Tobias o' the Light: A Story of Cape Cod
by unknown · English · Gutenberg #40104 · 422,019 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of Tobias o' the Light: A Story of Cape Cod
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: Tobias o' the Light: A Story of Cape Cod
Creator: James A. Cooper
Illustrator: Joseph Wykoff
Release date: June 28, 2012 [eBook #40104]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40104
Credits: Produced by Al Haines
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK TOBIAS O' THE LIGHT: A STORY OF CAPE COD ***
Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: Cover]
[Illustration: The wallowing motor-boat was still right side up. There
seemed to be but one person in it. (_See Page 67_)]
TOBIAS O' THE LIGHT
_A STORY OF CAPE COD_
BY
JAMES A. COOPER
AUTHOR OF "CAP'N ABE, STOREKEEPER" AND
"CAP'N JONAH'S FORTUNE"
ILLUSTRATED BY
JOSEPH WYKOFF
NEW YORK
GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
BOOKS BY
JAMES A. COOPER
CAP'N ABE, STOREKEEPER
CAP'N JONAH'S FORTUNE
TOBIAS O' THE LIGHT
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. A Cry in the Night
II. Confidences
III. The Apex of the Storm
IV. Prophecies
V. The Unexpected
VI. Dead Men's Shoes
VII. A Newcomer
VIII. Philosophy and Other Things
IX. The Drop of Wormwood
X. Starting Something
XI. The Black Squall
XII. Troubled Waters
XIII. Cross Purposes
XIV. A Variety of Happenings
XV. Decisive Action
XVI. Poison
XVII. Real Trouble
XVIII. A Clue
XIX. Suspicions
XX. Put to the Question
XXI. The Rising Tide of Doubt
XXII. What Frets Lorna
XXIII. More than Weather Indications
XXIV. Understanding
XXV. Across the Years
XXVI. High Tide
XXVII. What the Night Brought
XXVIII. Desperation
XXIX. Daybreak
XXX. A Silver-Banded Pipe
ILLUSTRATIONS
The wallowing motor-boat was still right side up. There seemed to be
but one person in it. (See Page 67) . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
"I'll run up to the light to dress," she said
"Oh, sugar, Heppy! What's the matter o' ye?"
"We must do something!" she cried. "Tobias! We *must*!"
TOBIAS O' THE LIGHT
CHAPTER I
A CRY IN THE NIGHT
Old Winter wrapped in his grave clothes stalked the flats and sand dunes
about the Twin Rocks Light. Spring had smiled at the grim old fellow
only the day before. She would flutter back again anon to dry the
longshore wastes and warm to life the scant herbage that tries its best
to clothe the Cape Cod barrens.
But now the wind blew and the sleet charged against the staff of the
lighthouse, masking thickly the glass that defended the huge Argand
lamp. Its steady ray filtered through this curtain with difficulty.
Tobias Bassett pulled on his oilskins and buckled down the sou'wester
over his ears preparatory to venturing upon the high gallery to scrape
the clinging snow from the glass.
"You have a care what you're doing up there, slipping around outside the
light," advised his sister Hephzibah, who should have been named
"Martha," being cumbered by so many cares. "You ain't so young as you
used to be, Tobias."
"And you don't have to throw it up to me. I know my age well enough
without looking into the family Bible, Heppy," chuckled the lightkeeper.
"I'm sure you ain't changed _it_. I ain't cal'latin' to be like old
Miz' Toomey that when she went to vote for the first time told the poll
clerk she was thirty-six years old but had lived in this district
fifty-four years. I ain't goin' to let go all holts yet. Leastways, not
while I'm climbing about that gallery!"
"You'd ought to have an assistant, Tobias," sighed his sister, who was
preparing supper, always served at an early hour in winter on the Cape.
"A young fellow to do the hard work. The Government ought to give you
one."
"They think one man to a stationary lamp like this is enough. But I can
have a helper if I want one," her brother announced.
"Then, why don't ye?"
"'Cause I'd have to pay his wages out o' my own pay check, and feed him
in the bargain," chuckled the lightkeeper. "I figger we can't afford
that."
"Oh, dear!" croaked the lachrymose Heppy, "if Uncle Jethro Potts would
only leave us some of his money when he dies. The good Lord knows we
need it as much as ary rel'tive he's got."
"Wal," commented Tobias, picking up his lighted lantern, "Jethro Potts
has got to slip his cable pretty soon to do us much good, Heppy. We're
getting kind o' along in years to enjoy wealth."
"Speak for yourself, Tobias Bassett!" said his sister, more
energetically. "I ain't too old to know what to do with money--if I had
it."
"Ho, ho!" ejaculated her brother. "Slipper's on t'other foot, ain't it?
I wonder what age you give the poll clerk?" and he went out of the
kitchen chuckling.
He mounted the spiral stairway leading up through the lighthouse. After
passing the level of the second story, where were the family bedrooms,
at intervals there were narrow windows--mere slits in the masonry.
These were blocked with glass and only on the leeward side could Tobias
see through them.
"Winter's dying hard," was his comment, climbing steadily to the lamp
room. "This squall come as sudden and as savage as ary storm we've had
this winter. And the sleet sticks to the glass like all kildee!"
He stepped into the lamp room, closing the door at the top of the
stairway. It was warm in here, with a strong and sickish smell of
burning oil. He shaded his eyes with the sharp of his hand to look into
the lamp, the wick of which he had ignited half an hour before.
It was burning evenly and with a white clear light. But warm as the
lamp room was and strong as was the reflection of the light upon the
outer panes, the sleet had frozen to the glass, making a lacework
curtain which the warning ray of the lamp could pierce only with
difficulty.
Tobias took a steel scraper and an old broom, opened a door at the back,
and went out upon the leeward gallery of the light. The snow wraiths
swept past the staff on either hand, whipping away over the sand dunes
and disappearing in the pall of darkness that hovered over the land.
When he ventured around to the front gallery he found a pallid radiance
on the sea superinduced by the muffled ray of the lamp. The snow,
driven by the gale, plastered the light tower on this side from its cap
ten feet above the lamp to that point twenty feet above its base to
which the spray from the wavecaps was thrown. There was a drift of
snow, too, on the railed balcony, through which the lightkeeper waded.
"Whew!" he gasped, turned his back to the blast, and began using the
scraper vigorously. "I can see I've got an all night's job at this off
an' on if this sleet holds to it. Ain't going to be heat enough from
that old lamp to melt the ice as fast as it makes."
He muttered this into the throat-latch of his storm coat while using the
scraper. The frozen sleet rattled down in long ribbons. He dropped the
scraper finally and seized his broom. It was then that he first heard
that cry which was the tocsin of the unexpected series of events which
marched into Tobias Bassett's life out of this late winter storm.
He dropped the broom and strained his ears for a repetition of the cry.
Was it the voice of some lost seafowl swept landward on the breast of
the storm? A gale out of the northeast brought many such to be dashed
lifeless at the foot of the lamp tower.
There was a human quality to this sound he had heard that startled
Tobias. If from the sea, then the craft on which the owner of the voice
was borne, was doomed.
There had not been a wreck on the Twin Rocks within the present
lightkeeper's experience. He shuddered to think of the horror of such a
catastrophe.
A vessel driven upon the grim jaws of the reef that here were out-thrust
from the sands, would be wracked to mere culch within the hour. The
life savers from Lower Trillion could never put off a boat or shoot a
line into the teeth of such a gale as this.
Tobias stooped for the broom again. Then he heard the cry repeated. If
it came on the wings of the wind----
He scrambled around to the leeward side of the tower. Here the savage
paean of the storm was muffled. The drumming of the waves on the rocks,
the eerie shriek of the wind, the clash of the snow and sleet as they
swept by, left the lightkeeper in a sort of unquiet eddy.
Against the gale came a repetition of the cry--a faint "Ahoy!"
Tobias struggled with the latch of the lamp room door, and finally got
inside the tower. He hurried to the stairway and descended to the warm
and odorous kitchen where Heppy was heaping the brown and flaky
fishcakes upon the platter on the stove-shelf.
"What is the matter with you to-night, Tobias Bassett?" she demanded.
"You're as uneasy as a hen on a hot brick. Where are you going now?" as
he started for the outer door.
"There's somebody out in this storm," he told her. "I heard 'em
shouting."
"For love's sake! In a boat?"
"No. From the land side. Somebody on the road."
Tobias banged the door behind him. In clear weather there was not much
to be seen from the entrance of the lighthouse in this landward
direction, save sand. Now about all Tobias could see was snow.
"Ahoy! Aho-o-oy the light!"
The cry was shattered against the singing gale. But the lightkeeper made
out the direction from which it came and started down the road toward
Lower Trillion. In the other direction were the summer residences of
certain wealthy citizens on the Clay Head. While beyond lay Clinkerport
at the head of the bay, the entrance to which the lighthouse guarded.
Tobias announced his coming by a hearty hail. He saw a muffled glow in
the snow pall ahead. Then the outlines of a low-hung motor car that was
quite evidently stalled in a drift.
"Hey!" he demanded. "What you doing in that contraption out in this
storm? Ain't you got no sense?"
"Now don't _you_ begin!" rejoined a complaining voice, and a rather
stalky figure appeared in the half-shrouded radiance of the headlights.
"I've been told already what I am and where I get off. It isn't my
fault that blame thing got stalled."
"It is your fault that we came this way from Harbor Bar," interposed a
very sweet but at present very sharp voice. ("Jest like cranberry
sarse," Tobias secretly commented.) "We should not have taken the shore
road."
"You didn't say so when we started," declared the tall young man,
indignantly.
"I was not driving the car. You insisted on doing that," chimed the
tart voice instantly.
"One would think you expected me to be omniscient."
"Well, you appear to be omnipresent--you are always in the way," and a
much shorter figure, muffled in furs, and quite evidently that of a
young woman, appeared beside the taller individual from the stalled car.
"And I cal'late, Heppy," Tobias explained, relating the event later to
his sister, "that them two socdologers of words would have brought on a
fist fight if I hadn't stepped into the breach, so to say, _and_ the
smaller of them castaways hadn't been a gal! Some day when I get time
I'm going to look up 'omniscient' and 'omnipresent' in the dictionary.
They sound like mighty mean words."
It was the lightkeeper's interference that saved further and more bitter
words between the two stranded voyagers. Tobias got another look at the
taller figure's face, and in spite of the pulled-down peak of his cap
and the goggles he wore, recognized it.
"If 'tain't Ralph Endicott!" exclaimed the lightkeeper. "And who is
that with you? _Not_ Miss Lorna?"
"Oh, Mr. Bassett!" cried the young woman, stumbling toward him. "Take
me to the light. I shall be _so_ glad of its shelter. Is Miss
Hephzibah at home?"
"She was when I left," said Tobias. "An' I cal'late she won't go
gaddin' endurin' this gale. It don't show right good sense for anybody
to be out such a night."
"That's what I tell him," the girl cried. "Anybody with sense----"
"You wanted to come over here and see what shape the house was in, Lorna
Nicholet!" stormed Ralph Endicott. "I was only doing you a favor."
"Do you call this a favor?" demanded the girl.
"Anybody would think I brought this storm on purposely."
"You certainly tried to get through a road that you should have known
would be drifted when it _did_ begin to snow. Bah! Give me your arm,
Mr. Bassett. He's the most useless----"
"Ain't no good _you_ staying out here, Ralphie," advised the old
lightkeeper. "Nobody will run off with that little buzz-cart of yourn.
Heppy's got fish balls for supper--a whole raft of 'em."
The young man followed through the snow, grumbling. The prospect of a
good meal, as Tobias later acknowledged, did not seem to influence a
college man as it once might the long-legged harum-scarum boy who had
raced these beaches for so many summers.
Endicott and Lorna Nicholet were of the sandpiper class. So Tobias
usually referred to the summer visitors who fluttered about the sands
for several months of each year. These young folks had been coming to
Clay Head each season since they were in rompers. Lorna's aunt, Miss
Ida Nicholet of Harbor Bar, and head of the family, owned the rambling
old house overlooking the mouth of the bay. The Endicotts--"the
Endicotts of Amperly," to distinguish them from numerous other groups of
the same name whose habitat dot the sea-coast of Massachusetts--usually
occupied one of the bungalows on Clay Head during the summer.
"See what the gale blowed in, Heppy," was the lightkeeper's announcement
as he banged open the outer door.
His sister turned, frying-fork in hand, and peered through her
spectacles at the snow-covered figures of the visitors. She was a
comfortably built person, was Hephzibah Bassett, with rosy-brown,
unwrinkled face, despite her unacknowledged age of fifty-odd. Her
iron-gray hair was parted in the center and crinkled over her ears in
tiny plaits, being caught in a small "bob" low on her plump neck behind.
She never went to bed at night without braiding her hair on the side in
several "pigtails" (to use her brother's unsavory expression) to be
combed out into this wavy effect when she changed her house gown in the
afternoon. It was a style of hair-dressing which, if old-fashioned,
became her well.
There was something very wholesome and kindly appearing about Hephzibah
Bassett. She might not possess the shrewdness of her brother, the
lightkeeper, and she did nag a good bit. Yet spinsterhood had not
withered her smile nor squeezed dry her fount of human kindness.
"For love's sake!" she cried now, when she had identified the petite
figure shaking its furs free of the sticky snow. "If 'tain't Lorny
Nicholet! Do come and give me a kiss, Lorny. I can't leave these
fishballs or they'd scorch."
The girl wriggled out of her coat and let it drop to the braided mat.
She was just such a looking girl as one might expect from her name.
There was French blood in the Nicholets. Lorna was distinctly of the
brunette type, small limbed, as lithe as a feline. Perhaps that was why
she could scratch! There were little short curls framing her broad, low
forehead. The gloss of a crow's wing accentuated the blackness of her
hair.
Her face glowed now from facing the storm--or was it from indignation?
Her eyes sparkled so luminously that one could not be sure whether they
were black or brown. She was one of those girls who seem all alive, all
of the time. She had the alert appearance of a wild bird on the
twig--ready for instant flight.
"Oh, how good it smells in here, Miss Heppy!" She fluttered across the
big kitchen and imprinted upon the woman's cheek a warm kiss. She
hugged, too, the ample arm that Heppy did not use in turning the
fishballs in the deep frying kettle.
"You certain sure give us a surprise, Lorny," said the lightkeeper's
sister.
"Of course I intended giving you a call as we passed," the girl said.
"But I started for the special purpose of looking over the house for
Aunt Ida and listing such new things as we shall need for the summer.
_This_ doesn't look much like summer, does it?"
"Oh, it's the last quintal of winter, I cal'late," said the woman,
spearing a brown cake. "Lucky I made a mess of these. I didn't really
expect any visitors to-night."
"That's just it, Miss Heppy! How will I ever get back to Harbor Bar
to-night?"
"You won't. Why should you? Your aunt will know you are safe--with
him."
Miss Heppy glanced slyly around at Ralph Endicott, whom she had but
briefly greeted. The girl, seeing her glance, pouted.
"I wish you wouldn't!" she said in a low voice. "It fairly gets on my
nerves. Everybody does it."
"Does what, child?" asked Miss Heppy, with surprise.
"Takes it for granted that Ralph Endicott and I are engaged."
"Wal--you be sort o' young, I suppose----"
"If I was forty I wouldn't be engaged to him!" flared up Lorna.
"For love's sake!" exclaimed the woman. "Don't say that. Though at
forty you ought to've been married to him a good many years," and she
broke into an unctuous chuckle that shook her ample bosom like jelly.
"I'll never marry him!" cried the girl, but under her breath.
"Now, now!" urged Miss Heppy. "You always be quarreling with Ralphie.
But you know they're jest love spats. He's a good fellow----"
"You don't know what it means, Miss Heppy, to a girl to have a man just
forced on her. Everybody trying to make her take him, willy-nilly."
"Um-m. None warn't never forced on me," admitted the woman, dividing
her attention between the frying fishballs and Lorna's affair of the
heart. "But I reckon, Lorna, they couldn't force a better boy on you."
"That is one of the worst phases of it," declared the girl seriously.
"There is not one single, solitary thing to be said against Ralph's
character. Unless--well, there was a girl when he went to college. At
least, so they say. But I suppose all boys must have their foolish
puppy-love affairs," concluded Lorna, with an owllike appearance of
wisdom that revealed the quite unsophisticated girl who believes she
"knows it all."
Miss Heppy merely stared. In her secluded life love was _love_. There
were no gradations known either as "puppy-love" or by other terms of
rating.
"It isn't that Ralph isn't good enough, Miss Heppy," whispered the girl.
"But he's been thrown at me all my life long!" She was not yet
twenty-one. "I just _won't_ marry him."
She stamped her foot on the hearth. Tobias, who had been leisurely
taking off his storm coat and unbuckling the strap of his sou'wester as
he talked cheerfully to the rather glum looking Ralph, now turned to the
women.
"I feel some like stomping in my stall, too," was his comment upon
Lorna's emphatic punctuation of her whispered defiance. "Bear a hand
with the supper, Heppy. I've got to go up to the gallery again and
clear the snow off the lamp. It surely does stick to-night. I was just
getting the glass clear when I heard you young folks shouting for
rescue.
"Come, Miss Lorna! Come, Ralph! Pull up cheers for yourselves.
Supper's ready, I cal'late, ain't it, Heppy?"
CHAPTER II
CONFIDENCES
The blast struck the light tower so heavily that Ralph Endicott felt the
whole structure vibrate as he followed Tobias up the spiral stairway
after supper. In spite of the lightkeeper's jollity and Miss Heppy's
kindness, the supper had seemed to hearten but little the spirits of the
young man.
He had offered to attend Tobias in his duty at the top of the tower more
for the purpose of getting away from the women than for any other
reason. He seized the broom and followed Tobias with the scraper out
upon the open gallery. If the storm had seemed furious before supper,
it had risen to a top gale now. The two men could scarcely face it on
the windward side.
The gale came in blasts that slapped their burden of snow against the
lighthouse with great force. Ralph was barely able to keep his feet.
But the sturdy lightkeeper went about the task with a certain phlegm.
They managed to free the glass of its curtain of snow. Then Ralph
staggered around to the sheltered gallery, on the heels of Tobias. The
younger man's was a gloomy face when they once more entered the lamp
room.
"Cheer up," said Tobias, getting his breath and eyeing Ralph aslant.
"They tell me the worst is yet to come. Though I tell you fair,
Ralphie, if the last end o' my life is anywhere as hard as what happened
me when I shipped cabin boy on the old _Sarah Drinkwater_, the good Lord
help me to bear it!
"Why, Ralphie, from the time she was warped out o' the dock at
Provincetown till we unloaded them box shocks at Santiago I didn't git
to git my clothes off--no, sir!
"We _did_ have bad weather, I cal'late, though I never got out on deck
often enough the whole endurin' v'y'ge to observe the sea and sky. I
was washing dishes, making up berths, cleaning pots and pans, peeling
'taters and turmits, and seeding raisins for the skipper's plum duff
most o' the time.
"Seeding raisins! Oh, sugar, I got to thinkin' that if that was all
going to sea meant, I might better have got a job in a scullery and kept
on an even footing. And I purty nigh got my lips in such a pucker
whistling while I seeded them raisins (cookie wouldn't trust me
otherwise) that I never did get 'em straight since.
"Say, lemme tell you!" proceeded Tobias, his weather-stained face
beaming in the glow of the great Argand light. "Cap'n Drinkwater
demanded his plum duff for supper ev'ry endurin' day of the v'y'ge, no
matter what the weather was. He had an old black cook, Sam Snowball,
that had got so's he could make that pudding to the queen's taste.
"Lemme tell you! The skipper was that stingy that he fed the crew rusty
pork and weevilly beans, and a grade of salt horse that would make a
crew of Skowegians mutiny. But the _Sarah Drinkwater_ never made long
enough v'y'ges for her crew to mutiny--no, sir!
"But that plum duff--oh, sugar! Bein' the boy, I never got more'n the
lickin's of the dish. If I got enough 'taters and salt horse to fill my
belly so's to keep my pants up, I was lucky. The skipper and the mate
divided the duff between 'em.
"Ahem!" he added critically, "you don't look as though there was any
plums at all in your duff, Ralph."
"There isn't," returned the young man shortly.
"Oh, sugar!" ejaculated the lightkeeper, drawing forth a short clay pipe
and a sack of cut tobacco. "I cal'late that you folks with money have
more real troubles than what we poor folks do."
"Huh! _Money!_" scoffed Endicott.
"Yep. It's mighty poor bait for fish, I cal'late. You can't even chum
with it."
"Money isn't everything," said the young man shrugging his shoulders.
"True. True as preaching," cried Tobias. "But 'twill buy most
everything you're likely to need in this world. And you've got enough,
Ralph, to keep you from getting gray-headed before your time worrying
about where your three meals a day are coming from. I don't see what
can be wrong with you. And that purty gal----"
"Now stop, Tobias Bassett!" exclaimed Endicott. "Don't keep reminding me
of Lorna. I get enough of that at home."
"Wal!" gasped the lightkeeper. "For you to speak so of Lorna! Why,
that's the main-skys'l-pole of the whole suit of spars--only needs the
main-truck to cap it. What do you mean?"
"Now, mind you," Endicott said earnestly. "I haven't a thing to say
against Lorna. She's a nice girl--for some other fellow. But I declare
to you, Tobias, _I won't marry her_."
"Oh, sugar!"
"Just because my Uncle Henry and her Aunt Ida have planned for us to do
so since we were little tads running about the beaches here, is no
reason why I should be tied up to Lorna forever and ever, Amen!"
"That's a mighty hard sayin'----"
"You think, like everybody else, that Lorna and I were made for each
other. We weren't! We'd fight all the time. We always do fight. Look
at to-night. The first little thing that goes wrong she jumps at me.
I'm sick of playing dog and rolling over every time Lorna orders me to.
"And look at the mess we're in to-night!"
"What's the matter with you, boy?" demanded the lighthouse keeper.
"You're under shelter. There's grub enough in the light to stave off
starvation for a spell. Nothing can't happen to your buzz-cart worse
than its being drifted under with snow."
"Oh, you don't understand, Tobias!" said the exasperated Ralph. "Our
going off in my car the way we did, and not getting back to-night--why!
it'll be all over Harbor Bar that we've eloped."
"I see," said the lightkeeper between puffs of his short pipe. Then:
"You don't cal'late to marry Lorna?"
"I won't have her thrown at me."
"I never had no gal throwed at me," Tobias reflected. "I dunno how
'twould feel. But I will say that if I had to catch such a throw as
Lorna Nicholet, I surely wouldn't make a muff of it!"
"That's all right," observed Endicott. "I'm not saying she isn't a nice
enough girl. But I don't believe she really wants me any more than I
want her. In fact, I know there was another fellow last year that she
was interested in. A chap named Conny Degger. He was in my class at
college. Kind of a sport, but I guess he's all right, at that. But
Lorna's Aunt Ida broke it up. Wouldn't let Conny shine around Lorna any
more when she learned about it.
"They've got us both thrown and tied, Tobias! That's the way Uncle
Henry, and Aunt Ida, and all the rest of my family and Lorna's people
have got us fixed. They act as though we'd just got to marry each
other. And after this mischance--breaking down here in the
snow--they'll all say we're disgraced forever if we don't announce the
engagement."
"Oh, sugar!" said the lightkeeper again, puffing away placidly.
In the kitchen Lorna Nicholet was making a confidante of Miss Heppy
quite as Ralph had trusted Tobias. Nor was the girl less determined to
thwart the intention of her family in this matrimonial affair, than was
Ralph in his attitude toward his relatives.
"For love's sake!" murmured the lightkeeper's sister, realizing at last
how much in earnest the girl was, "Miss Ida'll near about have a
conniption. She's set her heart on you an' Ralph marrying, for years."
"And his Uncle Henry is just as foolish," sighed Lorna, wiping her eyes.
"Why will old people never have sense enough to let young people's
affairs alone?"
"Well, now, as you might say," Miss Heppy observed, "Miss Ida and Henry
Endicott ain't re'lly old. Forty-odd ain't what ye might call aged--not
in a way of speaking. But I cal'late they are some sot in their ways."
"'Some sot' is right, Miss Heppy," repeated Lorna, suddenly giggling and
her vivid face a-smile once more. "In her own case Aunt Ida is a
misogamist; yet she urges marriage on me. And Ralph's Uncle Henry is a
misogynist in any case. Why he is so anxious to force Ralph into the
wedded state I do not see."
"Seems to me them air purty hard names to call your aunt and Henry
Endicott," murmured Miss Heppy.
"Oh!" Lorna laughed again. "They just mean that Aunt Ida hates
marriage and Uncle Henry hates women."
Miss Heppy waggled a doubtful head.
"They wasn't like that when I first remember them, Lorny," she said.
"Miss Ida Nicholet is a fine looking woman now. She was a pretty sight
for anybody's eyes when she was your age, or thereabout."
"I know she was quite a belle when she was young," Lorna agreed, rather
carelessly.
"And Henry Endicott wasn't any--what did you call him jest now?"
"A misogynist--a hater of women."
"He didn't hate 'em none when he come here that first summer," said Miss
Heppy, with a reflective smile. "He was a young professor at some
college then. I expect he didn't know as much about inventing things
then as what he does now. But he knowed more how to please women. He
pleased your Aunt Ida right well, I cal'late."
"Never! You don't mean it, Miss Heppy!" exclaimed Lorna, sensing a
romance.
"Yes, I thought then Miss Ida and Henry Endicott would make a match of
it. But somehow--well, such things don't always go the way you expect
them to. Both your aunt and Professor Endicott were high-strung--same's
you and Ralph be, Lorny."
"Why," cried the girl smiling again, "I'd never fight with Ralph at all
if they didn't try to make us marry. I wonder if it is so, that Aunt
Ida and Ralph's uncle were once fond of each other! If they could not
make a match of it, why are they so determined to force Ralph and me
into a marriage?"
"Mebbe because they see their mistake," Miss Heppy said judiciously. "I
don't believe your aunt and Henry Endicott have been any too happy
endurin' these past twenty-odd years."
"Tell me!" urged the girl, her cheeks aglow and her eyes dancing. "Is
remaining single all your life such a _great_ cross, Miss Heppy? Are
there not some compensations?"
The woman looked up from darning the big blue wool sock that could have
fitted none but her brother's foot. The smile with which she favored
the girl had much tenderness as well as retrospection in it.
"I don't believe that any woman over thirty is ever single from choice,
Lorny. She may never find the man she wants to marry. Or something
separates her from the one she is sure-'nough fitted to mate with. So,
she must make the best of it."
"But _you_, Miss Heppy?" asked Lorna, boldly. "Why didn't you ever
marry?"
"Why--I _was_ cal'lating on doing so, when I was a gal," said the woman
gently. "Listen!"
The girl, startled, looked all about the room and then back into Miss
Heppy's softly smiling face.
"Do you hear it, Lorny? The sea a-roaring over the reef and the wind
wailing about the light? That's my answer to your question. I seen so
many women in my young days left lone and lorn because of that sea. Ah,
my deary, 'tain't the men that go down to the sea in ships that suffer
most. 'Tis their wives and mothers, and the little children they leave
behind.
"When I was a young gal I never had a chance to meet ary men but them
that airned their bread on the deep waters. My father was drowned off
Hatteras, two brothers older than Tobias were of the crew of the
windjammer, _Seahawk_. She never got around the Horn on her last
v'y'ge. In seventeen homes about Clinkerport and Twin Rocks, the women
mourned their dead on the _Seahawk_.
"No, no. I didn't stay single from choice. But I shut my ears and eyes
to ary man that heard the call of the sea. And I never met no other,
Lorny."
The uproar of the storm was an accompaniment to Miss Heppy's story. The
solemnity of it quenched any further expression of what Lorna Nicholet
considered her troubles. Within the kitchen there was silence for a
space.
CHAPTER III
THE APEX OF THE STORM
Bedtime came, and Miss Heppy led Lorna, with the little whale oil hand
lamp, up one flight of the spiral stairway and ushered her into the best
bedroom. It was the whitewashed cell facing the ocean.
The waves boomed with sullen roar upon the rocks, breaking, it seemed,
almost at the base of the lighthouse. Spray, as well as the sleet,
dashed against the single unshuttered window. It was sheeted with
white. But Miss Heppy drew the curtains close.
"You won't be afraid to sleep here alone, will you, child?" asked the
lightkeeper's sister. "Tobias and I are only just across the landing.
Though I guess Tobias will be up most o' the night watchin' the lamp,
and he'll likely put your young man in his bed."
"I wish you wouldn't!" sighed Lorna. "He's not my young man, whatever
else he may be. I here and now disown all part and parcel in Ralph
Endicott."
"I dunno what Miss Ida will say," the woman observed mournfully. "It'll
be a shock to her. Wal, try to sleep, deary, if the wintry winds do
blow. I guess 'twill clear, come morning. These late winter storms
never last."
She had shaken out a voluminous canton-flannel nightgown which she laid
over the foot of the bed. Now she pricked up the two round wicks of the
lamp with a pin, and after kissing the visitor left her to seek repose.
She heard a heavy step on the stair as she reached the foot of it, so
held the kitchen door open for her brother. Tobias had left Ralph to
watch the lamp while he came down on some small errand. Finding his
sister alone, the lightkeeper lingered.
"I give it as my opinion, Heppy," he said, slowly puffing on his clay
pipe, "that it was lucky we was born handsome instead o' rich."
"You speak for yourself, Tobias," rejoined his sister, with good-natured
irony. "My beauty never struck in, so's to be chronic, as ye might say.
And I could do right now with lots more money than we've got."
"You'd only put it in the Clinkerport Bank--you know you would,"
chuckled Tobias. "And the most useless dollar in the world--to the
owner I mean--is a dollar in the bank."
"You never did properly appreciate money."
"No, thanks be! Not according to your standard of appreciation, Heppy.
Money is only good for what you spend it for. A dollar in the bank that
airns ye three cents a year ain't even worth thinkin' of--let alone
talking about. You might just as well hide it under the hearthstone.
It would be less worry."
"We ain't got enough in the Clinkerport Bank to worry you none," scoffed
his sister.
"I dunno. Arad Thompson, the president of the bank _might_ run off with
the funds. Such things do happen."
"And he confined to a wheel chair for ten years now!" ejaculated Miss
Heppy. "I shall never worry over our little tad of money--save that it
is so little."
"I give it as my opinion that money don't seem to do folks all the good
in the world that it oughter. Look at these two young ones, now, Lorna
and Ralph. Their folks has got more wealth than enough. And yet Ralph
croaks as though he saw no chance at all ahead of him but trouble."
"I do allow," admitted Miss Heppy, "that Lorna thinks as little of
Ralph's money as she seems to of the boy himself. And he's a nice boy."
"And she's just the nicest gal that ever stepped in shoe-leather,"
rejoined the lightkeeper stoutly.
"They don't 'preciate each other," sighed Miss Heppy.
"Ain't it so? I give it as my opinion that if they was poor--re'l
poor--they would fall in love with each other quick enough."
"I dunno----"
"_I do,_" declared the confident lightkeeper. "It's a case o' money
being no good at all to them young ones. If Ralph had to dig clams or
clerk it in a bank for a living, and Lorny didn't have more'n two
caliker dresses a year and could not get any more--why! them two would
fall in love with each other so hard 'twould hurt. That's my opinion,
Heppy, and I give it for what it's worth."
He knocked the heeltap out of his pipe on the stove hearth. His sister
was not giving him her full attention. She raised her eyes from her
darning and listened to the storm.
The wind shrieked like a company of fiends around the tall tower. The
sleet and spray slapped viciously against the shutterless windows on the
exposed side of the structure. The woman shook her head.
"It's a terrible night, Tobias. Listen!"
From the ocean rose the voice of a blast seemingly worse than any that
had gone before. It was the apex of the storm. It drowned anything
further Tobias might have said.
The hurricane from the sea took the light tower in its arms and shook
it. The roar of it made the woman's face blanch.
As the sound poured away into the distance the two in the kitchen heard
a crash of glass--then a scream. Tobias dashed for the stairway door.
"The lamp!" he shouted.
"That ain't no lamp, Tobias," declared his sister.
When he opened the door a gale rushed in and sucked the flame out of the
top of the lamp chimney with a "plop!" The stairway seemed filled with
a whirling cyclone of wintry air.
Tobias heard the clatter of Ralph Endicott's boots on the iron treads
coming down from above. A door was banging madly on the second floor.
Lorna screamed again.
"The window of the best room's burst in, Tobias," shouted Miss Heppy.
"That poor child!"
The lightkeeper had seized his lantern, and now he started up the
stairway. But youth was quicker than vigorous old age. Ralph plunged
into the bedchamber, the door of which had been burst open by the blast
from the wrecked window.
The cowering figure of the girl at the foot of the bed, wrapped in Miss
Heppy's voluminous nightgown, was visible in the whirlwind of snow. She
sprang toward Ralph with a cry of relief, and the young man gathered her
into his arms as though she were a child.
"Oh, Ralph!"
"All right, Lorna! You're safe enough. Don't be frightened," soothed
Endicott.
For a long moment he sheltered her thus, bulwarking his own body between
her and the blast from the window. She cowered in his arms. Then:
"For love's sake!" gasped Miss Heppy at the head of the stairs.
The lantern in her brother's hand broadly illumined the two young
people. Tobias himself was enormously amused.
"Don't look as though you hated each other none to speak of," was his
tactless comment.
"Tobias!" shrieked Miss Heppy.
Lorna struggled out of Ralph's arms in a flame of rage.
"How dare you, Ralph Endicott?" she cried. "I thought you were at least
a gentleman. You go right away from here--now--this minute! I'll never
speak to you again!"
"Why, I--I----"
Ralph was too startled for the moment to be angry. The girl ran in her
bare feet to the comfort of Miss Heppy's ample person.
"Take me somewhere! Take me to your room, Miss Heppy. I never want to
see him again. How dared he?"
"Oh, sugar!" murmured the perfectly amazed lightkeeper.
But the fires of rage began to glow within Ralph Endicott's bosom now,
blown by the blast of Lorna's ingratitude. His face blazed.
"What do you mean?" he demanded. "I did not come here because I wanted
to. You yelled loud enough for help. I--I----"
"That will do!" exclaimed Lorna, her head up, as regal as any angry
little queen could be. "If you were a gentleman by nature you would
have refused to stay here in the first place, when you knew the light
was my only shelter."
"Well, of all the----"
"You can go on to Clinkerport. Telephone from the hotel to Aunt Ida and
tell her where I am and whose care I am in. If the story that you and I
remained here all night together is circulated about Harbor Bar, I'll
never forgive you, Ralph Endicott!"
"Great Scott!" shouted the young man, coming out into the hall and
closing the door of the bedroom. "You don't suppose for a moment _I_
want such a story circulated among our friends, do you? No fear!"
He started down the stairs, pulling his cap over his ears and buttoning
his automobile coat up to his throat.
"For love's sake!" again gasped the troubled spinster, who still held
the girl in her arms.
"Hold on! Hold on!" exclaimed Tobias. "'Tain't fit for to turn a dog
out into this storm."
"I don't care!" cried the hysterical girl wildly. "He never should have
let the car stall in that snowdrift. He should have gone on to
Clinkerport alone instead of making a nuisance of himself around here."
The lower door banged as punctuation to her speech.
Tobias started to descend the stair. His sister motioned him
commandingly toward the door of the best room.
"You find some way to stopper that window, Tobias," she said, "and then
go back to your lamp. You can't do no good interfering in this."
She led the sobbing girl into her own room and closed the door. The
lightkeeper shook his head.
"I give it as my opinion," he muttered, "that women folks is as hard to
understand as the Chinee language. And they begin their finicking
mighty airly."
Lorna sobbed herself into quietness in Miss Heppy's feather bed, cuddled
into the good spinster's embrace. The latter did not speak one word of
criticism. But as her passion ebbed, Lorna's conscience pricked her
sorely. She only appeared to fall asleep. In truth she remained very
wide awake listening to the bellowing of the gale.
Suppose something should happen to Ralph out in the storm? It was
hours, it seemed to her, before the wind calmed at all. She visualized
her friend staggering along the road toward Clinkerport, back of the
Clay Head cottages that were all empty at this time of year. Suppose he
was overcome by the storm, and fell there, and was drifted over by the
snow?
She lay and trembled at these thoughts; but she would not have admitted
for the world that she cared!
After all, Ralph had been her playmate for years. Why, she could not
remember when Ralph was not hanging upon the outskirts of the Nicholet
family. He was as omnipresent, as she had told him, as Aunt Ida. And
Miss Ida Nicholet had ever been Lorna's guardian.
The girl was the youngest of a goodly number of brothers and sisters;
but her mother, Mr. Nicholet's second wife, had died at Lorna's birth.
Miss Ida had come into the big house at Harbor Bar at that time and
assumed entire control--at least of Lorna.
The other girls and boys had grown up and flown the nest. Mr. Nicholet
was a busy man of studious habits who, if the housemaid had come into
his library, kissed him on his bald crown, and asked him for twenty
dollars, would have produced the money without question, said, "Yes, my
child," and considered that he had done his duty by his youngest
daughter.
Lorna had often passed him on the street and he had not known her.
But Mr. Nicholet subscribed to everything Miss Ida, his energetic
sister, said. If she declared it was the right thing for Lorna to marry
Ralph Endicott--that ended the matter as far as Mr. Nicholet was
concerned. Lorna knew it to be quite useless to appeal to him.
By and by it began to rain--torrentially. This, following the snow
which had drifted so heavily during the evening, somewhat relieved
Lorna's anxiety. The rain would flood the roads and make them
impassable, even if Ralph could repair his car; but no wanderer on foot
would be drifted over by rain.
She heard Tobias go down and up the spiral staircase more than once. He
even went out of the lighthouse on one occasion. That was soon after
Ralph had gone and while the storm was still high. But the lightkeeper
had quickly returned.
Dawn came at last, clutching at the window with wan fingers. The pale
light grew slowly. Lorna heard Tobias rattling the stove-hole covers as
he built the kitchen fire. Then the odor of coffee reached her
nostrils, and Miss Heppy awoke.
CHAPTER IV
PROPHECIES
Lorna appeared in the lighthouse kitchen with red eyelids and the
bruised look about her eyes that usually advertises the lack of sleep in
the case of all dark-eyed people. But she smiled and thanked Miss Heppy
and Tobias briskly for their kindness.
"I am sure I do not know what I should have done if you had not taken me
in. Did the storm do much damage in your best chamber, Miss Heppy?"
"I ain't had time to see, child," replied the spinster. "Tobias will
have to get a new winder frame, I cal'late. You got it boarded up
tight, Tobias?"
"Tight's the word," her brother assured her.
"I hope nothing has happened to our house on Clay Head," Lorna said.
"Not likely. Them storm shutters and doors Miss Ida insisted on putting
on are a good thing, I allow," the lightkeeper observed.
"We'd ought to have outside blinds to our lower windows," his sister
complained. "But the Government don't think so."
"Now, don't let's get onto politics," said Tobias, his eyes twinkling.
"Ye know, Lorny, Heppy and me votes dif'rent tickets, and jest at
present she's ag'in the Government."
"Oh, you hush!" said Miss Heppy, as Lorna's laugh chimed in unison with
Tobias's mellow chuckle.
"Is it going to clear, Mr. Bassett?" the girl asked.
"I guess likely. Ain't been but one storm so fur that didn't clear.
And that's this one. But I give it as my opinion that it was a bad
night. Bad," he added, cocking an eye at Lorna, "for anybody who had to
be out in it."
"Now, Tobias!" ejaculated his sister.
"Them on shipboard, I mean, o' course," the lightkeeper hastened to say.
Lorna ignored this byplay. She would not reveal in any case that she
had felt anxiety for Ralph. She would only show interest in the
condition of the Nicholet house on the bluff, and after breakfast she
bundled up against the cutting gale that still blew, and ventured to
journey cross-lots to the summer residences.
The road, as Lorna had supposed, was badly washed by the rain where it
was not drifted with mushy snow. She wore Miss Heppy's overshoes and
waded ankle deep in slush as she crossed the barrens toward the steep
ascent of the Clay Head. At the foot of this bluff she struck into the
patrol-path--that well-defined trail made by the surfmen who patrol
every yard of the outer Cape Cod coast, from the Big End at the tip near
Provincetown, down to Monomoy Point south of Chatham.
It was slippery under foot, and the wind was still strong. The clouds
were breaking, however, and Lorna could see clear across the
wide-mouthed bay. She observed a gleam of light reflected from the
cupola of the life-saving station at Upper Trillion. A steam tug towing
a brick barge, that had run into Clinkerport ahead of the storm, was now
breasting the after-swell, putting out to sea.
The Nicholet house was the first in the row of summer houses which
overhung the beach toward Clinkerport. Lorna was sheltered from the
wind when she approached the side door to which she had the key.
As she mounted the steps she noted with surprise that one of the cellar
windows right at hand was uncovered. The plank shutter lay upon the
snow, and there were marks about the window that might have been made by
somebody entering the house.
"And such a night as last night was," murmured the amazed girl. "I can
scarcely believe there was a thief here."
Indeed, marauders of any character were seldom a menace upon the Cape.
The summer people who occupied the houses along Clay Head merely locked
their doors in winter and left them until the next season without fear
of trespassers.
Lorna slowly fitted the key in the lock and opened the door. She
entered softly. Could it be possible that an intruder was now in the
house?
At the left of this side entry was a small sitting-room. When the outer
door was closed she distinctly felt a warm current of air from between
the draperies that had been left hanging in the sitting-room doorway.
Amazed, she stepped hurriedly forward and held aside the curtain to look
in. There was a smouldering fire in the grate. Lying outstretched upon
the floor, with a rug wrapped about him, was a man. He was asleep, and
for the moment Lorna could not see his face, nor did she imagine who he
could be.
She tiptoed around the table, and then she saw the sleeper's flaxen
head. Suddenly he started, rolled over, and sat up. He opened
sleep-clouded eyes.
"Is--is that you, Lorna?" he yawned.
The girl's face flamed and her eyes fairly sparked with wrath. She made
a futile gesture with both hands as she backed away from Ralph Endicott.
"Oh, you--you----"
She could not articulate her disgust. Of all the perfectly useless
fellows she had ever heard of, Ralph took the palm!
Without uttering another word the girl left the room and the house.
Ralph had managed to spoil everything, after all. He had not gone to
Clinkerport and telephoned to Harbor Bar. The tongue of scandal would
not be stilled as she had hoped it might. And Lorna Nicholet considered
it quite scandalous for her friends to believe that she and Ralph
Endicott were "as good as engaged."
"I'll never forgive him! I'll never forgive him!" she cried over and
over, as she tramped back to the light.
She made no comment then to either Miss Heppy or Tobias about what she
had found at the house. She did not even notice the old lightkeeper's
sly glances. He had followed Ralph's footprints by lantern-light in the
storm the night before and knew where the young man had taken shelter
after being driven from the lighthouse by Lorna's sharp tongue.
Endicott did not appear that day at the Twin Rocks Light. But he must
have gone on to Clinkerport after Lorna's unexpected visit to the house
on Clay Head aroused him, for the next day--the shell road having become
passable again for motor cars--he came out with a truck from the garage
to tow his roadster into town.
"You can go back with the garage man and me, and I will hire a car to
take you home to Harbor Bar to-night," Endicott said sullenly enough, to
Lorna.
"I will go to Clinkerport with the garage man," the girl promptly
rejoined. "But you need not bother about me after I arrive there. I
can manage to get home by myself. The trains are running."
"Well, I telephoned your Aunt Ida I would bring you home," he said
gloomily. "They--they were some stirred up about us."
"They need be stirred up no further about us. I tell you I have got
through with you, Ralph Endicott--for good and all! I will not be
forced by my family to endure your company."
"It's fifty-fifty," he rejoined. "You don't have to ride any high horse
about it. I'm no more pleased with the prospect of catering to your
whims, I assure you."
"You are no gentleman!" she declared, her little fists clenched.
"At least, I am telling you the truth, Lorna," he said grimly. "Perhaps
being a gentleman precludes one's being candid."
"Oh--you!" she ejaculated again and turned her back on him.
Tobias watched them depart with puckered face. Separately the young folk
had shaken hands with the lightkeeper and his sister, and thanked them
warmly for their hospitality. But when the two cars started Lorna sat
up stiffly, "eyes front," beside the garage man and would not look back
for fear of seeing Ralph Endicott in the rear car.
"Just as friendly to each other as a couple o' strange dogs," observed
Tobias. "She's on her ear, sure enough. And Ralphie is just as stuffy
as they make 'em. What do you reckon will come of it, Heppy?"
"I know one thing, Tobias, and that ain't two," declared his sister
flatly. "None o' your interference is goin' to help matters. Don't you
think it."
"Wal--now--I dunno. If I can help a likely couple like Lorna and Ralph
to an understanding----"
"Huh! Matches are made in heaven," said his sister.
"Oh, sugar! They don't often smell so when you light 'em," chuckled
Tobias.
"Oh, you hush!"
"I'm thinkin' serious, Heppy, of helping them two foolish young ones to
an understanding."
"You'd better mind your own business, Tobias Bassett."
"Ain't it my business?" he queried, his head cocked on one side watching
the disappearing motor cars. "You know the Bible says we should all
turn to an' help get our neighbor's ass out o' the pit----"
"An' you'll be the biggest jack of all if you interfere in the affairs
of them young ones."
"I dunno----"
"You'd better know!" exclaimed Miss Heppy, exasperated. "For love's
sake! who ever told you, Tobias Bassett, that you knowed enough to
venture where even angels fear to tread?"
"Oh! Hum! Then I guess you don't cal'late after all that matches is
made in heaven," he chuckled. "And I give it as my opinion, Heppy, that
marrying and giving in marriage ain't never been angels' jobs. Mebbe a
mere human being like me might have more of a sleight at matchmaking
than the heavenly host--if anybody should drive up an' ax ye."
CHAPTER V
THE UNEXPECTED
Miss Heppy took pride in her front yard. The immediate vicinity of a
lighthouse is not often a beauty-spot, and that of the Twin Rocks Light
was for the most part bleached sand. Nevertheless the lightkeeper's
sister never failed to make her garden in early May.
The soil in which she coaxed to cheerful bloom old maid's pinks,
bachelor buttons, ladies' slippers, marigolds and a dozen other
old-fashioned flowers, was brought from a distance. The boisterous
autumn winds always drifted over the beds with sand; yet each spring
Miss Heppy, like nature herself, made all things new again.
"I vum!" said her brother in his good-natured, if critical way, "I don't
see why you do it. All you have to begin on every year is the
conch-shells and white pebbles for borders. Sea sand mixed with its
loam in such quantity would ha' sp'iled the Garden of Eden for any
agricultooral purposes."
"This ain't no Garden of Eden, I do allow," his sister said. "Wherever
them scientific fellers undertake to locate what was mankind's first
home, they never say 'twas here on the Cape."
"Oh, sugar!" chuckled Tobias. "It took them frozen-faced Puritan
ancestors of our'n to choose the Cape to locate on an' set the
Provincetown folks and the Plymouth folks a-fightin' over which town
should be celebrated in song an' story as the real landin' place of the
Pilgrim Fathers."
"Humph!" sniffed Hephzibah, "we hear enough about the Pilgrim Fathers.
I cal'late if it hadn't been for the Pilgrim Mothers there wouldn't have
been any settlement here a-tall."
"Ye-as," agreed Tobias, pursing his lips. "But the women didn't have
the vote then, so they didn't get advertised none to speak of. Of
course, there was Priscilla Alden--she that was a Mullens. Longfeller
advertised _her_ a good bit. She's the only woman among the Pilgrims
that we hear much about. I cal'late 'twas because she was one that
knowed her own mind."
"No," said his sister, whose habit of looking at the darker side of life
could not be denied. "No. The first woman the history of them times
tells about was drowned off the _Mayflower_ as she lay in Provincetown
Harbor."
"Oh, sugar! That's so," chuckled Tobias. "She was crowded overboard by
the deckload of furniture the packet carried. I never did understand
how such a small craft could have brought across all that household
stuff folks claim was in her cargo."
But Miss Heppy's reflections were not to be turned by frivolity.
"She," the spinster said, with a sigh, "was the first of us Cape Cod
women to suffer from the savage sea."
"Oh, sugar, Heppy!" ejaculated Tobias. "You're the beatin'est for
seining up trouble and seeing the blackest side of things. Enough to
give a man the fantods, you are! Hello! Here's the mail packet heaving
into sight."
A bony horse with a head so long that he might easily eat his oats out
of a flour barrel, appeared from around the turn in the Lower Trillion
road. He drew behind him a buckboard which sagged under the weight of
Amos Pickering, the rural mail carrier.
"Maybe he's got a letter for us," suggested Miss Heppy with some
eagerness. "You go see, Tobias."
The lightkeeper dropped his spade and made a speaking trumpet of his
hands. "Ahoy! Ahoy, Amos! What's the good word?"
The mail carrier waved an answering hand before diving into the sack at
his feet and bringing to light, as Tobias strode down to the roadside, a
letter and a paper.
"Wal, now," said the lightkeeper, "that's what ye might call a heavy
haul for us. I cal'late, Amos, if all your customers got as few parcels
o' mail as what me and Heppy does, you'd purt' near go out o' business."
"It's got a black border onto it, Tobias," said the mail carrier,
voicing the curiosity that ate like acid on his mind. "And it's
postmarked at Batten. Ain't that where your Uncle Jethro lives?"
"Sure enough!" agreed the lightkeeper. "But 'tain't his hand o'
write--nossir!"
"Be you sure?"
"Surest thing you know, Amos. 'Cause why? Cap'n Jethro Potts never
learned to more than make his mark--if that much."
"I cal'late he's dead, Tobias."
"Then it's sartain he didn't send this letter with the black border."
"Well, it must be something about him, don't you think?" suggested the
mail carrier leaning forward, his eager eyes twinkling.
"Why, we ain't in correspondence with nobody down there to Batten," said
Tobias slowly, and holding the letter far off as though he feared it
might explode.
Miss Heppy had got to her feet now and came forward.
"What's the matter with you, Tobias?" she cried. "Why don't you open it?
Amos won't get home to-night if you don't."
Her gentle sarcasm was quite lost on the two men. Her brother shook his
head.
"Can't open it," he said.
"Why not, for love's sake?" demanded the exasperated Heppy.
"'Cause it's for you," chuckled Tobias, thrusting the letter into her
hand.
"For love's sake!" repeated Miss Heppy much flustered. "I can't read
it, Tobias. I ain't got my specs here."
"No more have I," her brother rejoined. "But I cal'late I can read it
for you if 'tain't writ in Choctaw."
The others, Amos no less than Heppy, remained eagerly expectant while
Tobias worked his stubbed finger under the gummed flap of the envelope
and tore it open. The folded sheet of paper he drew forth was likewise
bordered with black. He held it off, for he was far-sighted, and read
aloud slowly:
"'Batten, Mass.
"'Miss Hephzibah Bassett,
"'Twin Rocks Light.
"'Dear Miss Heppy:--
"'Your uncle, Captain Jethro Potts, of this town, passed into rest this
day at noon. The funeral is set for Thursday at ten in the morning,
that being high tide. You and your family is hereby notified and are
requested to be present at the unsealing of Captain Potts' will in Judge
Waddams' office which will follow the ceremony at the grave.
"'Your relation by marriage,
"'ICIVILLA POTTS.'"
Then followed the date. The reading of the letter for the moment left
the trio--even the mail carrier--stunned. The latter finally said:
"Well! Well! That's sad news--'tis, for a fact. I expect he left a
tidy bit of money?"
"Poor Uncle Jethro!" murmured Miss Heppy.
"I don't know how much money Uncle Jethro had to leave," said Tobias
slowly. "But however much or little 'twas, he left it all. That's
sure."
Amos gathered up the reins.
"Course you'll both go down to the funeral?"
"'Tain't likely," Tobias said. "Somebody's got to stay and nuss this
light, and I cal'late 'twill be me."
But Miss Heppy would not hear to that. She declared it to be her
brother's duty to go and represent their branch of the family. To tell
the truth, Miss Heppy had never in her life been farther from
Clinkerport than to the East Harwich Fair, while Tobias was, of course,
like all deep-bottom sailors, "a traveled man."
Came Thursday, and Zeke Bassett arrived with his motor car to take
Tobias to the train. It was rather an early hour for a man to climb
into his Sunday suit, and the lightkeeper hated formal dress.
He should have been well used to the black suit by this time. It had
served him for state occasions for full twenty years. When it was
bought Tobias had not been so full-bodied as he was now. He was a
sturdy man, built brickwise, with more corners than curves, and the
black short-tailed coat strained at each and every seam to keep him
within its bounds.
To have buttoned it across his chest would have rent button from fabric.
It was so tight at the armholes that his elbows were held from his sides
and his shoulders squared in a most military fashion. Tight as the coat
was at these points, there were three sets of wrinkles plainly evident
at the back--two perpendicular and one set horizontal. Altogether this
ensemble of dress gave one the impression of a rather bulgy man being
slowly choked to death by his own habit.
"I don't mind wearin' 'em on the Sabbath," confessed Tobias. "To keep
in a proper frame of mind to enjoy one of Elder Hardraven's sermons,
who's as melancholy as a widder woman with six small children, a feller
needs to have something wearing on his mind b'sides his hair. It makes
me right religious feeling to put on Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes."
"For love's sake!" his sister said tartly, "you're going to a funeral.
I should think you would expect to feel religious."
"If I do," rejoined Tobias grimly, "me and the minister will be 'bout
the only ones there that feel that way. This here is going to be a
gathering of the vultures, Heppy."
"Why, Tobias, how you do talk!"
"Yep. The Pottses and their rel'tives are going to gather from far and
near to hear the reading of Uncle Jethro's will. Icivilly Potts would
never have writ us if Judge Waddams hadn't told her to. The Pottses of
Batten would like to make the fun'ral and reading of the will a
close-corporation affair, I cal'late. But 'tis evident Uncle Jethro
must have mentioned others in his last will and testament."
"Oh, Tobias!" gasped his sister, clasping her hands.
"Yep," he rejoined. "If the old captain left us something, you'll be
getting your wish, won't you?"
"Oh, don't Tobias!" she cried. "That sounds awful!"
"Oh, sugar!" drawled the practical lightkeeper, "we might's well own to
it. We never bothered Uncle Jethro none endurin' his life. He was here
and took pot-luck with us many's the time. He did seem to like your
fishballs an' biscuit, Heppy. If he hadn't had prop'ty to watch down
there at Batten, I cal'late he might nigh have lived here all the time.
So why shouldn't we have expectations?"
"Oh, Tobias!" she murmured.
"I am frank to say," the lightkeeper declared, "that I'm going down
there to Batten with expectations. Uncle Jethro is dead, and I cal'late
to show respect to his memory. If the sermon is long I'll likely go to
sleep during it. But I don't cal'late to sleep none in Judge Waddams'
office when the will is being read."
His perfectly frank acknowledgment shocked Miss Heppy. But that was
Tobias Bassett's way. He gave no hostage to Mrs. Grundy in any
particular. No odor of hypocrisy clung to anything he did or said. If
he had ever occasion to be untruthful he lied "straight from the
shoulder"--without any circumlocution.
In his Sunday clothes, however, Tobias o' Twin Rocks Light was not
likely to go to sleep under the dreariest funeral sermon that was ever
preached on the Cape. The embrace of the Iron Virgin of the Inquisition
could have been little more uncomfortable than that of his Sunday suit.
The Mariners' Chapel at Batten was set upon one of the loneliest sites
to be found along the entire length of the Cape's ocean shore.
Weather-bleached dunes and flats on which sparse herbage grew surrounded
the chapel. But the building was centrally located and tapped a
good-sized community. The gulls clamored about its squat bell-tower and
the marching sands drifted against its foundation. The northeasterly
windows which overlooked the sea were ground by the flying sand to a
pebbly roughness. The high roof beams were hand-hewn, for the chapel had
weathered at least four-score years. The pews were high-backed pens
with doors. The old-time worshipper in the Puritan House of God
preferred to be shut in from his neighbors, and he likewise kept his
religion a matter of close communion. The uncushioned seats were the
most uncomfortable that the ingenuity of man could devise.
There had been no service at the house. Such a thing as a private
funeral was not known in this community. A funeral is one of the most
important incidents in the existence of Cape Cod folks, and at Batten
(which was a clam-digging village) was held at high sea. It was
expected of the minister that he should preach a full and complete
sermon over the remains.
The bustling old undertaker, in shabby black broadcloth and with his
iron-grey hair brushed forward over his ears, giving him the look of a
super-serious monkey, marshaled the audience after the sermon to march
down one aisle past the coffin and out the other aisle.
The grim, mahogany-hued face of Captain Jethro Potts, the lines of which
even the touch of death could not soften, confronted his neighbors from
the coffin. His countenance was not composed as the dead usually are;
but looked as though he lay there in ambush, ready to jump out at one.
There was even the glitter of a beady eyeball behind the thin lashes
drawn down over his eye.
"He looks mighty like he was a-watchin' of ye," observed the undertaker
to Tobias. "I never see a corp' more nateral."
"You said it. 'Nateral' is right," agreed the lightkeeper. "I cal'late
Uncle Jethro has got something to spring on his rel'tives. He's
watchin' of 'em yet."
Whether the other members of the family had the same feeling about the
dead man's alertness or not, they saw the lid of the coffin screwed down
with complacency. Tobias was one of those who bore the coffin out to
the churchyard and lowered it into the newly opened grave, the sides of
which had to be bulkheaded to keep the sand from caving in.
Following the prayer there was a little lingering in the graveyard.
Judge Waddams had announced that he would read the dead man's will in
his office an hour later. Those interested began drifting back to the
village along the white shell road.
CHAPTER VI
DEAD MEN'S SHOES
A dozen or more grim-faced men and women were gathered in the lawyer's
office when Tobias Bassett entered. He had seen them all at the church
and grave, but there had been no opportunity to greet personally the
Pottses, the Bassetts and the Dawsons, names which for the most part
made up the roster of Captain Jethro's immediate family.
The lightkeeper proceeded to speak to each in turn. He was of no grim
disposition himself, and was sport enough in any case to shake hands
with his deadliest enemy before the battle.
His smile and cheerful word were for all, even for Icivilla Potts who
was, of all the dead captain's relatives, the one who considered that
Tobias's interest in the will should be infinitesimal. She had lived
next door to Captain Jethro's little box of a house for thirty years,
and had kept a sharp and hungry eye upon him and his affairs during all
of that time.
"Yes," she was saying, "he depended upon me for everything. If Cap'n
Jethro had been my own father I could have taken no more pains with
him."
"I don't doubt it! I don't doubt it!" put in Mrs. Andrew Dawson, as
sharp as any sparrow. "Cap'n Jethro told me that you'd interfered with
everything you could, the whole endurin' time. He said, the Cap'n did,
that you'd change the sun and moon, let alone the stars, in their
courses, if so be you could!"
"Haw! Haw!" chortled Isaac Bassett, a bewhiskered old man whose bleary
eyes and empurpled nose told the tale of much secret tippling. "Le's
speak right out in meetin' and tell all we know. Who'll be the first of
you women to tell how ye fished ter get the old Cap'n ter come and live
with ye?"
"Why, Ike Bassett! How you talk!" was the chorus of denial.
"'Tis so," chuckled Isaac. "Jethro told me once that purt' nigh every
woman that was any kin to him--and some that warn't--had offered to make
a home for him. Come to think of it, though," he added, turning a
bleary eye on Tobias, "there was one he said that hadn't bothered him
none that-a-way. How is your sister Heppy, Tobe?"
"Wal, she ain't no younger," said the lightkeeper, cheerfully.
"Otherwise she is spry."
Judge Waddams entered at this point, before the tide of family acrimony
could rise higher. He was a soft-stepping, palm-rubbing man, with a
bald crown and iron-grey burnsides. His clean-lipped mouth was a slit
no wider than the opening of his hip pocket. Yet he was not an
unsympathetic man, as his mild brown eyes betrayed.
"Well, friends, we are gathered here on an occasion that I had hoped
might be put off for a score of years yet. But Cap'n Jethro broke up
fast during the past year, as such men as he often do. When their old
hulks strike the rocks of age they go to pieces quickly.
"But Cap'n Jethro took time by the forelock and made all his property
arrangements in good season. He converted everything into cash--even to
the house he lived in to the last--and to settle his estate is going to
be a very easy matter.
"Are we all here?" proceeded Judge Waddams, looking slowly about the
room. His gaze fastened upon Tobias. "I don't see your sister, Miss
Heppy, Mr. Bassett?"
"You'll have to look twice at me, then, Judge," chuckled the
lightkeeper. "She couldn't make it to come, nohow."
Judge Waddams gravely nodded, unlocked a drawer in his table, and drew
forth a folded document of portentous appearance. There was
considerable stiffening in the chairs and a general clearing of throats.
The Judge adjusted his eyeglasses.
"Captain Jethro Potts entrusted me with the drawing of this will, and it
was sealed in my presence, and in that of two witnesses who have
absolutely no interest in the provisions of the instrument," he said
officially. "I will now read it."
The introduction and opening paragraphs held the breathless attention of
his audience. There followed itemized gifts of personal property, such
as the ancient furnishings of Captain Potts's little home--keepsakes
that might or might not satisfy a sentimental feeling in the hearts of
the recipients.
Icivilla Potts preened herself over the fact that the walnut highboy
which had been the chief piece of furniture in Captain Jethro's parlor
had been left to her by the maker of the will. Then:
"'Item: One certain two-gallon jug containing Jamaica rum, to my
mother's second cousin, Isaac Bassett--that remaining portion as he
shall not have already drunk at the unsealing of this instrument.'"
"Heh? By mighty! An' I drunk the last drop o' that rum just before we
took him to the church to-day," exploded Isaac, more in sorrow than in
anger. "Wal, I always did say that you couldn't get the best of Cap'n
Jethro Potts, dead or alive--an' this proves it!"
"Sarves ye right," declared Mrs. Andrew Dawson, as the lawyer frowned
down Isaac's interruption.
All those present--and some others--had been named for legacies of
personal property, saving Tobias. The other relatives of the dead man
began to gaze curiously upon the lightkeeper as the list was
concluded--Icivilla with scorn.
The lawyer read gravely the next partition of the will. It was to the
effect that the testator, having seen clearly that his relatives
hereinbefore named were covetous of his money, and would little consider
the sentimental value of the above legacies, bequeathed to each person
the sum of one dollar to be paid out of his estate by the administrator,
Edward Waddams.
This stunning statement smote dumb every listener save Isaac Bassett.
He burst into a raucous "Haw! haw!" and slapped his knee as he weaved
back and forth in his chair.
"By mighty!" he exploded, "I ain't the only one old Jethro fooled. Haw!
Haw!"
The high squeal of Andrew Dawson, who occasionally asserted himself in
spite of his wife, rose above the general murmur of disappointment and
anger:
"I wanter know, then, what's to become of all Jethro's money! I wanter
know _that_!"
"If you folks will keep quiet long enough for me to do so, I will read
the remainder of the instrument," Judge Waddams said sharply.
They subsided. But there were few but red and wrathful faces in the
company. Icivilla Potts was almost bursting with rage. Judge Waddams
continued.
The residue of the estate, which would amount, after all bills were
settled and fees paid, to about six thousand dollars, was to be divided
equally between Hephzibah Bassett and Tobias Bassett, of Twin Rocks
Light, the two relatives of all Captain Jethro Potts's clan, as the will
stated, who had never made him feel that they were covetous of his money
or wished him out of the way that they might get it.
"Oh, sugar!" murmured Tobias, actually disturbed. "Too bad Cap'n Jethro
felt that way about it. I don't believe _all_ of them wished him dead."
Judge Waddams looked scornfully over the company now expressing to each
other in no unmistakable terms their disappointment and chagrin, and
observed to the lightkeeper:
"There's a-many people's feet feel that itch for dead men's shoes,
Tobias. I'm glad you and Miss Heppy were favored by Cap'n Jethro. I
know of none of his family more deserving."
"Oh, sugar!" rejoined the lightkeeper, "I cal'late Cap'n Jethro didn't
much consider me and Heppy's deserts. It was to satisfy his own grudge
ag'in 'em that he done this. Still, we are as near to him in blood as
ary one of the others. And we didn't never cal'late on getting his
money, though I'm frank to say we hoped he'd give us some if he died
first.
"Wal, Judge, when you want Heppy and me to sign papers we'll meet you at
the Clinkerport Bank. This ain't no place for me just now. Icivilly
could purt' near tear me apart. I am going to escape while the escapin'
is good," Tobias concluded, chuckling.
He could not play the hypocrite by commiserating with the disappointed
crowd. Nor did he wish any of them to congratulate him when their
hearts were not at all attuned to such feeling.
"Least said, soonest mended," Tobias secretly observed. "Give 'em time
to trim their sails. But won't Heppy be purt' near surprised to death
over this? Oh, sugar!"
He was in no mood to discuss the surprising outcome of the funeral of
Captain Jethro Potts, even to the curious Clinkerport folks who knew of
the reason for his trip down the coast, and who saw him alight from the
up train that afternoon.
"Wal, how'd ye make out, Tobias?" asked Ben Durgin, the Clinkerport
station agent.
"Purt' tollerble," responded the lightkeeper cheerfully. "Though my
feet do ache some in these shoes."
"Did your Uncle Jethro leave much, Tobe?" asked a bolder spirit.
"Wal, as the feller said, he left the earth," chuckled Tobias.
"I say!" exclaimed Ezra Crouch, whose bump of inquisitiveness could only
be equaled by Amos Pickering, the mail carrier's, "didn't they read the
will, Tobias?"
"Oh, sugar! Yes. So they did," agreed the lightkeeper.
"Wal, then, who's to get his money?"
"Why--there wasn't nobody forgotten," Tobias assured him. "No, sir, not
a soul! There ain't no rel'tive of Cap'n Jethro' that can honestly say
he or she was forgotten in the will."
Nor was he more communicative when he chanced to meet Ralph Endicott
getting out of his roadster in front of the Clinkerport Inn.
"Wal, young feller!" exclaimed the lightkeeper, "what brings you over
here from Amperly? Ain't got your lady friend with ye, eh?"
"If you mean Lorna, I have _not_. She has gone to New York on a visit,
I understand. But Uncle Henry made me come over here and arrange for
one of Tadman's bungalows. He won't hear to our going anywhere else for
the summer."
"Which don't please you none, I can see," commented Tobias. "Which one
of them bungalows are you going to have?"
"I had to take the one right next to the Nicholet house," said the
disgruntled young man. "That was the only one left--it is so late in
the renting season. I was hoping to get Uncle Henry to agree to a
change for one summer, at least. But nothing doing!"
"I see," observed Tobias, grinning privately.
"Uncle Henry is all wrapped up in a new invention. He wants to be where
it is quiet. The goodness knows it's quiet enough at Clay Head."
"I cal'late. Come over to the light, Ralphie, and have a mess of
Heppy's fishballs."
"Well, I might drive you home just as well as not," the young fellow
agreed, smiling.
"You're a re'l bright boy, Ralphie, even if you can't appreciate Lorny
Nicholet."
"Now, stop that, Tobias Bassett!" exclaimed his young friend,
exasperated, "or I'll surely overturn you in the ditch," and he threw in
his clutch with a vicious jerk as the engine began to purr.
CHAPTER VII
A NEWCOMER
Tobias postponed the telling of the wonderful news to Miss Heppy until
after supper and after Ralph Endicott had wheeled away from the Twin
Rocks Light in his car. She had crowded down the question until then;
but it finally came out with a pop.
"Who did Uncle Jethro leave his money to, Tobias?" she demanded, as he
turned away from closing the door.
"To me an' you, Heppy--pretty near every last cent of it."
"Now, stop your funnin'!"
"Ain't funning. It is the truth," her brother said. "Six thousand
dollars, nearabout. And if you'd seen Icivilly Potts's face!" he
chuckled.
"For love's sake!" gasped Miss Heppy. "It can't be!"
"It _can_ be, for it _is_."
"Why, Tobias, we're rich!"
"I cal'late."
"I--I never would have believed it!" exclaimed his sister, and sinking
into her chair she threw her apron over her head and began to sob aloud.
"Oh, sugar! what you cryin' for?" Tobias demanded. "'Cause Icivilly and
them others didn't get Uncle Jethro's money? Have some sense, do! This
ain't no time for weeping. Just think of what you can do with three
thousand dollars."
"You just said six thousand!" ejaculated Miss Heppy, hastily reappearing
above the hem of her apron. "Where's half of it gone?"
"Oh, you're to get half and me half. What you going to do with your
three thousand, Heppy?"
"Just what you will do with yours, Tobias Bassett!" she exclaimed. "Put
it into the Clinkerport Bank to our joint account. We got 'most two
thousand there now. We'll have eight thousand against the time when we
can't work no more and will need it."
"Oh, sugar!" muttered her brother. "I might ha' knowed it. Your idea
of a pleasure spree always was going to the bank to make another ten
dollar deposit."
"Now, Tobias," she said with gravity, "don't you let no foolish,
spendthrift idees get a holt on your mind. I won't hear to 'em. You
never would have had a penny in the bank if it hadn't been for me."
"That's the truth," sighed Tobias. "You got me so that every time a
quarter comes my way the dove of peace on it screams for mercy. Yessir!
I'm getting to be a reg'lar miser, 'long o' you, Heppy."
The lightkeeper and his sister fully understood and appreciated each
other's virtues. That Tobias was generous to a fault and that
Hephzibah's saving disposition had long since warded him from financial
wreck, they both were well aware. Tobias publicly scorned, however, to
acknowledge this latter fact.
"I certainly shall hate to see you turn the key on every dollar of that
money, Heppy," he complained, preparing to mount to the lamp to see that
all was right up there. "We ain't never cut a dash in our lives. I
certainly should like to make a splurge for once."
"You'd fly right in the face of Providence if I wasn't here to hold you
back," declared his sister. "Experience can't teach you nothing."
"Oh, sugar! I know I've always spent my paycheck like ducks and
drakes," he chuckled. "Wal, leave it to you, Heppy, and Uncle Jethro's
money won't get much exercise, for a fact."
When he came down from the lamp he announced a change in the weather.
The wind began to whine around the tall staff and rain squalls drifted
across the sullenly heaving sea outside the Twin Rocks. The night
dissolved into a windy and tumultuous morning, and the fishing fleet
remained inside the capes.
Tobias went aloft after breakfast to clean and fill the lamp before
taking his usual morning nap. To the eastward rode a dun-colored object
that at first could scarcely be made out, even by his keen eyes.
"It's a craft of some kind--sure is!" he muttered. "But whether it's
turned bottom up, or is one o' them there motor-boats, decked over
for'ard and without no mast--Hi! There's a mast of a kind, and with a
pennant to it, or something. Mebbe 'tis the feller's shirt."
That the motor craft was in some trouble the lightkeeper was confident.
The heavy seas buffeted it without mercy. He saw that the master of the
craft could not keep steerageway upon it.
"He'll be swamped, first thing he knows," muttered the anxious
lightkeeper. "Yep! he's put up some kind of a flag for help. But,
sugar! nobody won't see him from inside the harbor--an' there ain't
another livin' craft upon the sea."
Tobias hurried down from the lamp gallery. The cove between the light
and the Clay Head was empty of all craft so early in the season. In
fact, the only boats in sight were his own sloop, still high and dry
upon the sands at the base of the lighthouse, and the heavy dory from
which he trolled for rock-fish as he chanced to have time on the outer
edge of the reefs.
He flung a word to Heppy, and she ran out and helped him launch the
dory.
"You have a care, Tobias," she cried after him as he settled the oars
between the thole-pins. "Remember you ain't so young as you used to be."
"Oh, sugar!" he returned, "I ain't likely to forget it as long as your
tongue can wag, Heppy."
The heaving gray waves roared over the rocks in great bursts of foam.
The tiny, sheltered bight between the reefs had offered a more or less
quiet launching for the dory, but the lightkeeper was soon in the midst
of flying spume, his craft tossed and buffeted by the broken water that
eddied off the points of the reef.
He drove clear of this in a few moments and pushed out to sea. Rising
on a "seventh wave"--a particularly big one--Tobias glanced over his
shoulder. The wallowing motor-boat was still right side up. There
seemed to be but one person in it. The pennant whipped from the short
staff in the stern where the figure of the man was likewise to be
distinguished.
"She's broken down complete," muttered the old lightkeeper, "and he's
keeping her head to it with an oar."
He settled himself for the long and arduous pull before him. In his
youth he had many times managed a dory--sometimes laden with fish from
the trawl-lines--in a worse sea than this. Tough in fibre as the ash
oar he drove, was Tobias Bassett. He did not overlook the possible peril
in this trip to the unmanageable motor-boat, but he had taken just such
chances often and again.
Spoondrift, dashed from the caps of the waves, drenched him. When he
turned his head now and again to make sure of his course, this spray
spat viciously in his face. Little whirlwinds swooped down upon the sea
and turned certain areas of it into boiling cauldrons of yellow foam.
"Looks like a caliker cat in a fit," was Tobias's comment on one
occasion.
But these squalls were for the most part ignored by the lightkeeper.
They were unpleasant visitations, but he knew the dory could weather
them.
He pushed on unfalteringly. Glancing from time to time over his
shoulder, Tobias saw that the occupant of the stalled motor-boat had
sunk down in her cockpit. He seemed to have lost his steering oar, and
the craft was being tossed whithersoever the sea would.
"The poor fish!" growled Tobias. "He's likely to find a watery grave
after all. Must be something the matter with him."
As the dory drew nearer the lightkeeper saw a pallid face staring at him
over the gunnel of the motor-boat. The boat had shipped considerable
water and was wallowing deep in the sea; but the man seemed unable even
to bail out.
"Crippled--must be," decided the rescuer, at last. "I'd better get to
him soon, or he'll lose all holts."
Despite the boisterous seas the lightkeeper brought his dory skilfully
alongside the tossing motor-boat. The wan face of the young fellow in it
advertised his woe.
"What's the matter with ye?" bawled Tobias.
"I've hurt my foot!" replied the man. "I guess I've sprained it."
"Oh, sugar! That might ha' kept ye from walking ashore. But what's the
matter with your boat?"
"The engine won't run, and the steering-gear is fouled. I haven't been
able to do a thing with it since daybreak."
"Hard luck!" returned Tobias. "Better come aboard here. Can ye make it
alone?"
"Can't you tow me? I don't want to lose my boat. It cost a lot of
money."
"Likely. But I ain't no sea-going towboat," said the lightkeeper. "If
I undertook to try to tow your boat, we'd bring up about to the Bahamas.
You'll have to kiss it good-bye, I cal'late."
"I'll pay you well," cried the other.
"Can't be did," said Tobias confidently. "Now, then, when I throw her
to ye, be ready to crawl over the gunnels. We ain't got no time to
jabber. Stand by!"
Seeing that the old man was firm in his intention, the castaway prepared
awkwardly to make the exchange. He was doused between the two boats,
but Tobias Bassett's strong hand helped him inboard, or a tragedy might
have been enacted. The castaway was a man in the early twenties, and
not at all robust looking. Nor did his countenance very favorably
impress the rescuer.
"Still, ye can't scurcely judge the good points of a drowned rat,"
Tobias considered, as the man he had rescued squatted in the stern of
the dory, nursing his right foot and groaning.
"Tell me all about it," the rescuer suggested. "How did it happen?"
"I left Nantucket yesterday noon, going to Boston."
"All the weather-wise folks on Nantucket must be dead, eh? Or didn't
nobody tell ye to take the inside passage?"
"Well, I thought I could make it outside before it blew really hard.
And I could have done so, only for that engine."
"I see."
"Then I fell and twisted my foot. It's swollen, you see. Can't put my
weight on it."
"Too bad," grunted the lightkeeper between strokes. "And you been
battin' off and on here all night?"
"Pretty near."
"Lucky I spied ye. It's going to blow harder before it gets through.
You didn't stand much chance of being picked up by any other craft, so
far inshore."
"I hate to lose my boat," complained the castaway.
"You like to have lost your life, young feller," said Tobias, seriously.
"You can get another motorboat easier. What's your name?"
"Conway Degger. I belong in Boston."
"Do ye, now? Come o' rich folks, I cal'late?"
"Not rich enough to throw away a motor-boat like that."
"Oh, sugar! I s'pose not. If the wind shifts she may come ashore."
"She'll be smashed up."
"Mebbe not past mending," said Tobias, trying to be comforting.
"Anyhow, you be glad, young feller, that ye got out of it as slick as ye
did."
"I don't want you to think I'm ungrateful," groaned Degger, caressing
his bruised foot. "But motor-boats don't grow on bushes."
"Never thought they did. Or I should try if one o' them bushes would
grow in Heppy's garden," chuckled the lightkeeper.
It was a long and hard pull to make the lighthouse landing. It was near
noon, and Tobias had rowed steadily for four hours, when the dory
grounded upon the sands with the surf roaring over the reefs between
which he had skilfully steered.
"Wal, we made it, didn't we?" sighed the lightkeeper, with a measure of
sarcasm quite lost upon Mr. Degger. "One spell I didn't know as we
would--you bein' crippled and helpless like you be."
"I am a thousand times obliged to you, Skipper," said Degger, quite
warmly, as he cautiously stood on one foot like a sandhill crane. "I
don't know how to thank you."
"No, I see ye don't," observed Tobias. "But ne'er mind. I got an attic
full of 'thank-yous.' Don't try to give me no more. Come up to the
light and have dinner. I smell fish chowder, and I do think my Sister
Heppy can make fish chowder 'bout right."
Conway Degger evidently agreed with the lightkeeper regarding Miss
Heppy's cooking. After Tobias had aided the cripple to hop up the
strand and to the light, and had introduced him to Miss Heppy, Degger
proceeded to make himself quite at home. Miss Heppy plodded up the
spiral stairway to the lamp room after dinner to consult with her
brother.
"He wants I should take him to board for a spell," she said. "He seems
a civil spoken sort of boy. I s'pose we could put him in the spare
room, now that you've finally got new winder-sashes for it."
"Wal, I s'pose you could."
"He wants to stay till his foot gets better. It's as black as your hat.
I been bandaging it."
"Did he want a bandage put on his pocketbook, too?"
"Now, Tobias! He's going to pay me four dollars."
"For the bandage?"
"A week. For his board."
"That's mighty good----"
"Why----"
"For _him_," finished the lightkeeper. "But it's your business, Heppy,
not mine. Seein's we are only going to have 'bout eight thousand
dollars in the bank, I presume you'd better take boarders to help out."
"Now, Tobias Bassett! it behooves us to make money while we may. We
ain't gettin' any younger."
"I agree with you," said her brother. "And I don't believe we'll be
wickedly overburdened with all the money you make out of this Degger
feller."
For Tobias had judged fairly accurately that young man's idiosyncrasies.
There was nothing of the spendthrift about Mr. Conway Degger.
CHAPTER VIII
PHILOSOPHY AND OTHER THINGS
Tobias Bassett was a social soul and the "boarder," as he insisted upon
calling the young man he had rescued from the motor-boat, was not
tongue-tied. Get Degger set on a course, as Tobias termed it, relating
to his own exploits, and the young fellow became more than voluble.
The lightkeeper and Miss Heppy certainly were surprised to learn that
their visitor was acquainted with the Nicholets.
"You don't mean to tell me that that is the Nicholets' summer home up on
that bluff? That first one yonder?" said the young man.
"That's it," replied Tobias, sitting on the bench beside the lighthouse
door to smoke an after-supper pipe. "I see the storm shutters are down.
They'll be coming soon, I cal'late."
"And Miss Lorna comes here every summer? A charming girl."
Tobias looked at him fixedly.
"I don't suppose you'd be knowing Ralph Endicott? The Endicotts will
occupy the house next to the Nicholets."
"The Endicotts of Amperly?"
"Them's the ones. Ralph is the one I mean. Feller 'bout your age,
mebbe."
"If it is the Ralph Endicott I know," said Degger, the expression of his
face changing, "he and I were at Harvard together."
"You don't say!" Tobias's eyes twinkled. The reason for the familiar
sound of the boarder's name was suddenly explained. This was the "Conny
Degger" Ralph had spoken of, for whose society Lorna had once shown a
penchant. "I cal'late you know Ralph pretty well, then?" insinuated the
lightkeeper.
"Oh, I was never chummy with Ralph Endicott," Degger observed. "He and
I were scarcely in the same set." Which was strictly true. Nobody
could doubt it. Then he verged on rather thin ice: "You see, Ralph's
kind are high-flyers." He dropped his voice a notch and glanced around
to make sure that Miss Heppy was not within hearing. "Fellows like
Ralph Endicott don't go to college altogether to study."
"I give it as my opinion," admitted Tobias, placidly smoking, "that some
of 'em go mostly to learn about the breeds o' bulldogs--both pipes and
canine. And they study how to play cards, and to dress as fancy as a
nigger minstrel. I've seen some of that kind. But Ralph----"
"No. He did not run to those foibles, I believe. But there was a
girl--well, you know how it is with some fellows, Skipper. Every pretty
face attracts them, and there are plenty of girls of light ideas in
every college town. Cambridge is no exception."
"Oh, sugar!" ejaculated the lightkeeper. "I wouldn't think it of
Ralph."
"Sly boy!" chuckled Conny Degger grinning. "Guess his folks never knew
much about it. They are straight-laced, I fancy. But he was seen a
good deal with Cora Devine--and she was not all she should be."
"Oh, sugar!" exclaimed Tobias again. "Maybe 'twas only a boy and girl
flirtation."
"_She_ was no innocent kid. Believe me, Skipper, that Devine girl knew
her way about. Why, I was told she'd been trooping with a burlesque
show. Ralph Endicott made a perfect jack of himself over her. It was
even rumored that they ran off and were married once when he was
half-stewed."
Tobias jumped on the bench and uttered a startled exclamation.
"What is the matter, Skipper?"
"Must o' been one of them pesky sandfleas," muttered the lightkeeper.
"Wal, go on with your tale o' crime."
"Ha! Ha! No crime about it. Just Endicott's foolishness. If he did
marry her, I'm sorry for him. She'll be bobbing up to confront him
later. Such girls always do. They are expensive trimmings to a fellow's
college career."
"I cal'late," agreed Tobias, more calmly.
But later he sounded Heppy on a topic which he had not touched upon
since back in the late winter when Lorna and Ralph had been stormbound
at the light.
"Didn't Lorny say something to you about Ralph paying 'tentions to some
gal at college? Wasn't she some worked up about it?"
"For love's sake, Tobias, she never spoke as though she'd feel jealous
any if Ralph Endicott had forty girls! I should say not! She did
mention that Ralph had some love affair when he was at school. But she
called it puppy love," concluded Miss Heppy, with a sniff.
"Humph! Sort o' scorned it, did she? It didn't seem to worry her
none?"
"Worry her? I should say not! But I guess 'twas only gossip at that.
I don't believe Ralph Endicott is the sort of a boy to play fast and
loose with any girl."
"Does seem as though we feel about alike on that score, Heppy,"
reflected her brother. "Ralph, it strikes me, is purt' sound timber.
But I wonder, now, where Lorna Nicholet got her information about
Ralph's chasing around after that chorus gal? Does seem as though such a
story _might_ be one o' the things that makes Lorna so determined to cut
Ralph adrift. Oh, sugar!"
But these final reflections of the lightkeeper were inaudible. He had
by no means lost interest in his matchmaking intrigue regarding the two
young people who he was convinced were "jest about made for each other."
His scheme--if scheme he had--had been in abeyance all these weeks. Now
that the families of the young people were about to take up their
residence on the Clay Head, he proposed to enter upon a more active
campaign for what he believed to be the happiness of all concerned.
Not alone was Miss Heppy aware of the long-past bond of affection
between Miss Ida Nicholet and Ralph's Uncle Henry. Tobias Bassett had
been just as observant as his sister--or anybody else.
Like others, he had wondered twenty years before why the then young
Professor Endicott had not pursued with more vigor the charming, if
independent, Ida Nicholet, and made her his bride. _There_ was a romance
nipped in the bud which Tobias always felt he might have mended--"if
he'd put his mind to it."
In any case he determined not to see the ship of Ralph and Lorna's
happiness cast on the rocks if he could help it. He felt that it might
be within his power to avert such disaster. The strategic yeast of the
true matchmaker began to stir within him.
"Miss Ida," as everybody called Lorna's assertive aunt, could not be
long in any place without making her presence felt. Her original and
independent character never failed to make its impress upon all
domestic, as well as other, affairs. The Nicholet menage was run like
clockwork. Miss Ida was the clock. Everything at the big house on Clay
Head was soon working smoothly, and Miss Ida could look about.
She was a tall, free-striding, graceful woman without a gray thread in
her abundant dark hair. She piled that hair low at the back of her head,
and her neck and throat were like milk, and flawless.
When she came across the barrens under her rose-tinted parasol to see
Miss Heppy at the Light, her plain morning dress was arranged as
carefully as a ball gown would be on another woman. In addition, her
pleasant eyes and round, firm chin, together with her Junoesque figure,
made her appearance most attractive.
"Well, Heppy, how do you do?" she asked, her voice mellow and full.
"How has the winter gone with you?"
"'Bout the same as usual, Miss Ida," the lightkeeper's sister replied.
"You _be_ a pretty sight. None o' the young ones can put anything over
you, Miss Ida. You ain't got a wrinkle or a fleck of gray in your
head."
Miss Ida laughed. "I'm forty-two. I'm frank to admit it. Why
shouldn't a woman be well preserved and in good health at my age if she
has never made herself a slave to some man?"
"For love's sake! As for _that_, I ain't never been married. But look
at my wrinkles!"
"Those are creases, not wrinkles, in your case, Heppy," laughed the
visitor. "You are getting too fat. And you have been practically a
slave for Tobias."
"Sure she has," agreed the lightkeeper grinning. "I've been thinking of
putting a nose-ring on her. She's abused, all right."
"You hush, Tobias! I ain't slaved for nobody _but_ him, Miss Ida,"
declared Hephzibah warmly. "While you, Miss Ida, have shouldered the
responsibility for your brother and all his family. If you'd married,"
added the longshore woman wisely, "like enough you wouldn't have had
nowhere near so big a family to care for."
"I wonder?" laughed the other woman. Yet her expressive countenance
became immediately serious. "My family is pretty well grown now, Heppy.
I am sure even Lorna is old enough to make a nest for herself. She has
been out two years."
"Out o' what?" Tobias asked, taking the pipe from his mouth and staring.
"Looks to me as though she was well supplied with most everything a
young gal ought to have, an' wasn't out o' nothing."
"I mean she has been in society two years."
"Oh, sugar! That's a case, is it, of when you're _out_, you're _in_?"
chuckled the lightkeeper. "I give it as my opinion that the only thing
Lorny lacks is a good husband."
Miss Ida flushed softly. "I hope she will see the advisability of
choosing wisely in that matter," the aunt said, speaking intimately to
these two old friends, at the expression of whose interest in her family
affairs she was far too sensible to take offence.
"Yes," she pursued. "You know what hopes her father and I have for her.
An eminently fitting alliance. And Ralph is a manly fellow. It does
seem as though those two were quite made for each other."
"Humph! Yes. 'Twould seem so," muttered Tobias. "But it does appear
sometimes as though the very things that _ought_ to be don't somehow
come around to happen."
"You are a philosopher, Tobias."
"Dunno as that's a compliment, Miss Ida," rejoined the lightkeeper, his
eyes twinkling. "I got all my wits about me yet, and most of them
philosophers you hear tell about ain't. They get on some hobby and ride
it to death. And a man ain't really broad-minded unless he can see both
sides to a question.
"Now, takin' the chances for and against your Lorna and Ralph Endicott
marryin'. What would you say, Miss Ida, was the one best bet?"
He looked up at her shrewdly, holding his pipe with that familiar
gesture of his. Miss Ida's gravity grew more profound.
"I believe you and Heppy must know that of late my niece and Ralph have
seemed to fret one another?" she queried.
"They give themselves away some when they stopped over here that time
they got stalled in Ralph's car," admitted Tobias. "Warn't it jest a
leetle spat?"
"I am afraid not. They have not seemed the same since. And I am afraid
it is Lorna's fault," sighed Miss Ida. "She is so hot-tempered. I have
warned her. The families have never considered any other possible
outcome but an alliance between Lorna and Ralph. I have told her so."
"I cal'late you have," murmured Tobias softly, pulling on his pipe
again.
"When she returns from New York--as she will in a day or two--I shall
put the matter to her very strongly. If you and Heppy have noticed
their drifting asunder, other people must have noticed it too. The
Nicholets would be utterly disgraced if it were said that Ralph
Endicott--er--dropped Lorna. And if he should, I fear it will be my
niece's own fault."
When she was gone Tobias snorted suddenly.
"Oh, sugar!" he said. "If I scorch 'em a mite graced, I want to know,
when Miss Ida's love affair with Professor Endicott busted up? Seems to
me that leetle gal, Lorny, is going to be put upon by her folks. _That_
won't do."
"Now, do try to mind your own business, Tobias," advised his sister,
comfortably rocking. "I know it will be hard for you to do so. But
you'll burn your fingers, like enough, if you don't."
The lightkeeper spread out his gnarled, work-blunted fingers to observe
them reflectively.
"Oh, sugar!" he said. "If I scorch 'em a mite helping that leetle gal
and Ralph Endicott out o' their muss, what's the odds, Heppy? You know,
we're put here to help each other."
"That is what most folks say that have an itch for minding other
people's business. Now, you have a care what you do, Tobias Bassett."
CHAPTER IX
THE DROP OF WORMWOOD
When Lorna Nicholet first appeared at the Twin Rocks Light after
arriving at her summer home, she gave no evidence of needing the
lightkeeper's--or any other person's--good offices. She was her usual
brisk, contented and fun-loving self.
Conway Degger chanced to be present when Lorna came to the Light. Miss
Ida had not seen the young man when she had called on Tobias and Heppy.
"What a surprise, Mr. Degger!" the girl said, giving him a warmly
welcoming hand. "I had no idea you were in this locality."
"I am a waif from the sea, Miss Nicholet," he told her. "You ask the
skipper, here, about it. I can never thank him enough. And Miss Heppy,
too, who has so kindly taken me in and ministered to my well-being."
"He says it pretty, don't he now?" whispered Miss Heppy to Tobias.
"Pretty is as pretty does," muttered the lightkeeper. "Somehow them
fanciful speeches of his'n don't bait much trawl with me."
But Miss Heppy considered Conny Degger quite worthy of approval. Lorna
found him interesting, too. Perhaps the very fact that her Aunt Ida had
opposed her acquaintance with the young man caused Lorna to be the more
contrary. And, really, Degger betrayed some rather attractive traits.
During the next few days the girl and the boarder at Twin Rocks Light
became close companions. They went fishing together in Tobias's dory.
They tramped the beach as far as the Lower Trillion life-saving station,
Degger's sprained foot being quite well again. And the young man
appeared regularly on the Clay Head bathing beach at the morning bathing
hour.
Among the few families already at the resort, who made up a little
social world of their own, it soon became a topic of conversation--this
companionship of Lorna Nicholet and Conny Degger. Particularly was it
commented upon, because for so many summers the girl and Ralph Endicott
had been such close chums.
Although the Endicotts had already arrived at the Clay Head, Ralph did
not at once put in an appearance. This fact perhaps threw Lorna the
more into Conny Degger's company. Tongues began to wag.
"I should say," squeaked Amos Pickering, who was a very busy man these
days because of the influx of summer visitors, "that Lorny Nicholet has
got another feller. That long-laiged Endicott boy's always been tagging
her other summers. Now this here boarder you got, Tobias, is stickin'
to her like a barnacle. What d'ye think it'll amount to?"
"I give it as my opinion," retorted the lightkeeper, pursing his lips,
"that it won't add none to your burdens, Amos. I don't see no weddin'
invitations in the offing for you to distribute."
"She's jest a-flirtin', is she?"
"Like a sandpiper," declared Tobias. "Keepin' her hand in as ye might
say. There ain't a mite o' harm in Lorny, but she's got to have some
amusement."
He was nevertheless glad to see Ralph arrive. The lightkeeper believed
that Lorna would much better have her old friend at hand to compare
Degger with.
Had he been present at the first meeting of the trio, Tobias Bassett
might have experienced some doubt of the value after all of such
comparison. Lorna greeted Ralph very coolly. She and Degger were about
to launch the lightkeeper's dory for a fishing trip when Ralph came
striding down from the Clay Head.
"'Lo, Ralph," was the girl's careless hail. "Did you put the bait-pail
in, Mr. Degger?"
"All right, Miss Lorna. It's right here. How do, Endicott?"
"I heard you were here, Degger," said Ralph, merely nodding to Lorna.
"What's running now?"
"Mostly squeteague and fluke," replied the girl. "Occasionally a tautog
on rocky bottom. No snappers yet."
"Nothing worthy of Your Majesty's prowess," gibed Degger. "I understand
you are a real fisherman," and he pushed off the boat.
Ralph's gaze narrowed and his brow clouded. He sat down on the sand.
There was room enough in the dory for a third; but neither of them had
suggested his joining them.
Perhaps Ralph's attitude was not exactly that of a dog in the manger.
But it did trouble him to see his erstwhile chum so friendly with Conny
Degger. Not that he knew of anything actually bad about the fellow.
Merely, he had seemed so inconsequential and, at times, rather vulgar.
Ralph was quite aware that some men are one thing to their masculine
friends while they act entirely differently in the company of women.
Degger, he thought, was of that kind. He hated to see Lorna "mixing
up," as he termed it, with the fellow.
He was not wise enough--wise in women's ways--to hide this feeling from
Lorna's sharp vision. She flattered herself that her old friend was
displaying jealousy. This supposition could not fail to please her.
Ralph had become such a nuisance in her opinion, that she was determined
to show him that she could easily attract other men. She would flout
him and his whole family--as well as her own--by playing about with
Conny Degger.
"Ralph thinks that he is the only man who ever pays me any attention,"
Lorna secretly ruminated. "And goodness knows, he has hung around so
close that almost everybody else has been driven off. Conceited! That
is just what Ralph Endicott is. Always looking over a tall collar at the
rest of the world. If he didn't believe that Adam's last name was
Endicott he never would admit relationship with the first of the race!
Humph!"
So she treated Degger particularly nicely on this occasion. She
overlooked some rather crude things about the young man, and from the
shore where Ralph lay she appeared to be having a most delightful time
with her fishing partner.
It made her angry to see how Ralph hung around. She delayed coming
ashore as long as she could, hoping he would go away. She did not want
a scene with him.
Ralph, however, did not even rise from his recumbent position when the
fishing party beached the dory on the strand between the out-thrust
reefs. Lorna hurried away, and Ralph did not attempt to join her, as she
had feared he would. Instead, he got up slowly and aided Degger draw up
the lightkeeper's dory.
"Awf'ly nice girl, that," said Degger boldly.
"Yes."
"Good sport, too. I never met a nicer girl."
"I don't believe you ever did," said the other, his level gaze boring
Degger rather unpleasantly.
"Oh, I don't know!" ejaculated Degger, with sudden warmth and a sneer on
his lips. "I've known a lot of girls----"
"But not of her kind," broke in Ralph. "And don't you think it! Watch
your step with Lorna."
"What's the matter with you, Endicott?" snapped Degger. "I don't have
to take orders from you."
"Not as long as you go straight you don't," Ralph assured him. "But we
all think too much of Lorna Nicholet around her to see anybody try to
misbehave with her."
"Oh--you----"
"I know a few things about you. It's none of my business what you try
out with other girls," Ralph hastily added. "But you be mighty careful
with Lorna."
He turned on his heel then and strode away. Degger sneered after him.
"Think's he is the Great I Am!" he muttered. "You'd think he owned the
girl. And putting on his airs with _me_!" Degger's scowl grew darker
as he added: "Guess the beggar wants me to pay up. That is like these
rich fellows. They are mighty free offering to lend you money; but they
make you feel the obligation forever after."
Now, Conway Degger quite wronged Ralph on this point. The latter had
entirely forgotten that Degger was in his debt from some time back in
their college days.
Indeed, Ralph Endicott was never one to trouble about money, for he
never remembered putting his hand into his pocket when he wanted that
commodity without finding it. His family had been wealthy for
generations. Just how well-to-do they were in the present generation he
had never troubled to ask. Uncle Henry and the family attorneys
attended to all that.
It did seem odd that just at this time the money matters of other people
should begin to disturb Ralph Endicott. Not that he bothered his head
about Conny Degger's affairs. It was somebody entirely different of
whose financial difficulties he was unexpectedly made aware.
Coming up from the shore following his brief conversation with Degger,
Ralph found the old lightkeeper mending a seine outside the lighthouse
door.
"Wal, now," said Tobias, "ye look some het up. I seen ye soaking
yourself out there on the sand in the sun, and I cal'lated you'd look
like a b'iled lobster when you come up. And you do."
Ralph knew that it was an angry flush Tobias saw on his face. He
grinned ruefully.
"More than the sun to make a fellow's blood boil, Mr. Bassett,
sometimes."
"Oh, sugar!" rejoined the lightkeeper. "Ye don't let that feller bother
ye none, do you, Ralph?"
"I do not like him much," the young man said stiffly.
"You mean you don't like him to be fooling around Lorny, hey?" said
Tobias, his head shrewdly on one side.
"It is none of _my_ business----"
"Course it is! Course it is!" exclaimed the lightkeeper vigorously.
"I've just about sized this Degger feller up, I cal'late. His folks
ain't any too well off, and I bet he'll never get round-shouldered
carrying his money around."
"What has that to do with it, Mr. Bassett?" demanded Ralph, rather
startled.
"Why, Lorny can't afford to waste her time with a feller like him," the
lightkeeper declared coolly. "She's got to marry somebody with money. I
know by the way Miss Ida was talkin' the other day over here, she was
worried about Lorny marrying."
"What _do_ you mean, Tobias Bassett?" ejaculated Ralph, dropping down on
the bench beside him.
"Why, I cal'late you know more about the Nicholets' affairs than I do."
"I don't understand you at all," said the young man. "Do you mean to
say----"
"That Lorny's got to marry money--yep!" exclaimed Tobias, pursing his
lips and nodding. "It 'ud ease matters a whole lot for Miss Ida and
Lorny's father if she gets a rich husband. Why, Ralph! I s'posed you
knowed _that_."
"I never dreamed it!"
"Cal'late that is why they were so anxious for you and her to make a
match of it," pursued the lightkeeper. "O' course, she don't know
nothing about it. But I give it as my opinion that a rich husband for
Lorny is going to take a great burden off the shoulders of her family."
"You amaze me." Ralph's face was a study.
"So ye see," said Tobias, with a cheerfulness that grated on Ralph's
nerves, "this Degger feller, unless he's got more money than he's showed
any sign of having, ain't got no chance with Lorna. Leastways," he
added, "not with her folks."
"I--I never thought of it before," said Ralph reflectively, "but I do
not think Degger has much money."
"Then he'd better be shooed away from the vicinity, as ye might say,"
the matchmaker said vigorously. "For if you air bound not to marry her
yourself, Ralph, no use her fallin' into the lap of a poor man."
"You know very well Lorna wouldn't marry me, Tobias Bassett!" exclaimed
Ralph angrily. "You needn't talk as though _I_ were at fault."
"Oh, sugar! I don't see you fallin' over your own feet none, young man,
to _make_ her marry ye."
"Don't you remember how she talked to me that night we were stormbound
here? Didn't she fairly drive me out of the lighthouse right at the
worst of the gale? You said yourself it wasn't a night fit for a dog to
be out in. If I'd undertaken to walk to Clinkerport they'd have found
me along the road somewhere, frozen stiff! That's all she cared about
me."
"Oh, sugar!" said Tobias again, "I wouldn't hold that against her.
She's spirited, Lorny is. She was mad with you----"
"I should say she was!"
"But she didn't re'lly mean it," pursued the lightkeeper. "If she had
thought you were in danger she'd never driv' you out. I'm sartain sure,
Ralph, that she thinks a heap of you."
"She shows it!"
"No, she don't show it. No more than you show how you re'lly feel
toward her."
"Huh!"
"Oh, I know," declared Tobias wagging a confident head. "You wouldn't
see no harm come to Lorny. That's why I tell you as I do that this
Degger--'nless he's a sight richer than he 'pears to be--ain't got no
business shining around her. I give it as my opinion that Lorna's
friends have got to come to her rescue and see that she marries a rich
man."
He stopped right there. Tobias Bassett was wise in his iniquity.
Without coming out unequivocally and stating in so many words that the
Nicholets had lost the greater part of their wealth, he had intimated
enough to trouble the waters of Ralph's mind.
The latter could not visualize the luxury-loving, softly-bred girl as a
poor man's wife. Why, Lorna never could in this world endure privation,
or even a lack of those things which only money--and plenty of it--could
purchase.
"Poor girl!" was the young man's secret thought. "She has always
expected to have plenty of money in her own right some day. Wonder what
John Nicholet has been doing with the family fortune? Speculating, I
bet! He's a visionary chap.
"But--but it seems terrible for Lorna if she must marry wealth to save
the family from penury. And she all unconscious of the fate in store
for her. It is a wicked, wicked shame!"
CHAPTER X
STARTING SOMETHING
It was long before this that the lightkeeper and his sister had been put
in possession of Jethro Potts' personal estate by Judge Waddams. The
nine days' wonder of that happening was past for Clinkerport folk, and
as the old couple made no splurge with their fortune, the neighbors put
aside the matter for fresher gossip.
With a stern hand Miss Heppy had put down incipient rebellion on her
brother's part. The legacy added to what they already had in the bank
made "just a little bit more."
"And that's purt' average unsatisfying," complained Tobias on occasion.
"You mean to tell me, Tobias Bassett, that it ain't a satisfying feeling
to know you got nigh eight thousand dollars in the bank?"
"It's jest so much more of a temptation to Arad Thompson," sighed her
brother. "Dunno as we'd be found guiltless if the bank did bust and
Arad Thompson should run off with the funds."
"I cal'late he won't run far in that wheel chair," said Heppy, perhaps
with additional confidence because of the bank president's affliction.
However, their simple minds could not fail to be fixed upon the nest-egg
a good part of the time. When one has worked and scraped to get together
a few dollars over a long stretch of years, the sudden access of
comparative riches cannot fail to become and continue to be a very
important topic of thought.
Whenever Tobias took his pay check to the bank and drew the cash needed
for their household expenses, he secretly desired to ask the cashier,
Mr. Bentley, to let him see that eight thousand in real money so as to
be sure the bank was still safely guarding it.
Tobias usually went to Clinkerport in the sloop _Marybird_ on these
marketing expeditions, now that the weather was good. Conny Degger on a
certain occasion went with him.
Degger's salvage from the wrecked motor-boat had been an oar, one
seat-cushion, and a broken pennant staff. In other words the craft had
been a total loss. And this fact appeared to worry the boarder
considerably.
He paid his weekly stipend of four dollars to Miss Heppy with admirable
promptness, and he had sent for a fairly well-filled trunk, so that he
made a presentable appearance in public. But he seemed to be, as Tobias
had hinted to Ralph, not overburdened with money.
At least, he spent little in the sight of the lightkeeper. He did not
even treat the latter to a good cigar, as might have been expected when
Tobias gave him passage in the _Marybird_ to and from Clinkerport.
"He ain't no three-minute egg, that's sure," was the lightkeeper's
comment to his sister. "He's hard-boiled all right."
Nor did Degger seem to make himself popular with the loafers around the
Clinkerport Inn and the livery stable, as so many of the youthful summer
visitors did. On one occasion, however, Tobias heard, and saw the
boarder in earnest conference with a man who seemed to be quite well
acquainted in Clinkerport, although he was not a resident.
"Well, Conny, take it from me," said this individual, "somebody has got
to pay for that motor-boat. When a fellow treats me right I'm the
easiest person who ever did another a good turn. But they say patience
runs out of virtue after a while. That's my case exactly."
"But I haven't any money to spare at present, Burtwell," complained
Degger, quite loud enough for the lightkeeper to hear.
"Get busy then and find some. How do you manage to live, I want to
know?"
"On expectations," Degger rejoined airily.
"Huh! I've seen her. She _looks_ all to the good," Burtwell said
coarsely. "Folks rich, I suppose?"
"As cream," admitted the optimistic Degger.
"And you expect to make a killing, Con?"
"I fancy I am not altogether wasting my time," the younger man drawled
in a tone that made Tobias want to kick him.
"Well," Burtwell said, "I can't afford to wait forever for the money I
had to advance on that motor-boat transaction. I tell you there is a
limit to my patience. But there may be a way for you to help me--and
yourself--to some of the wherewithal."
The lightkeeper took his packages then and passed the couple on the
store porch. He did not glance at Degger, nor did he wait for the
fellow to join him at the dock. He got under way in the _Marybird_ and
let the boarder exercise his legs on the shell road if he wanted to get
back to the Light for supper.
"Something's got to be done," ruminated Tobias, tacking for the cove, in
which he moored the sloop hard by the lighthouse. "This here feller may
be able to rush Lorny an' tie her up to some contract 'fore she knows
what he's about. He seems a'mighty sure of himself.
"I cal'late," pursued the lightkeeper, "that as the angels fear to tread
on this matrimonial path--as Heppy says--it's up to me to do so. I
ain't going to see little Lorny get stung in no marriage game. Nor yet
I don't mean Ralph shall lose all holts. Something's got to be done."
It seemed as though circumstances played into his hands. Tobias was
conceited enough perhaps to believe that he really was foredoomed to act
the part of matchmaker. At any rate, there was Lorna on the shore when
the _Marybird_ drifted in to her moorings, the site of which was marked
by a nail keg.
Tobias picked up the bight of the anchor cable and looped it upon a
becket, taking a turn or two for safety. Then he drew up the dory, put
aboard his purchases, locked the _Marybird's_ cabin, and sculled ashore.
Lorna smiled upon him.
"Nice day, Lorny."
"So it is, Mr. Bassett. Didn't Mr. Degger come home with you?"
"Oh, sugar! I forgot all about him, didn't I? Did you want to see him
partic'lar, Lorny?"
"Just wanted somebody to play with," she confessed.
"Wal! wal! you air to be pitied," he said. "Won't Ralph do?"
She made him a little face, but flushed too.
"Ralph Endicott is no fun any more. He's as grouchy as a sore-headed
bear."
"I want to know!"
"Yes. He's going away soon, anyway, I understand. And I'm glad of it,"
the girl declared.
"Oh, sugar! I suppose that's so," reflected Tobias, filling his pipe.
"Wal, a feller can't always appear chirpy an' lively when things is
going wrong with him."
She flashed him a look of suspicion. "What do you mean by that, Tobias
Bassett?"
"Er--wal, like enough he don't feel any too happy. I give it as my
opinion that none of the Endicotts do, right now. Wal!"
He sighed reflectively, and slowly pulled on his pipe to get it well
alight. Lorna continued to stare at him, a little puzzled frown marring
her brow.
"You are the most mysterious person," she said. "Tell me straight out
what you mean."
"Oh, sugar! I don't guess I need to tell you what Ralph's trouble is."
She flushed more deeply then, and her eyes began to spark. "If you are
hinting that I have anything to do with making Ralph Endicott
unhappy----"
"Not a-tall! Not a-tall!" the lightkeeper hastened to say. "But I
reckoned you'd know full as much about the Endicott's private affairs as
I do."
"Mr. Bassett! what _is_ it?"
"Why, ain't you even heard about it?" exclaimed the old fellow most
innocently. "Didn't nobody tell you how the Endicotts have lost purt'
near all their money? Oh, sugar! ain't you heard?"
"Never!"
"Wal, they do say Henry Endicott has jest about wrecked the family
fortune putterin' with them inventions of his. 'Tain't to be wondered
at. Might have been expected. Foolin' away both time and money.
Yessir!"
Each of these phrases was emitted between puffs of tobacco smoke which
served as a screen for the expression on the lightkeeper's countenance.
"Lost their money? The Endicotts? You can't mean it!" ejaculated
Lorna.
"Does seem too bad," went on Tobias. "'Twarn't Ralph's fault, of
course. But he feels it, I cal'late, as bad as any of 'em. Like enough
he's goin' away from here, like you say, to get him a job of work. I
shouldn't wonder," sighed the guileful Tobias.
"Why, Mr. Bassett, this is _awful_!" There was real sympathy in Lorna's
shocked tone.
"I cal'late that if your Aunt Ida did have a liking for Professor
Endicott years ago she was wise to turn him down. Yes'm. She likely
foresaw the snarl that was comin' through Henry's puttering with these
inventions. Your Aunt Ida is a wise woman, Lorny."
"Why, Mr. Bassett!" ejaculated Lorna, some displeasure in both her tone
and look, "Aunt Ida is not like that. She is the least mercenary person
I know."
"Wal, p'r'aps. I don't know. But she'll mebbe be just as well
satisfied now that you did turn Ralph down. Of course, a feller that's
got to work for his livin'--has his own way to make in the
world--wouldn't do for you."
"I don't know what you mean, Mr. Bassett," cried the girl, her head
high, her cheeks red, and already tight-lipped with wrath. "You have no
right to say that."
"Oh, sugar! I warn't meaning nothing out the way," said Tobias easily.
"It's a good thing you and Ralphie got over your foolishness 'bout each
other. Now, ain't it so?"
"You have no right--I won't listen--oh, Tobias Bassett! Is it really so
that the Endicotts are poor? Has Ralph really got to go to work? Why!
he never hinted at such a thing when he told me he was going away."
"Guess you ain't been showing him much sympathy, have ye?" rejoined the
callous Tobias. "But now see here!" His manner changed suddenly.
"Don't you go and run off to him and say that I told you all this. I
cal'late the Endicotts wouldn't be likely to want all the world and
Dick's hat band to know they'd lost their money. Ralph's proud--you
know he is."
"Oh, that is true," agreed Lorna, displaying much disturbance of mind.
"Ralph is the proudest fellow! It's in the Endicott blood. I suppose
they would starve before they would tell their dearest friends of the
straits they are in."
"I cal'late," agreed the quite unruffled lightkeeper.
"Perhaps that is what has made Ralph so grouchy."
"I shouldn't wonder a mite."
"I--I really can't think what to do," murmured Lorna.
"Oh, sugar! you can't do anything, child. Ralph wouldn't let you help
him. He wouldn't borrow money of a girl. Why, he wouldn't let me lend
him any," and the lightkeeper nodded his head ponderously.
It was plain that what he had said had made its impression on Lorna
Nicholet's mind. She wandered away, deep in thought and forgetting all
about Conny Degger.
"I cal'late," muttered Tobias, "I have started something at last. Now,
let 'er simmer!"
CHAPTER XI
THE BLACK SQUALL
Lorna Nicholet was of a joyous heart--a joy-bringer and a joy-giver.
She had spent a happy childhood. Miss Ida's firm government had been
the very best bringing up the girl could have had, for not only was she
of a lightsome disposition, but she was inclined to carry that chief
trait of her character to recklessness.
Left to herself, impulse would more often have guided her
decisions--both momentous and unimportant--than the really good sense
with which she was endowed. She was a charming mixture of infantile
trustfulness and downright practicality. She was wont to trust in the
good intentions of everybody, yet she often shrewdly evaded pitfalls
that girls of her cheerfully optimistic type sometimes get into.
Her happy association with Ralph Endicott caused Lorna to look upon all
young men as being like her chum. Because Ralph was chivalrous and a
"good fellow," Lorna believed such was the character of all young men.
She treated Conway Degger as she always had Ralph. Degger was shrewd
enough (or was it because of the warning word Ralph had once given him?)
in most instances to pattern his attitude after the example set by the
frank and clean-minded Endicott.
Occasionally there were crudities shown in Degger's nature that rather
shocked the gently bred Lorna. But she overlooked these lapses on his
part, and their companionship was in the main that of two healthy-minded
boys, rather than that of a young man and a young woman.
She had insisted upon blaming Ralph Endicott for the determination of
their families to force Ralph and herself into an engagement. She felt
that if he had "put his foot down like a man" and refused to hear of any
such arrangement the Endicotts and the Nicholets, in conclave assembled,
would give up the idea. That she had not yet declared in her own
household that she scorned Ralph and would not marry him, did not count
in her opinion. If Ralph was a real man he would not put such a burden
upon her. And then, secretly, she knew her Aunt Ida and her father
would take any such declaration on her part very lightly indeed.
"Lorna is very young yet, John," Miss Ida said to Lorna's father, and in
the girl's hearing. "Too young to really know her own mind. But
surely, when she throws off this childishness of thought, she must agree
with us that there is only one proper course to pursue. Ralph is a
splendid boy, and his family is irreproachable."
"He's a good deal like his Uncle Henry, I should say," observed John
Nicholet.
Miss Ida bridled, as she frequently did when Henry Endicott was
mentioned. Lorna had more than once noted it.
"I should hope Ralph would have some traits of character not patterned
upon those of his uncle," she said. "I believe that if Lorna takes
Ralph Endicott for a husband, she will do extremely well."
What could a girl say in rejoinder to such calm and over-riding
statements? Individuality was not to be considered at all! She must
look upon a marriage contract as of more importance to the family than
to herself.
"I might as well be a French girl, instead of a real Yankee," she
furiously complained. "What did our ancestors come here for? For
freedom! And I mean to have my share."
"There, there!" sighed Miss Ida, smiling faintly. "At least, my dear,
don't be loud if you do insist on being childish."
What could one do under these circumstances? Run away? Flout her
family--and the Endicotts--directly? But Lorna had no place to run away
to, and nobody she cared to run away with. Least of all at this time
did she have any idea of running away with Conny Degger!
That young man bided his time with admirable composure. If he was
deeply enamored of Lorna, he succeeded in hiding the feeling from public
view. The girl wanted a male companion to "play with." Beyond having a
good time swimming, and boating, and fishing, and following other
longshore pursuits, Lorna had no thought. Degger was a patient waiter.
The old lightkeeper's suggestion that Ralph and his family were in
financial difficulties gave Lorna certain pause. She had been treating
Ralph whenever they met to a mixture of careless comradery and downright
snubbing. He could consider himself as being, in her opinion, of small
importance. She thought this had begun to make its impression on what
she called "His High-Mightiness."
Of late she had caught Ralph looking at her with an expression of
countenance that she could not altogether fathom. Was it a look of
compassion? And why? Or did it display his secret fear of losing Lorna
altogether? The girl never had believed that Ralph Endicott was as much
opposed to the determination of the two families to get them married as
she herself was. What girl with a proper amount of pride and vanity
could have believed such to be the fact?
Tobias Bassett's matchmaking, brought to bear upon Lorna's mind, caused
the girl to reconsider Ralph's evident disturbed mental state. If Mr.
Henry Endicott had frittered away the family fortune, as Tobias
intimated, naturally Ralph's family would insist more strongly than ever
that he marry Lorna.
Upon coming of age Lorna would have a considerable fortune in her own
right. This dowry the Endicotts naturally would consider as being the
salvation of Ralph's fortunes, if not of the family's. Nor did this
thought seem at all shocking to the girl's mind.
The idea of Ralph going away to look for a business opening seemed much
more disturbing to Lorna. That an Endicott should be obliged to seek a
livelihood in the ordinary marts of trade was a most upsetting thought.
She really wished--did Lorna--that she might do something for her old
chum in a financial way without thereby pledging her hand to him in
marriage.
The effect of all these disturbing thoughts upon her own peace of mind
was to be considered. Already her Aunt Ida had emphatically declared it
to be Lorna's duty to marry Ralph. If Miss Nicholet knew of the waning
fortunes of the Endicotts, would she not be the more insistent that her
niece keep faith with Ralph and fulfil the contract so long arranged by
their kin?
"My goodness!" sighed Lorna, being sorry for Ralph, yet more sorry for
herself, "if it would only enter Aunt Ida's head to marry Professor
Endicott. That would be a logical way out of it, and would relieve me.
And if Aunt Ida was once in love with Ralph's uncle, why shouldn't she
come to the rescue instead of making me the sacrificial offering? Oh,
dear!"
Lorna's confidential relations with Ralph, however, were broken.
Instead of planning the day's activities with her old chum, it was to
Conny Degger she turned for assistance in pleasurably killing the idle
hours alongshore.
Degger did nothing quite as well as Ralph--unless his small talk was
more amusing. He did possess a fund of amusing chatter; whereas Ralph
had been wont to lapse into long spells of silence while he and Lorna
were fishing or sailing. Lorna often accused Degger of "talking the
fish off their feeding grounds."
Still, the light chatter of her new chum was not altogether
unentertaining. She could not expect any other young man to be just
like Ralph Endicott. Indeed, she told herself she did not want Conny
Degger to be the same sort of man as Ralph.
Now she had a chance to take the lead when they went fishing or boating.
She knew infinitely more (thanks to Ralph) about such sports than
Degger. Lorna could not, however, manage a boat--not even the
lightkeeper's dory--as well as Ralph. No fisherman's son in all
Clinkerport was a better sailor of small craft than Ralph Endicott.
So it was that the day came when Lorna (whether she would or no) desired
the presence of Ralph instead of Conny with her in the dory off the Twin
Rocks. She had ample opportunity on this occasion to compare the two
young men.
The weather had been uncertain all day. When Lorna and Conny Degger
came over from the Clay Head and borrowed the lightkeeper's dory, Tobias
would surely have warned them against going out had he seen them. But
he was taking his daily nap, for his care of the lamp in the tall tower
kept him awake a good part of each night.
Gusts of wind were swooping down upon the sea and ruffling it into lurid
patches far off shore--certain indication of coming trouble. After the
dory was beyond the shelter of the reefs the pleasure seekers saw
streaks of driving rain racing across the wave tops, away out on the
open sea. But the fish began to bite ravenously.
It was while their luck was so good that Lorna saw suddenly a figure
scrambling over the shore-end of the outer reef, and waving an energetic
arm to them.
"Now, what does _he_ want?" the girl demanded, with no little
exasperation.
"Who is it? The skipper?" Conny asked lightly, and without turning his
head.
"It's Ralph," she said shortly.
"Oh! Endicott? He is always trying to butt in, isn't he?" suggested
Conny, laughing. "Sour grapes, I suppose. Let him swing his arm off.
_He_ doesn't own this boat."
Lorna giggled. "It's funny," she commented, glancing back at the figure
gyrating on the rock. "Ralph doesn't often get so excited. And over
what, I wonder."
Neither she nor her companion looked skyward. Over the bay a black mass
of cloud had risen and was rolling toward the open sea. Lurid
lightnings played upon its edges.
The dory in which the girl and Conny Degger sat was several
cable-lengths off the jaws of the reef. It seemed as though they had
plenty of clear-way in which to manage the craft if a squall did strike.
Neither, however, expected what was threatening from the cloud.
When Ralph, mooning alone alongshore, as had become his wont of late,
spied the coming squall and the couple's danger therefrom, there was
ample time for the fishers to have got up anchor and gained shelter
between the Twin Rocks.
It was several minutes before Ralph realized that Lorna at least was
deliberately ignoring his effort to warn her of peril. Or was she so
much under Conny's influence that she considered his wisdom in weather
matters above that of Ralph?
The latter might be stung in his pride--a vulnerable spot--by such a
thought; but the occasion was too serious for him to shake off
responsibility by a shrug of his shoulders.
He saw at last that the fishers were determined to yield him no
attention. So, turning swiftly, he scrambled back to the sands. At the
cove lay his own motor-boat, the _Fenique_, the fastest of the small
flock of craft moored in the cove. In five minutes he reached the
strand, pushed in a skiff, and sculled out to the _Fenique's_ moorings.
Already the oily black mass of cloud had spread over the greater part of
Clinkerport Bay. Thunder muttered behind it. The vivid lightnings
intermittently lit the edges of the cloud. Behind that screen lurked an
electric storm that, when it burst, promised disaster. Any light craft
in its path would be as mere culch before a cyclone!
The barren backbones of the two reefs hid the dory on their seaward side
from the site of the _Fenique's_ moorings. Lorna and Conny might see
their danger in season and make for shelter while Ralph was getting his
motor-boat out of the harbor. But Endicott must take the risk of this.
As the girl and her companion in the dory had refused to heed his
warning, Ralph must needs risk his own life.
In spite of the seaworthiness of the lightkeeper's dory, Ralph did not
believe Degger was seaman enough to handle the boat in a black squall.
On him might rest the burden of the couple's rescue from the tempest
that threatened.
He snubbed the skiff's painter to the mooring buoy. The motor-boat was
in readiness for immediate use. He cast off the mooring hawser and went
forward to turn the wheel. The spark caught the first time he threw the
wheel over. The exhaust coughed sharply. Ralph eased on the engine and
seized the spokes of the steering wheel as the propeller blades began to
revolve.
The _Fenique_ swam out into the open cove, and he headed her for the
points of the double reef. The mouth of sheltered Clinkerport Bay was
filled with racing, foam-crested waves, the slate-hued sides of which
were veined with yellow. It was a wicked-looking patch of water into
which Ralph steered the motor-boat.
Above the thunder of the breakers on the rocks and the roar of the surf
along the shore he could now hear the high whine of the coming squall.
The black cloud seemed suddenly to have expanded into a smothering
mantle over both shore and sea.
As he steered the motor-boat around the out-thrust rocks, the black
squall burst. The dory had not escaped the peril of it. Lorna and
Conny had got up the kedge, and now Degger was at the oars tugging
vainly to drive the dory shoreward.
"The poor fish!" was Ralph's rather futile comment.
A good boatman would have known instantly that to head into the wind was
a perfectly useless undertaking. There was a short mast and a sail
lashed under the thwarts. To step the mast and spread a hand's breadth
of canvas, so keeping the dory before the wind and to outrun the waves
that were already beginning to climb, was the seamanly thing to do.
Just as Ralph had feared, Degger was doing what most surely would bring
the girl and himself into jeopardy.
"Ought to be a law against fellows like him ever getting into a boat!"
muttered Endicott, increasing the speed of his own craft when clear of
the point. "He's lost one boat already. You'd think that would satisfy
him. And to lug Lorna along with him----"
Ralph might have been somewhat unfair in this criticism of Degger; but
he was much worried for Lorna Nicholet's safety. Under the increasing
strokes of the propeller the _Fenique_ began fairly to bound over the
waves. She shook all through her length when her propeller blades
plunged out of the water. She was only "hitting the high spots" when
she came into view of the two in the dory.
Lorna screamed in satisfaction at sight of the _Fenique_ with Ralph
standing in her cockpit. It was a cheering sight.
But Conny missed his stroke as he glared over his shoulder to see the
approaching rescuer. A wave slapped aboard the dory, half filled it,
and dragged one of the oars from Degger's hand.
Lorna screamed again, this time in actual fear. She was waist deep in
the sea that had come inboard. Degger showed no white feather, although
he was awkward in getting into the stern with the remaining oar. The
dory had begun to swing broadside to the bursting seas, and their
situation was indeed perilous.
Ralph shouted a command that the two in the dory did not hear. Degger
knew of but one thing to do. He saw the dory in danger of being swamped
in the trough between two waves, and he plunged the oar into the sea to
right her. The next instant another wave came inboard, the impact of it
all but throwing him on his face in the bottom of the boat.
The dory began to settle under this weight of water. Their submersion
seemed to be at hand.
CHAPTER XII
TROUBLED WATERS
Each succeeding wave was likely to slop over the gunwale and add to the
cargo of salt water already shipped by the dory. She was squattering
down like a wounded duck, and seemingly quite as helpless.
Degger was able only to cling to the steering oar, and that was a most
futile thing to do. Lorna seized the bailer and threw the water out as
fast as she could. But one person could not bail as fast as the sea
came inboard.
The _Fenique_, meeting the cross-seas as Ralph Endicott steered her down
upon the wallowing dory, rolled enormously, but her owner knew the
craft's seaworthiness. Her water-tight compartments, bow and stern,
would keep her afloat even if the cockpit filled and she became quite
unmanageable.
The dory was fairly water-logged. That indeed was the salvation for the
moment of her two passengers. The dory would not turn turtle while it
swam so low in the sea.
Lorna was at last thoroughly frightened. It was not that she had never
been in equal peril. Once, when they were half-grown, she and Ralph had
been swept out to sea in a never-to-be-forgotten tempest, and had taken
refuge upon the Quail Shoal lightship. That was an occasion to be
remembered in very truth!
But the girl had not experienced at that time this terrible sinking
feeling of helplessness that she now endured. It was born in her mind
that it had been her perfect trust in Ralph Endicott that had buoyed her
up on those other occasions when they were in peril together. She felt
her own helplessness at the present time, and in Conny Degger's face she
marked nothing but an equal fear. Degger possessed none of Ralph's
initiative nor any degree of his cool courage.
She was face to face with death. She could not swim to the shore in
such a sea as this. Indeed, no swimmer could live in it. If Ralph in
his motor-boat did not overtake them soon, Lorna believed there was
little hope for Degger and herself.
She continued to bail desperately. The water in the boat rose against
her breast and almost choked her. The chill of it made her gasp. Dimly
she saw Degger struggling with the oar. She looked away at the plunging
_Fenique_ with Ralph standing amidships and clinging to the wheel.
"Ralph! Oh, Ralph!" she cried aloud.
The words were driven back into her throat by the gale. Degger's wildly
glaring eyes betrayed his complete panic. His very soul had turned to
water. It was mere muscular reaction--like that of a dead man--that
caused him to cling to the oar. He was positively transfixed with
terror.
The motor-boat plunged awkwardly toward the water-logged dory. Its bow
seemed aimed to ram the smaller craft amidships. The girl stopped
bailing.
If the motor-boat plunged upon them, what could save the two in the
dory? Lorna stretched her arms out to Ralph, Conny Degger released the
oar, ashen-faced and trembling.
Ralph's voice (how full and unshaken it seemed!) came down the wind to
them:
"Stand by to grab the rail! Look out for yourself, Degger!"
He threw the steering wheel over and lashed the spokes to hold it
steady. As the _Fenique's_ bow swerved off from the floundering dory,
Ralph sprang upon the roof of the cabin and flung himself along its
slippery surface to reach Lorna's out-stretched hands.
"Hold hard, Lorna!" he shouted.
The motor-boat slid past the dory. Ralph fairly snatched the girl out
of it.
Astern he heard an awful cry. Hugging Lorna tightly in the embrace of
his right arm, Ralph looked back.
Conny Degger had missed the _Fenique's_ rail, but he had gripped the
bight of a rope trailing overboard. He was being towed in the sea;
dragged through the bursting waves rather than over them. His precarious
situation was not to be derided.
A curling sea toppled over their heads and fell, a smashing weight, upon
the _Fenique_. The motor-boat staggered under the impact of the blow.
The cockpit was awash as Ralph stumbled down into it with Lorna in his
arms.
The girl struggled out of his grasp. She seized the rail, gripping it
with both hands.
"Conny! Save him!" she shrieked.
At this juncture her anxiety for Degger seemed to mark a deeper interest
than Ralph had suspected she felt for the man.
But Ralph had first their ultimate safety to think of. He leaped for
the wheel and relieved the strain under which the _Fenique_ labored. He
payed off carefully until the motor-boat began to ride the billows more
buoyantly.
When he stoppered the wheel again and turned to aid Degger, Lorna was
creeping aft with the evident intent of laying hold of the rope to which
the man clung. But she did not possess the strength to drag him
inboard.
Ralph set her aside with a fending arm and seized the rope. With a long
haul and a heave, he brought the gasping Degger under the rail of the
motor-boat.
As the craft rolled, Ralph leaned over the rail and seized the half
drowned Degger just as the latter's grip slipped from the rope. While
the rail dipped to the running sea the rescuer heaved him in-board.
Then Ralph leaped back to the wheel and righted the motor-boat again.
When she was once more headed right, flying ahead of the blast, he
glanced over his shoulder. Lorna was on her knees in the bottom of the
boat with Conny Degger's head in her lap. The tableau was somewhat
startling.
Of course, if she really cared for the fellow----
Then what Tobias Bassett had said about its being necessary for Lorna to
marry a wealthy man flashed into Ralph's mind. Degger certainly was not
wealthy. Ralph had reason to know this to be a fact.
If the Nicholets were in financial straits and looked to Lorna to make a
moneyed marriage, the girl had picked the wrong partner in her
match-making.
Ralph did not feel any scorn for Lorna in this supposition. He only
pitied her. Determined as she was not to marry Ralph, Endicott knew she
must be forced by family pressure to accept the next best marriageable
possibility. But he was sure Lorna was misinformed regarding Degger.
Of course, the latter believed the Nicholets to be wealthy. He was,
Ralph was confident, nothing more nor less than a fortune hunter. That
his old friend and this Degger were mutually mistaken in each other's
financial affairs was not a situation from which Ralph could extract any
amusement. Not at all! He hated to see Lorna waste any of her
thought--perhaps a measure of her confidence--upon such a character as
Degger.
"She has gone through the wood and picked up a crooked stick, after
all," Ralph reflected, while maneuvering the motor-boat. "I didn't
think she was such a little fool!"
There was some bitterness in this expression of his thought. Although
he had no wish to marry Lorna (or so he almost hourly told himself)
Ralph Endicott felt a certain proprietorship in the girl because of
their years of intimacy. Had she been his sister he believed he would
have felt the same.
When Degger learned that Lorna would have no dowry, he would leave her
flat. He was not a fellow to really fall in love with any girl. He was
too much in love with himself, was Conny Degger.
Ralph looked around again. The man was recovering, and Lorna had drawn
away from him. She was saturated as well as Degger, and Ralph saw now
that she shook with the cold.
"Come here, Lorna, and hold the wheel. Just as she is. There! I'll
get you something to put on."
Ralph drew out his keys and unlocked the cabin door. He found a heavy
pilot-cloth coat and made the girl put it on.
"If Degger wants anything let him look around for it," Ralph said, not
altogether graciously.
Lorna flashed him an inquiring glance from under her wet curls. Was it
possible that he was showing jealousy of Conny Degger? In spite of
their perilous position, she was amused by this suggestion.
That they were by no means out of danger was evident. The sea was
running high, the wind still blew, and driving rain flattened the tops
of the waves and beat upon the voyagers on the _Fenique_ most viciously.
The motor-boat was still running before the gale. Seaworthy as she was,
Ralph did not dare put back for the harbor's mouth. Lower Trillion was
the nearest port they could hope to make in safety.
It was too stuffy and uncomfortable in the low cabin to attract the
girl. Besides, one felt safer outside with the seas running as they
were.
She looked at Conny Degger's face again. Its expression declared so
plainly his panic that she turned her gaze away quickly. Never again,
Lorna told herself, would she be able to look at that young man without
remembering his cowardice.
Ralph however did not understand this. He had mistaken the natural pity
the girl showed Degger for a much more tender feeling.
Endicott had no suspicion that Lorna had been playing Degger all the
time for the express purpose of making Ralph himself feel slighted. It
wickedly delighted the girl to feel that she was making her old chum
jealous.
This possibility Ralph would not have admitted in any case. Professor
Henry Endicott and the other members of his family were constantly
hinting at a contract between Ralph and Lorna. Of late more than a
little had been said to him regarding the girl's association with this
Degger. Why did Ralph not put a stop to it, they inquired.
Although he denied to himself that he felt any jealousy, he had begun to
believe that it was his duty to separate Conny and Lorna. He was not so
lacking in humane instincts as to wish that Conny had lost his grip on
the rope when he was overboard so that the difficulty would have been
quite satisfactorily settled; and yet the thought flashed into his mind.
As Ralph conned the course of the plunging _Fenique_ he likewise conned
the problem of how to get rid of Conway Degger without inspiring in
Lorna's breast a greater liking for the fellow than he believed she
already sustained.
They raised the Lower Trillion life-saving station and drove on for the
mouth of the harbor. A can buoy marked the channel and a deep-mouthed
bell in a bracket on the end of the stone pier tolled intermittently.
Ralph skilfully steered into the calm pool behind this breakwater.
"Some traveling," he observed, when he had shut off the engine and
looked at his watch. "Forty-five minutes from the light. The old tub
never made better time, even in a flat calm."
"Are we safe at last?" gasped Degger, sitting up.
"Just as safe as though you were at home and in bed," rejoined Ralph
rather bruskly.
"What shall I do?" Lorna asked. "I look a fright."
"Why, Miss Lorna," Conny said, quickly regaining his spirits, "you'll
have time enough to dry your things in the cabin. We'll be here for
hours, I suppose."
"_We_ may," Ralph said quickly. "But Lorna can go home by land. I'll
find somebody with a flivver to take her up to Clay Head."
"Oh!" exclaimed Degger. "Then I guess I'll go with her."
"Guess again," Ralph rejoined. "I need you."
"What's that?" ejaculated the other.
"We'll start back in the _Fenique_ just as soon as the wind hauls off a
little. She's fluttering now."
"Do you think for one moment that I would risk my life outside in this
dinky little craft again unless it is calm? I guess all these
motor-boats are alike--as unsafe as they can be!"
"Oh, I'll not start back for the light until all danger is over," Ralph
told him quietly. "The clouds are breaking. In a couple of hours it
may be all right. And we must pick up Tobias's dory and tow it in."
"Of course!" Lorna said cheerfully. "I had forgotten that."
"Say!" exclaimed Degger loudly, "the skipper's dory can drift to the
Bahamas and back again, as far as I am concerned. I wouldn't trust
myself outside again to-day----"
"Then who will pay Tobias for his boat?" demanded Ralph sharply.
Lorna had been about to suggest this very point--although more
diplomatically--when Ralph blurted out his question. The scorn
expressed on his face and the fire in his eyes stirred her to some
defense of Degger's selfishness.
"Of course _I_ will pay Mr. Bassett," she said decisively. "It is my
fault that we lost the dory. I asked Conny to take me out in it. I
will pay Mr. Bassett if it is lost."
"It isn't going to be lost if I can help it," growled Ralph. "You can't
sink one of those dories very easily. I believe I can find it, if we go
back before night. Tobias is fond of that boat, too."
"Well, find it, if you are so set on doing so," snarled Degger. "I
refuse to risk my life."
"You are a lot keener on saving your life than anybody else, I imagine,"
Ralph rejoined scornfully. "I shall need somebody to help when I catch
the dory, and you're elected."
"You can't bully me, Endicott!" cried the other. "I don't like your
manner, anyway."
"That makes me sad," drawled Ralph. "I'm going to weep over that--when
I find time. But we'll have a try for Tobias's dory first."
"I won't go with you. You can't make me. I will accompany Miss Lorna."
"We'll see about that," was Ralph's rejoinder. He turned to the girl.
"I'll signal the station. Perhaps Zeke Bassett can get off, and he will
take you up in his car. He can find a boat to take you ashore. I don't
want to beach the _Fenique_."
"That's all right, Endicott. You need not bother about Miss Lorna," put
in Degger. "I'll attend to her transportation to Twin Rocks."
Lorna had hesitated to speak while the young men quarreled. Slowly
however her expression of countenance had hardened. She turned from
Degger and asked Ralph abruptly:
"Do you really think you can find the dory? Will it be afloat so long?"
"Oh, yes. Hard work to sink one of those boats. With somebody to help
me I'm almost sure to recover it."
"You needn't look to me to help you," sneered Degger.
"I'll go back with you," Lorna said quickly. "I can manage the
_Fenique_ while you fish for the dory."
"Miss Lorna! You won't think of such a thing!" Degger cried.
She ignored him.
"I'll go below and light a fire, Ralph. My things will be dry in an
hour. You put on this coat, or you'll catch cold," and she slipped out
of the pilot-coat.
"Not me," said Ralph easily. "Let Degger put it on. He'll be cold
riding up to the light in that open car of Zeke's."
Lorna dropped the coat on the bench and without looking again at Degger
opened the cabin door and slipped below. Degger's face displayed his
chagrin. Ralph chuckled audibly, turned his back on the fellow, too, and
shouted shoreward.
The coming of the _Fenique_ had been marked by the lookout in the cupola
of the life-saving station, and the very member of the crew of whom
Ralph had spoken, Zeke Bassett, now appeared upon the sands.
"Got your car handy, Mr. Bassett?" called Ralph. "Got a passenger for
you to take to the Twin Rocks Light--and beyond."
"Sure, I'll take him," was Bassett's reply, seeing that Ralph indicated
Degger. "Got enough of the briny, has he? I'll come right out in Sam's
skiff for him. You had some weather comin' down, didn't you, Mr.
Endicott?"
"'Some weather' is right," agreed Ralph. "But she's clearing now, don't
you think?"
"Sure," said the surfman. "Them black squalls don't really amount to
nothin'--after they are over."
Ralph turned to Degger again. The fellow was recovering a measure of
his usual confidence. He put on a somewhat uncertain smile.
"If you all think the trouble is over, I don't know but I might go back
with you after all."
"I _do_ know that you won't!" Ralph retorted. "You get into that skiff,
Degger, when Bassett comes out for you."
"Say! who are you bullying, I'd like to know?"
"I'm telling you. I did pick you out of the sea, but I don't have to
keep you aboard here any longer than I wish to. You'll go ashore now."
"Oh, yes! That is the kind of fellow you are," snarled Degger. "You've
had it in for me ever since I borrowed some of your loose change back
there at Cambridge. I haven't forgotten it--don't think!"
"I thought you had," was Ralph's mild sarcasm.
That did not even cause Conway Degger to blush. He still spoke heatedly.
"I presume you expect me to fall down and worship you for saving my
life."
"Not _you_," sighed Ralph. "Gratitude I am sure is not your besetting
sin."
"Oh, you're only jealous," sneered the other. "Anybody can see that.
And you think you'll have a better time alone with Lorva aboard than you
would if I went back to the light with you."
Ralph started for him. Then he halted, holding himself in. If there
was a fight here on board the motor-boat Lorna must surely be aware of
it. He bent on Conway Degger a look that warned him that he had gone
far enough.
"I know just the sort of scamp you are, Degger," he said in a low voice.
"I should not have let you hang around as you have. Your rep at college
was enough."
"How about your own?" sneered Degger. "There was that Cora Devine--how
about _her_?"
"Well, how about her?" rejoined Ralph, with unmoved countenance.
"You try to interfere in my affairs," Degger said furiously, "and
somebody will hear all about that Devine girl--believe me!"
"I don't just get you, Degger," Ralph returned calmly. "But if for no
other reason, that threat would make me promise to interfere--and to
some purpose."
"You----"
"Listen!" commanded Ralph, with a gesture that silenced the oath on
Degger's lips. "When Zeke Bassett takes you as far as the Twin Rocks
Light, you pack your grip and go on with him to Clinkerport. I don't
care how far you travel beyond Clinkerport. But if you are still at the
Light when I get back there, I'll thrash you out of your skin! Believe
me, Degger, I mean it. I hope you will be unwise enough to wait for me
at the Light. You'll be glad enough to go after I give you what you are
suffering for."
He turned to catch the loop of the painter Bassett tossed him, and drew
the skiff alongside the motorboat. Degger did not even hesitate. He
stepped down into the small boat, shaking with the cold, if not with
fear. He scorned Ralph's pilot-coat. The surfman grinned up at Ralph,
nodded, and pulled back to the strand.
Ralph Endicott had taken the bit in his teeth. He was determined to run
certain matters his way from this time on!
CHAPTER XIII
CROSS PURPOSES
An odor of coffee was wafted through the cracks around the cabin door.
In a little while Lorna called him.
"I've made a hot drink, Ralph," she said. "Just as soon as I get my
clothing dry you must come down and change."
"Thanks, Lorna," Endicott said, accepting the cup of coffee. "But I
don't need to. I didn't take a header into the briny as you did. You'd
better put on my oilskins. Your dress won't be fit to wear."
He had removed his shoes and socks and rolled up the legs of his
trousers. In this free-and-easy costume he could the better get about
the wet boat. He swabbed out the cockpit and set the waterproof covered
cushions on their edges to dry. He wiped off the machinery with a
handful of waste, and tried the spark. The mechanism of the _Fenique_
seemed to have suffered but little from the battering of the heavy seas.
The clouds scattered quickly. The sun appeared again, low hung in the
west and of a golden-red--prophesying that old weather-wise doggerel:
"Red at night
Sailors' delight."
The slate-colored seas outside the harbor still ran high, but they
heaved now without breaking into foam. Their rumbling thunder against
the breakwater was more subdued; no longer did the fierce insistence of
the black squall mark the sound of the surf. The brief tempest had
winged its way out to sea.
"Shall we start soon, Ralph?" asked Lorna, appearing from the cubby in
the mannish apparel he had suggested.
"If you are not afraid that it is still too rough."
"Nonsense! I'm not afraid with _you_," she said with a frankness that
secretly pleased him. She seemed quite unconscious that her words
marked a comparison of Conway Degger and Ralph. She added: "The
_Fenique_ is a good boat."
"We'll try it, then," Ralph said cheerfully and without looking directly
at her.
But she was worth looking at! With her glossy curls banded with one of
Ralph's old neckties that she had found below, her dark and glowing face
was more piquant than usual. The oilskins swathing her figure made it
seem veritably boyish.
She, too, was barefooted, and her tiny, high-arched feet were as white
as milk. Ralph looked at them shyly; but Lorna seemed quite unconscious
of his scrutiny.
They did not speak of Conway Degger. Yet Ralph thought--it was a
poignant flash in his mind--that the girl had been just as unconsciously
frank with Degger as she was with him. Was she not too old now to play
about with men, like the little tomboy she was wont to be?
Never until Degger had come into their life had this thought ruffled
Ralph's tranquillity. Surely Lorna Nicholet was a woman grown. She
should leave off childish things.
Yet she was such a bewitching morsel of a girl! Ralph moved nervously.
He cast another glance at those wondrously white, blue-veined insteps.
She was so slim, yet perfectly formed! The ankles sticking out of the
rolled-up legs of the oilcloth trousers were wonderfully sculptured.
She sat on the bench with her ankles crossed before her, for all the
world like a thoughtless boy. Nevertheless her sex-charm took hold upon
Ralph Endicott's senses as it never had before. "Why," he told himself,
"what a sweet wife Lorna would be for the man who wooed and won her!"
It was sacrilege for a fellow of Conny Degger's kind to be accorded even
the most innocent association with her!
"She's nothing but a child in thought," Ralph told himself. "She's had
too much freedom. Or have I grown up in this last year while she has
remained just what she looks to be--a little, winsome child?"
Ralph Endicott should have looked twice, perhaps. As he turned
determinedly away the girl shot him a roguish glance from under her
tumbled curls. Then she drew in the tiny feet, and the voluminous
trouser-legs fell over and hid them.
Ralph did not understand the new feelings stirring within him. Without
another word or glance he started the engine and steered the motor-boat
for the narrow entrance to Lower Trillion Harbor.
The sea was extremely choppy at the harbor mouth. The motor-boat danced
about, her propeller wiggling wildly out of the water more than half the
time. But Lorna expressed no perturbation. She only clung to the rail
with both hands, and when a billow chanced to break and dash a bucket of
water over her, she laughed aloud.
"Plucky kid!" thought Ralph with pride. "There never was a girl to beat
her--never!"
Yet he had by no means forgotten how unkindly she had treated him.
There was that time back there in the late winter when they had been
cast upon the hospitality of the lightkeeper and his sister. Ralph
could not overlook that occasion.
"If she thinks she can pick me up and throw me away again, like an old
glove and just as she pleases, she's a lot mistaken," the young man told
himself. "I believe Lorna is a born flirt."
He could not really harden his heart toward his little chum. But he
told himself he was not blind to her faults. He had always excused her
waywardness, even of late. And now what Tobias had said about the
Nicholets' financial trouble made Ralph feel even more consideration for
the girl.
Of course Miss Ida and John Nicholet were particularly desirous that
Lorna should marry Ralph, especially in view of the family's misfortune.
And if Ralph did not marry her the Nicholets might make it very
unpleasant for Lorna.
"I'll say they will," sighed Ralph. "She doesn't know about their
poverty, poor girl. They are covering it up all right. But it is going
to put us both in a mighty tight corner. Lorna can't marry a poor man
in any case. Why! that is preposterous to consider even. But if she
doesn't favor me--and heaven knows she doesn't--how will she ever square
it with her family? They have never given her a chance to meet the
right chaps.
"Great grief! Do I want to marry Lorna or not? I wonder!"
He cast another glance at her over his shoulder. She still sat on the
bench. She had shaken the curls over her face, and her red lips were
pursed in a most adorable pout.
Ralph sighed hugely, shrugged his shoulders, and looked forward again.
It certainly was a puzzle!
Suddenly he saw something that brought a cry from his lips. Lorna
jumped up and ran to him, clinging to his arm and pressing close against
him as she looked over his shoulder.
"Oh! do you see it, Ralph?" she cried.
He pointed. The dory heaved into view again on another billow--a dark
patch upon the slate-colored sea.
"Can we catch it?" breathed Lorna in his ear, a curl brushing his
flushing cheek.
"To be sure," and he moved aside. "You take hold here. She doesn't
kick much. Steady now!"
"Oh!" she pouted, "I can manage the old wheel well enough," and she
crowded in beside him.
She had rolled up the sleeves of his storm jacket, and her little brown
hands gripped the wheelspokes in a most capable fashion. Ralph stepped
back and allowed her to take his place. He grew cool again and grinned
to himself. She certainly was one plucky girl!
He had no idea that he had overlooked a chance that perhaps would never
be offered to him again.
He got a bucket from below and then coiled down a length of halyard and
held the end of it in readiness as Lorna brought the _Fenique_ rubbing
alongside the wallowing dory.
Ralph went over the side, carrying the rope and bucket with him and
stood knee deep in water in the dory's bottom. He bent on the line and
gestured to the girl to bear off so as to drag the dory astern of the
motor-boat. Then he went to work to bail out with the bucket.
This was a hard fight at first, for the waves were still boisterous.
Every now and then one broke over the dory and came near to filling it
as full as it was when Ralph got aboard.
But the young fellow persevered. If he possessed one characteristic
stronger than another, it was stubbornness. At this juncture it proved
to be a virtue. He plied the bucket steadily, and at last lowered the
water in the dory so that he could afford to take breath.
"Good boy, Ralphie," shouted Lorna, down wind, and he looked up to see
her elfin face all asmile again for him. He waved his hand cheerily.
"Shall I tune her up a little?" she asked.
"Little at a time, Kid! That's the boy!"
He had spoken to her that way ten years before when they were in the
middle of some adventurous escapade. Lorna flushed and turned away her
face again. More than a pout expressed her vexation now. Ralph did not
show a proper appreciation of her "grown-upness." She had been for the
moment too kind to him!
So after that, and when he had bailed the dory completely and had come
inboard, Lorna snubbed him. Her fluctuating attitude certainly puzzled
the young man.
"Now what have I done?" he secretly wondered.
But as she left the wheel to him without speaking and went to sit down
alone in the stern of the _Fenique_, he did not urge conversation upon
her. They sailed into Clinkerport Bay, and so around to the cove beside
the lighthouse, both about as cheerful as had been their wont when
together during the past few weeks.
Tobias came down to the shore to hail them.
"I give it as my opinion," the lightkeeper said, "that you sandpipers
air all lackin' in good sense. 'Tis a mystery to me how you come to get
raised to the age you be without getting drowned a dozen times over!"
"I was born to be hung," Ralph told him. "The sea isn't wet enough to
drown me."
"But you've no business riskin' Lorny's life in your tom-fool v'y'ges."
Ralph did not even bother to deny the lightkeeper's charge. He snubbed
the motor-boat to the mooring buoy and then sculled Lorna ashore in the
dory. She still wore his oilskins and was bare-footed, but carried her
dress over her arm.
"I'll run up to the light to dress," she said. "In any case I must see
Mr. Degger for a moment."
[Illustration: "I'll run up to the light to dress," she said.]
"Your eyesight will have to be pretty average good, then," drawled
Tobias.
"Why?" she asked, hesitating.
"He's left."
"Why, he was with us down at Lower Trillion!"
"Ya-as. I know. He come back up here with Zeke in the automobile,
changed his clothes, packed his sea chist, and went on with Zeke to
Clinkerport. Heppy's fair put out. She'd made a heap of fishballs for
supper. Cal'late you an' Ralph better stop an' help us eat 'em, Lorny."
"Thank you. As Mr. Degger has gone I will go home immediately," the
girl said. "Good evening, Mr. Bassett." She did not even cast a
scornful glance at Ralph.
"Oh, sugar!" was Tobias's comment.
CHAPTER XIV
A VARIETY OF HAPPENINGS
Ralph remained at the lighthouse and did justice to the fishcakes. Miss
Heppy was "all in a stew," as Tobias said, over the sudden departure of
the boarder.
"I'm fair troubled that he wasn't satisfied with our table," the good
woman said. "Fishballs and brown loaf and clam chowder and johnnycake
and baked beans Saturday night and Sundays, is pretty tryin', I do
allow, to them as ain't used to it. We never do have a piece of fresh
meat."
"Oh, sugar!" chuckled Tobias. "Don't belittle your fodder, Heppy. You
air a mighty good cook as fur as you go. If you had all kinds of fancy
doo-dads you wouldn't know how to cook 'em, you know you wouldn't."
"What do you s'pose cookbooks was made for, Tobias Bassett?" demanded
Miss Heppy.
"I cal'late they make good pipe-lights," rejoined her brother, suiting
his action to his word as he stood at the mantel after supper and rolled
himself a spill of a page of the culinary guide in question. "Come,
Ralph, le's go up and see if the light is burning bright. 'You in your
small corner, an' I in mine.' That allus seemed a cheerful sort o' hymn
to me.
"Huh!" he added. "Got your own little packet of coffin-nails? That
Degger feller was always havin' one o' them things stuck in a corner of
his mouth."
Ralph promptly threw away the cigarette and filled his pipe from
Tobias's sack of tobacco. The lightkeeper led the way, chuckling. When
they reached the lamp room the old man turned a curious eye on his young
friend and bluntly demanded:
"Tell us all about it, Ralphie. I see the mention of our ex-boarder
stirred you up. What made him in such a hurry to leave us?"
"Don't tell Miss Heppy," begged Ralph, "but I guess it is my fault that
she's lost her boarder."
"You ought to have a leather medal for bringing it about," declared
Tobias. "I certain sure was glad to see him go. What happened? He and
Lorny got out in my boat while I was asleep. I can't be about and
stirrin' to watch the weather for 'em _all_ the time."
Ralph briefly narrated the adventure while Tobias listened, puffing at
his pipe and nodding his head.
"I cal'late Lorny's got something to thank you for, then?" he suggested.
Ralph laughed harshly.
"You saw how she acted when we came ashore. Did she seem overpoweringly
grateful?"
"Oh, sugar!" chuckled Tobias. "What chance did you give her to fall on
your neck and tell you how much she thought of you?"
"Now, Tobias Bassett! I don't want any girl to fall on my neck. Least
of all Lorna Nicholet."
"Ain't ready yet to sacrifice yourself' for the good of her family?"
"I won't see a fellow like Conway Degger fool her," growled Ralph. "I
will break up his game all right. But I tell you Lorna would not marry
me on a bet."
"Oh, sugar! She's something of a sport, Lorny is. I cal'late you ain't
ever made her that proposition?"
"Really, I don't have to wait for a ton of coal to fall on me to take a
hint," Ralph said, but looking away from the amused lightkeeper.
"No? I dunno 'bout that," muttered Tobias, who found his matchmaking
with this rather dense young fellow somewhat uphill work. "I'd like to
see Lorny get a good fellow with as much money as you've got, Ralph, and
almost as much sense."
"Huh!"
"And that Degger don't fill the bill."
"If he doesn't let her alone----"
"Yep. That's all right. But in removing him from the scene you don't
give Lorny no other play-toy. And she's been used to having a chap at
her beck an' call all of the time. You know that."
"But, Tobias! She doesn't want me. She has shown plainly enough that
she cares nothing for me."
"Oh, sugar! I don't see how it is that you young fellers understand so
little about womenfolks."
"To hear you talk! And you not even married!"
"That's why," rejoined Tobias slyly. "I cal'late I understand 'em too
well. Now, s'posin' Lorna was a gal you'd just met and you was stuck on
her? S'posin' you wanted to make a good impression on her--eh? How
would you go about it? S'posin' you was really fallin' in love with
Lorny?"
Ralph slowly flushed. The smoke from his pipe choked him--or seemed to.
He coughed and turned from Tobias again.
Actually he was seeing in his mind's vision a tiny, milk-white,
blue-veined foot sticking out of the leg of a pair of oilcloth overalls.
But Lorna Nicholet possessed dignity, too. Nor did she have always to
wait on the ruffling of her temper to show it.
Miss Ida chanced to suffer an infrequent headache on this evening and
there were guests at dinner, although it was quite an informal affair.
An hour after she had run barefooted and in Ralph's suit of oilskins,
along the beach and up the path to the house on Clay Head, Lorna, in a
perfect dinner toilet, slipped into the seat at the head of the table
after her father and his guests were seated.
There are raveled edges at every dinner to be hemmed. The perfectly
served meal is usually the one over which the hostess has worried her
nerves to the raw. There was a new maid--of the usual kind one gets at
the seashore--and Lorna was obliged to cover her deficiencies and carry
on at the same time a spirited conversation with the women guests.
The men were seated at her father's end of the table, and Lorna sensed
early in the meal that this was a semi-business gathering. The wives
had been brought along to make the occasion seem less like a board-room
wrangle.
Now and then Lorna heard a few words of the business discussion that
went steadily on from cherry-stone clams to black coffee, like an organ
accompaniment to the chatter of feminine voices.
"But we can't count on Endicott."
"What is the matter with the fellow? He was strong for the proposition
a year ago."
"Usually Henry Endicott will at least listen to plans for a public
improvement."
"Wrapped in some new invention, like enough."
"Those experiments of his must cost him a pretty penny."
"And they bring in no dividends," was the conclusion of John Nicholet.
It was these observations coming to her ear that caused Lorna to seek
her father in his den after the guests were gone. She rustled in and
perched herself upon the broad arm of his smoking chair and set, as
usual, a moist kiss upon the apex of his bald crown.
"A very satisfactory evening--yes, very satisfactory," said John
Nicholet. "Let me see. Where was your aunt, child?"
"Headache, daddy. I believe that is more often than not a feminine
excuse for escaping a dry-as-dust dinner. I don't blame Aunt Ida. I do
think that your business friends' wives are the most unentertaining
people!"
"Bless us! Are they? I had no idea. Really, pet, it was a business
conference."
"So I gathered," Lorna said. "What was it all about, daddy?"
"Just a scheme for making two dollars grow where only one grew before.
And I think it will succeed."
"Without Professor Endicott's cooperation?" she asked.
"Bless us! Do you--ah, you 'listened in,' rogue!" he accused, shaking
an admonishing finger at her. "Keep a still tongue about it, please,
for the present."
"Surely. But I was interested----"
"Of course. Of course," said her father. "Especially when you heard the
name of Endicott. If your Ralph had any money of his own (which he
hasn't, for it is all tied up in trust funds, I understand) I would let
him in on this instead of his Uncle Henry."
Lorna had gone red and looked vexed at his mention of "her Ralph." But
she was still curious.
"I suppose Professor Endicott really manages the whole Endicott estate,
daddy?"
"Oh, yes. It is all in his hands. And I do not understand when we
offer him such a bang-up investment why he doesn't come in."
"Could it be possible that he is short of funds, daddy?"
"Of ready cash, you mean? Why, I have always understood that the
Endicott securities were so placed that they brought in a continual
stream of dividends. Conservative in the extreme, yet safe investments.
Otherwise, how has Henry managed to run that family in such an
extravagant way and to pour money into his experiments as well?"
"Couldn't that be the very reason why he does not enter into this
investment that you have offered him?" ventured Lorna. "Perhaps the
Endicott fortune is depleted to such an extent that he has no surplus
for investment."
"Bless us! Do you know that to be a fact, daughter?"
"I do not know anything about it. It may be only gossip. But it is
reported that Professor Endicott has wasted the family fortune."
"Dear me! You don't mean that, Lorna? That would be a catastrophe.
What does Ralph say about it?"
"I have never spoken to Ralph about such matters," said Lorna, a little
stiffly.
"No, no. I presume not. Such a sordid thing as money does not interest
you youngsters. And in any case, if Ralph didn't have a penny to bless
himself with, we can be thankful that your money is well placed and you
and he need not worry."
Lorna got off the arm of the chair quickly. She stamped her foot.
"Daddy, I tell you I have no intention of marrying Ralph Endicott!"
"Bless us!" gasped her father. "If Henry has made ducks and drakes of
their money and Ralph hasn't a penny, who will marry the boy if you
don't?"
Amos Pickering waved a flabby hand to attract the attention of the
lightkeeper while yet the monster-headed horse was a long way from Miss
Heppy's flower-beds where Tobias was sunning himself with his pipe.
"Here comes the _Daily Bladder_," remarked Tobias, speaking to his
sister, who was inside the lighthouse. "Now we'll l'arn whose punkin is
the biggest."
He arose slowly from his seat and went down the sandy slope to the road.
Amos had a paper for the lightkeeper, but he was bursting with news
himself.
"Ye ain't got no boarder no more, I understand, Tobias," the rural mail
carrier began.
"You understand correct," agreed Tobias, biting on his pipe stem. "An'
I give it as my opinion that Heppy maybe just about broke even on his
board--if anybody should drive up and ax ye, Amos."
But the mail carrier brushed this financial consideration aside. There
was the canker of gossip eating on his inquiring mind, and he blurted
out the subject at once:
"I didn't just know whether you run that feller out, Tobe, or whether
'twas his fight with Ralph Endicott that sent him kitin'."
"His fight with Ralph?" questioned Tobias with pursed lips. "Did they
fight?"
"So I'm told. Didn't you hear about it?" asked the eager Amos.
"Not as I know of."
"Why, so they tell me down to Little Trillion. Over that Nicholet gal.
You know, Tobias, she's been playin' fast and loose with them two
fellers all summer."
"No. I didn't know that, neither," declared the lightkeeper, puffing
more rapidly on his pipe.
"Wal, now, you know, Tobe, she's got them two fellers on her string. It
come to a head, they tell me, an' Endicott licked this Degger to a
fare-ye-well, put him ashore at the Lower Trillion life saving station,
and sailed away with the gal on that motor-boat of his'n. They tell me
they was gone all night, nobody knows where--heh?"
For Tobias had dropped his pipe and his eyes suddenly blazed.
"I know all about that, Amos," he said sternly.
"Ye do? I thought ye didn't."
"I know it ain't so. Ralph went out after Lorna and that Degger in his
motor-boat when they was in danger of being drowned as dead as Pharaoh's
hosts. He put Degger ashore at Lower Trillion 'cause the feller was
scare't. He brought Lorna back here less'n an hour after Degger arrived
in Zeke Bassett's car. That's the truth on it. Who's tellin' this
dirty story about town, anyway?"
"Wal, now, Tobias, mebbe it is nothin' but a pack o' lies. They was
a-tellin' of it at the post-office. That Degger is stoppin' at the Inn.
He an' a feller named Lon Burtwell. Mebbe you've seed him about town,
off an' on, this summer?"
"Go on," said Tobias, ruefully scrutinizing the broken pipe he had
picked up.
"An' they said that Degger said he'd had a row with Endicott. He said
Endicott had sailed away with the gal. Intimated mebbe they'd
_e_-loped. Degger said Endicott did just that with another gal once,
when he was at college. There was a scandal about it."
"And I can see there's some scandal about this," Tobias rejoined
reflectively. "Wal, Amos, dates is dates, and you can't fool the clock.
I met Ralph and Lorny when they come ashore, and it was just in the
shanks of the evening, 'fore supper.
"I don't reckon Ralph ever laid his hand on that Degger yet; but if he
hears this story I shouldn't be surprised if there was a ruction. I
knowed that Degger didn't have no more morals than a clam worm."
CHAPTER XV
DECISIVE ACTION
It was impossible that such a story should be wafted about the community
without reaching Ralph Endicott's ears. Lorna might never hear it, but
Ralph's association with the longshore folk was much closer than that of
most of the dwellers on Clay Head.
In spite of the Endicott pride and a large measure of dignity for so
young a man--which Lorna sometimes scoffed at--Ralph was not considered
at all "stuck up" by the natives. He was quite at home on fishing smack
or clam flat. He could hold his own in any work or rough sport with the
younger men of Clinkerport. And, in addition, he could be depended on
at any time to lend a hand.
For this very trait of which fellows of Degger's kidney had taken
advantage at college, Clinkerport folk respected him. And the
individual who brought to Ralph the unkind gossip that the mail carrier
had repeated to Tobias o' the Light, thought he was doing Ralph a favor.
"'Course, we don't b'lieve nothing like that of you and Miss Nicholet,"
the gossip-laden tongue concluded. "And Amos Pickering says that Tobias
Bassett says that you an' the gal was back at the Light from Lower
Trillion an hour after Degger got back.
"But you know how such stories spread. The truth's a cripple while a
lie wears the seven-leagued boots! An' this Degger does say that you
had trouble over another gal up there where you went to college----"
"Where is Degger keeping himself?" demanded Ralph, breaking into his
informant's story at this point.
"Why, he an' Lon Burtwell air around together a good deal. You know
Burtwell? He's some kind of a promoter--or suthin'. I dunno but he's
buyin' up cranberry bogs. There's his car standin' over yon'. He and
Degger rides around together a good deal."
Ralph waited, his face rather blue looking, his eyes smoldering. After
a time he saw Conway Degger come out of the hotel. He was with a dark,
sleek-looking man.
They got into the touring car, the dark man, whom Ralph knew to be Lon
Burtwell, settling himself behind the steering wheel. Ralph stepped
into his own drab roadster.
The other car passed him, heading out of town on the road to Harbor Bar.
Ralph pushed the starter. Then he let in his clutch. The roadster
wheeled into the wake of the bigger car. Both left town at an easy
pace.
Whether Degger looked back and saw that they were followed and by whom,
or for some other reason, as soon as they were clear of the town the
bigger car's speed was increased. It whirled away in a cloud of dust,
and the roar of its muffler could have been heard for miles.
Ralph stepped on his accelerator and the low-hung roadster darted up the
road as though shot out of a gun. There was no county constable by the
way to time either of the cars.
The start Burtwell's car had gained in the beginning kept it well ahead
for the first ten or twelve miles. The smaller car, however, was of
racing model, and Ralph was a speed demon. He finally forced the nose
of his machine almost under the rear axle of Burtwell's motor car and
hung there with bulldog persistence.
Degger knew the pursuer was there, as was shown by his climbing upon the
seat and looking over the crushed-back hood of the car. He motioned
Ralph away. If the bigger car had to slow down there might be a
collision.
But Endicott knew exactly what he was about. He wanted to worry the
driver of the big automobile. His was the speedier machine of the two,
and he knew how to handle it to a hair. As Burtwell slowed down, Ralph
shut off speed accordingly. The road was narrow here, and he waited for
a wider stretch of it before proceeding with a plan he had.
"Get back!" yelled Conny Degger, gesticulating with his hand.
Grimly Endicott held to his course. Burtwell slowed still more. They
came to the wider piece of road for which Ralph had been waiting.
He pulled out from behind Burtwell's car and went past like the wind.
There was less than a mile on which to maneuver, and it was a lonely
piece of road.
For twenty seconds the roadster dashed ahead with a thuttering roar of
its exhaust. Then Ralph shut off, applied the brakes cautiously and,
just as he was stopping, turned the car squarely to block the road.
Burtwell's horn emitted a scared squawk. He came to a stop with
clashing gears and Burtwell himself spouting profanity.
"What do you mean, you crazy fool?" he bawled, hopping out from behind
the wheel when his car had stopped with its radiator almost touching the
mudguard of Ralph's roadster.
"I have no business with you, Burtwell," Ralph replied, carelessly
tossing his gloves and the cap and mask into his driving seat as he
stepped from his own car. "My business is with Degger."
"What kind of a hold-up is this, anyway?" demanded Burtwell
blusteringly. "Do you want to talk to this fellow, Conny?"
"I haven't got a bit of use for him," declared Degger, remaining in the
seat.
Ralph's smile was grim enough.
"I've only one use for you, Degger," he said. "I'm going to mop up a
part of this road with you. Get out and take your medicine."
"What's this?" snapped Burtwell. "You ruffian! Get your car out of my
way and let us pass, or I'll show you something altogether new."
"Keep out of this, Burtwell," advised Ralph quietly, yet never losing
sight of the promoter. "I am going to give Degger the thrashing of his
young sweet life."
"What for?" demanded Burtwell.
"He knows. Perhaps it is because I don't like the color of his tie--or
the cut of his coat--or that hat he wears. In any case, it is going to
be just as good a thrashing as though I had the best reason in the
world----
"Ah! Would you?"
Burtwell's hand had gone to his hip and he started to draw something
from his pocket. Ralph stooped, leaped forward, and drove his right
shoulder into the fellow's midriff as he wound his long arms tightly
about his waist. Endicott had not played tackle on the scrub team for
nothing!
The breath was driven out of Burtwell with an explosive grunt. Ralph
wrenched the weapon from his hand, stood up, and threw the fellow full
length in the dust.
"That will be about all for _you_," he said sharply. "A pretty little
automatic." He tossed the weapon over the nearest fence. "Now, Degger,
get out of that car. Or are you packing some such plaything as your
partner?"
He leaped to the side of the automobile and seized Degger by the
shoulders. The fellow screamed as Ralph dragged him out over the door.
"Put up your fists, Degger," commanded Ralph, setting him staggeringly
on his feet in the road. "Defend yourself! Whether you fight, or don't
fight, I am going to do my best to change your face if I can't your
morals."
"You brute!" bawled Degger, growing white.
"That won't save you," Ralph declared, and struck a blow that, landing
upon Degger's forehead, knocked him clear across the road.
"Get up and take it!" exclaimed Ralph fiercely. "Or shall I come after
you?"
But the blow had roused every ounce of fight there was in Conny Degger.
He bounded across the road and swung his right hand high above his head.
Just in time Ralph saw there was a stone in it.
He dodged, and the missile sailed over the roadside fence.
"Good!" shouted Ralph, and, leaping into the fray, struck again and
again. "I don't--much care--how you fight--as long--as you--do fight!"
Each punctuation was a punch delivered. A dozen healthy blows landed
about Degger's head. He was already groggy. He began to yell for
Burtwell to help.
"Get something! Out of the tool box! Knock him out!" he shouted.
Ralph had not overlooked the possibility of Burtwell's coming into the
fight from that angle. The man had scrambled to his feet and was doing
exactly what Degger begged him to do. He was rummaging in the tool box.
At this moment Degger received a terrific blow on the jaw. He sank
under it, and his eyes rolled up.
Ralph caught him before he could fall, wheeled with him in his arms and
heaved him up just as Burtwell started with a heavy wrench in his hand
for the common enemy.
"Didn't I tell you to keep out of this?" Ralph panted, and with a great
heave of his shoulders flung the almost senseless Degger into Burtwell's
face.
The two went down together, and neither immediately tried to rise.
Ralph went to his car, looked back over his shoulder, and with a flash
of teeth and a bitter grin demanded:
"Got enough? You, Degger, know what this is for. If you don't put a
bridle on your tongue after this, better put many a mile between us.
For if I come after you again I won't let you off so easy."
He got into the car, started it, backed it around, and shot up the road
on the return journey to Clinkerport before his two victims were on
their feet.
Ralph was not entirely unmarred. When he had backed his roadster into
the stable behind the bungalow that served the Endicotts for a garage,
he went into the washroom and bathed his bruises and the cut above his
right eye.
There was room in the stable for his small car and the family
automobile. The remainder of the floor space had been turned into a
laboratory and workshop by Professor Endicott.
The latter caught sight of his nephew before he could plaster up the
cut. He opened the door of the washroom, and, standing there, a tall,
sapling-like figure in his white smock, stared rather grimly at Ralph.
"Another smash-up?" he asked.
"No, sir. The car isn't hurt. Just a little trouble with a fellow."
"With whom, may I ask?"
"That Degger." For Ralph was nothing if not perfectly frank.
A smile wreathed Professor Endicott's lips. He was an austerely
handsome man with abundant hair which was gray only at the temples, and
a smoothly shaven face. His eyes saw all there was to be seen through
amber-tinted glasses.
That he kept much to himself, seemed not fond of society, and was wholly
wrapped up in his experiments, made Professor Endicott seem less human
than he really was. His sense of humor was by no means blunted.
"So you finally awoke to the presence of the worm in the apple?" he
suggested.
"Degger has a dirty mouth. I had to stop it," muttered Ralph.
"It went as far as that?"
"Say! how am I going to tell Lorna who she shall, or shall not,
associate with?"
"You should have a right to."
"Let me tell you, Uncle Henry, Lorna is not a girl to be bidden in any
matter. No man will ever dominate her."
"You used to," said the professor, with a sudden smile.
"Yes. When we were kids. But no more. Believe me, Lorna is a young
woman who knows her own mind and means to have her own way."
"Even with the man she marries?"
"She has no intention of marrying me."
"Don't you mean, Ralph, that the lack of intention is on your side?"
said the professor, his brow bent sternly. "The fault lies at your
door, young man. There has been a well understood arrangement for
years----"
"Between the families--yes," interrupted Ralph. "But Lorna and I never
agreed.'
"How can you talk so childishly?" said Professor Endicott in much the
same tone Miss Ida Nicholet used with Lorna. "It is too late to hedge
now, Ralph. Be a man. Fulfil your family obligations. If the girl
seems indifferent it is because you have not been sufficiently
loverlike. Can't you see?"
"I see well enough; but you do not," his nephew returned bluntly. "I am
quite sure Lorna cares nothing for me in that way. And I am not at all
sure that I wish to marry her."
"Yet you interfere with this Degger----"
"If she was my sister I'd do that. He is a scurrilous scoundrel."
"Of course," was Professor Endicott's thoughtful comment. "I presume
Lorna will attract plenty of such fortune hunters until you and she let
it be publicly announced that you are engaged."
Ralph's expression changed. He wagged his head in a regretful negative.
"No, uncle, I think not. Degger, even, was bound to learn in time that
the Nicholets are not as well off as they are counted."
"What? What's that?" demanded the professor, startled.
"Haven't you heard anything about it?"
"That the Nicholets have lost money?"
"_All_ of their money. So I understand. I bet Lorna's father has been
speculating--and with her money and Miss Ida's as well as his own."
"Great heavens, Ralph! this is not a joke, is it?" gasped his uncle.
"I don't see anything to joke about in the loss of one's fortune.
Either it is so, or it is not so."
"John Nicholet is visionary. He was at me not long ago to join in one
of his financial schemes. I could not be bothered. Besides, I told him
plainly I needed all my ready cash for these experiments I am making.
"I--I--Ralph! If this is _true_--if our neighbors have sustained severe
losses--surely you would not break off with Lorna because of that? What
if she has no dowry?"
"Uncle Henry!"
"Of course not," said the professor hurriedly. "We have plenty of money,
Ralph. There will be enough for you and Lorna. The little girl never
need feel the pinch of poverty."
"But suppose she will not have me in any case?" cried the younger man.
"I can't carry her off to the minister's and marry her, willy-nilly."
"Pooh! Pooh! Cave-man tactics are quite out of date. You are a most
unromantic chap, Ralph. Why don't you try to make the girl like you?
And surely she _must_ marry somebody with money. It would be a calamity
if she secured a penniless fellow like that Degger.
"It is your duty, Ralph, to fulfil the plans made by the two families
for your welfare and the girl's. Under the disturbing circumstances you
speak of, it is all the more important that you and Lorna come to a
prompt understanding. Suppose they--Miss Ida, for instance--should
believe for a moment that because of their misfortune we
were--er--unwilling to have the engagement announced? Why, Ralph, the
Endicott name would be forever disgraced!"
"Huh!"
"If Lorna's fortune has been unwisely invested by her father--and Miss
Ida's money, too--something must be done about it! Something certainly
must be done!"
CHAPTER XVI
POISON
So near did Tobias Bassett's matchmaking schemes come to naught that had
he known it he would have--in his own words--"let go all holts."
It seemed that his intimation to Ralph and Lorna regarding the supposed
loss of their respective fortunes was a bubble that was bound to be
punctured. For Professor Henry Endicott, in spite of his seemingly
self-centered existence, possessed a proper share of kindliness, and
considered the Nicholets' financial troubles as his own.
He seldom left his own premises. Between meals, and sometimes until
late into the night, the professor lived in his laboratory, reading and
experimenting. The white smock he wore while thus engaged had become
much more familiar to him than evening dress.
Yet after dinner on this evening Ralph was surprised to see his uncle,
arrayed in the prescribed garments for an evening call (and rather rusty
they were, for Mrs. Mallow, the housekeeper, knew little about grooming
a man, and their old valet, Jerome, was purblind and fairly tottering
with age), march across the two lawns to the Nicholet house.
Ralph himself was seriously considering the journey which he had already
hinted to Lorna he purposed taking. He was not saying anything about it
at home, for he feared his Uncle Henry and his Cousin Luce would object.
He was determined, however, not to waste the entire summer in loafing
about Clay Head and the Twin Rocks Light.
Ralph planned for this escape from home entanglements just as another
and lighter-minded young fellow might have schemed for some forbidden
spree. He packed his steamer trunk in secret.
Professor Endicott came to the dimly lit veranda of the Nicholet house,
which overlooked the starlit bay. The white beam of the Twin Rocks
Light was flung far seaward. Its illumination did nothing to abate the
pale rays of the stars which glittered on the ruffled water of the
almost land-locked harbor.
A figure in white, quietly swaying in a basket rocker, leaned forward to
distinguish the man's features.
"Henry! Professor Endicott! Come up. You _are_ an unexpected caller."
"Er--yes, Miss Ida. I am not very neighborly in my habits, I
acknowledge. So busy--always. You know. Er--is John in his room?"
"My brother has gone to Boston," said Miss Ida, pushing a light chair
toward him with her neatly slippered foot. "Will you sit down,
Professor Endicott?"
"Thanks, Miss Ida. Has John gone for any length of time?"
"He could not tell me how long he would be away. But he did say he
might be detained for some days. Did you wish to see him particularly?"
"Yes. I did, really. But of course I can wait for his return," Henry
Endicott added hastily. "There is nothing troubling him in business,
Miss Ida, is there?" he finally blurted out.
"No. Not that I know of," was the slow reply.
"I fancied the last time John spoke to me he was in some business
difficulty. Nothing of--er--importance, of course. But I was so deep
in the theory of an experiment at the time--ah, perhaps I did not pay
sufficient attention. Of course you would know, Miss Ida?"
"My brother confides a good deal in me," said the woman placidly. "I
believe he has under way some new business deal. Perhaps it is that you
mean."
"Perhaps that was it," returned Endicott.
How could he come out bluntly with this suspicion Ralph had put in his
mind regarding the loss of the Nicholet fortune? He could not do it!
He uttered a few commonplace remarks. He was vastly disturbed, and even
a tete-a-tete with Miss Ida did not calm him. It was on the tip of his
tongue all the time to venture upon the ground of financial
difficulties. Yet it was quite plain to the professor's observation
that Miss Ida was not after all in her brother's confidence regarding
this very serious matter. If outsiders were informed of the disaster
that threatened or had overtaken the Nicholets, the head of the family
had managed thus far to hide it from the other members thereof.
Miss Ida was quite unaware of any present or coming disaster. The
professor desired greatly to get hold of John Nicholet. He finally
said:
"When John returns, tell him to come and see me." He rose from his
seat. "I really wish to talk with him. Perhaps there is something I
may be able to do----"
His words trailed off again into silence. He said good-night and
descended the steps. When his figure was only a dim outline across the
lawn, Miss Ida sighed.
A dainty person in a shimmering frock came lightly to her side from the
darker end of the porch.
"What did the professor want, Aunt Ida?"
"I really cannot imagine," Miss Ida said, quite composedly.
"Bu
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/40104