They turned it into a "Signing of the
Declaration," patterned after the old steel engraving. One of them, as
the scroll lay open on the rail under her pen hand, unwittingly set foot
in a scrubbing bucket kept there with a line attached for bailing water
from the river, and was so unnerved by the fun of it that all at once
the scroll flirted back into scroll form and fell through the whirling
air that eddied behind the boat. Yet it had the luck to drop upon the
deck below, and there presently an immigrant stood mutely gazing up with
it in his lifted hand. Otto Marburg came and stood looking up beside
him.
Dropping the bucket's line through the balusters under the rail, Basile
stepped over the guards and proceeded, while the girls acted out their
girlish distresses, to let himself down. The foolish exploit was
sufficiently unsafe and painful to be its own reward, the rough line
cutting his hands and forcing him, as soon as he dared, to drop into the
arms of the two men. With them and others he passed from sight between
the great wheels but soon was with the pretty signers again, coming up
alone by way of the cook-house and pantry. His hands showed ugly red
scars as he brushed away a few flies that liked his perfumery and had
stubbornly followed him from below.
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