He would come back and never know what had happened--nor even know how she had tried to atone for her deceit.

And he would find his house in possession of--of--those devils! No! No! she must not die yet, at least not until she had warned the Fort.

She seized the oars again with frenzied strength; the boat had stopped under the unwonted strain, staggered, tried to rise in an uplifted sea, took part of it over her bow, struck down Mrs.Bunker under half a ton of blue water that wrested the oars from her paralyzed hands like playthings, swept them over the gunwale, and left her lying senseless in the bottom of the boat.
***** "Hold har-rd--or you'll run her down." "Now then, Riley,--look alive,--is it slapin' ye are!" "Hold yer jaw, Flanigan, and stand ready with the boat-hook.

Now then, hold har-rd!" The sudden jarring and tilting of the water-logged boat, a sound of rasping timbers, the swarming of men in shirtsleeves and blue trousers around her, seemed to rouse her momentarily, but she again fainted away.
When she struggled back to consciousness once more she was wrapped in a soldier's jacket, her head pillowed on the shirt-sleeve of an artillery corporal in the stern sheets of that eight-oared government barge she had remembered.

But the only officer was a bareheaded, boyish lieutenant, and the rowers were an athletic but unseamanlike crew of mingled artillerymen and infantry.
"And where did ye drift from, darlint ?" Mrs.Bunker bridled feebly at the epithet.
"I didn't drift.