The Lion's Paw & Rob White
This page contains a chapter-by-chapter summary of The Lion's Paw as well as the opening sentances of each chapter.
Chapter 1
Penny tied the ribbon in a little bow on top of her head and walked across to the window. Standing there in her petticoat, she looked first down into the place they called the couryard. She always looked out of her windows this way-first down at the straight graveled walks betweek the scraggly flower beds and thin lawns...
Chapter 2
Behind them in the night-dark town a clock struck two. The sudden sound of it startled Penny and Nick, and they walked closer together, their swinging arms touching every now and then.
Thinking back over the hours which had passed, Penny could remember only a few of the things, for most of the memory seemed to be just walking...
Chapter 3
Penny and the boy looked at each other for a long time. Penny knew that he was thinking about what she had said, and as she waited for him to make up his mind she could feel excitement beginning to boil inside her. If he just nodded his head and said he would go, she thought, she and Nick would be safe...
Chapter 4
The boat was moving now into the darkness of the sea. Penny looked back at the town and saw the band of darkness moving steadily in between the wharves and the boat. Then she looked ahead toward the faraway lights of the channel buoys and the Christmas-tree lights on the two peninsulas which formed the bay...
Chapter 5
Penny was dreaming that she was standing outside the tall iron gates at the orphanage. The children, inside the gates, were walking slowly along the graveled paths. They were all dressed in white clothes and they weren’t playing. There wasn’t any laughter, and none of the little ones were chasing one another...
Chapter 6
As Penny stood in the suddenly silent cabin she could feel the trap closing in on them again, the freedom they had known slipping away. Already the talk and laughter at breakfast, the memory of the white sails spread in the darkness, the , the waking form the dream to find herself far from the iron gates seemed long ago. The trap was closing, the space of freedom they had narrowing, the doors slamming shut on them...
Chapter 7
Ben had closed the cabin tightly so the lights wouldn’t show and it was hot, but it felt good after the cool river’s evening mist. Penny was sitting on the edge of her bunk, her pants legs rolled up, her feet in a bucket of brine. She lifted up one dropping foot and looked at it. It was pink and swollen a little...
Chapter 8
Darkness was coming before sunset as the sky was slowly being covered by a low overcast. While Penny and Nick set the table in the cabin for the supper Ben went to the companionway and looked up at the solid gray of the sky through which the sunlight was soft and also gray. Going up the ladder a few steps. Ben tapped with his fingernail on the face of the barometer...
Chapter 9
Darkness was coming before sunset as the sky was slowly being covered by a low overcast. While Penny and Nick set the table in the cabin for the supper Ben went to the companionway and looked up at the solid gray of the sky through which the sunlight was soft and also gray. Going up the ladder a few steps. Ben tapped with his fingernail on the face of the barometer...
Chapter 10
After supper, as they waited for darkness, they sat in the cockpit, studying the chart of the St. Lucie Canal and the Caloosahatchee Canal and River.
Ben said, “We’ve got to get this navy organized better. The way it is, with everybody working at the same time or sleeping, if we got a long spell of three or four days, all hands would collapse at the same time...
Chapter 11
When Penny woke up it was broad daylight. For a little while she lay in bed wondering why Ben hadn't waked her, then she began to fear that something had gone wrong. She jumped out of bed, glanced at Nick sound asleep in his bunk, and, putting on her clothes, ran up the companion ladder...
Chapter 12
The Lion’s Paw was no longer confined between the close banks of a canal, her keel no longer barely cleared the earth of a channel, he bows no longer sliced out curling waves of water tinged yellow with mud. She was sailing full and by to a westerly wind across San Carlos Bay in the Gulf of Mexico. There was room for her to turn, room to run; her bow wave was blue water with a curl of white foam, and below her keel there was more blue water down to the hard bottom...
Chapter 13
The search for the Lion's Paw went on day after day. The brassy sun hammered down on them, burning their knees and forearms and the backs of their necks to a deep mahogany, peeling their noses and forehead and the backs of their knees. Nick's collection of shells piled hight and higher in the cardboard box, but they found no Lion's Paw-not ever a proken piece of one...
Chapter 14
The Lion's Paw sailed with deceptive smoothness out of the shelter of the little bay. Ben had rolled a triple reef in her mainsail and had rigged a small strom jib, but even under this canvas the wind was so strong that she lifted and churched out a white goaming wake. The three of them huddled in the cockpit, Ben steering, the wind abeam as they made easting out toward deeper water...
Chapter 15
IN THE main cabin the water was now only a few inches deep, and Penny at the blige pump was pulling it out fast. As Ben began searching through the dirty and soaked charts he called, "How you making, Penny?"
"Fine," Penny called back, her voice a little muffled.
"We're leaving as soon as I can find the chart," Ben said. "No sign of that man yet, and the storm's over..."
Chapter 16
It was late at night, and the Lion’s Paw lay silently at anchor in the little bay. A gentle wind, like an apology for the storm, hummed software in her rigging; a gentle sea, ashamed of the wreckage it had made, lapped at the smooth hull.
In the main cabin, clean again, Penny and Nick lay—awake...
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