JOE LAMBERT’S FERRY.

245

JOE LAMBERT’S FERRY.

 

By GEORGE Cary EGGLESTON.

 

T was a thoroughly disagreeable March morning.
The wind blew in sharp gusts from every quarter
of the compass by turns. It seemed to take especial
delight in rushing suddenly around corners and taking
away the breath of anybody it could catch there com-
ing from the opposite direction. The dust, too, filled
people’s eyes and noses and mouths, while the damp
raw March air easily found its way through the best
clothing, and turned boys’ skins into pimply goose-
flesh.

It was about as disagreeable a morning for going
out as can be imagined; and yet everybody in the
little Western river town who could get out went out
and stayed out.

Men and women, boys and girls, and even little
children, ran to the river-bank : and, once there, they
stayed, with no thought, it seemed, of going back to
their homes or their work.

The people of the town were wild with excitement,
and everybody told everybody else what had hap-
pened, although everybody knew all about it already.
Everybody, I mean, except Joe Lambert, and he had
been so busy ever since daylight, sawing wood in
Squire Grisard’s woodshed, that he had neither seen
nor heard anything at all. Joe was the poorest per-
son in the town. He was the only boy there who
really had no home and nobody to care for him.
Three or four years -before this March morning, Joe
had been léft an orphan, and being utterly destitute,
he should have been sent to the poorhouse, or “bound

out” to some person as a sort of servant. But Joe
Lambert had refused to go to the poorhouse or to
become a bound boy. He had declared his ability to
take care of himself, and by working hard at odd jobs,
sawing wood, rolling barrels on the wharf, picking
apples or weeding onions as opportunity offered, he
had managed to support himself “after a manner,”
as the village people said. That is to say, he gener-
ally got enough to eat, and some clothes to wear.
He slept in a warehouse shed, the owner having
given him leave to do so on condition that he would
act as a sort of watchman on the premises.

Joe Lambert alone of all the villagers knew nothing
of what had happened; and of course Joe Lambert
did not count for anything in the estimation of people
who had houses to live in. The only reason I have
gone out of the way to make an exception of so unim-
portant a person is, that I think Joe did count for
something on that particular March day at least.

When he finished the pile of wood that he had to
saw, and went to the house to get his money, he found
nobody there. Going down the street he found the
town empty, and, looking down a cross street, he saw
the crowds that had gathered on the river-bank, thus
learning at last that something unusual had occurred,
Of course he ran to the river to learn what it was.

When he got there he learned that Noah Martin
the fisherman who was also the ferryman between
the village and its neighbor on the other side of the
river, had been drowned during the early morning in
a foolish attempt to row his ferry skiff across the
stream. The ice which had blocked the river for
two months, had begun to move on the day before,
and Martin with his wife and baby—a child about
a year old — were on the other side of the river at
the time. Early on that morning there had been a
temporary gorging of the ice about a mile above the
town, and, taking advantage of the comparatively
free channel, Martin had tried to cross with his wife
and child, in his boat.

The gorge had broken up almost immediately, as
the river was rising rapidly, and Martin’s boat had
been caught and crushed in the ice. Martin had
been drowned, but his wife, with her child in her
arms, had clung to the wreck of the skiff, and had
been carried by the current to a little low-lying
island just in front of the town.

What had happened was of less importance, how-
ever, than what people saw must happen. ‘The poor
woman and baby out there on the island, drenched
as they had been in the icy water, must soon die with
cold, and, moreover, the island was now nearly under
water, while the great stream was rising rapidly. It.
was evident that within an hour or two the water