"Don't leave me, oh! don't leave me here to die," the woman pleaded, as
he started into the woods.
"I'll stay by you an' we'll die together, if we must; but it's not my
idee to die at all, Mary. I'm goin' to bring that air scow ashore while
I cut a hickory, if I can find one, to break this yer chain."
Plunging again into the mud nearly to his waist, Phoebus pulled the
scow up into the woods, and had barely concealed himself when he saw
come out of the creek below Twiford's house a cat-boat like the
_Ellenora Dennis_, and stand towards the island in the cripple.
"The tide's agin' em, an' they must make a tack to get yer," Jimmy
muttered; "but I'm afraid this knife will have to go to the heart of
some son of Pangymonum in ten minutes, or Ellenory Dennis never agin be
pestered by her ugly lover."
He was seized with a certain frenzy of strength and discernment at the
danger he was in, and, as he carried the scow onward and across the
woodland island, heavy as it was, he also noted a single small hickory
tree on that farther margin, and threw himself against it and bent it
down, and plunged his knife into the straining fibres so that it
crackled and splintered in his hand. He leaped to the tree and scaled it
as he had often climbed a mast, and he thrust the sapling under the
staple, trimming the point down with the knife as he clutched the tree
by his knees, and then, catching the young hickory like a lever, he
dropped down the pine trunk and got his shoulder under the sapling and
brought the weight of his body desperately against it.
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