II.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXII, Issue 36, 8 September 1904, Page 23

11.

By and by the March gales began to beat along the coast The waters of the bay rose and lashed themse,\es with oceanic fury. The winds threatened the houses, the piers, the railroad. One morning there came a telephone report to the station that the train from the region west of Falmauth Cape would be unable to reach the Cape station and to go on to Falmouth Town on the other side of the bay. Floods had washed away bridges and roadbeds in the interior, and £o»r forty-eight hours at least there would bo no train. Falmout/h Cape settled itself to the excited security of a mere watcher of calamities , but mi two hours it ceased even to watch, for the storm had wrought havoc with the telephono wires, and it was cut ofT from the worlid.

Two things diove Larry stubbornly to town that m,onnng. One was a boyish pride in the fact that he had never missed a day's work since he .obtained a position ; the other was that Myrtle had been uncommonly trying the night before with her weak coquetries and her bad temper, and he wished to escape her neighborhood for 'a while He harnessed the old horse, wrapped himself well, and drove across the road bridge that paralleled the railroad bridge across the bay and into Falmouth Town.

In tihe dftecno'on tihe section of the road bridge next to Falmout'h Cape succumbed to the strain of the winds and the rising billows. Cracking and crashing, it was swept away, aln'd the mooring of the structure terminated abruptly over the seething, tar-Mack waters an eighth of a mile from the Cape sfhore. Tihe arch still stood, and the wooden girders on which the flooring had been laid.

All that afternoon Mrs. Doherty rusfheid about beseeching someone to go and save her boy. Everyone answered that her boy would not attempt to make the .journey home that evening. In the morning, perhaps, the wires would be woTking again, arid the town end of the brildgc could he warned of the damiage at the Cape end. Anyway, they said, there was no practicable way of reaching her grandson.

Myrtle, to whom the old woman went in final appeal,, sicofied at the notion of Larry's attempting to return in the evening. 'He wouldn't bie such a fool ! ' she said conclusively. ' Fool ! ' cried his grandmother in anguish and ex,as,peration. ' 'Tis us that kjnows the bridge is broke, n(ot him. All was safe an' well whin he went over this m^rnin'.,, Wny wouldn't (he be comin' home to-night ? He'll start, all in the dark an' the wind, ,an" he'll drive, an' there'll be no seem' the end, an'— are ye going to do notihm 1 at "all, at all ? ' ' What could Ido ? ' demanded Myrtle, suddenly, but sufficiently reasonable. ' If it was the man I was goin' to marry,' declared the old woman, with red spots in the wrinkled hollows of her cheeks, and glittering points in her eyes, ' I'd crawl along the broken wood, over t/he pillars there, till I could reach the boarded part of the biridge. An' thin I'd walk an' run, an' run an' walk, till I came to Falm'omtjh Town, and there I'd stand to \jvait an' warn him ! ' ' La, Mrs. Doherty, yo-u certainly do make me tired,' reported Myrtle. ' I ain't so dead set on 'keepin' a beau as you'd be, if you bad one ! ' Something in the brutal egotism which she had uncovered silenced Mrs. Doherty. She started and shook her head in dumb uncomprehension, then turned ani walked back to the cabin. Prom the height on which it stood she eooild see the bay. here lashed white. there curving in splendid devouring waves of glistening black. '■Maybe I was mealnt for the bay, afther alj,' &he said r as she moved about putting, the cabin to rights. Then she went out, a quaint and sturdy figure with her tight, white cap, her short, quilted skirt, and her red shawl crossed on her bosom, and tied at her waist in the back. Down to the place where the bridge had been she trudged. Later, one of the Cape children came home screaming that old Mrs. Doherty was crawling along the girders that remained on the demolished section of the bridge— he had seen her red shawl.