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At last came the day wherein the final trial-trip should be made. The pumps built by Mr. Doolittle, but not according to order, had failed once, but new ones had been supplied, and everything seemed propitious. David and Ezra, with their mother in the boat, rowed once more to Poverty Island. “On the morrow the great venture should begin,” they said.

The time was mid-October. The forests had wrapped the cooling coast in warmth of coloring that was soft and many-hued as the shawls of Cashmere, while the sun-made fringe of goldenrod fell along the shores of river and island and sea.

Mrs. Bushnell’s heart beat proudly above the fond affection that could not suppress a shiver, as the Turtle was pushed into the stream. She could not help seeing that David made a line fast from the seine-house to his boat ere he went down. They watched many minutes to see him rise to the surface, but he did not.

“Mother,” said Ezra, “the pump for forcing water out when he wants to rise don’t work, and we must pull him in. He feared it.”

As he spoke the words he laid hold on the line, and began gently to draw on it.

“Hurry! hurry! do! ” cried Mrs. Bushnell, seizing the same line close to the water’s edge, and drawing on it with all her strength. She was vexed that Ezra had not told her the danger in the beginning, and she “knew very well that SHE would not have stood there and let David die of suffocation, in that horrid, brass-topped coffin!”

“Hold, mother!” cried Ezra; “pull gently, or the line may part on some barnacled rock if it gets caught.”

Nevertheless, Mrs. Bushnell pulled in as fast as she could.

The tide was sweeping up the river, and a shark, in hard chase after a school of menhaden, swam steadily up, with fin out of water.

Just as the shark reached the place, he made a dive, and the rope parted!

Mrs. Bushnell screamed a word or two of the terror that had seized her. Ezra looked up, amazed to find the rope coming in so readily, hand over hand. He cast it down, sprang to the boat, and pushed off to the possible rescue, only to find that the Turtle was making for the river-bank instead of the island.

He rowed to the spot. His brother, for the first time in his life, was overcome with disappointment and disinclined to talk.

“I–I,” said David, wiping his forehead. “I grew tired, and made for shore. The tide was taking me up fast.”

“Did you let go the line?” questioned Ezra.

“Yes.”

“The pump works all right, then?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve frightened mother terribly.”

“Have I? I never thought. I forgot she was here. Let us get back, then;” and the two brothers, without speaking a word, rowed down against the sweep of tide, the great Turtle in tow.

The three went home, still keeping a silence broken only by briefest possible question and answer.

The golden October night fell upon the old town. Pochaug River, its lone line of silver gathered in many a stretch of interval into which the moon looked calmly down, lay on the land for many a mile.

Again and again, during the evening, David Bushnell went out from the house and stood silently on the rough bridge that crossed the river by the door.

“Let David alone, mother,” urged Ezra, as she was about to follow him on one occasion. “He is thinking out something, and is better alone.”

That which the young man was thinking at the moment was, that he wished the moon would hurry and go down. He longed for darkness.

The night was growing cold. Frost was in the air.

As he stood on the rough logs, a post-rider, hurrying by with letters, came up.

“Holloa there!” he called aloud, not liking the looks of the man on the bridge.

“It’s I,–David Bushnell, Joe Downs! You can ride by in safety,” he responded, ringing out one of his merriest chimes of laughter at the very idea of being taken for a highwayman.