping process. We noticed then, too, at once, that the smaller log, which was bound as an outrigger support to the other, had not been chopped or hewn at all, even by the rudest instrument. It was not hollowed by fire like the other, but it had clearly been burned down by a similar slow and controlled fire and also separated from its upper branches in the same way. It was bound to the strut-sticks as the strut-sticks were also bound to the main log, by thick-twisted and vine ropes wound about again and again. The square of yellow sail was also woven from dried and plaited grass. There seemed to be dried bits of roots or bark or some sort of food in the bottom.

If Adam, driven from the garden of Eden, had had to take boat, we agreed that Eve could have complained, properly, of such a conveyance. So we stared at the single man it bore with still more wondering surprise and curiosity as he bumped alongside, now, and caught our rope and we drew him up.

He had, indeed, coat and pants and shirt, as the skipper had seen far off; but more than that, we saw that though his clothes were surely more worn than ours and had been water-soaked much longer and more often, yet their cut and pattern still showed very like our own; and ours, mostly, had been made upon Broadway and Fifth Avenue within six months. His thick, fair hair was long but not uncut; and he had accomplished something close enough to a shave so that we could see, fairly, the straight lines of his features. He was a boy, little over twenty; but near six feet and well built. He was neither starved nor thirsty.

Thus, and from such a ship at least fifteen hundred miles from any land we knew, he came overside and faced us thankfully, gratefully—but coolly and with something, not entirely his own, controlling him. He had, of course, almost an hour to compose himself after he had seen that he must be saved; and that hour, clearly, he had given to some strange, controlling consideration.

“What ship is this?” he demanded of us directly then, after the first few words were said. “And what has brought it down here? And who are you and where bound now?”

So we explained ourselves to him first, as if his appearance there were the natural thing. Then:

“If that is all, gentlemen,” he met us respectfully after he had heard, “and you must not go on at once, will you take me back—oh, will you not take me back, for just an hour or two at least, to where—where I have come from? It can’t be a hundred miles down there,” he pointed to the South from which he had appeared, “for now that I am safe—I must—oh take me back—take me back!” he cried.

“But — why — what? What?” we began.

“I was a passenger on the Briseis, gentlemen,” he had controlled himself again and replied to us as simply as he had asked our explanation; “the Briseis—from the Isthmus to Wellington.”

Glances passed between us and we nodded. “She was overdue a month when we sailed. So you—”

“Yes,” he said, “‘she lost her rudder and screw in the same storm and drove from her course two weeks, sinking; and then she went down. As far as I know, I am the only one saved. I was washed off with wreckage which floated and kept together. That is all I can tell you of the Briseis. And if I could tell any more, I guess it would be only what you have heard or read—a thousand times. I was four days in the water after I was washed off as she sank; and then—but I see I shall have to tell you, gentlemen, before you can know or understand why I have to go back—why you must take me back—to tell him and—thank him!”

But then, as he faced us smiling, he collapsed suddenly and fell sobbing, at our feet.

“For I must go back! Oh, take me back, men! Oh take me back for an hour, at least! For I must—I must thank him!

II

The sun had set, and the short sea twilight was fast dimming dark before he could tell us. He had rested and been given good food; and as we drew about him on the forward deck in the first cool of the evening, he faced us quietly and calmly again. But as if we could know, somehow, that his was not a tale which one could tell, stared at, and waited upon, we lay back carelessly in little groups as if interested in one another more than in him and the words he uttered.

Some of us looked out upon the darkening sea, and some lay prostrate upon the deck to watch for the first stars; and some of us studied the ruby and emerald glows of our lights on either side of the bridge; and the rest seemed to listen, in silence, for the lap and bubble of the water against our smooth sides. For again our engines were stilled and the ship held back to mere steerage way, at the command of our Chief, till we could learn why this boy, whom we had picked up from the surface of the seas, wished to return and who it was that he must revisit to tell of his rescue and to thank “him.”

“For two weeks,” he started at last like a confessor, “as I said to you this noon, we were driven on a sinking ship; and then as the decks got low to the waves, I was washed off; but I caught some boards and other wooden things which held together, and I clung to those things four days and five nights.

“I take no credit,” he lowered his head a little. “I take no credit for that,” he repeated slowly. “There were those, of course—many, as in every shipwreck—who let themselves sink without a sign of a struggle to end it all at once when the ship goes down. We all knew where we were—two thousand miles from any coast and, besides that, blown far out of the path of any possible vessel. Many, many, I know, must have had the same sort of a chance to catch at wreckage that I had; but they would not take it. But please understand,” he raised his head in frank appeal to us, “that I do not try to give myself credit for holding on those four days. I make no excuse for what I must tell you. For I know that many, many more than those who gave up at once to save themselves the struggle—yes, many more than those, held on, or would have tried to hold on, at least as long as I did. I give it as no excuse for me that I held on those first four days,” he repeated again, “and five nights,” he added after a little pause, as if to be entirely fair to himself.

“On the morning of the fifth day, then,” he had bent his head again, “I could just see sometimes, as I washed to the top of the waves—land; and a good deal of land; land on two sides of me, in big blurs above the waves. It was a group of islands, surely.

“I need not tell you how I fought for that land and struggled with the waves to get to those islands—to make sure that I wouldn’t be washed by them. And I need not tell you how I hoped; no, after holding on to those boards for four days, I was sure—sure that, of course, those islands must save me. For I was sure—sure from my first sight of them, and I saw how large and how many they were—that they must hold some sort of people and support some sort of life and that I would surely be safe there and have some chance to get away. At the very worst, I told myself as I fought toward them, I must find—savages.

“I was blinded by the water, of course, when I first saw them and while I was fighting to get to them; but then I came suddenly to one of them; and I caught the rocks and climbed up all weak and shaking and—glad. There was no sign of anyone in that bare, rocky part; so, before I went to look for them, I threw myself down right there on the dry, bare rock and hugged myself with joy. Then I fell asleep, from exhaustion, I suppose it was.

“The next morning I woke—sore, stiff and terribly hungry and thirsty. I was scarcely able to move. I got up and looked about sanely then; and as my dreams and the plans of them came back to me, yes—I cried. For that land for which I had clung and held on to those slippery boards in the waves till my arms were pulled from their sockets and my fingers torn and my whole body wrenched and sprained—that land was just cliffs of rock and great, sloping granite reefs leaning up from the sea; and neither farther up nor farther back from the water in any direction upon those rocks where I had climbed and thrown myself down, was a single scrap of green or growing thing or any life or living thing at all, but a gull or two which flew at and then away from me.

“I looked across at the other groups of rocks which, from the waves the day before, had seemed such great islands; and I saw that they were all the same—all blue and gray and black and bald and bare, like the one where I stood. Some seemed to have a few more gulls; that was all.

“I had saved myself through all those long, awful days then—I had spared myself the easy—oh so easy and obvious ending at the first, to fight four days and five nights with the sea and win from it—the boon to sit and starve upon those rocks!

“But the sea had gone down a good deal; and as I found some water, from the rain of the storm, caught in hollows, I promised myself to make still another fight before giving up. So I got a few of my boards which had been washed up with me, and struck out for the next group of rocks nearest me. But when I landed, I saw that it was all as I had seen it from the other—all bare and barren. Nothing. But still I struck over to the next to find it the same: and then to the next; and the next; and then—

“Men, as I crossed that fifth one and came opposite the next to the very, last, I saw a patch of green! Yes; and good, growing grass and bushes and, beside that, surely even a few trees! So I sank down and cried again—but this time from the different cause—for I saw a hut, a cabin, yes; a human house surely!—under the trees and beyond the bushes. For somehow and sometime not only soil and grass and growing things and trees had come there to save me; but men, too—men had come there, too, before me to wait for me and surely—surely to save me!

“So I shouted as loud as I could to them and threw myself into the water again to give myself up to them. And I caught the steep rocks at the shore and climbed up, as strong as I ever was; and then—gentlemen, perhaps I can make it a fair excuse that I was very weak and done—I broke down entirely that time. For the soil which had come to those rocks to support me, was all thin sand; and there was nothing but a few rank grasses and root-things and a few bitter bushes; and a dozen trees, caught and grown large somehow in the crevices of the rocks over the sea. And half of these had been burned down. And the men—the men who had come there to save me and to whom I had shouted so as I jumped into the sea again to swim to them; they—he was only an old gray and worn and beaten white man, single and shipwrecked there like myself. And he was dead. He had died, perhaps a week before.

“And he had held on there helplessly, without getting away; he had held on—I can not call it lived—eighteen years, half starving and alone.”

The boy raised his head a little and looked from one to another of us as we leaned nearer in the deeper silence.

“I knew,” he explained, “because he had upon him a pocket note-book—one of those common note-books with a current calendar on the front leaf—and the calendar was eighteen years old; and the entries he had made, at first till he filled it, were eighteen years old.

“And as yet my stomach turned and almost refused—empty and starved as it was—to take his bitter roots and berries and bits of bark and dried fish for, you see, I knew what his life—his holding on those eighteen years, must have meant. He had been no Robinson Crusoe, with a supply of guns and tools and a good island to feed him and a Friday for company and to serve him; nor had he any Swiss Family Robinson store-ship and bag to draw upon when his own fingers failed. He had come there, like myself, with just what a civilized man has in his pockets when a sea suddenly sweeps him from a ship—a pocket-knife and a pencil, a few coins and scraps of paper. And he had found there—what I have said—a few roots and bitter berries and bark and sometimes a fish; and for company, besides the gulls, maybe a dozen south sea parrots, blown like himself from some thousand-mile-away place, afraid to go back and breeding there. And as I saw all this at once and my stomach sickened, as I say, at that first taste of his food, I went back and looked into his face and saw—no, men,” the boy raised his head again to us in his confession, “I can not tell you what I saw there. But, perhaps, I can tell you this way; for after I had seen, I—I—buried him quickly, men, for I could not do before that man’s face, though he was dead, what I had determined to do then after I had seen my sure future there in those things upon that island. For after seeing him, I was ashamed to let him see me do that which, after an hour there, I had to do; and which he would not do—in eighteen years. For I need not tell you, when I tell you I had to cover him first, that he had died—still holding on.”

I do not know exactly what we all had expected: for we were catching our breaths a little quicker and leaning a little closer together. The night was now long established; and one of the sailors had left, almost unnoted, a lantern burning between us on the deck. The boy, as he had bowed his head a little again, brought Bassett, who was sitting beyond him, from the shadow into the light. The seaman, too, had caught his breath as quickly as we scientists. He even moved as if he would touch the other; but drew back.

Our man from the galley appeared the fourth or fifth time to warn us that our supper was long served; but instead of going away now, he sat himself in the circle outside us where many of the crew already had collected quietly.

“So I covered him,” the boy went on, “more that I should not have to see him, when I did it, than to bury him for his sake. And then I took up his knife. But—I could not do it there. So I went away and hid from him; but again, like a coward, I could not—with his knife. And I had none of my own; so I had to search for another way. And at once I saw it before me—ready, sure. For the island rose at one end to a couple of hundred feet and then the rock fell sheer—a deep, straight drop with no possible doubt of death at the bottom; and death, too, as sudden and easy as it would be sure. But before I could do it, I saw marks—marks which he must have made, standing there at times when the rain-water might be gone or his fish and berries failing so that he starved a little more than usual. I saw those marks: and swore at myself and went back.

“I sat on the ground before his hut, then, and tried to think of some other proper way—some way, perhaps, that he might not have had always before him and always refused. So as I sat there, gentlemen,” the boy raised his head again, “trying to decide the way, one of the parrots, which had been his only company—one of them came to me, not at all afraid, and stood looking at me; and then suddenly, ‘I will never give up!’ it said straight to me. ‘I will never give up!’ it said, surely. And it stared straight at the knife which I had dropped, and ‘I will never do it!’ it shot at me again. And, ‘I shall never throw me down!’ It startled me, gentlemen; just that, ‘I shall never throw me down!’

“And, ‘What?’ I caught at the bird and held it. ‘What?’ I choked it. ‘What did he say? What’ and, ‘Nor any other way!’ the bird screeched at me then. ‘I will never give up!’ it cried at me, as it struggled free. ‘I will never give up!’ it flung back at me from the bush. ‘I will never give up!’ And that day, at least, I knew I could not.”

He stopped again; but this time he did not look at us; and none of us consciously looked at him or at one another.

“That man,” the boy continued, “had held no illusions of his chance to get away. From his notes, which he wrote for his own record when he first found that land, he had put the probable position of those rocks. Do not misunderstand me,” he explained quickly. “Those notes and nothing else about him or his things showed in any way that he ever thought anyone might find him or them. They were just records he made for his own recollection. For instance, they never gave the slightest hint who he was or what ship he had come from. He would not have to record things like that for himself. But he had put down his impressions, on first landing, where he thought the rocks must be in relation to his last known position. He had even made a map from memory, when it was freshest, in which he placed the rocks as well as he could. And this showed, too, that he held no illusions of a rescue. And I had covered his face because I knew it was not cowardice or any other lack which had kept him there. No; he had held on because he would never give up! Because he would not do ‘it!’ Because he would not throw himself ‘down!’ He would never give up! That was it—and all!

“Of course wondered many, many times,” the boy went on, “in those long, long weeks afterwards, when day after day—day after day, I did not do ‘it,’ why I did not. Or rather, I wondered exactly what in that man was keeping me from it. For what—what could I see that he had gained, or won or accomplished by holding on, as he had, and never giving up till his bitter, bitter, ‘natural’ end? Why, indeed, did I not end it for myself sooner, rather than hold on longer, when I saw there before me how by such a course he had gained and gotten—nothing. I had not yet spent a day for each of his years upon that rock; and, as I just began to find the terror and awfulness of being there, I knew—without having the witness of those denials which he had made to himself again and again so that even the parrots cried them—I knew that a thousand, thousand times he must have wished, in a way I could not yet know, to end it. But he had not. He had held on to the end. And why? For what purpose? And for what good?

“I, gentlemen, I had honestly to tell myself, as I tried to puzzle it out, that I did not know—that I could see no good whatsoever, or gain in it. I had to tell myself that the real reason I still held on was a fear, sometimes, that as I had come and found him, another might—just might come and find—us both. And I could not bear the comparison. But not a thing gave me a chance to think that he had ever thought of that—of any one coming. No; it was not for anyone else. For he had remained, to the end, too sane to think of such a possibility. It was clearly for his own honor and for himself that he had held on and would not give up! His own honor and his trust and accountability, I suppose, to life; so that he would never end it, while he still could hold on. But what, I asked myself a thousand times again, had he shown that here his long, awful fight had won? What had he held here which could honorably prevent me from ending it now?

“And a thousand times I told myself, as honestly as I could, gentlemen, that thing—at least nothing that held there. Somewhere else and with other conditions, it would be different. But here, surely, I told myself, no honor or accountability to others or responsibility to any duty could hold—me, at least. Only a silly sentiment to match that man who had held on kept holding me when I could see before me the nothing he had gained. So I grew angry at the parrots who kept fluttering down to me and flinging at me his fool determinations which could not save him and had spared him—nothing.

“I searched the island finally again for any chance of saving myself. There were the dozen larger, besides the smaller, trees; five of each he had burned down and evidently used up in his fires afterwards, as I could find no trace of their timber. could not make a raft from the rest; but it was as good a raft as I might make, that I had left te climb these rocks for refuge, two thousand miles, at least from any shore, I knew. No; there was nothing else and no other way. So that night I determined again, as was not a coward, to end it now for all. But as I drove the parrots away from me that night so that I could do it, I caught again at something I had heard them mumble before but had never been quite able to make out.

“‘I shall swim it again!’ it sounded like; and I called the parrots back and repeated it to them to find out. And yes, ‘I shall swim it again;’ they could say it fairly after me. But when they repeated it of themselves, ‘I shall begin it again—I shall begin it again!” When I repeated that to them, they could say that, too, as well. It puzzled me enough, anyway, to keep me that night; and the next morning, as they shrieked it at me once more, I tried out the thing that I had thought under the stars.

“I told you that, before finding his island, I had climbed over five others—all bare and barren. His was the sixth; but there was another—a seventh—beyond. What he meant to ‘begin’ again, I could not test; but if he had been nerving himself to swim something again, and it was what he had said, he could have been swimming only to this seventh island. I climbed down the rocks to the water on that side, therefore, and sure enough I found his marks on the way down; and stuck in the rocks above the water, was a block of wood, like one which a weak swimmer would take to support him as he swam. I took it and shoved off and came to the other rocks. They were more barren and bald and bare than any of the others. I saw all this as with weakening strokes I swam to them; but then, as I rounded them, I saw that, though black and bare, they made a bay—a harbor and a safe beach for—for—for beginning again—the boat—he had made and—was not able to swim to again—but which—saved—me.

“But, thank God, gentlemen, he had not failed just as it was finished! No, a little before! So I did not have merely to take it from him. No: he had failed just before he had bound it together; so I could do that, at least. And I took it back and filled it with the rest of his roots and bark and berries and the fish he had saved and dried; and in the place he had hollowed, put the rain-water he had stored. And I was glad to go back! for as I looked about at his things then and saw those other five great stumps where he had burned and hollowed out his other boats, I knew.”

He turned to us all suddenly and broke out in his shaking appeal. “So, men, oh take me back to him now that I am safe! Oh take me back there to him, men, just for an hour, now that I am safe, to tell him so and—thank him! For he had not only held on and waited; but he had built from those first four great trees, four other boats; but lost them all against his rocks before they could be finished; and always, always he would begin again and again till he found that harbor, across, where he could begin still again, at last, the boat to save—me! But, oh, he must have known, before he could even have begun that last, that before it could be finished he would not be alive to ‘swim that water again.’ But still he began it and kept on till it was all but finished in time to save—me. For he would never give up; he would never throw himself down or do ‘it;’ and he would never give up beginning his boat again-never give up believing that he should ‘swim it again’ till he had saved me.

“And so, oh, men, don’t you see I must go back and tell him and—and thank him as well as I can? Oh, I know he never knew that I would come; and that he could never have thought or done a thing for me. But he did it for himself and so—saved me! He held on to the end and never gave himself up, so he saved me—me whom he could not know would ever come! So—so will you not take me back?”

His head fell suddenly forward again; and for more than a moment there was silence. Then I saw, as I looked toward the boy, in the shadow beyond, the face of Bassett, our skipper. As if he had felt that the appeal of the boy to us all was his to answer, he leaned over and touched him.

“I haven’t the say, boy.” We knew then that he was speaking to us rather than to the lad whom he touched as he spoke. “I haven’t the say of this ship,” he repeated, “‘where it’s to go. I can only take it where these gentlemen say; but—but if I had, I'd take you back to let y’ tell him, boy—yes, to let y’ tell him now and thank him—as well as y’ can.”

“No, Bassett,”—our Chief had cleared his throat and raised his head quickly to meet the skipper’s challenge. “No, Bassett.” he said, “you wouldn’t take him back to that island—to that little lonely island of his Hope, lost back there, to tell Aim there or thank him—there. You wouldn’t yourself. You will take him instead straight back to where we are all bound, together, and where—where that man, whose shell only lies back there, covered, on his island of Hope, lives in a nation’s body and waits for this boy whom he saved to come to him and tell him there and thank him.”

And again we all waited till the skipper moved and, raising the boy in his arms, supported him and took him below And still we all sat silent till, in the engine room, we heard again the beat of the engines and the push of the propellers, as they churned to hasten our return to the civilization whither we were bearing the boy and his Story.

And finally, of course, one by one we began to recollect ourselves again, and to think triumphantly of our new sounding charts and specimens. But the Chief still stood looking out. over the surface of the seas that he had sounded; and as he stood there, his hand in his coat-pocket played absently with the coins he held awaiting the outcome of our wager. And as he touched them, then, he, too, seemed to recollect himself, and drawing forth his hand, gazed at the coins, recognizingly. {[dhr]} “I must pay these to Bassett to-morrow,” he said, quietly.