"
When the range, warming to its work, had made her kitchen-parlor
a little too hot to hold us, she hospitably suggested the river
shore as cooler, where she knew a comfortable log we could sit
on. Thither she presently followed when the steamer's whistle
sounded, and held her boat for us to get safely in. The most
nervous of our party offered the reflection, as she sculled us
out into the stream to overhaul the pausing steamer, that she
must find the ferry business very shattering to the nerves, and
she said,
"Yes, but it's nothing to a murder case I was on, once."
"Oh, what murder, what murder?" we palpitated back; and both of
us forgot the steamer, so that it almost ran us down, while our
ferrywoman began again:
"A man shot a nurse--There! Throw that line, will you?"
But he, who ought to have thrown the line for her, in his
distraction let her drop her oar and throw the line herself, and
then we scrambled aboard without hearing any more of the murder.
This is the climax I have been working up to, and I call it a
fine one; as good as a story to be continued ever ended an
instalment with.
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