Tales and Sketches Part 12

Captain Hackett caught hold of him, but the undertow swept them both away, locked in each other's arms. The brave woman plunged after them, and, with the strength of a giantess, bore them, clinging to each other, to the sh.o.r.e, and up to her fire. The five sailors followed in succession, and were all rescued in the same way.

A few days after, Captain Hackett and his crew were taken off Long Point by a pa.s.sing vessel; and Abigail Becker resumed her simple daily duties without dreaming that she had done anything extraordinary enough to win for her the world's notice. In her struggle every day for food and warmth for her children, she had no leisure for the indulgence of self- congratulation. Like the woman of Scripture, she had only "done what she could," in the terrible exigency that had broken the dreary monotony of her life.

It so chanced, however, that a gentleman from Buffalo, E. P. Dorr, who had, in his early days, commanded a vessel on the lake, found himself, shortly after, at a small port on the Canada sh.o.r.e, not far from Long Point Island. Here he met an old shipmate, Captain Davis, whose vessel had gone ash.o.r.e at a more favorable point, and who related to him the circ.u.mstances of the wreck of the Conductor. Struck by the account, Captain Dorr procured a sleigh and drove across the frozen bay to the shanty of Abigail Becker. He found her with her six children, all thinly clad and barefooted in the bitter cold. She stood there six feet or more of substantial womanhood,--not in her stockings, for she had none,--a veritable daughter of Anak, broad-bosomed, large-limbed, with great, patient blue eyes, whose very smile had a certain pathos, as if one saw in it her hard and weary life-experience. She might have pa.s.sed for any amiable giantess, or one of those much--developed maids of honor who tossed Gulliver from hand to hand in the court of Brobdingnag. The thing that most surprised her visitor was the childlike simplicity of the woman, her utter unconsciousness of deserving anything for an action that seemed to her merely a matter of course. When he expressed his admiration with all the warmth of a generous nature, she only opened her wide blue eyes still wider with astonishment.

"Well, I don't know," she said, slowly, as if pondering the matter for the first time,--"I don't know as I did more 'n I'd ought to, nor more'n I'd do again."

Before Captain Dorr left, he took the measure of her own and her children's feet, and on his return to Buffalo sent her a box containing shoes, stockings, and such other comfortable articles of clothing as they most needed. He published a brief account of his visit to the heroine of Long Point, which attracted the attention of some members of the Provincial Parliament, and through their exertions a grant of one hundred acres of land, on the Canada sh.o.r.e, near Port Rowan, was made to her. Soon after she was invited to Buffalo, where she naturally excited much interest. A generous contribution of one thousand dollars, to stock her farm, was made by the merchants, ship-owners and masters of the city, and she returned to her family a grateful and, in her own view, a rich woman.

When the story of her adventure reached New York, the Life-Saving Benevolent a.s.sociation sent her a gold medal with an appropriate inscription, and a request that she would send back a receipt in her own name. As she did not know how to write, Captain Dorr hit upon the expedient of having her photograph taken with the medal in her hand, and sent that in lieu of her autograph.

In a recent letter dictated at Walsingham, where Abigail Becker now lives,--a widow, cultivating with her own hands her little farm in the wilderness,--she speaks gratefully of the past and hopefully of the future. She mentions a message received from Captain Hackett, who she feared had almost forgotten her, that he was about to make her a visit, adding with a touch of shrewdness: "After his second shipwreck last summer, I think likely that I must have recurred very fresh to him."

The strong lake winds now blow unchecked over the sand-hills where once stood the board shanty of Abigail Becker. But the summer tourist of the great lakes, who remembers her story, will not fail to give her a place in his imagination with Perry's battle-line and the Indian heroines of Cooper and Longfellow. Through her the desolate island of Long Point is richly dowered with the interest which a brave and generous action gives to its locality.