The Sea Lions; Or, The Lost SealersCooper, James Fenimore
General
The Sea Lions; Or, The Lost Sealers
Cooper, James Fenimore
Sea stories; Sealers (Persons) -- Fiction
Baring the limb, Roswell soon satisfied himself that the bone had worked
itself into place. Bandages were instantly applied to keep it there while
splints were making. It was, perhaps, a little characteristic that Daggett
took out his knife, and aided in shaving down these splints to the
necessary form and thickness. They were made out of the staff of the
broken lance, and were soon completed. Roswell manifested a good deal of
dexterity and judgment in applying the splints. The handkerchiefs were
used to relieve the pressure in places, and rope-yarns from the ratlin
stuff furnished the means of securing everything in its place. In half an
hour, Roswell had his job completed, and that before there was much
swelling to interfere with him. As soon as the broken limb was thus
attended to, it was carefully raised, and laid upon the rock along with
its fellow, a horizontal position being deemed better than one that was
perpendicular.
Not less than four painful hours now passed, ere the gang of hands from
the vessels reached the base of the mountain. It came prepared, however,
to transport the sufferer on a hand-barrow that had been used in conveying
the skins of seal across the rocks. On this barrow Daggett was now
carefully placed, when four men lifted him up, and walked away with him
for a few hundred yards. These were then relieved by four more; and, in
this manner, was the whole distance to the house passed over. The patient
was put in his bunk, and some attention was bestowed on his bruises and
other injuries.
Glad enough was the sufferer to find himself beneath a roof, and in a room
that had its comforts; or what were deemed comforts on a sealing voyage.
As the men were in the dormitory very little of the time except at night,
he was enabled to sleep; and Roswell had hopes, as he now told Stimson,
that a month or six weeks would set the patient on his feet again.
"He has been a fortunate fellow, Stephen, that it was no worse," added
Roswell, on that occasion. "But for the luck which turned the lance-pole
beneath him, every bone he has would have been broken."
"What you call _luck_, Captain Gar'ner, I call _Providence_," was
Stephen's answer. "The good book tells us that not a sparrow shall fall
without the eye of Divine Providence being on it."
Chapter XVIII.
"Now far he sweeps, where scarce a summer smiles,
On Bhering's rocks, or Greenland's naked isles;
Cold on his midnight watch the breezes blow,
From wastes that slumber in eternal snow,
And waft across the waves' tumultuous roar,
The wolf's long howl from Oonalaska's shore,"
Campbell.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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