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Caleb West, Master Diver

by Francis Hopkinson Smith · English · Gutenberg #42362 · 495,928 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Caleb West, Master Diver

Author: Francis Hopkinson Smith

Illustrator: Malcolm Fraser
        Arthur Ignatius Keller


        
Release date: March 18, 2013 [eBook #42362]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/42362

Credits: Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
        Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CALEB WEST, MASTER DIVER ***

[Illustration: “I ain’t blamin’ her, nor never will”]




                       CALEB WEST, MASTER DIVER

                        BY F. HOPKINSON SMITH



                        WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY

                 MALCOLM FRASER AND ARTHUR I. KELLER



                         BOSTON AND NEW YORK
                    HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY

                    The Riverside Press, Cambridge
                                 1898




        COPYRIGHT, 1897 AND 1898, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND CO.
                COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY F. HOPKINSON SMITH
                         ALL RIGHTS RESERVED




CONTENTS

        I. The Cape Ann Sloop
       II. A Morning’s Mail
      III. Captain Brandt at the Throttle
       IV. Among the Blackfish and Tomcods
        V. Aunty Bell’s Kitchen
       VI. A Little Dinner for Five
      VII. Betty’s First Patient
     VIII. The “Heave Ho” of Lonny Bowles
       IX. What the Butcher Saw
        X. Strains from Bock’s ’Cello
       XI. Captain Joe’s Telegram
      XII. Captain Joe’s Creed
     XIII. A Shanty Door
      XIV. Two Envelopes
       XV. A Narrow Path
      XVI. Under the Willows
     XVII. The Song of the Fire
    XVIII. The Equinoctial Gale
      XIX. From the Lantern Deck
       XX. At the Pines
      XXI. The Record of Nickles, the Cook
     XXII. After the Battle
    XXIII. A Broken Draw
     XXIV. The Swinging Gate
      XXV. Under the Pitiless Stars
     XXVI. Caleb Trims His Lights




LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

    “I ain’t blamin’ her, nor never will”
    “Swung back the gate with the gesture of a rollicking boy”
    “Helen ... in white muslin—not a jewel”
    “No, it’s my Betty”
    “What’s she but a chit of a child that don’t know no better”
    “Sanford ... raised her hand to his lips”
    “Thank God, Tony! Thank God!”
    “Victory is ours!”
    “The diver knelt in a passive, listless way”
    “Ain’t nothin’ to skeer ye, child”




                     CALEB WEST, MASTER DIVER




CHAPTER I

THE CAPE ANN SLOOP


The rising sun burned its way through a low-lying mist that hid the
river, and flashed its search-light rays over the sleeping city. The
blackened tops of the tall stacks caught the signal, and answered in
belching clouds of gray steam that turned to gold as they floated
upwards in the morning air. The long rows of the many-eyed tenements
cresting the hill blinked in the dazzling light, threw wide their
shutters, and waved curling smoke flags from countless chimneys.

Narrow, silent alleys awoke. Doors opened and shut. Single figures
swinging dinner-pails, and groups of girls with baskets, hurried to
and fro. The rumbling of carts was heard and shrill street cries.

Suddenly the molten ball swung clear of the purple haze and flooded
the city with tremulous light. The vanes of the steeples flashed and
blazed. The slanting roofs, wet with the night dew, glistened like
silver. The budding trees, filling the great squares, flamed pink and
yellow, their tender branches quivering in the rosy light.

Now long, deep-toned whistles—reveille of forge, spindle, and
press—startled the air. Surging crowds filled the thoroughfares;
panting horses tugged at the surface cars; cabs rattled over the
cobblestones, and loaded trucks began to block the crossings.

The great city was astir.

At the sun’s first gleam, Henry Sanford had waked with joyous start.
Young, alert, full of health and courage as he was, the touch of its
rays never came too early for him. To-day they had been like the hand
of a friend, rousing him with promises of good fortune.

Dressing with eager haste, he had hurried into the room adjoining his
private apartments, which served as his uptown business office.
Important matters awaited him. Within a few hours a question of vital
moment had to be decided,—one upon which the present success of his
work depended.

As he entered, the sunshine, pouring through the wide windows, fell
across a drawing-table covered with the plans of the lighthouse he was
then building; illumined a desk piled high with correspondence, and
patterned a wall upon which were hung photographs and sketches of the
various structures which had marked the progress of his engineering
career.

But it was toward a telegram lying open on his desk that Sanford
turned. He took it in his hand and read it with the quiet satisfaction
of one who knows by heart every line he studies. It was headed
Keyport, and ran as follows:—

    To Henry Sanford, C. E., Washington
    Square, New York.

    Cape Ann sloop arrived and is a corker.
    Will be at your uptown office in the morning.

                                     Joseph Bell.

“Dear old Captain Joe, he’s found her at last!” he said to himself,
and laughed aloud.

With a joyous enthusiasm that lent a spring and vitality to every
movement, he stepped to the window and raised the sash to let in the
morning air.

It was a gala-day for the young engineer. For months Captain Joe had
been in search of a sloop of peculiar construction,—one of so light a
draught that she could work in a rolling surf, and yet so stanch that
she could sustain the strain of a derrick-boom rigged to her mast.
Without such a sloop the building of the lighthouse Sanford was then
constructing for the government on Shark Ledge, lying eight miles from
Keyport, and breasting a tide running six miles an hour, could not go
on. With such a sloop its early completion was assured.

The specifications for this lighthouse provided that the island which
formed its base—an artificial one made by dumping rough stones over
the sunken rock known as Shark’s Ledge—should be protected not only
from sea action, but from the thrust of floating ice. This Sanford was
to accomplish by paving its under-water slopes with huge granite
blocks, to form an enrockment,—each block to be bedded by a diver.

The engineer-in-chief of the Lighthouse Board at Washington had
expressed grave doubts as to the practicability of the working methods
submitted by Sanford for handling these blocks, questioning whether a
stone weighing twelve tons could be swung overboard, as suggested by
him, from the deck of a vessel and lowered to a diver while the boat
was moored in a six-mile current. As, however, the selection of the
means to be employed lay with the contracting engineer, and not with
the Board, Sanford’s working plans had finally been approved. He had
lacked only a sloop to carry them out. This sloop Captain Joe had now
found.

No wonder, then, that the splendor of the early sunshine had seemed a
harbinger of success, nor that as the minutes flew his eagerness
increased to grasp the captain’s hand.

At the first sound of his heavy step in the hall outside, Sanford
sprang from his desk and threw the door wide open to welcome the big,
burly fellow,—comrade and friend for years, as well as foreman and
assistant engineer on his force.

“Are you sure she’ll handle the stones?” were the first words he
addressed to the captain,—there were no formalities between these
men. “Nothing but a ten-horse engine, remember, will lift them from
the dock. What’s the sloop’s beam?”

“Thirty foot over all, an’ she’s stiff as a church,” answered Captain
Joe, all out of breath with his run up the stairs,—pushing his Derby
hat back from his forehead as he spoke. “An’ her cap’n ain’t no
slouch, nuther. I see him yesterday ’fore I come down. Looks’s ef he
hed th’ right stuff in him. Says he ain’t afeard o’ th ’Ledge, an’
don’t mind layin’ her broadside on, even ef she does git a leetle mite
scraped.”

“How’s her boiler?” Sanford asked, with sudden earnestness.

“I ain’t looked her b’iler over yit, but her cylinders is big enough.
If her steam gives out, I’ll put one of our own aboard. She’ll do,
sir. Don’t worry a mite; we’ll spank that baby when we git to ’t,”—and
his leathery, weather-tanned face cracked into smiles.

Sanford laughed again. The cheerful humor of this man, whose judgment
of men never failed him, and whose knowledge of sea-things made him
invaluable, was always a tonic to him.

“I’m glad you like her skipper,” he said, taking from a pigeonhole in
his perfectly appointed desk, as he spoke, the charter-party of the
sloop. “I see his name is Brandt, and the sloop’s name is the
Screamer. Hope she’ll live up to her name. The charter-party, I think,
ought to contain some allusion to the coast-chart, in case of any
protest Brandt may make afterwards about the shoaliness of the water.
Better have him put his initials on the chart,” he added, with the
instinctive habit of caution which always distinguished his business
methods. “Do you think the shallow water round the Ledge _will_
scare him?” he continued, as he crossed the room to a row of shelves
filled with mechanical drawings, in search of a round tin case holding
the various charts of Long Island Sound.

Captain Joe did not answer Sanford’s question at once. His mind was on
something else. He took off his hat and pea-jacket, hung them on a
hook, moved back the pile of books from the middle of the table, with
as little consideration as he would have shown to so many bricks,
corked a bottle of liquid ink for safety, flattened with his big hands
the chart which Sanford had unrolled, weighted its four corners with a
T square and some color-pans, and then, bending his massive head,
began studying its details with all the easy confidence of a first
officer on a Cunarder.

As he leaned over the chart the sunlight played about his face and
brought into stronger relief the few gray hairs which silvered the
short brown curls crisped about his neck and temples. These hairs
betrayed the only change seen in him since the memorable winter’s day
when he had saved the lives of the passengers on the sinking
ferry-boat near Hoboken by calking with his own body the gash left in
her side by a colliding tug. But time had touched him nowhere else. He
was still the same broad-as-he-was-long old sea-dog; tough, sturdy,
tender-eyed, and fearless. His teeth were as white, his mouth was as
firm, his jaw as strong and determined.

The captain placed his horn-tipped finger on a dot marked “Shark’s
Ledge Spindle,” obliterating in the act some forty miles of sea-space;
repeated to himself in a low voice, “Six fathoms—four—one and a
half—hum, ’t ain’t nothin’; that Cape Ann sloop can do it;” and then
suddenly remembering Sanford’s question, he answered, with quick
lifting of his head and with a cheery laugh, “Skeer him? Wait till ye
see him, sir. And he won’t make no _pro_-test, nuther. He ain’t
that kind.”

When the coast-chart had been rolled up and replaced in the tin case,
to be taken to Keyport for the skipper’s initials, both men resumed
their seats by Sanford’s desk. By this time some of the young
engineer’s enthusiasm over the finding of the sloop had begun to cool.
He seemed, as he sat there, a different man, as with businesslike
address he turned to the discussion of various important details
connected with the work.

“Anything left of the old house, captain?” he asked, taking from the
table a rough sketch of the new shanty to be built on the Ledge,—the
one used while the artificial island was being built having been
injured by the winter storms.

“Not much, sir: one side’s stove in an’ the roof’s smashed. Some o’
the men are in it now, gittin’ things in shape, but it’s purty
rickety. I’m a-goin’ to put the new one here,”—his finger on the
drawing,—“an’ I’m goin’ to make it o’ tongue-an’-grooved stuff an’
tar the roof to git it water-tight. Then I’ll hev some iron bands made
with turnbuckles to go over the top timbers an’ fasten it all down in
the stone-pile. Oh, we’ll git her so she’ll stay put when hell breaks
loose some night down Montauk way!” and another hearty laugh rang out,
shaking the captain’s brawny chest, as he rolled up the drawing and
tucked it in the case for safety.

“There’s no doubt we’ll have plenty of that,” said Sanford, with a
slight touch of anxiety in his tones. “And now about the working
force. Will you make many changes?” he asked.

“No, sir. We’ll put Caleb West in charge of the divin’; ain’t no
better man’n Caleb in or out a dress. Them enrockments is mighty ugly
things to set under water, an’ I won’t trust nobody but Caleb to do
it. Lonny Bowles’ll help tend derricks; an’ there’s our regular
gang,—George Nickles an’ the rest of ’em. I only got one new man so
far: that’s a young feller named Bill Lacey. He looks like a
skylarkin’ chap, but I kin take that out o’ him. He kin climb like a
cat, an’ we want a man like that to shin the derricks. He’s tended
divers, too, he says, an’ he’ll do to look after Caleb’s life-line an’
hose when I can’t. By the way, sir, I forgot to ask ye about them
derricks. We got to hev four whackin’ big sticks to set them big stone
on top o’ the concrete when we git it finished, an’ there ain’t no
time to lose on ’em. I thought maybe ye’d order ’em to-day from
Medford?”

While Sanford was writing a telegram to a shipbuilder at Medford
ordering “four clean, straight, white pine masts not less than twenty
inches at the butt,” and delivering it to his negro servant, Sam, whom
he called from the adjoining room, Captain Joe had arisen from his
chair and had taken down his pea-jacket and Derby hat, without which
he never came to New York,—it was his one concession to metropolitan
exactions: the incongruity between the pea-jacket and the Derby hat
always delighted Sanford.

“But, Captain Joe,” said Sanford, looking up, “you mustn’t go;
breakfast will be ready in a minute. Young Mr. Hardy is coming, whom
you met here once before. He wants to meet you again.”

“Not this mornin’, sir. I’ve got a lot o’ things to look after ’fore I
catch the three-ten. I’m obleeged to ye all the same,” and he humped
his arms and shoulders into his weather-beaten pea-jacket and picked
up the tin case.

“Well, I wish you would,” said Sanford, with a hand on the captain’s
shoulder, and real disappointment in his tone, “but you know best, I
suppose.”

With the big brown hand of the captain in his own he followed him to
the top of the stairs, where he stood watching the burly figure
descending the spiral staircase, the tin case under his arm, spy-glass
fashion.

“You’ll see me in the morning, captain,” Sanford called out, not
wanting him to go without another word. “I’ll come by the midnight
train.”

The captain looked up and waved his hand cheerily in lieu of a reply.

Sanford waited until the turn of the staircase hid him from view, then
turned, and, drawing the heavy curtains of the vestibule, passed
through it to his private apartments, flooded with the morning light.




CHAPTER II

A MORNING’S MAIL


Sanford dropped into a brown leather chair, and Sam, with the fawning
droop of a water-spaniel, placed the morning paper before him, moved a
small table nearer, on which his master could lay the morning’s mail
as it was opened, adjusted the curtains so as to keep the glare from
his paper, and with noiseless tread withdrew to the kitchen. Whatever
the faults of this product of reconstruction might have been,—and Sam
had many,—neglect of Sanford’s comfort was not one of them.

According to his lights he was scrupulously honest. Although he
dressed with more care on Sunday afternoons than his master,—generally
in that gentleman’s cast-off clothes, and always in his discarded
neckties and gloves,—smoked his tobacco, purloined his cigars, and
occasionally drank his wine, whenever the demands of his social life
made such inroads on Sanford’s private stock necessary to maintain a
certain prestige among his ebonized brethren, he invariably drew the
line at his master’s loose change and his shirt-studs. This was due,
doubtless, to some drops of blood, trickling through his veins and
inherited from an old family butler of an ancestor, which, while they
permitted him the free use of everything his master ate, drank, and
wore,—a common privilege of the slave days,—debarred him completely
from greater crimes.

His delinquencies—all of them perfectly well known to Sanford—never
lost him his master’s confidence: he knew the race, and never expected
the impossible. Not only did he place Sam in charge of his household
expenditures, but he gave him entire supervision as well of his rooms
and their contents.

In these apartments Sam took the greatest pride. They were at the top
of one of those old-fashioned, hip-roofed, dormer-windowed houses
still to be found on Washington Square, and consisted of five rooms,
with dining-room and salon.

Against the walls of the salon stood low bookcases, their tops covered
with curios and the hundred and one knickknacks that encumber a
bachelor’s apartment. Above these again hung a collection of etchings
and sketches in and out of frames, many of them signed by fellow
members of the Buzzards, a small Bohemian club of ten who often held
their meetings here.

Under a broad frieze ran a continuous shelf, holding samples of half
the pots of the universe, from a Heidelberg beer-mug to an East Indian
water-jar; and over the doors were grouped bunches of African arrows,
spears, and clubs, and curious barbaric shields; while the centre of
the room was occupied by a square table covered with books and
magazines, ashtrays, Japanese ivories, and the like. Set in among them
was an umbrella-lamp with a shade of sealing-wax red. At intervals
about the room were smaller tables, convenient for decanters and
crushed ice, and against the walls, facing the piano, were wide divans
piled high with silk cushions, and near the window which opened on a
balcony overlooking the square stood a carved Venetian wedding-chest,
which Sanford had picked up on one of his trips abroad.

Within easy reach of reading-lamp and chair rested a four-sided
bookcase on rollers, filled with works on engineering and books of
reference; while a high, narrow case between two doors was packed with
photographs and engravings of the principal marine structures of our
own and other coasts. It was at once the room of a man of leisure and
a man of work.

Late as was the season, a little wood fire smouldered in the open
fireplace,—one of the sentiments to which Sanford clung,—while
before it stood the brown leather chair in which he sat.

“I forgot to say that Captain Bell will not be here to breakfast, Sam,
but Mr. Hardy is coming,” said Sanford, suddenly recollecting himself.

“Yaas, sah; everything’s ready, sah,” replied Sam, who, now that the
telegram had been dispatched and the morning papers and letters
delivered, had slipped into his white jacket again.

Sanford picked up the package of letters, a dozen or more, and began
cutting the envelopes. Most of them were read rapidly, marked in the
margin, and laid in a pile beside him. There were two which he had
placed by themselves without opening: one from his friend Mrs. Morgan
Leroy, and the other from Major Tom Slocomb, of Pocomoke, Maryland.

Major Slocomb wrote to inform him of his approaching visit to New
York, accompanied by his niece, Miss Helen Shirley, of Kent
County,—“a daughter, sir, of Colonel Talbot Shirley, one of our
foremost citizens, whom I believe you had the honor of meeting during
your never-to-be-forgotten visit among us.”

The never-to-be-forgotten visit was one that Sanford had made the
major the winter before, when he was inspecting the site for a stone
and brush jetty he was about to build for the government, in the
Chesapeake, near those famous estates which the Pocomokian inherited
from his wife, “the widow of Major Talbot, suh.”

During this visit the major had greatly endeared himself to the young
engineer. Under all the Pocomokian’s veneer of delightful mendacity,
utter shiftlessness, and luxurious extravagance, Sanford had
discovered certain qualities of true loyalty to those whom he loved,
and a very tender sympathy for the many in the world worse off than
himself. He had become convinced too that the major’s conversion from
a vagabond with gentlemanly instincts to a gentleman with strong
Bohemian tendencies might easily be accomplished were a little more
money placed at the Pocomokian’s disposal. With an endless check-book
and unlimited overdrafts, settlements to be made every hundred years,
the major would be a prince among men.

The niece to whom the major referred in his letter lived in an
adjoining county with a relative much nearer of kin. Like many other
possessions of this acclimated Marylander, she was really not his
niece at all, but another heritage from his deceased wife. The major
first saw her on horseback, in a neat-fitting riding-habit which she
had made out of some blue army kersey bought at the country store. One
glance at her lovely face, the poise of her head, the easy grace of
her seat, and her admirable horsemanship decided him at once.
Henceforward her name was to be emblazoned on the scroll of his family
tree!

It was not until Sanford had finished the major’s letter that he
turned to that from Mrs. Leroy. He looked first at the circular
postmark to see the exact hour at which it had been mailed; then he
rose from the big chair, threw himself on the divan, tucked a pillow
under his head, and slowly broke the seal. The envelope was large and
square, decorated with the crest of the Leroys in violet wax, and
addressed in a clear, round, almost masculine hand. “My dear Henry,”
it began, “if you are going to the Ledge, please stop at Medford and
see how my new dining-room is getting on. Be sure to come to luncheon
to-morrow, so we can talk it over,” etc., and ended with the hope that
he had not taken cold when he left her house the night before.

It had contained but half a dozen lines, and was as direct as most of
her communications; yet Sanford held it for a long time in his hands,
read and re-read it, looked at the heading, examined the signature,
turned it over carefully, and, placing it in its envelope, thrust it
under the sofa-pillow. With his hands behind his head he lay for some
time in thought. Then taking Mrs. Leroy’s letter from under the
pillow, he read it again, put it in his pocket, and began pacing the
room.

The letter had evidently made him restless. He threw wide the sashes
of the French window which opened on the iron balcony, and looked for
a moment over the square below, where the hard, pen-line drawing of
its trees was blurred by the yellow-green bloom of the early spring.
He turned back into the room, rearranged a photograph or two on the
mantel, and, picking up a vase filled with roses, inhaled their
fragrance and placed them in the centre of the dainty breakfast-table,
with its snowy linen and polished silver, that Sam had just been
setting near him. Reseating himself in his chair, he called again to
the ever watchful darky, who had been following his movements through
the crack of the pantry door.

“Sam.”

“Yaas ’r,” came a voice apparently from the far end of the pantry;
“comin’, sah.”

“Look over the balcony again and see if Mr. Hardy is on his way across
the square. Why! what’s become of the fellow?” he said to himself,
consulting the empire clock with broken columns which decorated the
mantel. “It’s after ten now. I’ll wager Helen wrote him by the same
mail. No wonder he’s late. Let me see! She gets here in three days.
Jack will be out of his head.” And Sanford sighed.

“I ’spec’s dat’s him a-comin’ up now, sah,” Sam called. “I yeared de
downstairs do’ click a minute ago. Here he is, sah,” drawing aside the
curtain that hid the entrance to the outer hall.

“Sorry, old man,” came a voice increasing in distinctness as the
speaker approached, “but I couldn’t help it, I had a lot of letters to
answer this morning, or I should have been on time. It don’t make any
difference to you; it’s your day off.”

“My day off, is it? I was out of bed this morning at six o’clock.
Captain Joe stopped here on his way from the train; he has just left;
and if you had stayed away a minute more, I’d have breakfasted without
you. And that isn’t all. That sloop I’ve been looking for has arrived,
and I go to Keyport to-night.”

“The devil you do!” said Jack, a shade of disappointment crossing his
face. “That means, I suppose, you won’t be back this spring. How long
are you going to be building that lighthouse, anyhow, Henry?”

“Two years more, I’m afraid,” said Sanford thoughtfully. “Breakfast
right away, Sam. Take the seat by the window, Jack. I thought we’d
breakfast here instead of in the dining-room; the air’s fresher.”

Jack opened his coat, took a rose from the vase, adjusted it in his
buttonhole, and spread his napkin over his knees.

He was much the younger of the two men, and his lot in life had been
far easier. Junior partner in a large banking-house down town, founded
and still sustained by the energy and business tact of his father,
with plenty of time for all the sports and pastimes popular with men
of his class, he had not found it a difficult task to sail easily
through life without a jar.

“What do you hear from Crab Island, Jack?” asked Sanford, a sly
twinkle in his eye, as he passed him the muffins.

“They’ve started the new club-house,” said Jack, with absolute
composure. “We are going to run out that extension you suggested when
you were down there last winter.” He clipped his egg lightly, without
a change of countenance.

“Anything from Helen Shirley?”

“Just a line, thanking me for the magazines,” Jack answered in a
casual tone, not the faintest interest betraying itself in the
inflections of his voice. Sanford thought he detected a slight
increase of color on his young friend’s always rosy cheeks, but he
said nothing.

“Did she say anything about coming to New York?” Sanford asked,
looking at Jack quizzically out of the corner of his eye.

“Yes; now I come to think of it, I believe she did say something about
the major’s coming, but nothing very definite.”

Jack spoke as if he had been aroused from some reverie entirely
foreign to the subject under discussion. He continued to play with his
egg, flecking off the broken bits of shell with the point of his
spoon. With all his pretended composure, however, he could not raise
his eyes to those of his host.

“What a first-class fraud you are, Jack!” said Sanford, laughing at
last. He leaned back in his chair and looked at Hardy good-humoredly
from under his eyebrows. “I would have read you Slocomb’s letter,
lying right before you, if I hadn’t been sure you knew everything in
it. Helen and the major will be here next week, and you know the very
hour she’ll arrive, and you have staked out every moment of her time.
Now don’t try any of your high-daddy tricks on me. What are you going
to do next Tuesday night?”

Jack laughed, but made no attempt to parry a word of Sanford’s thrust.
He looked up at last inquiringly over his plate and said, “Why?”

“Because I want you to dine here with them. I’ll ask Mrs. Leroy to
chaperon Helen. Leroy is still abroad, and she can come. We’ll get
Bock, too, with his ’cello. What other ladies are in town?”

Jack’s face was aglow in an instant. The possibility of dining in
Sanford’s room, with its background of rich color and with all its
pretty things that Helen he knew would love so well, lent instant
interest to Sanford’s proposition. He looked about him. He made up his
mind just where he would seat her after dinner: the divan nearest the
curtains was the best. How happy she would be, and how new it would
all be to her! He could have planned nothing more delightful. Then
remembering that Sanford had asked him a question, he recovered
himself and nonchalantly gave the names of several young women he knew
who might be agreeable guests. But after a moment’s reflection he
suggested as a second thought that Sanford leave these details to Mrs.
Leroy. Jack knew her tact, and he knew to a nicety just how many young
girls Mrs. Leroy would bring. The success of bachelor dinners, from
Hardy’s present standpoint, was not dependent upon the attendance of
half a dozen extra young women and _two_ men; quite the reverse.

The date for the dinner arranged, and the wisdom of leaving the list
of guests to Mrs. Leroy agreed upon, the talk drifted into other
channels: the Whistler pastels at Klein’s; the garden-party to be
given at Mrs. Leroy’s country-seat near Medford when the new
dining-room was finished and the roses were in bloom; the opportunity
Sanford might now enjoy of combining business with pleasure, Medford
being a short run from Shark Ledge; the success of Smearly’s last
portrait at the Academy, a photograph of which lay on the table; the
probable change in Slocomb’s fortunes, now that, with the consent of
the insurance company who held the mortgage, he had rented what was
left of the Widow Talbot’s estate to a strawberry planter from the
North, in order to live in New York; and finally, under Jack’s
guidance, back to Helen Shirley’s visit.

When the two men, an hour later, passed into the corridor, Sanford
held two letters in his hand ready to mail: one addressed to Major
Slocomb, with an inclosure to Miss Shirley, the other to Mrs. Morgan
Leroy.

Sam watched them over the balcony until they crossed the square, cut a
double shuffle with both feet, admired his black grinning face in the
mirror, took a corncob pipe from the shelf in the pantry, filled it
with some of Sanford’s best tobacco, and began packing his master’s
bag for the night train to Keyport.




CHAPTER III

CAPTAIN BRANDT AT THE THROTTLE


The sun was an hour high when Sanford arrived at Keyport and turned
quickly toward the road leading from the station to Captain Joe’s
cottage, a spring and lightness in his step which indicated not only
robust health, but an eagerness to reach at once the work absorbing
his mind. When he gained the high ground overlooking the cottage and
dock, he paused for a view that always charmed him with its play of
light and color over sea and shore, and which seemed never so
beautiful as in the early morning light.

Below him lay Keyport Village, built about a rocky half-moon of a
harbor, its old wharves piled high with rotting oil-barrels and
flanked by empty warehouses, behind which crouched low, gray-roofed
cabins, squatting in a tangle of streets, with here and there a white
church spire tipped with a restless weather-vane. Higher, on the
hills, were nestled some old homesteads with sloping roofs and wide
porches, and away up on the crest of the heights, overlooking the sea,
stood the more costly structures with well-shaved lawns spotted with
homesick trees from a warmer clime, their arms stretched appealingly
toward the sea.

At his feet lay the brimming harbor itself, dotted with motionless
yachts and various fishing-craft, all reflected upside down in the
still sea, its glassy surface rippled now and then by the dipping
buckets of men washing down the decks, or by the quick water-spider
strokes of some lobster-fisherman,—the click of the row-locks
pulsating in the breathless morning air.

On the near point of the half-moon stood Keyport Light,—an
old-fashioned factory chimney of a Light,—built of brick, but painted
snow-white with a black cigar band around its middle, its top
surmounted by a copper lantern. This flashed red and white at night,
over a radius of twenty miles. Braced up against its base, for a
better hold, was a little building hiding a great fog-horn, which on
thick days and nights bellowed out its welcome to Keyport’s best.

On the far point of the moon—the one opposite the Light, and some two
miles away—stretched sea-meadows broken with clumps of rock and
shelter-houses for cattle, and between these two points, almost
athwart the mouth of the harbor, like a huge motionless whale lay
Crotch Island, its backbone knotted with summer cottages. Beyond the
island away out under the white glare of the risen sun could be seen a
speck of purplish-gray fringed with bright splashes of spray glinting
in the dazzling light. This was Shark’s Ledge.

As Sanford looked toward the site of the new Light a strange sensation
came over him. There lay the work on which his reputation would rest
and by which he would hereafter be judged. Everything else he had so
far accomplished was, he knew, but a preparation for this his greatest
undertaking. Not only were the engineering problems involved new to
his experience, but in his attitude in regard to them he had gone
against all precedents as well as against the judgments of older
heads, and had relied almost exclusively upon Captain Joe’s personal
skill and pluck. While it was true that he never doubted his ultimate
success, there always came a tugging at his heartstrings and a
tightening of his throat whenever he looked toward the site of the
lighthouse.

Turning from the scene with a long drawn breath, he walked with
slackened step down the slope that led to the long dock fronting the
captain’s cottage. As he drew nearer he saw that the Screamer had been
moored between the captain’s dock (always lumbered with paraphernalia
required for sea-work) and the great granite-wharf, which was piled
high with enormous cubes of stone, each as big as two pianos.

On her forward deck was bolted a hoisting-engine, and thrust up
through the hatch of the forecastle was the smoke-stack of the boiler,
already puffing trial feathers of white steam into the morning air.
She had, too, the heavy boom and stout mast used as a derrick. Captain
Joe had evidently seen no reason to change his mind about her, for he
was at the moment on her after-deck, overhauling a heavy coil of
manilla rope, and reeving it in the block himself, the men standing by
to catch the end of the line.

When Sanford joined the group there was no general touching of
hats,—outward sign of deference that a group of laborers on land
would have paid their employer. In a certain sense, each man here was
chief. Each man knew his duty and did it, quietly, effectually, and
cheerfully. The day’s work had no limit of hours. The pay was never
fixed by a board of delegates, one half of whom could not tell a
marlinespike from a monkey-wrench. These men had enlisted for a war
with winds and storms and changing seas, and victory meant something
more to them than pay once a month and plum duff once a week. It meant
hours of battling with the sea, of tugging at the lines, waist-deep in
the boiling surf that rolled in from Montauk. It meant constant,
unceasing vigilance day and night, in order that some exposed site
necessary for a bedstone might be captured and held before a
southeaster could wreck it, and thus a vantage-point be lost in the
laying of the masonry.

Each man took his share of wet and cold and exposure without
grumbling. When, by some accident, a cowardly and selfish spirit
joined the force, Captain Joe, on the first word of complaint, handed
the man his money and put him ashore. The severity of the work was
never resented. It was only against their common enemies, the winds
and the seas, that murmurs were heard. “Drat that wind!” one would
say. “Here she’s a-haulin’ to the east’rd agin, an’ we ain’t got them
j’ints [in the masonry] p’inted.” Or, “It makes a man sick to see th’
way this month’s been a-goin’ on,—not a decent clay since las’
Tuesday.”

Sanford liked these men. He was always at home with them. He loved
their courage, their grit, their loyalty to one another and to the
work itself. The absence of ceremony among them never offended him.
His cheery “Good-morning” as he stepped aboard was as cheerily
answered, but no other demonstration took place.

Captain Joe stopped work only long enough to shake Sanford’s hand and
to present him to the newcomer, Captain Bob Brandt of the Screamer.

“Cap’n Bob!” he called, waving his hand.

“Ay, ay, sir!” came the ready response of his early training.

“Come aft, sir. Mr. Sanford wants ye.” The “sir” was merely a
recognition of the captain’s rank.

A tall, straight, blue-eyed young fellow of twenty-two, with a face
like an open book, walked down the deck,—one of those perfectly
simple, absolutely fearless, alert men found so often on the New
England coast, with legs and arms of steel, body of hickory, and hands
of whalebone: cabin-boy at twelve, common sailor at sixteen, first
mate at twenty, and full captain the year he voted.

Sanford looked him all over, from his shoes to his cap. He knew a
round full man when he saw him. This one seemed to be without a flaw.
Sanford saw too that he possessed that yeast of good nature without
which the best of men are heavy and dull.

“Can you lift these blocks, Captain Brandt?” he asked in a hearty
tone, more like that of a comrade than an employer, his hand extended
in greeting.

“Well, I can try, sir,” came the modest reply, the young man’s face
lighting up as he looked into Sanford’s eyes, where he read with equal
quickness a ready appreciation, so encouraging to every man who
intends to do his best.

Captain Brandt and every member of the gang knew that it was not the
mere weight of these enrockment blocks which made the handling of them
so serious a matter; twelve tons is a light lift for many
boat-derricks. It was the fact that they must be loaded aboard a
vessel not only small enough to be easily handled in any reasonable
weather, but with a water-draught shoal enough to permit her lying
safely in a running tide alongside the Ledge while the individual
blocks were being lowered over her side.

The hangers-on about the dock questioned whether any sloop could do
this work. All winter, in fact, they had discussed it about the tavern
stoves.

“Billy,” said old Marrows, an assumed authority on stone-sloops, but
not in Sanford’s employ, although a constant applicant, “I ain’t
sayin’ nothin’ agin her beam, mind, but she’s too peaked forrud.
’Nother thing, when she’s got them stones slung, them chain-plates
won’t hold ’er shrouds. I wouldn’t be s’prised to see that mast jerked
clean out’er her.”

Bill Lacey, the handsome young rigger to whom the remark was
addressed, leaned over the sloop’s rail, scanned every bolt in her
plates, glanced up at the standing rigging, tried it with his hand as
if it were a tight-rope, and with a satisfied air answered, “Them
plates is all right, Marrows,—it’s her b’iler that’s a-worryin’ me.
What do you say, Caleb?” turning to Caleb West, a broad-shouldered,
grizzled man in a sou’wester, who was mending a leak in a
diving-dress, the odor of the burning cement in a pan beside him
mingling with the savory smell of frying pork coming up from the
galley.

“Wall, I ain’t said, Billy,” replied Caleb in a cheery voice, stroking
his bushy gray beard. “Them as don’t know better keep shet.”

There was a loud laugh at the young rigger’s expense, in which
everybody except Lacey and Caleb joined. Lacey’s face hardened under
the thrust, while Caleb still smiled, a quaint expression
overspreading his features,—one that often came when something
pleased him, and which by its sweetness showed how little venom lay
behind his reproofs.

“These ’ere sloops is jes’ like women,” said George Nickles, the cook,
a big, oily man, with his sleeves rolled up above his elbows, a greasy
apron about his waist. He was dipping a bucket overboard. “Ye can’t
tell nothin’ about ’em till ye tries ’em.”

The application of the simile not being immediately apparent,—few of
Nickles’ similes ever were,—nobody answered. Lacey stole a look at
Nickles and then at Caleb, to see if the shot had been meant for him,
and meeting the diver’s unconscious clear blue eyes, looked seaward
again.

Lonny Bowles, a big derrickman from Noank quarries, in a red shirt,
discolored on the back with a pink Y where his suspenders had crossed,
now moved nearer and joined in the discussion.

“She kin h’ist any two on ’em, an’ never wet ’er deck combin’s. I seen
these Cape Ann sloops afore, when we wuz buildin’ Stonin’ton
breakwater. Ye wouldn’t believe they had it in ’em till ye see ’em
work. Her b’iler’s all right.”

“Don’t you like the sloop, Caleb?” said Sanford, who had been
listening. “Don’t you think she’ll do her work?” he continued, moving
a rebellious leg of the rubber dress to sit the closer.

“Well, of course, sir, I ain’t knowed ’er long ’nough to swear by yit.
She’s fittin’ for loadin’ ’em on land, maybe, but she may have some
trouble gittin’ rid of ’em at the Ledge. Her b’iler looks kind o’ weak
to me,” and the master diver bent over the pan, stirring the boiling
cement with his sheath-knife, the rubber suit sprawled out over his
knees, the awkward, stiff, empty legs and arms of the dress flopping
about as he patched its many leaks. Then he added with a quaint smile,
“But if Cap’n Joe says she’s all right, ye can pin to her.”

Sanford moved a little closer to Caleb, holding the pan of cement for
him, and watching him at work. He had known him for years as a
fearless diver of marvelous pluck and endurance; one capable of
working seven consecutive hours under water. When an English bark had
run on top of Big Spindle Reef and backed off into one hundred and ten
feet of water, the captain and six of the crew were saved, but the
captain’s wife, helpless in the cabin, had been drowned. Caleb had
gone below, cleared away the broken deck that pinned her down, and had
brought her body up in his arms. His helmet was spattered inside with
the blood that trickled from his ears, owing to the enormous pressure
of the sea. This had been not a twelvemonth since.

The constant facing of dangers had made of the diver a quiet, reticent
man. There was, too, a gentleness and restful patience about him that
always appealed to Sanford, and next to Captain Joe he was the one man
on the working force whom he trusted most. Of late his pale blue eyes
had shone with a softer light, as if he were perpetually hugging some
happiness to himself. Those who knew him best said that all this happy
gentleness had come with the girl wife. Since he had entered Sanford’s
employment he had married a second and a younger wife,—a mere child,
the men said, young enough to be his daughter, too young for a man of
forty-five.

And yet Caleb was not an old man, if the possession of vigor and
energy meant anything. His cheeks had the rosy hue of perfect health,
and his step was lighter and more agile than that of many men half his
years. Only his beard was gray. Yet he was called by his shipmates
old, for in the hard working world in which he lived none but the
earlier years of a man’s life counted as youth.

His cabin, a small, two-story affair, bought with the money he had
saved during his fifteen years on the Lightship and after his first
wife’s death, lay a short distance up the shore above that of Captain
Joe, and in plain sight of the Screamer.

When Caleb rose to wash his hands, he caught sight of a blue apron
tossing on its distant porch. Bill Lacey saw the apron too, and had
answered it a moment later with a little wave of his own. Caleb did
not notice Billy’s signal, but Captain Joe did, and a peculiar look
filled his eye that the men did not often see. In his confusion Lacey
flushed scarlet, and upset the pan of cement.

When Nickles announced breakfast, Captain Joe soused a bucket
overboard, rested it on the rail and plunged in his hands, the
splashing drops glistening in the sunlight, and called out:—

“Come, Mr. Sanford,—breakfast’s ready, men.” Then, waving his hand to
Caleb and the others who had been discussing the Screamer, he said,
laughing, “All you men what’s gittin’ skeery ’bout this sloop kin step
ashore. I’m a-goin’ to load three o’ them stone aboard here after
breakfast, if I roll her over bottom side up.”

Sanford sat at the head of the table, his back to the companionway,
the crew’s bunks within reach of his hand. He was the only man who
wore a coat. Set out before him were fried eggs sizzling in squares of
pork; hashed potatoes, browned in what was left of the sizzle;
saleratus biscuit, full of dark spots; and coffee in tin cups. There
was also a small jug of molasses, protected by a pewter top, and there
was, too, a bottle of tomato catsup, whose contents were
indiscriminately spattered over every plate.

Long years of association had familiarized Sanford with certain rules
of etiquette to be observed at a meal like this. Whoever finished
first, he knew, must push back his stool out of the way and instantly
mount to the deck. In confined quarters, elbow-room is a luxury, and
its free gift a courtesy. He also knew that to leave anything on his
plate would have been regarded as an evidence of extreme bad manners,
suggesting moreover a reflection upon the skill of the cook. It was
also a part of the code to wipe one’s knife carefully on the last
piece of bread, which was to be swallowed immediately, thus
obliterating all traces of the repast, except, of course, the bones,
which must be picked clean and piled on one side of the plate. Captain
Joe himself never neglected any of these little amenities.

Sanford forgot none of them. He wiped his knife and cleared his plate
as carefully as any of his men. He drank from his tin cup, and ate his
eggs and fried pork too with the same zest that he would have felt
before one of Sam’s choicest breakfasts. He really enjoyed these
repasts. To him there was something wonderfully inspiring in watching
a group of big, strong, broad-breasted, horny-handed laboring men
intent on satisfying a hunger born of fresh air and hard work. There
was an eagerness about their movements, a relish as each mouthful
disappeared, attended by a good humor and sound digestion that would
have given a sallow-faced dyspeptic a new view of life, and gone far
toward converting a dilettante to the belief that although forks and
napkins were perhaps indispensable luxuries, existence might not be
wholly desolate with plain fingers and shirt-cuffs.

Breakfast over, Captain Joe was the first man on deck. He had left his
pea-jacket in the cabin, and now wore his every-day outfit—the blue
flannel shirt, long since stretched out of shape in its efforts to
accommodate itself to the spread of his shoulders, and a pair of
trousers in which each corrugated wrinkle outlined a knotted muscle
twisted up and down a pair of legs sturdy as rudder-posts.

“Come, men!” he called in a commanding voice, with none of the gentler
tones heard at the breakfast-table. “Pull yourselves together.... Bill
Lacey, lower away that hook and git them chains ready.... Fire up,
Cap’n Brandt, and give ’er every pound o’ steam she’ll carry....
Here,—one or two of ye, run this ’ere line ashore and make her bow
fast.... Drop that divin’-suit, Caleb; this ain’t no time to patch
things.”

These orders were volleyed at the men as he stepped from the sloop to
the wharf, each man springing to his place with an alacrity seldom
seen among men of other crews. Close association with Captain Joe
always inspired a peculiar confidence and loyalty not only among his
own men, but in all the others who heard his voice. His personal
magnetism, his enthusiasm, his seeming reckless fearlessness, and yet
extreme caution and watchful care for the safety of his men, had
created among his employees a blind confidence in his judgment that
always resulted in immediate and unquestioned obedience to his orders,
no matter what the risk might seem.

The sloop was now lying alongside the wharf, with beam and stern lines
made fast to the outlying water-spiles to steady her. When the tackle
was shaken clear, the boom was lowered at the proper angle; the heavy
chain terminating in an enormous S-hook, which hung directly over the
centre of one of the big enrockment blocks.

Captain Joe moved down the dock and adjusted with his own hands the
steel “Lewis” that was to be driven into the big trial stone.
Important details he never left to others. If this Lewis should slip,
with the stone suspended over the sloop’s deck, the huge block would
crush through her timbers, sinking her instantly.

The Screamer’s captain was at the throttle, watching the steadily
rising steam-gauge.

“Give ’er a turn and take up the slack!” shouted Captain Joe.

“Ay, ay, sir!” answered the skipper quickly, as the cogs of the
hoisting-engine began to move, winding all the loose slackened “fall”
around the drum, until it straightened out like a telegraph wire.

“What’s she carryin’ now, Cap’n Bob?” again shouted Captain Joe.

“Seventy-six pounds, sir.”

“Give ’er time—don’t push ’er.”

A crowd began to gather on the dock: fishermen and workmen on their
way to the village, idlers along the shore road, and others. They all
understood that the trial of the sloop was to be made this morning,
and great interest was felt. The huge stones had rested all winter on
this wharf, and had been discussed and rediscussed until each one
outweighed the Pyramids. Loading such pieces on board a vessel like
the Screamer had never been done in Keyport before.

Old Marrows whispered certain misgivings, as he made fast a line far
up on the wharf. Some of the listeners moved back across the road,
yielding to the vague fear of the inexperienced. Bets were offered
that “her mast would be tore clean out of her;” or that “she’d put her
starboard rail under water afore she’d start ’em;” and that “she’d
sink where she lay.”

The needle of the gauge on the sloop’s boiler revolved slowly until it
registered ninety pounds. Little puffs of blue vaporless steam hissed
from the safety-valve. The boiler was getting ready to do its duty.

Captain Joe looked aloft, ordered the boom topped a few inches, so
that the lift would be plumb, sprang upon the sloop’s deck,
scrutinized the steam-gauge, saw that the rope was evenly wound on the
drum, emptied an oil-can into the sunken wooden saddle in which the
butt of the boom rested, followed with his eye every foot of the
manilla fall from the drum through the double blocks to the chain
hanging over the big stone, called to the people on the dock to get
out of harm’s way, saw that every man was in his place, and shouted
the order, clear and sharp,—

“Go ahead!”

The cogs of the drum of the hoisting-engine spun around until the
great weight began to tell; then the strokes of the steam-pistons
slowed down. The outboard mooring-lines were now tight as standing
rigging. The butt of the boom in the sunken saddle was creaking as it
turned, a pungent odor from the friction-heated oil filling the air.
The strain increased, and the sloop careened toward the wharf until
her bilge struck the water, drawing taut as bars of steel her outboard
shrouds. Ominous clicks came from the new manilla as its twists were
straightened out.

Captain Bob Brandt still stood by the throttle, one of his crew
firing,—sometimes with refuse cotton waste soaked in kerosene. He was
watching every part of his sloop then under strain to see how she
stood the test.

The slow movement of the pistons continued.

The strain on the outboard shroud became intense. A dead silence
prevailed, broken only by the clicking fall and the creak of the
roller blocks.

Twice the safety-valve blew a hoarse note of warning.

Slowly, inch by inch, the sloop settled in the water, stopped
suddenly, and quivered her entire length. Another turn of the drum on
her deck and the huge stone canted a point, slid the width of a dock
plank, and with a hoarse, scraping sound turned half round and swung
clear of the wharf!

A cheer went up from the motley crowd on the dock.

Not a word escaped the men at work. The worst was yet to come.

The swinging stone must yet be lowered on deck.

“Tighten up that guy,” said Captain Joe quietly, between his teeth,
never taking his eyes from the stone; his hand meanwhile on the fall,
to test its strain.

Bill Lacey and Caleb ran to the end of the dock, whipped one end of a
line around a mooring-post, and with their knees bent to the ground
held on with all their strength. The other end of the guy was fastened
to the steel S-hook that held the Lewis now securely in the stone.

“Easy—ea-s-y!” said Captain Joe, a momentary shadow of anxiety on his
face. The guy held by Caleb and Lacey gradually slackened. The great
stone, now free to swing clear, moved slowly in mid-air over the edge
of the wharf, passed above the water, cleared the rail of the sloop,
and settled on her deck as gently as a grounding balloon.

The cheer that broke from all hands brought the fishwives to their
porches.




CHAPTER IV

AMONG THE BLACKFISH AND TOMCODS


Hardly had the men ceased cheering when the boom was swung back,
another huge stone was lifted from the wharf, and loaded aboard the
sloop. A third followed, was lowered upon rollers on the deck and
warped amidships, to trim the boat. The mooring-lines were cast off,
and the sloop’s sail partly hoisted for better steering, and a
nervous, sputtering little tug tightened a tow-line over the
Screamer’s bow.

The flotilla now moved slowly out of the harbor toward the Ledge.
Captain Brandt stood at the wheel. His face was radiant. His boat had
met the test, just as he knew she would. She had stood by him too many
times before for him to doubt her now.

There had been one night at Rockport when she lay till morning, bow on
to a gale, within a cable’s length of the breakwater. This saw-toothed
ledge, with the new floating buoys of Captain Joe’s, could not
frighten him after that.

Yet not a word of boasting passed his lips. He spun his wheel and held
his peace.

When the open harbor was reached, the men overhauled the boom-tackle,
getting ready for the real work of the day. Bill Lacey and Caleb West
lifted the air-pump from its case, and oiled the plunger. Caleb was to
dive that day himself,—work like this required an experienced
hand,—and find a bed for these first three stones as they were
lowered under water. Lacey was to tend the life-line.

As the tug and sloop passed into the broad water, Medford Village
could be seen toward the southeast. Sanford adjusted his marine-glass,
and focused its lens on Mrs. Leroy’s country-house. It lay near the
water, and was surmounted by a cupola he had often occupied as a
lookout when he had been Mrs. Leroy’s guest, and the weather had been
too rough for him to land at the Ledge. He saw that the bricklayers
were really at work, and that the dining-room extension was already
well under way, the scaffolding being above the roof. He meant, if the
weather permitted, to stop there on his way home.

Soon the Ledge itself loomed up. The concrete men were evidently busy,
for the white steam from the mixers rose straight into the still air.

An hour more and the windows on the lee side of the shanty could be
distinguished, and a little later, the men on the platform as they
gathered to await the approaching flotilla. When they caught sight of
the big blocks stored on the Screamer’s deck, they broke into a cheer
that was followed by a shrill saluting whistle from the big
hoisting-engine on the Ledge, answered as cheerily by the approaching
tug. Work on the Ledge could now begin in earnest.

If Crotch Island was like the back of a motionless whale, Shark’s
Ledge was like that of a turtle,—a turtle say one hundred and fifty
feet long by a hundred wide, lying in a moving sea, and always fringed
by a ruffling of surf curls, or swept by great waves that rolled in
from Montauk. No landing could ever be made here except in the eddy
formed by the turtle itself, and then only in the stillest weather.

The shell of this rock-incrusted turtle had been formed by dumping on
the original Ledge, and completely covering it, thousands of tons of
rough stone, each piece as big as a cart-body. Upon this stony shell,
which rose above high-water mark, a wooden platform had been erected
for the proper storage of gravel, sand, barrels of cement,
hoisting-engines, concrete mixers, tools, and a shanty for the men. It
was down by the turtle’s side—down below the slop of the surf—that
the big enrockment blocks were to be placed, one on the other, their
sides touching close as those on a street pavement. The lowest stone
of all was to be laid on the bottom of the sea in thirty feet of
water; the top one was to be placed where its upper edges would be
thrust above its splash. In this way the loose rough stones of the
turtle’s shell would have an even covering and the finished structure
be protected from the crush of floating ice and the fury of winter
gales.

By a change of plan the year before, a deep hole nearly sixty feet in
diameter had been made in the back of this turtle by lifting out these
rough stones. This hole was now being filled with concrete up to
low-water level and retained in form by circular iron bands. On top of
this enormous artificial bedstone was to be placed the tower of the
lighthouse itself, constructed of dressed stone, many of the single
pieces to be larger than those now on the Screamer’s deck. The four
great derrick-masts with “twenty-inch butts” which had been ordered by
telegraph the day before in Sanford’s office were to be used to place
these dressed stones in position.

The situation was more than usually exposed. The nearest land to the
Ledge was Crotch Island, two miles away, while to the east stretched
the wide sea, hungry for fresh victims, and losing no chance to worst
the men on the Ledge. For two years it had fought the captain and his
men without avail. The Old Man of the Sea hates the warning voice of
the fog-horn and the cheery light in the tall tower—they rob him of
his prey.

The tug continued on her course for half a mile, steered closer, the
sloop following, and gained the eddy of the Ledge out of the racing
tide. Four men from the platform now sprang into a whaleboat and
pulled out to meet the sloop, carrying one end of a heavy hawser which
was being paid out by the men on the Ledge. The hawser was made fast
to the sloop’s cleats and hauled tight. The tug was cast loose and
sent back to Keyport. Outboard hawsers were run by the crew of the
whaleboat to the floating anchor-buoys, to keep the sloop off the
stone-pile when the enrockment blocks were being swung clear of her
sides.

Caleb and Lacey began at once to overhaul the diving-gear. The
air-pump was set close to the sloop’s rail; and a short ladder was
lashed to her side, to enable the diver to reach the water easily. The
air-hose and life-lines were then uncoiled.

Caleb threw off his coat and trousers, that he might move the more
freely in his diving-dress, and with Lonny Bowles’s assistance twisted
himself into his rubber suit,—body, arms, and legs being made of one
piece of air-tight and water-tight rubber cloth.

By the time the sloop had been securely moored, and the boom-tackle
made ready to lift the stone, Caleb stood on the ladder completely
equipped, except for his copper helmet, the last thing done to a diver
before he sinks under water. Captain Joe always adjusted Caleb’s
himself. On Caleb’s breast and between his shoulders hung two lead
plates weighing twenty-five pounds each, and on his feet were two
iron-shod shoes of equal weight. These were needed as ballast, to
overbalance the buoyancy of his inflated dress, and enable him to sink
or rise at his pleasure. Firmly tied to his wrist was a stout
cord,—his life-line,—and attached to the back of the copper helmet
was a long rubber hose, through which a constant stream of fresh air
was to be pumped inside his helmet and suit.

In addition to these necessary appointments there was hung over one
shoulder a canvas haversack, containing a small cord, a chisel, a
water-compass, and a sheath-knife. The sheath-knife is the last
desperate resource of the diver when his air-hose becomes tangled or
clogged, his signals are misunderstood, and he must either cut his
hose in the effort to free himself and reach the surface, or suffocate
where he is.

Captain Joe adjusted the copper helmet, and stood with Caleb’s glass
face-plate in his hand, thus leaving his helmet open for a final order
in his ear, before he lowered him overboard. The cogs of the
Screamer’s drum began turning, followed by the same creaking and
snapping of manilla and straining of boom that had been heard when she
was loaded.

Meanwhile between the sea and the sloop a fight had already begun. The
current which swept by within ten feet of her bilge curled and eddied
about the buoy-floats, tugging at their chains, while wave after wave
tried to reach her bow, only to fall back beaten and snapping like
hungry wolves.

The Cape Ann sloop had fought these fights before: all along her
timber rail were the scars of similar battles. She had only to keep
her bow-cheeks from the teeth of these murderous rocks, and she could
laugh all day at their open jaws.

With the starting of the hoisting-engine the steam began to hiss
through the safety-valve, and the bow-lines of the sloop straightened
like strands of steel. Then there came a slight, staggering movement
as she adjusted herself to the shifting weight. Without a sound, the
stone rose from the deck, cleared the rail, and hung over the sea.
Another cheer went up—this time from both the men on board the sloop
and those on the Ledge. Captain Brandt smiled with closed lips. Life
was easy for him now.

“Lower away,” said Captain Joe in the same tone he would have used in
asking for the butter, as he turned to screw on Caleb’s face-plate,
shutting out the fresh air, and giving the diver only pumped air to
breathe.

The stone sank slowly into the sea, the dust and dirt of its long
outdoor storage discoloring the clear water.

“Hold her,” continued Captain Joe, his hand still on Caleb’s
face-plate, as he stood erect on the ladder. “Stand by, Billy. Go on
with that pump, men,—give him plenty of air.”

Two men began turning the handles of the pump. Caleb’s dress filled
out like a balloon; Lacey took his place near the small ladder, the
other end of Caleb’s life-line having been made fast to his wrist, and
the diver sank slowly out of sight, his hammer in his hand, the air
bubbles from his exhaust-valve marking his downward course.

As Caleb sank, he hugged his arms close to his body, pressed his knees
together, forcing the surplus air from his dress, and dropped rapidly
toward the bottom. The thick lead soles of his shoes kept his feet
down and his head up, and the breast-plates steadied him.

At the depth of twenty feet he touched the tops of the sea-kelp
growing on the rocks below,—he could feel the long tongues of leaves
scraping his legs. Then, as he sank deeper, his shoes struck an
outlying boulder. Caleb pushed himself off, floated around it,
measured it with his arms, and settled to the gravel. He was now
between the outlying boulder and the Ledge. Here he raised himself
erect on his feet and looked about: the gravel beneath him was white
and spangled with starfish; little crabs lay motionless, or scuttled
away at his crunching tread; the sides of the isolated boulder were
smooth and clean, the top being covered with waving kelp. In the dim,
greenish light this boulder looked like a weird head,—a kind of
submarine Medusa, with her hair streaming upward. The jagged rock-pile
next it, its top also covered with kelp, resembled a hill of purple
and brown corn swaying in the ceaseless current.

Caleb thrust his hand into his haversack, grasped his long knife,
slashed at the kelp of the rock-pile to see the bottom stones the
clearer, and sent a quick signal of “All right—lower away!” through
the life-line, to Lacey, who stood on the sloop’s deck above him.

Almost instantly a huge square green shadow edged with a brilliant
iridescent light sank down towards him, growing larger and larger in
its descent. Caleb peered upward through his face-plate, followed the
course of the stone, and jerked a second signal to Lacey’s wrist. This
signal was repeated in words by Lacey to Captain Brandt, who held the
throttle, and the shadowy stone was stopped within three feet of the
gravel bottom. Here it swayed slowly, half turned, and touched on the
boulder.

Caleb watched the stone carefully until it was perfectly still, crept
along, swimming with one hand, and measured carefully with his eye the
distance between the boulder and the Ledge. Then he sent a quick
signal of “Lower—all gone,” up to Lacey’s wrist. The great stone
dropped a chain’s link; slid halfway the boulder, scraping the kelp in
its course; careened, and hung over the gravel with one end tilted on
a point of the rocky ledge. As it hung suspended, its lower end buried
itself in the gravel near the boulder, while the upper lay aslant up
the slope of the rock-covered ledge.

Caleb again swam carefully around the stone, opened his arms, and
inflating his dress rose five or six feet through the green water,
floated over the huge stone, and grasping with his bare hand the
lowering chain by which the stone hung, tested its strain. The chain
was as rigid as a bar of steel. This showed that the stone was not
fully grounded, and therefore dangerous, being likely to slide off at
any moment. The diver now sent a telegram of short and long jerks
aloft, asking for a crowbar; hooked his legs around the lowering chain
and pressed his copper helmet to the chain links to listen to Captain
Joe’s answer. A series of dull thuds, long and short, struck by a
hammer above—a means of communication often possible when the depth
of water is not great—told him that the crowbar he had asked for
would be sent down at once. While he waited motionless, a blackfish
pressed his nose to the glass of his face-plate, and scurried off to
tell his fellows living in the kelp how strange a thing he had seen
that day.

A quick jerk from Lacey, and the point of the crowbar dangled over
Caleb’s head. In an instant, to prevent his losing it in the kelp, he
had lashed another and smaller cord about its middle, and with the bar
firmly in his hand laid himself flat on the stone. The diver now
examined carefully the points of contact between the boulder and the
hanging stone, inserted one end of the bar under its edge, sent a
warning signal above, braced both feet against the lowering chain,
threw his whole strength on the bar, and gave a quick, sharp pull. The
next instant the chain tightened; the bar, released from the strain,
bounded from his hand; there was a headlong surge of the huge shadowy
mass through the waving kelp, and the great block slipped into its
place, stirring up the bottom silt in a great cloud of water-dust.

The first stone of the system of enrockment had been bedded!

Caleb clung with both hands to the lowering chain, waited until the
water cleared, knocked out the Lewis pin that held the S-hook, thus
freeing the chain, and signaled “All clear—hoist.” Then he hauled the
crowbar towards him by the cord, signaled for the next stone, moved
away from the reach of falling bodies, and sank into a bed of sea-kelp
as comfortably as if it had been a sofa-cushion.

These breathing spells rest the lungs of a diver and lighten his work.
Being at rest he can manage his dress the better, inflating it so that
he is able to get his air with greater ease and regularity. The relief
is sometimes so soothing that in long waits the droning of the
air-valve will lull the diver into a sleep, from which he is suddenly
awakened by a quick jerk on his wrist. Many divers, while waiting for
the movements of those above, play with the fish, watch the crabs, or
rake over the gravel in search of the thousand and one things that are
lost overboard and that everybody hopes to find on the bottom of the
sea.

Caleb did none of these things. He was too expert a diver to allow
himself to go to sleep, and he had too much to think about to play
with the fish. He sat quietly awaiting his call, his thoughts on the
day of the week and how long it would be before Saturday night came
again, and whether, when he left that morning, he had arranged
everything for the little wife, so that she would be comfortable until
his return. Once a lobster moved slowly up and nipped his red fingers
with its claw, thinking them some tidbit previously unknown. (The
dress terminates at the wrist with a waterproof and air-tight band,
leaving the hands bare.) At another time two tomcods came sailing
past, side by side, flapped their tails on his helmet, and scampered
off. But Caleb, sitting comfortably on his sofa-cushion of seaweed
thirty feet under water, paid little heed to outside things. His eyes
only saw a tossing apron and a trim little figure on a cabin porch, as
she waved him a last good-by.

                        *    *    *    *    *

In the world above, a world of fleecy clouds and shimmering sea, some
changes had taken place since Caleb sank out of the sunlight. Hardly
had the second stone been made ready to be swung overboard, when there
came a sudden uplifting of the sea. One of those tramp waves preceding
a heavy storm had strayed in from Montauk and was making straight for
the Ledge.

Captain Joe sprang on the sloop’s rail and looked seaward, and a shade
of disappointment crossed his face.

“Stand by on that outboard ha’sser!” he shouted in a voice that was
heard all over the Ledge.

The heavy outboard hawser holding the sloop whipped out of the sea
with the sudden strain, thrashed the spray from its twists, and
quivered like a fiddle-string. The sloop staggered for an instant,
plunged bow under, careened to her rail, and righted herself within
oar’s touch of the Ledge. Three feet from her bilge streak crouched a
grinning rock with its teeth set!

Captain Joe smiled and looked at Captain Brandt.

“Ain’t nothin’ when ye git used to’t, Cap’n Bob. I ain’t a-goin’ ter
scratch ’er paint. Got to bank yer fires. Them other two stone’ll have
to wait till the tide turns.”

“Ay, ay, sir,” replied the skipper, throwing the furnace door wide
open. The danger was passed for the second time, and in the final test
his boat had proved herself. Yet again he did not boast. There was
only a fearless ready-to-meet-anything air about him as, with
shoulders squared and head up, he walked down the deck and said to
Captain Joe, in a tone as if he were only asking for information, but
without the slightest shade of anxiety, “If that ’ere ha’sser’d
parted, Cap’n Joe, when she give that plunge, it would ’a’ been all up
with us,—eh?”

“Yes,—’spec’ so,” answered the captain, his mind, now that the danger
had passed, neither on the question nor on the answer. Then suddenly
awakening with a look of intense interest, “That line was a new one,
Cap’n Bob. I picked it out a-purpose; them kind don’t part.”

Sanford, who had been standing by the tiller, anxiously watching the
conflict with the sea, walked forward and grasped the skipper’s hand.

“I want to congratulate you,” he said, “on your sloop and on your
pluck. It is not every man can lie around this stone-pile for the
first time and keep his head.”

Captain Brandt flushed like a bashful girl, and turned away his face.
“Well, sir—ye see”—He never finished the sentence. The compliment
had upset him more than the escape of the sloop.

All was bustle now on board the Screamer. The boom was swung in
aboard, lowered, and laid on the deck. Caleb had been hauled up to the
surface, his helmet unscrewed, and his shoes and breast-plate taken
off. He still wore his dress, so that he could be ready for the other
two stones when the tide turned. Meanwhile he walked about the deck
looking like a great bear on his hind legs, his bushy beard puffed out
over his copper collar.

During the interval of the change of tide dinner was announced, and
the Screamer’s crew went below to more sizzle and doughballs, and this
time a piece of corned beef, while Sanford, Captain Joe, Caleb, and
Lacey sprang into the sloop’s yawl and sculled for the shanty and
their dinner, keeping close to the hawser still holding the sloop.

                        *    *    *    *    *

The unexpected made half the battle at the Ledge. It was not unusual
to see a southeast roll, three days old, cut down in an hour to the
smoothness of a mill-pond by a northwest gale, and before night to
find this same dead calm followed by a semi-cyclone. Only an expert
could checkmate the consequences of weather manœuvres like these.
Before Captain Joe, sitting at the head of the table, had filled each
man’s plate with his fair proportion of cabbage and pork, a whiff of
wind puffed in the bit of calico that served as a curtain for the
shanty’s pantry window,—the one facing east. Captain Joe sprang from
his seat, and, bareheaded as he was, mounted the concrete platforms
and looked seaward. Off towards Block Island he saw a little wrinkling
line of silver flashing out of the deepening haze, while toward Crotch
Island scattered flurries of wind furred the glittering surface of the
sea with dull splotches,—as when one breathes upon a mirror. The
captain turned quickly, entered the shanty, and examined the
barometer. It had fallen two points.

“Finish yer dinner, men,” he said quietly. “That’s the las’ stone
to-day, Mr. Sanford. It’s beginnin’ ter git lumpy. It’ll blow a livin’
gale o’ wind by sundown.”

A second and stronger puff now swayed the men’s oilskins, hanging
against the east door. This time the air was colder and more moist.
The sky overhead had thickened. In the southeast lay two sun-dog
clouds, their backs shimmering like opals, while about the feverish
eye of the sun itself gathered a reddish circle like an inflammation.

Sanford was on the platform, reading the signs of the coming gale. It
was important that he should reach Keyport by night, and he had no
time to spare. As the men came out one after another, each of them
glanced toward the horizon, and quickening his movements fell to work
putting the place in order. The loose barrow planks were quickly
racked up on the shanty’s roof, out of the wash of the expected surf;
an extra safety-guy was made fast to the platform holding the
hoisting-engine, and a great tarpaulin drawn over the cement and
lashed fast. Meanwhile Captain Joe busied himself in examining the
turnbuckles of the holding-down rods, which bound the shanty to the
Ledge, and giving them another tightening twist, ordering the heavy
wooden shutters for the east side of the shanty to be put up, and
seeing that the stove-pipe that stuck through the roof was taken down
and stored inside.

All this time the Screamer tugged harder at her hawser, her bow
surging as the ever-increasing swell raced past her.

Orders to man the yawl were now given and promptly obeyed.

“Keep everything snug, Caleb, while I’m gone!” Captain Joe shouted, as
he stepped into the boat. “It looks soapy, but it may be out to the
nor’ard an’ clear by daylight. Sit astern, Mr. Sanford. Pull away,
men, we ain’t got a minute.”

                        *    *    *    *    *

When the Screamer, with two unset stones still on her deck, bore away
from the Ledge with Sanford, Captain Joe, and Lacey on board, the
spray was flying over the shanty roof.

Caleb stood on the platform waving his hand. He was still in his
diving-dress. His helmet only had been removed, and his bushy beard
was flying in the wind.

“Tell Betty I’ll be home for Sunday,” the men heard him call out, as
they flew by under close reef.




CHAPTER V

AUNTY BELL’S KITCHEN


The storm was still raging, the wind beating in fierce gusts against
the house and rattling the window-panes, when Sanford awoke in the
low-ceiled room always reserved for him at Captain Joe’s.

“Turrible dirty, ain’t it?” the captain called, as he came in with a
hearty good-morning and threw open the green blinds. “I guess she’ll
scale off; it’s hauled a leetle s’uth’ard since daylight. The glass is
a-risin’, too. Aunty Bell says breakfas’ ’s ready jes’ ’s soon’s you
be.”

“All right, captain. Don’t wait. I’ll come in ten minutes,” replied
Sanford.

Outside the little windows a wide-armed tree swayed in the storm, its
budding branches tapping the panes. Sanford went to the window and
looked out. The garden was dripping, and the plank walk that ran to
the swinging-gate was glistening in the driving rain.

These changes in the weather did not affect his plans. Bad days were
to be expected, and the loss of time at an exposed site like that of
the Ledge was always considered in the original estimate of the cost
of the structure. If the sea prevented the landing of stone for a day
or so, the sloop, as he knew, could load a full cargo of blocks from
the wharf across the road, now hidden by the bursting lilacs in the
captain’s garden; or the men could begin on the iron parts of the new
derricks, and if it cleared, as Captain Joe predicted, they could trim
the masts and fit the bands. Sanford turned cheerfully from the
window, and picked up his big sponge that lay by the tin tub Aunty
Bell always filled for him the night before.

The furniture and appointments about him were of the plainest. There
were a bed, a wash-stand and a portable tub, three chairs, and a small
table littered with drawing materials. Dimity curtains, snow-white,
hung at the windows, and the bureau was covered with a freshly
laundered white Marseilles cover. On the walls were tacked mechanical
drawings, showing cross-sections of the several courses of
masonry,—prospective views of the concrete base and details of the
cisterns and cellars of the lighthouse. Each of these was labeled
“Shark Ledge Lighthouse. Henry Sanford, Contractor,” and signed, “W.
A. Carleton, Asst. Supt. U. S. L. Estb’t.” In one corner of the room
rested a field transit, and a pole with its red-and-white target.

The cottage itself was on the main shore road leading from the village
to Keyport Light, and a little removed from the highway. It had two
stories and a narrow hall with rooms on either side. In the rear were
the dining-room and kitchen. Overlooking the road in front was a wide
portico with sloping roof.

There were two outside doors belonging to the house. These were always
open. They served two purposes,—to let in the air and to let in the
neighbors. The neighbors included everybody who happened to be
passing, from the doctor to the tramp. This constant stream of
visitors always met in the kitchen,—a low-ceiled, old-fashioned
interior, full of nooks and angles, that had for years adapted itself
to everybody’s wants and ministered to everybody’s comfort,—and was
really the cheeriest and cosiest room in the house.

Its fittings and furnishings were as simple as they were convenient.
On one side, opposite the door, were the windows, looking out upon the
garden, their sills filled with plants in winter and sou’wester hats
in summer. In the far corner stood a pine dresser painted bright
green, decorated with rows of plates and saucers set up on edge,
besides various dishes and platters, all glistening from the last
touch of Aunty Bell’s hand polish. Next to the dresser was a broad,
low settle, also of pine and also bright green, except where countless
pairs of overalls had worn the paint away. Chairs of all kinds stood
about,—rockers for winter nights, and more ceremonious straight-backs
for meal-times. There was a huge table, too, with always a place for
one more, and a mantel-rest for pipes and knickknacks,—never known
to be without a box of matches or a nautical almanac. There were rows
of hooks nailed to the backs of the doors, especially adapted to
rubber coats and oilskins. And tucked away in a corner under the
stairs was a fresh, sweet-smelling, brass-hooped cedar bucket with a
cocoanut dipper that had helped to cool almost every throat from
Keyport Village to Keyport Light.

But it was the stove that made this room unique: not an ordinary,
commonplace cooking-machine, but a big, generous, roomy arrangement,
pushed far back out of everybody’s way, with out-riggers for broiling,
and capacious ovens for baking, and shelves for keeping things hot,
besides big and little openings on top for pots and kettles and
frying-pans, of a pattern unknown to the modern chef; each and every
one dearly prized by the cheery little soul who burnt her face to a
blazing red in its service. This cast-iron embodiment of all the
hospitable virtues was the special pride of Aunty Bell, the captain’s
wife, a neat, quick, busy little woman, about half the size of the
captain in height, width, and thickness. Into its recesses she poured
the warmth of her heart, and from out of its capacious receptacles she
took the products of her bounty. Every kettle sang and every griddle
“sizzed” to please her, and every fire crackled and laughed at her
bidding.

When Sanford entered there was hardly room enough to move. A damp,
sweet smell of fresh young grass came in at an open window. Through
the door could be seen the wet graveled walks, washed clean by the
storm, over which hopped one or more venturesome robins in search of
the early worm.

Carleton, the government superintendent, sat near the door, his chair
tilted back. In the doorway itself stood Miss Mary Peebles, the
schoolmistress, an angular, thin, mild-eyed woman, in a rain-varnished
waterproof. Even while she was taking it off, she was protesting that
she was too wet to come in, and could not stop. Near the stove stooped
Bill Lacey, drying his jacket. Around the walls and on the
window-sills were other waifs, temporarily homeless,—two from the
paraphernalia dock (regular boarders these), and a third, the captain
of the tug, whose cook was drunk.

All about the place—now in the pantry, now in the kitchen, now with a
big dish, now with a pile of plates or a pitcher of milk—bustled
Aunty Bell, with a smile of welcome and a cheery word for every one
who came.

Nobody, of course, had come to breakfast,—that was seen from the way
in which everybody insisted he had just dropped in for a moment out of
the wet to see the captain, hearing he was home from the Ledge, and
from the alacrity with which everybody, one after another, as the
savory smells of fried fish and soft clams filled the room, forgot his
good resolutions and drew up his chair to the hospitable board.

Most of them told the truth about wanting to see the captain. Since
his sojourn among them, and without any effort of his own, he had
filled the position of adviser, protector, and banker to half the
people along the shore. He had fought Miss Peebles’s battle, when the
school trustees wanted the girl from Norwich to have her place. He had
recommended the tug captain to the towing company, and had coached him
over-night to insure his getting a license in the morning. He had
indorsed Caleb West’s note to make up the last payment on the cabin he
had bought to put his young wife Betty in; and when the new furniture
had come over from Westerly, he had sent two of his men to unload it,
and had laid some of the carpets himself on a Saturday when Betty
expected Caleb in from the Ledge, and wanted to have the house ready
for his first Sunday at home.

When Mrs. Bell announced breakfast, Captain Joe, in his shirt-sleeves,
took his seat at the head of the table, and with a hearty, welcoming
wave of his hand invited everybody to sit down,—Carleton first, of
course, he being the man of authority, and representing to the
working-man that mysterious, intangible power known as the
“government.”

The superintendent generally stopped in at the captain’s if the
morning were stormy; it was nearer his lodgings than the farmhouse
where he took his meals—and then breakfast at the captain’s cost
nothing. He had come in on this particular day ostensibly to protest
about the sloop’s having gone to the Ledge without a notification to
him. He had begun by saying, with much bluster, that he didn’t know
about the one stone that Caleb West was “reported” to have set; that
nothing would be accepted unless he was satisfied, and nothing paid
for by the department without his signature. But he ended in great
good humor when the captain invited him to breakfast and placed him at
his own right hand. Carleton liked little distinctions when made in
his favor; he considered them due to his position.

The superintendent was a type of his class. His appointment at Shark
Ledge Light had been secured through the efforts of a brother-in-law
who was a custom-house inspector. Before his arrival at Keyport he had
never seen a stone laid or a batch of concrete mixed. To this
ignorance of the ordinary methods of construction was added an
overpowering sense of his own importance coupled with the knowledge
that the withholding of a certificate—the superintendent could choose
his own time for giving it—might embarrass everybody connected with
the work. He was not dishonest, however, and had no faults more
serious than those of ignorance, self-importance, and conceit. This
last broke out in his person: he wore a dyed mustache, a yellow
diamond shirt-pin, and on Sundays patent leather shoes one size too
small.

Captain Joe understood the superintendent thoroughly. “Ain’t it
cur’us,” he would sometimes say, “that a man’s old’s him is willin’
ter set round all day knowin’ he don’t know nothin’, never larnin’,
an’ yit allus afeard some un’ll find it out?” Then, as the
helplessness of the man rose in his mind, he would add, “Well, poor
critter, somebody’s got ter support him; guess the guv’ment’s th’ best
paymaster fur him.”

When breakfast was over, the skipper of the Screamer dropped in to
make his first visit, shaking the water from his oilskins as he
entered.

“Pleased to meet yer, Mis’ Bell,” he said in his bluff, wholesome way,
acknowledging the captain’s introduction to Mrs. Bell, then casting
his eyes about for a seat, and finally taking an edge of a window-sill
among the sou’westers.

“Give me your hat an’ coat, and do have breakfast, Captain Brandt,”
said Mrs. Bell in a tone as hearty as if it were the first meal she
had served that day.

“No, thank ye, I had some ’board sloop,” replied Captain Brandt.

“Here, cap’n, take my seat,” said Captain Joe. “I’m goin’ out ter see
how the weather looks.” He picked up the first hat he came to,—as was
his custom,—and disappeared through the open door, followed by nearly
all the seafaring men in the room.

As the men passed out, each one reached for his hat and oilskins
hanging behind the wooden door, and waddling out stood huddled
together in the driving rain like yellow penguins, their eyes turned
skyward.

Each man diagnosed the weather for himself. Six doctors over a patient
with a hidden disease are never so impressive nor so obstinate as six
seafaring men over a probable change of wind. The drift of the
cloud-rack scudding in from the sea, the clearness of the air, the
current of the upper clouds, were each silently considered. No
opinions were given. It was for Captain Joe to say what he thought of
the weather. Breaking clouds meant one kind of work for them,—fitting
derricks, perhaps,—a continued storm meant another.

If the captain arrived at any conclusion, it was not expressed. He had
walked down to the gate and leaned over the palings, looking up at the
sky across the harbor, and then behind him toward the west. The rain
trickled unheeded down the borrowed sou’wester and fell upon his blue
flannel shirt. He looked up and down the road at the passers-by
tramping along in the wet: the twice-a-day postman, wearing an old
army coat and black rubber cape; the little children crowding together
under one umbrella, only the child in the middle keeping dry; and the
butcher in the meat wagon with its white canvas cover and swinging
scales. Suddenly he gave a quick cry, swung back the gate with the
gesture of a rollicking boy, and threw both arms wide open in a mock
attempt to catch a young girl who sprang past him and dashed up the
broad walk with a merry ringing laugh that brought every one to the
outer door.

“Well, if I live!” exclaimed Mrs. Bell. “Mary Peebles, you jes’ come
here an’ see Betty West. Ain’t you got no better sense, Betty, than to
come down in all this soakin’ rain? Caleb’ll be dreadful mad, an’ I
don’t blame him a mite. Come right in this minute and take that shawl
off.”

“I ain’t wet a bit, Aunty Bell,” laughed Betty, entering the room. “I
got Caleb’s high rubber boots on. Look at ’em. Ain’t they big!”
showing the great soles with all the animation of a child. “An’ this
shawl don’t let no water through nowhere. Oh, but didn’t it blow round
my porch las’ night!” Then turning to the captain, who had followed
close behind, “I think you’re real mean, Cap’n Joe, to keep Caleb out
all night on the Ledge. I was that dead lonely I could’er cried. Oh,
is Mr. Sanford here?” she asked quickly, and with a little shaded tone
of deference in her voice, as she caught sight of him in the next
room. “I thought he’d gone to New York. How do you do, Mr. Sanford?”
with another laugh and a nod of her head, which Sanford as kindly
returned.

“We come purty nigh leavin’ everybody on the Ledge las’ night, Betty,
an’ the sloop too,” said Captain Joe, “cutting” his eye at the skipper
as he spoke. Then in a more serious tone, “I lef’ Caleb a-purpose,
child. We got some stavin’ big derricks to set, an’ Mr. Sanford wants
’em up week arter next, an’ there ain’t nobody kin fix the anchor
sockets but me an’ Caleb. He’s at work on ’em now, an’ I had to come
back to git th’ bands on ’em. He’ll be home for Sunday, little gal.”

“Well, you jes’ better, or I’ll lock up my place an’ come right down
here to Aunty Bell. Caleb wasn’t home but two nights last week, and
it’s only the beginnin’ of summer. I ain’t like Aunty Bell,—she can’t
get lonely. Don’t make no difference whether you’re home or not, this
place is so chuck-full of folks you can’t turn round in it; but ’way
up where I live, you don’t see a soul sometimes all day but a peddler.
Oh, I jes’ can’t stand it, an’ I won’t. Land sakes, Aunty Bell, what a
lot of folks you’ve had for breakfast!”

[Illustration: “Swung back the gate with the gesture of a rollicking boy”]

With another laugh she turned to the table, picked up a pile of
plates, and carried them into the pantry to Miss Peebles, who was
there helping in the wash-up.

Lacey, who had stopped to look after his drying coat when the men went
out, watched her slender, graceful figure, and bright, cheery, joyous
face, full of dimples and color and sparkle, the hair in short curls
all over her head, the throat plump and white, the little ears
nestling and half hidden.

She had been brought up in the next village, two miles away, and had
come over every morning, when she was a girl, to Miss Peebles’s
school. Almost everybody knew her and loved her; Captain Joe as much
as if she had been his own child. She filled a place in his heart of
which he seldom spoke,—never to Aunty Bell,—a place empty until
Betty came, and always aching since he and his wife had laid away, on
the hill back of the village church, the only child that had ever come
to them.

When Caleb gave up the lightship Captain Joe had established him with
Betty’s mother as boarder, and that was how the marriage came about.

When Betty returned to the room again, her arms loaded with plates,
Carleton and Lacey were standing.

“Take this seat; you must be tired walking down so far,” said
Carleton, with a manner never seen in him except when some pretty
woman was about.

“No, I’m not a bit tired, but I’ll set down till I get these boots
off. Aunty Bell, can you lend me a pair of slippers? One of these
plaguy boots leaks.”

“I’ll take ’em off,” offered Carleton, with a gesture of gallantry.

“You’ll do nothin’ of the kind!” she exclaimed, with a toss of her
head. “I’ll take ’em off myself,” and she turned her back, and slipped
the boots from under her dress. “But you can take ’em to Aunty Bell
an’ swap ’em for her slippers,” she added, with a merry laugh at the
humor of her making the immaculate Carleton carry off Caleb’s old
boots. The slippers on, she thanked him, with a nod, and, turning her
head, caught sight of Lacey.

“What are you doing here, Bill Lacey?” she asked. “Why ain’t you at
the Ledge?”

Although the young rigger had been but a short time on the captain’s
force, he had employed every leisure moment of it in making himself
agreeable to the wives of the men. To Betty his attentions had been
most marked.

He had saved her the best of the long thin shavings that curled from
his spoke-shave when he was planing the huge derrick masts on the
wharf. And when she came to gather them as kindling for her stove, he
had done everything in his power to win her confidence, detaining her
in talk long after the other women had departed with their loads.

When he answered her sally to-day, his white teeth gleamed under his
curling mustache.

“Captain wants me,” he said, “to fit some bands round the new
derricks. We expect ’em over from Medford to-day, if it clears up.”

“An’ there ain’t no doubt but what ye’ll get yer job, Billy,” burst
out the captain; “it’s breakin’ now over Crotch Island,” and he
bustled again out of the open door, the men who had followed him
turning back after him.

Carleton waited until he became convinced that no part of his
immaculate personality burdened Betty’s mind, and then, a little
disconcerted by her evident preference for Lacey, joined Sanford in
the next room. There he renewed his complaint about the enrockment
block having been placed without a notification to him, and it was not
until Sanford invited him on the tug for a run to Medford to inspect
Mrs. Leroy’s new dining-room that he became pacified.

As Mrs. Bell and the schoolmistress, Miss Peebles, were still in the
pantry, a rattling of china marking their progress, the kitchen was
empty except for Lacey and Betty. The young rigger, seeing no one
within hearing, crossed the room, and, bending over Betty’s chair,
said in a low tone, “Why didn’t you come down to the dock yesterday
when we was a-hoistin’ the stone on the Screamer? ’Most everybody
’longshore was there. I had some chips saved for ye.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” returned Betty indifferently.

“Ye ought’er seen the old man yesterday,” continued Lacey; “me an’ him
held the guy, and he was a-blowin’ like a porpoise.”

Betty did not answer. She knew how old Caleb was.

“Hadn’t been for me it would’er laid him out.”

The girl started, and her eyes flashed. “Bill Lacey, Caleb knows more
in a minute than you ever will in your whole life. You shan’t talk
that way about him, neither.”

“Well, who’s a-talkin’?” said Lacey, looking down at her, more
occupied with the curve of her throat than with his reply.

“You are, an’ you know it,” she answered sharply.

“I didn’t mean nothin’, Betty. I ain’t got nothin’ agin him ’cept his
gittin’ you.” Then in a lower tone, “You needn’t take my head off, if
I did say it.”

“I ain’t takin’ your head off, Billy.” She looked into his eyes for
the first time, her voice softening. She was never angry with any one
for long; besides, she felt older than he, and a certain boyishness in
him appealed to her.

“You spoke awful cross,” he said, bending until his lips almost
touched her curls, “an’ you know, Betty, there ain’t a girl, married
or single, up ’n’ down this shore nor nowheres else, that I think as
much of as I do you, an’ if”—

“Here, now, Bill Lacey!” some one shouted.

The young rigger stepped back, and turned his head.

Captain Joe was standing in the doorway, with one hand on the frame,
an ugly, determined expression filling his eyes.

“They want ye down ter the dock, young feller, jes’ ’s quick ’s ye kin
get there.”

Lacey’s face was scarlet. He looked at Captain Joe, picked up his hat,
and walked down the garden path without a word.

Betty ran in to Aunty Bell.

When the two men reached the swinging-gate, Captain Joe laid his hand
on Lacey’s shoulder, whirled him round suddenly, and said in a calm,
decided voice that carried conviction in every tone, “I don’t say
nothin’, an’ maybe ye don’t mean nothin’, but I’ve been a-watchin’ ye
lately, an’ I don’t like yer ways. One thing, howsomever, I’ll tell
ye, an’ I don’t want ye ter forgit it: if I ever ketch ye a-foolin’
round Caleb West’s lobster-pots, I’ll break yer damned head. Do ye
hear?”




CHAPTER VI

A LITTLE DINNER FOR FIVE


Sanford’s apartments were in gala-dress. Everywhere there was a
suggestion of spring in all its brightness and promise. The divans of
the salon were gay with new cushions of corn-yellow and pale green.
The big table was resplendent in a new cloth,—a piece of richly
colored Oriental stuff that had been packed away and forgotten in the
Venetian wedding-chest that stood near the window. All the pipes,
tobacco pouches, smoking-jackets, slippers, canes, Indian clubs,
dumb-bells, and other bachelor belongings scattered about the rooms
had been tucked out of sight, while books and magazines that had lain
for weeks heaped up on chairs and low shelves, and unframed prints and
photographs that had rested on the floor propped up against the wall
and furniture, had been hidden in dark corners or hived in their
several portfolios.

On the table stood a brown majolica jar taller than the lamp, holding
a great mass of dogwood and apple blossoms, their perfume filling the
room. Every vase, umbrella jar, jug, and bit of pottery that could be
pressed into service, was doing duty as flower-holder, while over the
mantel and along the tops of the bookcases, and even over the doors
themselves, streamed festoons of blossoms intertwined with smilax and
trailing vines.

Against the tapestries covering the walls of the dining-room hung big
wreaths of laurel tied with ribbons. One of these was studded with
violets, forming the initials H. S. The mantel was a bank of flowers.
From the four antique silver church lamps suspended in the four
corners of the room swung connecting festoons of smilax and blossoms.
The dinner-table itself was set with the best silver, glass, and
appointments that Sanford possessed. Some painted shades he had never
seen before topped the tall wax candles.

Sanford smiled when he saw that covers had been laid for but five.
That clever fellow Jack Hardy had carried his point,—all those
delicate questions relating to the number and the selection of the
guests had been left to Mrs. Leroy. She had proved her exquisite tact:
Bock had been omitted, there were no superfluous women, and Jack could
have his tête-à-tête with Helen undisturbed. It was just as well,
Sanford thought. With these two young persons happy, the dinner was
sure to be a success.

Upon entering his office, he found that the decorative raid had
extended even to this his most private domain. The copper helmet of a
diving-dress—one he sometimes used himself when necessity
required—had been propped up over his desk, the face-plate unscrewed,
and the hollow opening filled with blossoms, their leaves curling
about the brass buttons of the collar. The very drawing-boards had
been pushed against the wall, and the rows of shelves holding his
charts and detailed plans had been screened from sight by a piece of
Venetian silk exhumed from the capacious interior of the old chest.

The corners of Sam’s mouth touched his ears when Sanford looked at
him, and every tooth was lined up with a broad grin.

“Doan’ ask me who done it, sah. I ain’t had nuffin to do wid it,—wid
nuffin but de table. I sot dat.”

“Has Mrs. Leroy been here?” Sanford asked, coming into the
dining-room, and looking again at the initials on the wall. He knew
that Jack could never have perfected the delicate touch alone.

“Yaas ’r, an’ Major Slocomb an’ Mr. Hardy done come too. De gen’lemen
bofe gone ober to de club. De major say he comin’ back soon’s ever you
gets here. But I ain’t ter tell nuffin ’bout de flowers, sah. Massa
Jack say ef I do he brek my neck, an’ I ’spec’s he will. But Lord,
sah, _dese_ ain’t no flowers. Look at dis,” he added, uncovering
a great bunch of American Beauties,—“dat’s ter go ’longside de lady’s
plate. An’ dat ain’t ha’f of ’em. I got mos’ a peck of dese yer
rose-water roses in de pantry. Massa Jack gwine ter ask yer to
sprinkle ’em all ober de table-cloth; says dat’s de way dey does in de
fust famblies South.”

“Have the flowers I ordered come?” Sanford asked, as he turned towards
the sideboard to fill his best decanter.

“Yaas ’r, got ’em in de ice-chest. But Massa Jack say dese yer
rose-water roses on de table-cloth’s a extry touch; don’t hab dese
high-toned South’n ladies ebery day, he say.”

Sanford reëntered the salon and looked about. Every trace of its
winter dress too had gone. Even the heavy curtains at the windows had
been replaced by some of a thin yellow silk.

“That’s so like Kate,” he said to himself. “She means that Helen and
Jack shall be happy, at any rate. She’s missed it herself, poor girl.
It’s an infernal shame. Bring in the roses, Sam: I’ll sprinkle them
now before I dress. Any letters except these?” he added, looking
through a package on the table, a shade of disappointment crossing his
face as he pushed them back unopened.

“Yaas ’r, one on yo’ bureau dat’s jus’ come.”

Sanford forgot Jack’s roses, and with a quick movement of his hand
drew the curtains of his bedroom and disappeared inside. The letter
was there. He seldom came home from any journey without finding one of
these little missives to greet him. He broke the seal and was about to
read the contents when the major’s cheery, buoyant voice was heard in
the outside room. The next instant he had pushed the curtains aside
and peered in.

“Where is he, Sam? In here, did you say?”

Not to have been able to violate the seclusion of Sanford’s bedroom at
all times, night or day, would have grievously wounded the
sensibilities of the distinguished Pocomokian; it would have implied a
reflection on the closeness of their friendship. It was true he had
met Sanford but half a dozen times, and it was equally true that he
had never before crossed the threshold of this particular room. But
these trifling drawbacks, mere incidental stages in a rapidly growing
friendship, were immaterial to him.

“My dear boy,” he cried, as he entered the room with arms wide open,
“but it does my heart good to see you!” and he hugged Sanford
enthusiastically, patting his host’s back with his fat hands over the
spot where the suspenders crossed. Then he held him at arm’s length.

“Let me look at you. Splendid, by gravy! fresh as a rose, suh,
handsome as a picture! Just a trace of care under the eyes, though. I
see the nights of toil, the hours of suffering. I wonder the brain of
man can stand it. But the building of a lighthouse, the illumining of
a pathway in the sea for those buffeting with the waves,—it is
gloriously humane, suh!”

Suddenly his manner changed, and in a tone as grave and serious as if
he were full partner in the enterprise and responsible for its
success, the major laid his hand, this time confidingly, on Sanford’s
shirt-sleeve, and said, “How are we getting on at the Ledge, suh? Last
time we talked it over, we were solving the problem of a colossal mass
of—of—some stuff or other that”—

“Concrete,” suggested Sanford, with an air as serious as that of the
major. He loved to humor him.

“That’s it,—concrete; the name had for the moment escaped
me,—concrete, suh, that was to form the foundation of the
lighthouse.”

Sanford assured the major that the concrete was being properly
amalgamated, and discussed the laying of the mass in the same
technical terms he would have used to a brother engineer, smiling
meanwhile as the stream of the Pocomokian’s questions ran on. He liked
the major’s glow and sparkle. He enjoyed most of all the never ending
enthusiasm of the man,—that spontaneous outpouring which, like a
bubbling spring, flows unceasingly, and always with the coolest and
freshest water of the heart.

“And how is Miss Shirley?” asked the young engineer, throwing the
inquiry into the shallows of the talk as a slight temporary dam.

“Like a moss rosebud, suh, with the dew on it. She and Jack have gone
out for a drive in Jack’s cyart. He left me at the club, and I went
over to his apartments to dress. I am staying with Jack, you know.
Helen is with a school friend. I know, of co’se, that yo’r dinner is
not until eight o’clock, but I could not wait longer to grasp yo’r
hand. Do you know, Sanford,” with sudden animation and in a rising
voice, “that the more I see of you, the more I”—

“And so you are coming to New York to live, major,” said Sanford,
dropping another pebble at the right moment into the very middle of
the current.

The major recovered, filled, and broke through in a fresh place. The
new questions of his host only varied the outlet of his eloquence.

“Coming, suh? I have _come_. I have leased a po’tion of my estate
to some capitalists from Philadelphia who are about embarking in a
strawberry enterprise of very great magnitude. I want to talk to you
about it later.” (He had rented one half of it—the dry half, the half
a little higher than the salt-marsh—to a huckster from Philadelphia,
who was trying to raise early vegetables, and whose cash advances upon
the rent had paid the overdue interest on the mortgage, leaving a
margin hardly more than sufficient to pay for the suit of clothes he
stood in, and his traveling expenses.)

By this time the constantly increasing pressure of his caller’s
enthusiasm had seriously endangered the possibility of Sanford’s
dressing for dinner. He glanced several times uneasily at his watch,
lying open on the bureau before him, and at last, with a hurried
“Excuse me, major,” disappeared into his bathroom, and closed its
flood-gate of a door, thus effectually shutting off the major’s
overflow, now perilously near the danger-line.

The Pocomokian paused for a moment, looked wistfully at the blank
door, and, recognizing the impossible, called to Sam and suggested a
cocktail as a surprise for his master when he appeared again. Sam
brought the ingredients on a tray, and stood by admiringly (Sam always
regarded him as a superior being) while the major mixed two comforting
concoctions,—the one already mentioned for Sanford, and the other
designed for the especial sustenance and delectation of the
distinguished Pocomokian himself.

This done he took his leave, having infused into the apartment, in ten
short minutes, more sparkle, freshness, and life than it had known
since his last visit.

Sanford saw the cocktail on his bureau when he entered the room again,
but forgot it in his search for the letter he had laid aside on the
major’s entrance. Sam found the invigorating compound when dinner was
over, and immediately emptied it into his own person.

“Please don’t be cross, Henry, if you can’t find all your things,” the
letter read. “Jack Hardy wanted me to come over and help him arrange
the rooms as a surprise for the Maryland girl. He says there’s nothing
between them, but I don’t believe him. The blossoms came from Newport.
I hope you had time to go to Medford and find out about my
dining-room, and that everything is going on well at the Ledge. I will
see you to-night at eight. —K. P. L.”

Sanford, with a smile of pleasure, shut the letter in his bureau
drawer, and entering the dining-room, picked up the basket of roses
and began those little final touches about the room and table which he
never neglected. He lighted the tapers in the antique lamps that hung
from the ceiling, readjusting the ruby glass holders; he kindled the
wicks in some quaint brackets over the sideboard; he moved the
Venetian flagons and decanters nearer the centrepiece of
flowers,—those he had himself ordered for his guests and their
chaperon,—and cutting the stems from the rose-water roses sprinkled
them over the snowy linen.

With the soft glow of the candles the room took on a mellow, subdued
tone; the pink roses on the cloth, the rosebuds on the candle-shades,
and the mass of Mermets in the centre being the distinctive features,
and giving the key-note of color to the feast. To Sanford a
dinner-table with its encircling guests was always a palette. He knew
just where the stronger tones of black coats and white shirt-fronts
placed beside the softer tints of fair shoulders and bright faces must
be relieved by blossoms in perfect harmony, and he understood to a
nicety the exact values of the minor shades in linen, glass, and
silver, in the making of the picture.

The guests arrived within a few minutes of one another. Mrs. Leroy, in
yellow satin with big black bows caught up on her shoulder, a string
of pearls about her throat, came first: she generally did when dining
at Sanford’s; it gave her an opportunity to have a chance word with
him before the arrival of the other guests, and to give a supervising
glance over the appointments of his table. And then Sanford always
deferred to her in questions of taste. It was one of the nights when
she looked barely twenty-five, and seemed the fresh, joyous girl
Sanford had known before her marriage. The ever present sadness which
her friends often read in her face had gone. To-night she was all
gayety and happiness, and her eyes, under their long lashes, were
purple as the violets which she wore. Helen Shirley was arrayed in
white muslin,—not a jewel,—her fair cheeks rosy with excitement.
Jack was immaculate in white tie and high collar, while the
self-installed, presiding genial of the feast, the major, appeared in
a costume that by its ill-fitting wrinkles betrayed its pedigree,—a
velvet-collared swallow-tail coat that had lost its onetime freshness
in the former service of some friend, a skin-tight pair of trousers,
and a shoestring cravat that looked as if it had belonged to Major
Talbot himself (his dead wife’s first husband), and that was now so
loosely tied it had all it could do to keep its place.

“No one would have thought of all this but you, Kate,” said Sanford,
lifting Mrs. Leroy’s cloak from her shoulders.

“Don’t thank me, Henry. All I did,” she answered, laughing, “was to
put a few flowers about, and to have my maid poke a lot of man-things
under the sofas and behind the chairs, and take away those horrid old
covers and curtains. I know you’ll never forgive me when you want
something to-morrow you can’t find, but Jack begged so hard I couldn’t
help it. How did you like the candle-shades? I made them myself,” she
added, tipping her head on one side like a wren.

“I knew you did, and I recognized your handiwork somewhere else,”
Sanford answered, with a significant shrug of his shoulders towards
the dining-room, where the initial wreath was hung.

“It is a bower of beauty, my dear madam!” exclaimed the major, bowing
like a French dancing-master of the old school when Sanford presented
him, one hand on his waistcoat buttons, the right foot turned slightly
out. “I did not know when I walked through these rooms this afternoon
whose fair hands had wrought the wondrous change. Madam, I salute
you,” and he raised her hand to his lips.

[Illustration: “Helen ... in white muslin—not a jewel”]

Mrs. Leroy looked first in astonishment as she drew back her fingers.
Then as she saw his evident sincerity, she made him an equally
old-fashioned curtsy, and broke into a peal of laughter.

While this bit of comedy was being enacted, Jack, eager to show Helen
some of Sanford’s choicest bits, led her to the mantelpiece, over
which hung a sketch by Smearly,—the original of his Academy picture;
pointed out the famous wedding-chest and some of the accoutrements
over the door; and led her into the private office, now lighted by
half a dozen candles, one illuminating the copper diving-helmet with
its face-plate of flowers. Helen, who had never been in a bachelor’s
apartment before, thought it another and an enchanted world.
Everything suggested a surprise and a mystery.

But it was when she entered the dining-room on Sanford’s arm that she
gave way completely. “I never saw anything so charming!” she
exclaimed. “And H. S. all in a lovely wreath—why, these are
_your_ initials, Mr. Sanford,” looking up innocently into his
eyes.

Sanford smiled quizzically, and a shade of cruel disappointment
crossed Jack’s face. Mrs. Leroy broke into another happy, contagious
laugh, and her eyes, often so impenetrable in their sadness, danced
with merriment.

The major watched them all with ill-disguised delight, and, beginning
to understand the varying expressions flitting over his niece’s face,
said, with genuine emotion, emphasizing his outburst by kissing her
rapturously on the cheek, “You dear little girl, you, don’t you know
your own name? H. S. stands for Helen Shirley, not Henry Sanford.”

Helen gave a little start, avoiding Jack’s gaze, and blushed scarlet.
She might have known, she said to herself, that Jack would do
something lovely, just to surprise her. Why did she betray herself so
easily?

When, a moment later, in removing her glove, she brushed Jack’s hand,
lying on the table-cloth beside her own, the slightest possible
pressure of her little finger against his own conveyed her thanks.

Everybody was brimful of happiness: Helen radiant with the inspiration
of new surroundings so unlike those of the simple home she had left
the day before; Jack riding in a chariot of soap-bubbles, with
butterflies for leaders, and drinking in every word that fell from
Helen’s lips; the major suave and unctuous, with an old-time gallantry
that delighted his admirers, boasting now of his ancestry, now of his
horses, now of his rare old wines at home; Sanford leading the
distinguished Pocomokian into still more airy flights, or engaging him
in assumed serious conversation whenever that obtuse gentleman
insisted on dragging Jack down from his butterfly heights with Helen,
to discuss with him some prosaic features of the club-house at Crab
Island; while Mrs. Leroy, happier than she had been in weeks, watched
Helen and Jack with undisguised pleasure, or laughed at the major’s
good-natured egotism, his wonderful reminiscences and harmless
pretensions, listening between pauses to the young engineer by her
side, whose heart was to her an open book.

Coffee was served on the balcony, the guests seating themselves in the
easy-chairs. Mrs. Leroy selected a low camp-stool, resting her back
against the railing, where the warm tones of the lamp fell upon her
dainty figure. She was at her best to-night. Her prematurely gray
hair, piled in fluffy waves upon her head and held in place by a long
jewel-tipped pin, gave an indescribable softness and charm to the rosy
tints of her skin. Her blue-gray eyes, now deep violet, flashed and
dimmed under the moving shutters of the lids, as the light of her
varying emotions stirred their depths. About her every movement was
that air of distinction, and repose, and a certain exquisite grace
which never left her, and which never ceased to have its fascination
for her friends. Added to this were a sprightliness and a vivacity
which, although often used as a mask to hide a heavy heart, were
to-night inspired by her sincere enjoyment of the pleasure she and the
others had given to the young Maryland girl and her lover.

When Sam brought the coffee-tray she insisted on filling the cups
herself, dropping in the sugar with a dainty movement of her fingers
that was bewitching, laughing as merrily as if there had never been a
sorrow in her life. At no time was she more fascinating to her
admirers than when at a task like this. The very cup she handled was
instantly invested with a certain preciousness, and became a thing to
be touched as delicately and as lightly as the fingers that had
prepared it.

The only one who for the time was outside the spell of her influence
was Jack Hardy. He had taken a seat on the floor of the balcony, next
the wall—and Helen.

“Jack, you lazy fellow,” said Mrs. Leroy, with mock indignation, as
she rose to her feet, “get out of my way, or I’ll spill the coffee.
Miss Shirley, why don’t you make him go inside? He’s awfully in the
way here.”

One of Jack’s favorite positions, when Helen was near, was at her
feet. He had learned this one the summer before at her house on Crab
Island, when they would sit for hours on the beach.

“I’m not in anybody’s way, my dear Mrs. Leroy. My feet are tied in a
Chinese knot under me, and my back has grown fast to the rain-spout.
Major, will you please say something nice to Mrs. Leroy and coax her
inside?”

Sam had rolled a small table, holding a flagon of cognac and some
crushed ice, beside the major, who sat half buried in the cushions of
one of Sanford’s divans. The Pocomokian struggled to his feet.

“You mustn’t move, major,” Mrs. Leroy called. “I’m not coming in. I’m
going to stay out here in this lovely moonlight, if one of these very
polite young gentlemen will bring me an armchair.” With a look of
pretended dignity at Jack and Sanford.

“Take _my_ seat,” said Jack, with a laugh, springing to his feet,
suddenly realizing Mrs. Leroy’s delicate but pointed rebuke. “Come,
Miss Helen,” a better and more retired corner having at this moment
suggested itself to him, “we won’t stay where we are abused. Let us
join the major.” And with an arm to Miss Shirley and a sweeping bow to
Mrs. Leroy, Jack walked straight to the divan nearest the curtains.

When Helen and Jack were out of hearing, Mrs. Leroy looked toward the
major, and, reassured of his entire absorption in his own personal
comfort, turned to Sanford, and said in low, earnest tones, in which
there was not a trace of the gayety of a moment before, “Can the new
sloop lay the stones, Henry? You haven’t told me a word yet of what
you have been doing for the last few days at the Ledge.”

“I think so, Kate,” replied Sanford in an equally serious voice. “We
laid one yesterday before the easterly gale caught us. You got my
telegram, didn’t you?”

“Of course! but I was anxious for all that. Ever since I had that talk
with General Barton I’ve felt nervous over the laying of those stones.
He frightened me when he said no one of the Board at Washington
believed you could do it. It would be so awful if your plan should
fail.”

“But it’s not going to fail, Kate. I can do it, and will.” There was a
decided tone in his voice, and his eyebrows were knitted in the way
she loved: she read his determination in every word and look. “All I
wanted was a proper boat, and I’ve got that. I watched her day before
yesterday. I was a little nervous until I saw her lower the first
stone. Her captain is a plucky fellow,—Captain Joe likes him
immensely. I wish you could have been there to see how cool he
was,—not a bit flustered when he saw the rocks under the bow of his
sloop.”

Kate handed him her empty coffee-cup, and going to the edge of the
balcony rested her elbows on the railing, a favorite gesture of hers,
and looked down on the treetops of the square.

“Caleb West, of course, went down with the first stone, didn’t he?”
she asked when he joined her again. She knew Caleb’s name as she did
those of all the men in Sanford’s employ. There was no detail of the
work he had not explained to her.

“And was the sea-bottom as you expected to find it?” she added.

“Even better,” he answered, eager to discuss his plans with her.
“Caleb reports that as soon as he gets the first row of enrockment
stones set, the others will lie up like bricks. And it’s all coming
out exactly as we have planned it, too, Kate.”

He went over with her again, as he had done so many times before, all
of his plans for carrying on the work and the difficulties that had
threatened him. He talked of his hopes and fears, of his confidence in
his men, his admiration for them, and his love for the work itself. To
Sanford, as to many men, there were times when the sympathy and
understanding of a woman, the generous faith and ready belief of one
who listens only to encourage, became a necessity. To have talked to a
man as he did to Kate would not only have bored his listener, but
might have aroused a suspicion of his own professional ability.

“I wonder what General Barton will think when he finds your plan
succeeds? He says everywhere that you cannot do it,” Kate continued,
with a certain pride in her voice, after listening to some further
details of Sanford’s plans for placing the enrockment blocks.

“I don’t know and I don’t care. It’s hard to get these old-time
engineers to believe in anything new, and this foundation is new. But
all the same, I’d rather pin my faith to Captain Joe than to any one
of them. What we are doing at the Ledge, Kate, requires mental pluck
and brute grit,—nothing else. Scientific engineering won’t help us a
bit.”

Sanford now stood erect, with face aglow and kindling eyes, his back
to the balcony rail. Every inflection of his voice showed a keen
interest in the subject.

“And yet, after all, Kate, I realize that my work is mere child’s
play. Just see what other men have had to face. At Minot’s Ledge, you
know,—the light off Boston,—they had to chisel down a submerged rock
into steps, to get a footing for the tower. But three or four men
could work at a time, and then at dead low water. They got only one
hundred and thirty hours’ work the first year. The whole Atlantic
rolled in on top of them, and there was no shelter from the wind.
Until they got the bottom courses of their tower bolted to the steps
they had cut in the rock, they had no footing at all, and had to do
their work from a small boat. Our artificial island helps us
immensely; we have something to stand on. And it was even worse at
Tillamook Rock, on the Pacific coast. There the men were landed on a
precipitous crag sticking up out of the sea, from breeches buoys slung
to the masthead of a vessel. For weeks at a time the sea was so rough
that no one could reach them. They were given up for dead once. All
that time they were lying in canvas tents lashed down to the sides of
the crag to keep them from being blown into rags. All they had to eat
and drink for days was raw salt pork and the rain-water they caught
from the tent covers. And yet those fellows stuck to it day and night
until they had blasted off a place large enough to put a shanty on.
Every bit of the material for that lighthouse, excepting in the
stillest weather, was landed from the vessel that brought it, by a
line rigged from the masthead to the top of the crag; and all this
time, Kate, she was thrashing around under steam, keeping as close to
the edge as she dared. Oh, I tell you, there is something stunning to
me in such a battle with the elements!”

Kate’s cheeks burned as Sanford talked on. She was no longer the
dainty woman over the coffee-cups, nor the woman of the world she had
been a few moments before, eager for the pleasure of assembled guests.

Her eyes flashed with the intensity of her feelings. “When you tell me
such things, Henry, I am all on fire,” she cried. Then she stopped as
suddenly as if some unseen hand had been laid upon her, chilling and
shriveling the hot burning words. “The world is full of such great
things to be done,” she sighed, “and I lead such a mean little life.”

Sanford looked at her in undisguised admiration. Then, as he watched
her, his heart smote him. He had not intended to wound her by his
enthusiasm over his own work, nor to awaken in her any sense of her
own disappointments; he had only tried to allay her anxieties over his
affairs. He knew by the force of her outburst that he had
unconsciously stirred those deeper emotions, the strength of which
really made her the help she was to him. But he never wanted them to
cause her suffering.

These sudden transitions in her moods were not new to him. She was an
April day in her temperament, and would often laugh the sunniest of
laughs when the rain of her tears was falling. These were really moods
he loved.

It was the present frame of mind, however, that he dreaded, and from
which he always tried to save her. It did not often show itself. She
was too much a woman of the world to wear her heart upon her sleeve,
and too good and tactful a friend to burden even Sanford with sorrows
he could not lighten. He knew what had inspired the outburst, for he
had known her for years. He had witnessed the long years of silent
suffering which she had borne so sweetly,—even cheerfully at
times,—had seen with what restraint and self-control she had
cauterized by silence and patient endurance every fresh wound, and had
watched day by day the slow coming of the scars that drew all the
tighter the outside covering of her heart.

As he looked at her out of the corner of his eye,—she leaning over
the balcony at his side,—he could see that the tears had gathered
under her lashes. It was best to say nothing when she felt like this.
He recognized that to have made her the more dissatisfied, even by
that sympathy which he longed to give, would have hurt in her that
which he loved and honored most,—her silence, and her patient loyalty
to the man whose name she bore. “She’s had a letter from Leroy,” he
said to himself, “and he’s done some other disgraceful thing, I
suppose;” but to Kate he said nothing.

Gradually he led the talk back to Keyport, this time telling her of
his men and their peculiarities and humors; of Caleb and his young and
pretty wife; and of Aunty Bell’s watchful care over his comfort
whenever he spent the night at Captain Joe’s.

Nothing had disturbed the other guests. The clink of the major’s glass
and the intermittent gurgle of the rapidly ebbing decanter as Sam
supplied his wants could still be heard from the softly lighted room.
On the foreordained divan, half hidden by a curtain, sat Jack and
Helen, their shoulders touching, studying the contents of a
portfolio,—some of the drawings upside down, their low talk broken
now and then by a happy, irrelevant laugh.

By this time the moon had risen over the treetops, the tall buildings
far across the quadrangle breaking the sky-line. Below could be seen
the night life of the Park: miniature figures strolling about under
the trees, flashing in brilliant light or swallowed up in dense
shadow, as they passed through the glare of the many lamps scattered
among the budding foliage; a child romping with a dog, or a belated
woman wheeling a baby carriage home. The night was still, the air soft
and balmy; only the hum of the busy street a block away could be heard
where they stood.

Suddenly the figure of a boy darted across the white patch of pavement
below them. Sanford leaned far over the railing, a strange,
unreasoning dread in his heart.

“What is it, Henry?” asked Mrs. Leroy.

“Looks like a messenger,” Sanford answered.

Mrs. Leroy bent over the railing, and watched the boy spring up the
low steps of the street door, ring the bell violently, and beat an
impatient tattoo with his foot.

“Whom do you want?” Sanford called gently.

The boy looked up, and, seeing the two figures on the balcony,
answered, “Mr. Henry Sanford. Got a death message.”

“A death message, did he say?” gasped Mrs. Leroy. Her voice was almost
a whisper.

“Yes; don’t move.” He laid a hand on her arm and pointed toward the
group inside. A quick, sharp contraction rose in his throat. “Sam,” he
called in a lowered tone.

“Yaas ’r,—comin’ direc’ly.”

“Sam, there’s a boy at the outside door with a telegram. He says it’s
a death message. Get it, and tell the boy to wait. Go quietly, now,
and let no one know. You will find me here.”

Mrs. Leroy sank into a chair, her face in her hands. Sanford bent over
her, his voice still calm.

“Don’t give way, Kate; we shall know in a moment.”

She grasped his hand and held on. “Oh, who do you suppose it is,
Henry? Will Sam _never_ come?”

While he was comforting her, urging her to be patient and not to let
Helen hear, Sam reëntered the room,—his breath gone with the dash
down and up three flights of stairs,—walked slowly toward the
balcony, and handed Sanford a yellow envelope. Its contents were as
follows:—

    Screamer’s boiler exploded 7.40 to-night.
    Mate killed; Lacey and three men injured.

                                Joseph Bell.

Sanford looked hurriedly at his watch, forgetting, in the shock, to
hand Mrs. Leroy the telegram.

Mrs. Leroy caught his arm. “Tell me quick! Who is it?”

“Forgive me, dear Kate, but I was so knocked out. It is no one who
belongs to you. It is the boiler of the Screamer that has burst. Three
men are hurt,” reading the dispatch again mechanically. “I wonder who
they are?” as if he expected to see their names added to its brief
lines.

For a moment he leaned back against the balcony, absorbed in deep
thought.

“Twenty-three minutes left,” he said to himself, consulting his watch
again. “I must go at once; they will need me.”

She took the telegram from his hand. “Oh, Henry, I am so sorry,—and
the boat, too, you counted upon. Oh, how much trouble you have had
over this work! I wish you had never touched it!” she exclaimed, with
the momentary weakness of the woman. “But look! read it again.” Her
voice rose with a new hope in it. “Do you see? Captain Joe signs
it,—he’s not hurt!”

Sanford patted her hand abstractedly, and said, “Dear Kate,” but
without looking at her or replying further. He was calculating whether
it would be possible for him to catch the midnight train and go to the
relief of the men.

“Yes, I can just make it,” he said, half aloud, to himself. Then he
turned to Sam, who stood trembling before him, looking first at Mrs.
Leroy and then at his master, and said in an undertone, “Sam, send
that boy for a cab, and get my bag ready. I will change these clothes
on the train. Ask Mr. Hardy to step here; not a word, remember, about
this telegram.”

Jack came out laughing, and was about to break into some raillery,
when he saw Mrs. Leroy’s face.

Sanford touched his shoulder, and drew him one side out of sight of
the inmates of the room. “Jack, there has been an explosion at the
work, and some of the men are badly hurt. Say nothing to Helen until
she gets home. I leave immediately for Keyport. Will you and the major
please look after Mrs. Leroy?”

                        *    *    *    *    *

Sanford’s guests followed him to the door of the corridor: Helen
radiant, her eyes still dancing; the major bland and courteous, his
face without a ruffle; Jack and Mrs. Leroy apparently unmoved.

“Oh, I’m so sorry you must go!” exclaimed Helen, holding out her
hands. “Mr. Hardy says you do nothing but live on the train. Thank you
ever so much, dear Mr. Sanford; I’ve had _such_ a lovely time.”

“My dear suh,” said the major, “this is positively cruel! This
Hennessy”—he was holding his glass—“is like a nosegay; I hoped you
would enjoy it with me. Let me go back and pour you out a drop before
you go.”

“Why not wait until to-morrow?” said Jack in perfunctory tones, the
sympathetic pressure of his hand in Sanford’s belying their sincerity.
“This night traveling will kill you, old man.”

Sanford smiled as he returned the pressure, and, with his eyes resting
on Helen’s joyous face, replied meaningly, “Thank you, Jack; it’s all
right, I see. Not a word until she gets home.”

Helen’s evening had not been spoiled, at all events.

Once outside in the corridor,—Sam down one flight of steps with
Sanford’s bag and coat,—Mrs. Leroy half closed the door, and laying
her hand on Sanford’s shoulder said, with a force and an earnestness
that carried the keenest comfort straight to his heart, “I’ve seen you
in worse places than this, Henry; you always get through, and you will
now. I shall not worry, and neither will you. I know it looks dark to
you, but it will be brighter when you reach Keyport and get all the
facts. I will come up myself on the early morning train, and see what
can be done for the men.”




CHAPTER VII

BETTY’S FIRST PATIENT


The wounded men lay in an empty warehouse which in the whaling-days
had been used for the storing of oil, and was now owned by an old
whaler living back of the village.

Captain Joe had not waited for permission and a key when the accident
occurred and the wounded men lay about him. He and Captain Brandt had
broken the locks with a crowbar, improvised an operating-table for the
doctors out of old barrels and planks, and dispatched messengers up
and down the shore to pull mattresses from the nearest beds.

The room he had selected for the temporary hospital was on the ground
floor of the building. It was lighted by four big windows, and
protected by solid wooden shutters, now slightly ajar. Through these
openings timid rays of sunlight, strangers here for years, stole down
slanting ladders of floating dust to the grimy floor, where they lay
trembling, with eyes alert, ready for instant retreat. From the
overhead beams hung long strings of abandoned cobwebs encrusted with
black soot, which the bolder breeze from the open door and windows
swayed back and forth, the startled soot falling upon the white cots
below. In one corner was a heap of rusty hoops and mouldy
staves,—unburied skeletons of old whaling-days. But for the
accumulation of years of dust and mould the room was well adapted to
its present use.

Lacey’s cot was nearest the door. His head was bound with bandages;
only one eye was free. He lay on his side, breathing heavily. The
young rigger had been blown against the shrouds, and the iron
foot-rest had laid open his cheek and forehead. The doctor said that
if he recovered he would carry the scar the rest of his life. It was
feared, too, that he had been injured internally.

Next to his cot were those of two of the sloop’s crew,—one man with
ribs and ankle broken, the other with dislocated hip. Lonny Bowles,
the quarryman, came next. He was sitting up in bed, his arm in a
sling,—Captain Brandt was beside him; he had escaped with a gash in
his arm.

Captain Joe was without coat or waistcoat. His sleeves were rolled up
above the elbows, his big brawny arms black with dirt. He had been up
all night; now bending over one of the crew, lifting him in his arms
as if he had been a baby, to ease the pain of his position, now
helping Aunty Bell with the beds.

Betty sat beside Lacey, fanning him. Her eyes were red and heavy, her
pretty curls matted about her head. She and Aunty Bell had not had
their clothes off. Their faces were smudged with the soot and grime
that kept falling from the ceiling. Aunty Bell had taken charge of the
improvised stove, heating the water, and Betty had assisted the
doctors—there were two—with the bandages and lint.

“It ain’t as bad as I thought when I wired ye,” said Captain Joe to
Sanford, stopping him as he edged a way through the group of men
outside. “It’s turrible hard on th’ poor mate, jes’ been married.
Never died till he reached th’ dock. There warn’t a square inch o’
flesh onto him, the doctor said, that warn’t scalded clean off. Poor
feller,” and his voice broke, “he ain’t been married but three months;
she’s a-comin’ down on the express. Telling her’s the wust thing we’ve
got to do to-day. Cap’n Bob’s goin’ ter meet ’er. The other boys is
tore up some,” he went on, “but we’ll have ’em crawlin’ ’round in a
week or so. Lacey’s got th’ worst crack. Doctor sez he kin save his
eye if he pulls through, but ye kin lay yer three fingers in th’ hole
in his face. He won’t be as purty as he was,” with an effort at a
smile, “but maybe that’ll do him good.”

Sanford crossed at once to Lacey’s bed, and laid his hand tenderly on
that of the sufferer. The young fellow opened his well eye, and a
smile played for an instant about his mouth, the white teeth gleaming.
Then it faded with the pain. Betty bent over him still closer and
adjusted the covering about his chest.

“Has he suffered much during the night, Betty?” asked Sanford.

“He didn’t know a thing at first, sir. He didn’t come to himself till
the doctor got through. He’s been easier since daylight.” Then, with
her head turned toward Sanford, and with a significant gesture,
pointing to her own forehead and cheek, she noiselessly described the
terrible wounds, burying her face in her hands as the awful memory
rose before her. “Oh, Mr. Sanford, I never dreamed anybody could
suffer so.”

“Where does he suffer most?” asked Sanford in a whisper.

Lacey opened his eye. “In my back, Mr. Sanford.”

Betty laid her fingers on his hand. “Don’t talk, Billy; doctor said ye
weren’t to talk.”

The eye shut again wearily, and the brown, rough, scarred hand with
the blue tattoo marks under the skin closed over the little fingers
and held on.

Betty sat fanning him gently, looking down upon his bruised face. As
each successive pain racked his helpless body she would hold her
breath until it passed, tightening her fingers that he might steady
himself the better: all her heart went out to him in his pain. Aunty
Bell watched her for a moment; then going to her side, she drew her
hand with a caressing stroke under the girl’s chin, a favorite
love-touch of hers, and said:—

“Cap’n says we got to go home, child, both of us. You’re tuckered out,
an’ I got some chores to do. We can’t do no more good here. You come
’long an’ get washed up ’fore Caleb comes. You don’t want to let him
see ye bunged up like this, an’ all smudged and dirty with th’ soot
a-droppin’ down. He’ll be here in half an hour. They’ve sent the tug
to the Ledge for him an’ the men. Come, Betty, that’s a good child.”

“I ain’t a-goin’ a step, Aunty Bell. I ain’t sleepy a bit. There ain’t
nobody to change these cloths but me. Caleb knows how to get along,”
she answered, her eyes watching the quick, labored breathing of the
injured man.

The mention of Caleb’s name brought her back to herself. Since the
moment when she had left her cottage, the night before, and in all her
varying moods since, she had not once thought of her husband. At the
sound of the explosion she had run out of her house bareheaded, and
had kept on down the road, overtaking Mrs. Bell and the neighbors. She
had not stopped even to lock her door. She only knew that the men were
hurt, and that she had seen Captain Joe and the others working on the
sloop’s deck but an hour before. She still saw Lacey’s ghastly face as
the lantern’s light fell upon it, and his limp body carried on the
barrow plank and laid outside the warehouse door, and could still hear
the crash of Captain Joe’s iron bar when he forced off the lock. She
would not leave the sufferer, now that he had crawled back to life and
needed her,—not, at least, until he was out of all danger. When
Captain Joe passed a few minutes later with a cup of coffee for one of
the sufferers, she was still by Lacey’s side, fanning gently. He
seemed to be asleep.

“Now, little gal,” the captain called out, “you git along home. You
done fust-rate, an’ the men won’t forgit ye for it. Caleb’ll be mighty
proud when I tell ’im how you stood by las’ night when they all piled
in on top o’ me. You run ’long now after Aunty Bell, an’ git some
sleep. I’m goin’ ’board the sloop to see how badly she’s hurted.”

Betty only shook her head. Then she rested her face against Captain
Joe’s strong arm and said, “No, please don’t, Captain Joe. I can’t go
now.”

She was still there, the fan moving noiselessly, when Mrs. Leroy, her
maid, and Major Slocomb entered the hospital. The major had escorted
Mrs. Leroy from New York, greatly to Sanford’s surprise, and greatly
to Mrs. Leroy’s visible annoyance. All her protests the night before
had only confirmed him in his determination to meet her at the train
in the morning.

“Did you suppose, my dear suh,” he said, in answer to Sanford’s
astonished look, as he handed that dainty woman from the train on its
arrival at Keyport, “that I would permit a lady to come off alone into
a God-forsaken country like this, that raises nothin’ but rocks and
scrub pines?”

Mrs. Leroy seemed stunned when she saw the four cots upon which the
men lay. She advanced a step toward Lacey’s bed, and then, as she
caught sight of the bandages and the ghastly face upon the
blood-stained pillow, she stopped short and grasped Sanford’s arm, and
said in a tremulous whisper, “Oh, Henry, is that his poor wife sitting
by him?”

“No; that’s the wife of Caleb West, the master diver. That’s Lacey
lying there. He looks to be worse hurt than he is, Kate,” anxious to
make the case as light as possible.

Her eyes wandered over the room, up at the cobwebbed ceiling and down
to the blackened floor.

“What an awfully dirty place! Are you going to keep them here?”

“Yes, until they can get to work again. The building is perfectly dry
and healthy, with plenty of ventilation. We will have it cleaned
up,—it needs that.”

Betty merely glanced at the group as she sat fanning the sleeping man.
Their entrance had made but little impression upon her; she was too
tired to move, and too much absorbed in her charge to offer the fine
lady a chair.

Something in the girl’s face touched the visitor.

“Have you been here all the morning?” she asked, crossing to Betty’s
side of the cot, and laying a hand on her shoulder. With the passing
of the first shock the natural tenderness of her heart had overcome
her. She wanted to help.

Betty raised her eyes, the rims red with her long vigil, and the
whites all the whiter because of the fine black dust that had sifted
down and discolored her pale cheeks.

“I’ve been here all night, ma’am,” she said sweetly and gently, drawn
instinctively by Mrs. Leroy’s sympathetic face.

“How tired you must be! Can I do anything to help you? Let me fan him
while you rest a little.”

Betty shook her head.

The major crossed over to the cot occupied by Lonny Bowles, the big
Noank quarryman, whose arm was in a sling, and sat down on the edge of
the bed. No one had yet thought of bringing in chairs, except for
those nursing the wounded. As the Pocomokian looked into Bowles’s
bronzed, ruddy face, at the wrinkles about his neck, as seamy as those
of a young bull, the great broad hairy chest, and the arms and hands
big and strong, he was filled with astonishment. Everything about the
quarryman seemed to be the exact opposite of what he himself
possessed. This almost racial distinction was made clearer when, in
the kindness of his heart, he tried to comfort the unfortunate man.

“I’m ve’y sorry,” the major began, with an embarrassment entirely new
to him, and which he could not account for in himself, “at finding you
injured in this way, suh. Has the night been a ve’y painful one? You
seem better off than the others. How did you feel at the time?”

Bowles looked him all over with a curious expression of countenance.
He was trying to decide in his mind, from the major’s white tie,
whether he was a minister, whose next remark would be a request to
kneel down and pray with him, or whether he were a quack doctor who
had come to do a little business on his own account. The evident
sincerity and tenderness of the speaker disconcerted him for the
moment. He hesitated for a while, and finally formulated a reply in
his mind that would cover the case if his first surmise as to his
being a minister were correct, and might at the same time result in
his being let alone if the second proved to be the case.

“Wall, it was so damn sudden. Fust thing I knowed I wuz in the water
with th’ wind knocked out’er me, an’ the next wuz when I come to an’
they bed me in here an’ the doctor a-fixin’ me up. I’m all right, ye
see, only I’m drier’n a lime-kiln. Say, cap,”—he looked over toward
the water-bucket, and called to one of the men standing near the
door,—“fetch me a dipper.”

To call a landsman “cap” around Keyport is to dignify him with a title
which he probably does not possess, but which you think would please
him if he did.

“Let me get you a drink,” said the major, rising from the bed with a
quick spring indicative of his hearty desire to serve him. He clipped
the floating tin in the bucket and brought it to the thirsty man.

Bowles drained the contents to its last drop. “He ain’t no preach an’
he ain’t no sawbones,” he said to himself, as he returned the empty
tin to Slocomb with a “Thank ye,—much obleeged.”

Somehow the reply satisfied the major far more than the most
elaborately prepared speech of thanks which he remembered ever to have
received.

Then the two men continued to talk freely with each other, the one act
of kindness having broken down the barrier between them. The
Pocomokian, completely forgetting himself, told of his home on the
Chesapeake, of his acquaintance with Sanford, of his coming up to look
after Mrs. Leroy. The major’s tone of voice was as natural and
commonplace as if he had been conversing with himself alone. “Couldn’t
leave a woman without protection, you know,” to which code of
etiquette Bowles bobbed his head in reply; the genuine, unaffected
sympathy of the rough man before him seemed to have knocked every
fictitious prop from under his own personality.

The quarryman, in turn, talked about the Ledge, and what a rotten
season it had been,—nothing but southeasters since work opened; last
week the men only got three days’ work. It was terrible rough on the
boss (the boss was Sanford), paying out wages to the men and getting
so little back; but it wasn’t the men’s fault,—they were standing by
day and night, catching the lulls when they came; they’d make it up
before the season was over; he and Caleb West had been up all the
night before getting ready for the big derricks that Captain Joe was
going to set up as soon as they were ready; didn’t know what they were
going to do now with that Screamer all tore up: a record of danger,
unselfishness, loyalty, pluck, hard work, and a sense of duty that was
a complete revelation to Slocomb, whose whole life had been one
prolonged loaf, and whose ideas of the higher type of man had
heretofore been somehow inseparably interwoven with a veranda, a
splint-bottomed chair, a palm-leaf fan, and somebody within call to
administer to his personal wants.

When Captain Joe returned from an inspection of the sloop’s
injuries,—strange to say, they were very slight compared to the force
of the explosion,—Mrs. Leroy was still talking to Sanford, suggesting
comforts for the men, and planning for mosquito nettings to be placed
over their cots. The maid, a severe-looking woman in black, who had
never relaxed her grasp of the dressing-case, had taken a seat on an
empty nail-keg which somebody had brought in, and which she had
carefully dusted with her handkerchief before occupying. It was
evident from her manner that there was absolutely nothing she could do
for anybody.

Captain Joe looked at the party for a moment, noted Mrs. Leroy’s
traveling costume of blue foulard and dainty bonnet, ran his eye over
the maid, glanced at the major, in an alpaca coat, with white
waistcoat and necktie and gray slouch hat, and said in his calm,
forceful, yet gentle way to Mrs. Leroy, “It was very nice of ye to
come an’ bring yer friend,” pointing to the maid, “an’ any o’ Mr.
Sanford’s folks is allers welcome at any time; but we be a rough lot,
an’ the men’s rough, and ye kin see for yerself we ain’t fixed up fur
company. They’ll be all right in a week or so. Ef ye don’t mind now,
ma’am, I’m goin’ to shet them shetters to keep the sun out o’ their
eyes an’ git th’ men quiet,—some on ’em ain’t slep’ any too much. The
tug’ll be here to take ye all over to Medford whenever ye’re ready;
she’s been to th’ Ledge fur th’ men. Mr. Sanford said ye’d be goin’
over soon.” He glanced about the room as he spoke, until his eye
rested on Sanford. “Ye’re goin’ ’long, didn’t I hear ye say, sir?”
Then addressing Slocomb, whose title he tried to remember, “We’ve done
th’ best we could, colonel. It ain’t like what ye’re accustomed to,
mebbe,—kind’er ragged place,—but we got th’ men handy here where we
kin take care on ’em, an’ still look after th’ work, an’ we ain’t got
no time to lose this season; it’s been back’ard, blowin’ a gale half
the time. There’s the tug whistle now, ma’am,” turning again to Mrs.
Leroy.

Mrs. Leroy did not answer. She felt the justice of the captain’s
evident want of confidence in her, and realized at once that all of
her best impulses could not save her from being an intrusion at this
time. None of her former experience had equipped her for a situation
of such gravity as this. With a curious feeling of half contempt for
herself, she thought, as she looked around upon the great strong men
suffering there silently, how little she had known of what physical
pain must be. She had once read to a young blind girl in a hospital,
during a winter, and she had sent delicacies for years to a poor man
with some affliction of the spine. She remembered that she had been
quite satisfied with herself and her work at the time; and so had the
pretty nurses in their caps, and the young doctors whom she met, the
head surgeon even escorting her to her carriage. But what had she done
to prepare herself for a situation like this? Here was the reality of
suffering, and yet with all her sympathy she felt within herself a
fierce repugnance to it. After all her aspirations, how weak she was,
and how heartily she despised herself!

As she turned to leave the building, holding her skirts in her hand to
avoid the dirt, the light of the open door was shut out, and eight or
ten great strong fellows in rough jackets and boots, headed by Caleb
West, just landed by a tug from the Ledge, walked hurriedly into the
room, with an air as if they belonged there and knew they had work to
do, and at once.

Caleb strode straight to Lacey’s bed. His cap was off, his hands were
clasped behind his back. He felt his eyes filling, and a great lump
rose in his throat as he stood looking down at him. He never could see
suffering unmoved.

The young rigger opened his well eye, and the pale cheek flushed
scarlet as he saw Caleb’s face bending over him.

“Where did it hit ye, sonny?” asked Caleb, bending closer, and
slipping one hand into Betty’s as he spoke.

Betty pointed to her own cheek. Lacey, she said, was too weak to
answer for himself.

“I’ve been afeard o’ that b’iler,” Caleb said, turning to one of the
men, “ever sence I see it work.”

Betty shook her head warningly, holding a finger to her lips. Caleb
and the men stopped talking.

“You been here all night, Betty?” whispered Caleb, putting his mouth
close to her ear, and one big hand on her rounded shoulder.

Betty nodded her head.

“Ye ought’er be mighty proud o’ her, Caleb,” said Captain Joe, joining
the group, and speaking in a lowered tone. “Ain’t many older women
’longshore would’er done any better. I tried ter git ’er to go home
with Aunty Bell two hours ago, but she sez she won’t.”

Caleb’s face glowed and his heart gave a quick bound as he listened to
Captain Joe’s praise of the girl wife that was all his own. His rough
hand pressed Betty’s shoulder the closer. He had always known that the
first great sorrow or anxiety that came into her life would develop
all her nature and make a woman of her. Now the men about him would
see the strong womanly qualities which had attracted him.

“Lemme take hold now, Betty,” said Caleb, still whispering, and
stooping over her again. “Ye’re nigh beat out, little woman.”

He slipped his arm around her slender waist as if to lift her from the
chair. Betty caught his fingers and loosened his hand from its hold.

“I’m all right, Caleb. You go home. I’ll be ’long in a little while to
get supper.”

Caleb looked at her curiously. Her tone of voice was new to him. She
had never loosened his arm before, not when she was tired and sick.
She had always crept into his lap, and put her pretty white arms
around his neck, and tucked her head down on his big beard.

“What’s the matter, little one?” he asked anxiously. “Maybe it’s
hungry ye be?”

“Yes, I guess I’m hungry, Caleb,” said Betty wearily.

“I’ll go out, Betty, an’ git ye some soup or somethin’. I’ll be back
right away, little woman.” He tiptoed past the cot, putting on his cap
as he went.

Two of the men followed him with their eyes and smiled. One looked
significantly at Lacey and then toward the retreating figure, and
shook his head in a knowing way.

Betty had not answered Caleb. She did not even turn her head to follow
his movements. She saw only the bruised, pale face before her as she
listened to the heavy breathing of the sufferer. She would have
dropped from her chair with fatigue and exhaustion but for some new
spirit within her which seemed to hold her up, and to keep the fan
still in her hand.

When Sanford, after escorting Mrs. Leroy to her home, returned to the
improvised hospital, he found the lanterns lighted, and learned that
the doctor had dressed the men’s wounds, and had reported everybody on
the mend, especially Lacey; at Betty’s urgent request he had made a
careful examination of the young rigger’s wounds, and had pronounced
him positively out of danger. Only then had she left her post and gone
to her own cottage with Caleb.

Captain Joe had followed Aunty Bell home for a few hours’ rest, and
all the watchers had been changed.

There was but one exception. Beside the cot upon which lay the sailor
with the dislocated hip sat the major, with hat and coat off, his
shirt-cuffs rolled up. He was feeding the sufferer from a bowl of soup
which he held in his hand. He seemed to enjoy every phase of his new
experience. It might have been that his sympathies were more than
usually aroused, or it might have been that the spirit of vagabondage
within him, which fitted him for every condition in life, making him
equally at home among rich and poor, and equally agreeable to both,
had speedily brought him into harmony with the men about him.
Certainly no newly appointed young surgeon in a charity hospital could
have been more entirely absorbed in the proper running of the
establishment than was Slocomb in the care of these rough men. He had
refused point-blank Mrs. Leroy’s pressing invitation to spend the
night at her house, his refusal causing much astonishment to those who
misunderstood his reasons.

“I’m going to take charge here to-night, major,” said Sanford, walking
toward him, realizing for the first time that he had neglected his
friend all day, and with a sudden anxiety as to where he should send
him for the night. “Will you go to the hotel and get a room, or will
you go to Captain Joe’s cottage? You can have my bed. Mrs. Bell will
make you very comfortable for the night.”

The major turned to Sanford with an expression of profound sympathy in
his face, hesitated for a moment, and said firmly, with a slight
suggestion of wounded dignity in his manner, and in a voice which was
sincerity itself, “By gravy, suh, you wouldn’t talk about going to bed
if you’d been yere ’most all day, as I have, and seen what these po’
men suffer. My place is yere, suh, an’ yere I’m going to stay.”

Sanford had to look twice before he could trust his own eyes and ears.
What was the matter with the Pocomokian?

“But, major,” he continued in protest, determining finally in his mind
that some quixotic whim had taken possession of him, “there isn’t a
place for you to lie down. You had better get a good night’s rest, and
come back in the morning. There’s nothing you can do here. I’m going
to sit up with the men myself to-night.”

The major did not even wait for Sanford’s reply. He placed the hot
soup carefully on the floor, slipped one hand under the wounded man’s
head that he might swallow more easily, and then raised another
spoonful to the sufferer’s lips.




CHAPTER VIII

THE “HEAVE HO” OF LONNY BOWLES


The accident to the Screamer had delayed work at the Ledge but a few
days. Other men had taken the place of those injured, and renewed
efforts had been made by Sanford and Captain Joe to complete to
low-water mark the huge concrete disk, forming a bedstone sixty feet
in diameter and twelve feet thick, on which the superstructure was to
rest. This had been accomplished after three weeks of work, and the
men stood in readiness to begin the masonry of the superstructure
itself so soon as the four great derricks required in lifting and
setting the cut stone of the masonry could be erected. They were only
waiting for Mr. Carleton’s acceptance of the concrete disk, the first
section of the contract. The superintendent’s certificate of approval
was important, one rule of the Department being that no new section of
the work should begin until the preceding section was officially
approved.

Carleton, however, declined to give it. His ostensible reason was that
the engineer-in-chief was expected daily at Keyport, and should
therefore pass upon the work himself. His real reason was a desire to
settle a score with Captain Joe by impeding the progress of the work.

This animosity to Captain Joe had been aroused by an article very
flattering to the superintendent, published in the “Medford Journal,”
in which great credit had been given to Carleton for his “heroism and
his prompt efficiency in providing a hospital for the wounded men.”
The day after its publication, the “Noank Times,” a political rival,
sent to make an investigation of its own, in the course of which the
reporter encountered Captain Joe. The captain had not seen the Medford
article until it was shown him by the reporter. He thereupon gave the
exact facts in regard to the accident and the subsequent care of the
wounded men, generously exonerating the government superintendent from
all responsibility for the notice; adding with decided emphasis that
“Mr. Carleton couldn’t ’a’ said no such thing ’bout havin’ provided
the hospital himself, ’cause he was over to Medford to a circus the
night the accident happened, and didn’t git home till daylight next
mornin’, when everything was over an’ the men was in their beds.” The
result of this interview was a double-leaded column in the next issue
of the “Noank Times,” which not only ridiculed its rival for the
manufactured news, but read a lesson on veracity to Carleton himself.

The denial made by the “Times” was the thrust that had rankled
deepest; for Carleton, unfortunately for himself, had inclosed the
eulogistic article from the “Medford Journal” in his official report
of the accident to the Department, and had become the proud possessor
of a letter from the engineer-in-chief commending his “promptness and
efficiency.”

So far the captain had kept his temper, ignoring both the obstacles
Carleton had thrown in his way and the ill-natured speeches the
superintendent was constantly making. No open rupture had taken place.
Those, however, who knew the captain’s explosive temperament
confidently expected that he would break out upon the superintendent,
in answer to some brutal thrust, in a dialect so impregnated with
fulminates that the effect on Carleton would be disastrous. But they
were never gratified. “’T ain’t no use answerin’ back,” was all he
said. “He don’t know no better, poor critter.”

Indeed, it was only when a great personal danger threatened his men
that the captain’s every-day, conventional English seemed inadequate.
On such occasions, when the slightest error on the part of his working
force might result in the instant death or the maiming of one of them,
certain and it is to be hoped unrecorded outbursts of profanity,
soaring into crescendos and ending in fortissimos, would often escape
from the captain’s lips with a vim and rush that would have raised the
hair of his Puritan ancestors,—rockets of oaths, that kindled with
splutters of dissatisfaction, flamed into showers of abuse, and burst
into blasphemies which cleared the atmosphere like a thunderclap. For
these transgressions he never made any apology. In the roar of the sea
they seemed sometimes the only ammunition he could depend upon.
“Somebody’ll git hurted round here, if ye ain’t careful; somehow I
can’t make ye understand no other way,” he would say. This was as near
as he ever came to apologizing for his sinfulness. But he never wasted
any of these explosives on such men as Carleton.

As the superintendent persisted in his refusal to give the certificate
of acceptance, and as each day was precious, Sanford, whose confidence
in the stability and correctness of the work which he and Captain Joe
had done was unshaken, determined to begin the erection of the four
derricks at once. He accordingly gave orders to clear away the
mixing-boards and tools; thus burning his bridges behind him, should
the inspection of the engineer-in-chief necessitate any additional
work on the concrete disk.

These derricks, with their winches and chain guys, were now lying on
the jagged rocks of the Ledge, where they had been landed the day
before by Captain Brandt with the boom of the Screamer,—now stanch and
sound as ever, a new engine and boiler on her deck. They were designed
to lift and set the cut-stone masonry of the superstructure,—the top
course at a height of fifty-eight feet above the water-line. These
stones weighed from six to thirteen tons each.

During the delay that followed the accident the weather had been
unusually fine. Day after day the sun had risen on a sea of silver
reflecting the blue of a cloudless sky, with wavy tidelines engraved
on its polished surface. At dawn Crotch Island had been an emerald,
and at sunset an amethyst.

With the beginning of the dog-days, however, the weather had changed.
Dull leaden fogbanks dimming the distant horizon had blended into a
pearly-white sky. Restless, wandering winds sulked in dead calms, or
broke in fitful, peevish blasts. Opal-tinted clouds showed at sunrise,
and prismatic rings of light surrounded the moon,—all sure signs of a
coming storm.

Captain Joe watched the changing sky where hour by hour were placarded
the bulletins of the impending outbreak, and redoubled his efforts on
the lines of the watch-tackles at which the men were tugging, pulling
the derricks to their places.

By ten o’clock on the 15th of August, three of the four derricks,
their tops connected by heavy wire rope, had been stepped in their
sockets and raised erect, and their seaward guys had been made fast,
Caleb securing the ends himself. By noon, the last derrick—the fourth
leg of the chair, as it were—was also nearly perpendicular, the men
tugging ten deep on the line of the watch-tackles. This derrick, being
the last of the whole system and the most difficult to handle, was
under the immediate charge of Captain Joe. On account of its position,
which necessitated the bearing of its own strain and that of the other
three derricks as well, its outboard seaward guy was as heavy as that
of a ship’s anchor-chain. The final drawing taut of this chain, some
sixty feet in length, stretching, as did the smaller ones, from the
top of the derrick-mast down to the enrockment block, and the
fastening of its sea end in the block, would not only complete the
system of the four erected derricks, but would make them permanent and
strong enough to resist either sea action or any weight that they
might be required to lift. The failure to secure this chain guy into
the anchoring enrockment block, or any sudden break in the other guys,
would result not only in instantly toppling over the fourth derrick
itself, but in dragging the three erect derricks with it. This might
mean, too, the crushing to death of some of the men; for the slimy,
ooze-covered rocks and concrete disk on which they had to stand and
work made hurried escape impossible.

To insure an easier connection between this last chain and the
enrockment block, Caleb had fastened below water, into the Lewis hole
of the block, a long iron hook. Captain Joe’s problem, which he was
now about to solve, was to catch this hook into a steel ring which was
attached to the end of the chain guy. The drawing together of this
hook and ring was to be done by means of a watch-tackle, which
tightened the chain guy inch by inch, the gang of men standing in line
while Captain Joe, ring in hand, waited to slip it into the hook. A
stage manager stretching a tight-rope supported on saw-horses, with a
similar tackle, solves, on a smaller scale, just such a problem every
night.

Carleton, who never ran any personal risks, sat on the platform, out
of harm’s way, sneering at the men’s struggles, and protesting that it
was impossible to put up the four derricks at once. Sanford was across
the disk, some fifty feet from Captain Joe, studying the effect of the
increased strain on the outboard guys of the three derricks already
placed.

The steady rhythmic movement of the men, ankle-deep in the water,
swaying in unison, close-stepped, tugging at the tackle-line, like a
file of soldiers, keeping time to Lonny Bowles’s “Heave ho,” had
brought the hook and ring within six feet of each other, when the foot
of one of the men slipped on the slimy ooze and tripped up the man
next him. In an instant the whole gang were floundering among the
rocks and in the water, the big fourth derrick swaying uneasily, like
a tree that was doomed.

“Every man o’ ye as ye were!” shouted Captain Joe, without even a look
at the superintendent, who had laughed outright at their fall. While
he was shouting he had twisted a safety-line around a projecting rock
to hold the strain until the men could regain their feet. The great
derrick tottered for a moment, steadied itself like a drunken man, and
remained still. The other three quivered, their top connecting guys
sagging loose.

“Now make fast, an’ two ’r three of ye come here!” cried the captain
again. In the easing of the strain caused by the slipping of the men,
the six feet of space between hook and ring had gone back to ten.

Two men scrambled like huge crabs over the slippery rocks, and
relieved Captain Joe of the end of the safety-line. The others stood
firm and held taut the tug-lines of the watch-tackle. The slow,
rhythmic movement of the gang to the steady “Heave ho” began again.
The slack of the tackle was taken up, and the ten feet between the
hook and the ring were reduced to five. Half an hour more, and the
four great derricks would be anchored safe against any contingency.

The strain on the whole system became once more intense. The seaward
guy of the opposite derrick—the one across the concrete disk—shook
ominously under the enormous tension. Loud creaks could be heard as
the links of the chain untwisted and the derricks turned on their
rusty pintles.

Then a sound like a pistol-shot rang out clear and sharp.

Captain Joe heard Sanford’s warning cry, but before the men could ease
the strain one of the seaward guys that fastened the top of its
derrick to its enrockment-block anchorage snapped with a springing
jerk, writhed like a snake in the air, and fell in a swirl across the
disk of concrete, barely missing the men.

The gang at the tug-line turned their heads, and the bravest of them
grew pale. The opposite derrick, fifty feet away, was held upright by
but a single safety-rope. If this should break, the whole system of
four derricks, with its tons of chain guys and wire rope, would be
down upon their heads.

Carleton ran to the end of the platform, ready to leap. Sanford
ordered him back. Two of the men, in the uncertainty of the moment,
slackened their hold. A third, a newcomer, turned to run towards the
concrete, as the safer place, when Caleb’s viselike hand grasped his
shoulder and threw him back in line.

There was but one chance left,—to steady the imperiled derrick with a
temporary guy strong enough to stand the strain.

“Stand by on that watch-tackle, every —— —— man o’ ye! Don’t one
o’ ye move!” shouted Captain Joe in a voice that drowned all other
sounds.

The men sprang into line and stood together in dogged determination.

“Take a man, Caleb, as quick’s God’ll let ye, an’ run a wire guy out
on that derrick.” The order was given in a low voice that showed the
gravity of the situation.

Caleb and Lonny Bowles stepped from the line, leaped over the slippery
rocks, splashed across the concrete disk, now a shallow lake with the
rising tide, and picked up another tackle as they plunged along to
where Sanford stood, the water over his rubber boots. They dragged a
new guy towards the imperiled derrick. Lonny Bowles, in his eagerness
to catch the dangling end of the parted guy, began to scale the
derrick-mast itself, climbing by the foot-rests, when Captain Joe’s
crescendo voice overhauled him. He knew the danger better than Bowles.

“Come down out’er that, Lonny!” (Gentle oaths.) “Come down, I tell
ye!” (Oaths crescendo.) “Don’t ye know no better’n to”—(Oaths
fortissimo.) “Do ye want to pull that derrick clean over?” (Oaths
fortissimisso.)

Bowles slid from the mast just as Sanford’s warning cry scattered the
men below him. There came a sudden jerk; the opposite derrick
trembled, staggered for a moment, and swooped through the air towards
the men, dragging in its fall the two side derricks with all their
chains and guys.

“Down between the rocks, heads under, every man o’ ye!” shouted the
captain.

The captain sprang last, crouching up to his neck in the sea, his head
below the jagged points of two rough stones, just as the huge fourth
derrick, under which he had stood, lunged wildly, and with a ringing
blow struck a stone within three feet of his head,—the great
anchor-chain guy twisting like a cobra over the slimy rocks.

When all was still, Sanford’s anxious face rose cautiously from behind
a protecting rock near where the first derrick had struck. There came
a cheer of safety from Caleb and Bowles, answered by another from
Captain Joe, and Sanford and the men crawled out of their holes, and
clambered upon the rocks, the water dripping from their clothing.

Not a man had been hurt!

“What did I tell you?” called out Carleton sneeringly, more to hide
his alarm than anything else.

“That’s too bad, Mr. Sanford, but we can’t help it,” said Captain Joe
in his customary voice, paying no more attention to Carleton’s talk
than if it had been the slop of the waves at his feet. “All hands,
now, on these derricks. We got’er git ’em up, boys, if it takes all
night.”

Again the men sprang to his orders, and again and again the crescendos
of oaths culminated in fortissimos of profanity as the risks for the
men increased.

For five consecutive hours they worked without a pause.

Slowly and surely the whole system, beginning with the two side
derricks, whose guys still held their anchorage, was raised upright,
Sanford still watching the opposite derrick, a new outward guy having
replaced the broken one.

It was six o’clock when the four derricks were again fairly erect. The
same gang was tugging at the watch-tackle, and the distance between
the hook and the ring was once more reduced to five feet. The hook
gained inch by inch towards its anchorage. Captain Joe’s eyes gleamed
with suppressed satisfaction.

All this time the tide had been rising. Most of the rough, above-water
rocks were submerged, and fully three feet of water washed over the
concrete disk. Only the tops of the rough stones where Sanford stood,
and the platform where Carleton sat, out of all danger from derricks
or sea, were clear of the incoming wash.

Meanwhile the Screamer’s life-boat—the only means the men had that
day of leaving the Ledge and boarding the sloop, moored in the lee of
the Ledge—had broken from her moorings, and lay dangerously near the
rocks. The wind too had changed to the east. With it came a long,
rolling swell that broke on the eastern derrick,—the fourth one, the
key-note of the system, the one Captain Joe and the men were
tightening up.

Suddenly a window was opened somewhere in the heavens, and a blast of
wet air heaped the sea into white caps, and sent it bowling along
towards the Ledge and the Screamer lying in the eddy.

Captain Joe, as he stood with the hook in his hand, watched the sea’s
carefully planned attack, and calculated how many minutes were left
before it would smother the Ledge in a froth and end all work. He
could see, too, the Screamer’s mast rocking ominously in the rising
sea. If the wind and tide increased, she must soon shift her position
to the eddy on the other side of the Ledge. But no shade of anxiety
betrayed him.

The steady movement of the tugging men continued, Lonny’s “Heave ho”
ringing out cheerily in perfect time. Four of the gang, for better
foothold, stood on the concrete, their feet braced to the iron mould
band, the water up to their pockets. The others clung with their feet
to the slippery rocks.

The hook was now within two feet of the steel ring, Captain Joe
standing on a rock at a lower level than the others, nearly waist-deep
in the sea, getting ready for the final clinch.

Sanford from his rock had also been watching the sea. As he scanned
the horizon, his quick eye caught to the eastward a huge roller pushed
ahead of the increasing wind, piling higher as it swept on.

“Look out for that sea, Captain Joe! Hold fast, men,—hold fast!” he
shouted, springing to a higher rock.

Hardly had his voice ceased, when a huge green curler threw itself
headlong on the Ledge, wetting the men to their arm-pits. Captain Joe
had raised his eyes for an instant, grasped the chain as a brace, and
taken its full force on his broad back. When his head emerged, his cap
was gone, his shirt clung to the muscles of his big chest, and the
water streamed from his hair and mouth.

Shaking his head like a big water-dog, he waved his hand, with a
laugh, to Sanford, volleyed out another rattling fire of orders, and
then held on with the clutch of a devil-fish as the next green roller
raced over him. It made no more impression upon him than if he had
been an offshore buoy.

The fight now lay between the rising sea and the men tugging at the
watch-tackle. After each wave ran by the men gained an inch on the
tightening line. Every moment the wind blew harder, and every moment
the sea rose higher. Bowles was twice washed from the rock on which he
stood, and the newcomer, who was unused to the slime and ooze, had
been thrown bodily into a water-hole. Sanford held to a rock a few
feet above Captain Joe, watching his every movement. His anxiety for
the safe erection of the system had been forgotten in his admiration
for the superb pluck and masterful skill of the surf-drenched
sea-titan below him.

Captain Joe now moved to the edge of the anchor enrockment block,
standing waist-deep in the sea, one hand holding the hook, the other
the ring. Six inches more and the closure would be complete.

In heavy strains like these the last six inches gain slowly.

“Give it to ’er, men—all hands now—give it to ’er! Pull, Caleb!
Pull, you —— ——!” (Air full of Greek fire.) “Once more—all
together —— ——!” (Sky-bombs bursting.) “All to—”

Again the sea buried him out of sight, quenching the explosives
struggling to escape from his throat.

The wind and tide increased. The water swirled about the men, the
spray flew over their heads, but the steady pull went on.

A voice from the platform now called out,—it was that of Nickles, the
cook: “Life-boat’s a-poundin’ bad, sir! She can’t stan’ it much
longer.”

Carleton’s voice shouting to Sanford from the platform came next: “I’m
not going to stay here all night and get wet. I’m going to Keyport in
the Screamer. Send some men to catch this life-boat.”

The captain raised his head and looked at Nickles; Carleton he never
saw.

“Let ’r pound an’ be damned to ’er! Go on, Caleb, with that tackle.
Pull, ye”—Another wave went over him, and another red-hot explosive
lost its life.

With the breaking of the next roller the captain uttered no sound. The
situation was too grave for explosives. Whenever his profanity stopped
short the men grew nervous: they knew then that a crisis had arrived,
one that even Captain Joe feared.

The captain bent over the chain, one arm clinging to the anchorage,
his feet braced against a rock, the hook in his hand within an inch of
the ring.

“_Hold hard!_” he shouted.

Caleb raised his hand in warning, and the rhythmic movement ceased.
The men stood still. Every eye was fixed on the captain.

“LET GO!”

The big derrick quivered for an instant as the line slackened, stood
still, and a slight shiver ran through the guys. The hook had slipped
into the ring!

The system of four derricks, with all their guys and chains, stood as
taut and firm as a suspension bridge!

Captain Joe turned his head calmly towards the platform, and said
quietly, “There, Mr. Carleton, they’ll stand now till hell freezes
over.”

                        *    *    *    *    *

As the cheering of the men subsided, the captain, squeezing the water
from his hair and beard with a quick rasp of his fingers, sprang to
Sanford’s rock, grasped his outstretched hand, shook it heartily, and
called to Caleb, in a firm, cheery voice that had not a trace of
fatigue in it after twelve hours of battling with sea and derricks,
“All o’ you men what’s goin’ in the Screamer with Mr. Carleton to
Keyport for Sunday ’d better look out for that life-boat. Come, Lonny
Bowles, pick up them tackles an’ git to the shanty. It’ll be awful
soapy round here ’fore mornin’.”




CHAPTER IX

WHAT THE BUTCHER SAW


Caleb sat on the deck of the Screamer on her homeward run, his face
turned toward Keyport Light, beyond which his little cabin lay. His
eyes glistened, and there came a choking in his throat as he thought
of meeting Betty. He could even feel her hand slipped into his, and
could hear the very tones of her cheery welcome, when she met him at
the gate and they walked together up the garden path to the porch.

Most of the men who had stood to the watch-tackles in the rolling surf
sat beside him on the sloop. Those who were still wet, including
Sanford, had gone below into the cabin, out of the cutting wind. Those
who, like Caleb, had changed their clothes, sat on the after deck.
Captain Joe, against Sanford’s earnest protest, had remained on the
Ledge for the night. He wanted, he said, to see how the derricks would
stand the coming storm.

It had been a busy month for the diver. Since the explosion he had
been almost constantly in his rubber dress, working not only his
regular four hours under water,—all that an ordinary man could
stand,—but taking another’s place for an hour or two when some piece
of submarine work at the Ledge required his more skillful eye and
hand. He had set some fifty or more of the big enrockment blocks in
thirty feet of water, each block being lowered into position by the
Screamer’s boom, and he had prepared the anchor sockets in which to
step the four great derricks. Twice he had been swept from his hold by
the racing current, and once his helmet had struck a projecting rock
with such force that he was deaf for days. His hands, too, had begun
to blister from the salt water and hot sun. Betty, on his last Sunday
at home, had split up one of her own little gloves for plasters, and
tried to heal his blisters with some salve. But it had not done his
bruises much good, he thought, as he probed with his stub of a thumb
the deeper cracks in his tough, leathery palms.

Now that the men were convalescent he gloried more and more in his
wife’s energy and capacity. To relieve a wounded man, serve him night
and day, and by skill, tenderness, and self-sacrifice get him once
more well and sound and on his legs, able to do a day’s work and earn
a day’s pay,—this, to Caleb, was something to be proud of and to
glory in. But for her nursing, he would often say, poor Billy would
now be among the tombstones on the hill back of Keyport Light.

Caleb’s estimate of Betty’s efforts was not exaggerated. Her patient
had been the most severely injured, and her task had therefore been
longer and more severe. The cut on Lacey’s cheek and frontal bone,
dividing his eyebrow like a sabre slash, had been deep and ugly and
slow to heal; and the bruise on his back had developed into a wound
that in its progress had sapped his youthful strength. He had been her
patient from the first, and she had never neglected him an hour since
the fatal night when she helped the doctor wind his bandages. When on
the third day fever set in, she had taken her seat by his bedside
until the delirium had passed. Mrs. Bell and Miss Peebles, the
schoolmistress, had relieved each other in the care of the other
wounded men,—all of them, strange to say, were single men, and all of
them away from home.

Betty would go to her own cabin for an hour each day, but as soon as
her work was done she would pull down the shades, lock the house door,
and, with a sunbonnet on her head and some little delicacy in her
hand, hurry down the shore road again to the warehouse hospital. This
had been the first real responsibility of her life, the first time in
which anything had been expected of her apart from the endless cooking
of three meals a day, and the washing up and sweeping out that
followed.

There were no more lonely hours for her now. A new tenderness, too,
had been aroused in her nature because of the helplessness of the boy
whose feeble, hot fingers clutched her own. The love which this
curly-headed young rigger had once avowed for her when there were
strength and ruggedness in every sinew of his body, when his red lips
were parted over the white teeth and his eyes shone with pride, had
been quite forgotten as she watched by his bed. It was this
helplessness of his which was ever present in her mind, his suffering.
She realized that the prostrate young fellow before her was dependent
on her for his very life and sustenance, as a child might have been.
It was for her he waited in the morning, refusing to touch his
breakfast until she gave it to him,—unable at first, reluctant
afterward. It was for her last touch on his pillow that he waited at
night before he went to sleep. It was she alone who brought the smiles
to his face, or inspired him with a courage he had almost lost when
the pain racked him and he thought he might never be able to do a
day’s work again.

The long confinement had left its mark on Lacey. He was a mere outline
of himself the first day he was able to sit in the sunshine at the
warehouse door. His hands were white, and his face was bleached. When
he gained a little strength, Captain Joe gave him light duties about
the wharf, the doctor refusing to let him go to the Ledge. But even
after he was walking about, Betty felt him still under her care, and
prepared dainty dishes for him. When she took them to him, she saw,
with a strange sinking of her heart, that he gained but slowly, and
was still weak and ill enough to need a woman’s care.

The story of her nursing and of the doctor’s constant tribute to her
skill was well known, and Caleb, usually so reticent, would talk of it
again and again. Most of the men liked to humor his pride in her, for
Betty’s blithesome, cheery nature made her a favorite wherever she was
known.

“I kind’er wish Cap’n Joe had come ashore to-night,” Caleb said,
turning to Captain Brandt, who stood beside him, his hand on the
tiller. “He’s been soakin’ wet all day, an’ he won’t put nothin’ dry
on ef I ain’t with him. ’T warn’t for Betty I’d ’a’ stayed, but the
little gal’s so lonesome ’t ain’t right to leave her. I don’ know what
Lacey ’d done but for Betty. Did ye see ’er, Lonny, when she come in
that night?” All the little by-paths of Caleb’s talk led to Betty.

It was the same old question, but Lonny, seated on the other side of
the deck, fell in willingly with Caleb’s mood.

“See ’er? Wall, I guess! I thought she’d keel over when the doctor
washed Billy’s face. He did look ragged, an’ no mistake, Caleb; but
she held on an’ never give in a mite.”

Carleton sat close enough to overhear the remark.

“Why shouldn’t she?” he sneered, behind his hand, to the man next him.
“Lacey’s a blamed sight better looking fellow than what she’s got. The
girl knows a good thing when she sees it. If it was me, I’d”—

He never finished the sentence. Caleb overheard the remark, and rose
from his seat, with an expression in his eyes that could not be
misunderstood. Sanford, watching the group through the cabin window,
and not knowing the cause of Caleb’s sudden anger, said afterwards
that the diver looked like an old gray wolf gathering himself for a
spring, as he stood over Carleton with hands tightly clinched.

The superintendent made some sort of half apology to Caleb, and the
diver took his seat again, but did not forgive him; neither did the
older men, who had seen Betty grow up, and who always spoke of her
somehow as if she belonged to them.

“T’ain’t decent,” said Lonny Bowles to Sanford when he had joined him
later in the cabin of the Screamer and had repeated Carleton’s remark,
“for a man to speak agin a woman; such fellers ain’t no better ’n
rattlesnakes an’ ought’er be trompled on, if they is in guv’ment pay.”

When the sloop reached Keyport harbor, the men were landed as near as
possible to their several homes. Caleb, in his kindly voice, bade
good-night to Sanford, to Captain Brandt, to the crew, and to the
working gang. To Carleton he said nothing. He would have overlooked
and forgotten an affront put upon himself, but never one upon Betty.

“She ain’t got nobody but an ol’ feller like me,” he often said to
Captain Joe,—“no chillen nor nothin’, poor little gal. I got to make
it up to her some way.”

As he walked up the path he was so engrossed with Carleton’s flippant
remark, conning it over in his mind to tell Betty,—he knew she did
not like him,—that he forgot for the moment that she was not at the
garden gate.

He looked up at the house and noticed that the shades were pulled down
on the garden side of the house.

“She ain’t sick, is she?” he said to himself. “I guess nussin’ Lacey’s
been too much for her. I ought’er knowed she’d break down. ’Pears to
me she did look peaked when I bid her good-by las’ Monday.”

“Ye ain’t sick, little woman, be ye?” he called out as he opened the
door.

There was no response. He walked quickly through the kitchen, passed
into the small hall, calling her as he went, mounted the narrow
stairs, and opened the bedroom door softly, thinking she might be
asleep. The shutters were closed, the room was in perfect order. The
bed was empty. The sheet and covering were turned neatly on his side,
and the bedding was clean and had not been slept in. At its foot,
within reach of his hand, lay his big carpet slippers that she had
made for him. He stooped mechanically, gazing at the untouched pillow,
still wondering why she had turned the sheet, his mind relieved now
that she was not ill.

Then he remembered that it was not yet dark, and that, on account of
the coming storm, he was an hour earlier than usual in getting home.
His face lightened. He saw it all now: Betty had not expected him so
soon, and would be home in a little while.

When he entered the kitchen again he saw the table. There was but one
plate laid, with the knife and fork beside it. This was covered by a
big china bowl. Under it was some cold meat with the bread and butter.
Near the table, by the stove, a freshly ironed shirt hung over a
chair.

He understood it all now. She had put his supper and his shirt where
he would find them, and was not coming home till late. He would “clean
up” right away, so as to be ready for her.

When he had washed, dressed himself in his house clothes, and combed
his big beard, he dragged a chair out on the front porch, to watch for
her up and down the road.

The men going home, carrying their dinner-pails, nodded to him as they
passed, and one stopped and leaned over the gate long enough to wonder
whether the big August storm would break that night, adding, “We
generally has a blow ’bout this time.”

While he sat waiting the butcher stopped to leave the weekly piece of
meat for Sunday,—the itinerant country butcher, with his shop in one
of the neighboring villages, and his customers up and down all the
roads that led out of it; supplies for every household in his wagon,
and the gossip of every family on his lips.

His wagon had sides of canvas painted white, with “Fish, Meat and
Poultry” in a half-moon of black letters arching over the owner’s
name, and was drawn by a horse that halted and moved on, not by the
touch of the lines,—they were always caught to a hook in the roof of
the wagon,—but by a word from the butcher, who stood at the
tail-board, where the scales dangled, sorting fish, hacking off pieces
of red meat, or weighing scraggly chickens proportionate to the wants
and means of his various customers. He was busying himself at this
tail-board, the dripping of the ice pock-marking the dusty road below,
when he caught sight of Caleb.

“Wall, I kind’er hoped somebody’d be hum,” he said to himself,
wrapping the six-pound roast in a piece of yellow paper. With a tuck
to his blue over-sleeves, he swung open the gate. “So ye didn’t go
’long, Caleb, with Mis’ West? I see it begin to blow heavy, and was
wond’rin’ whether you’d get in—best cut, you see,” opening the paper
for Caleb’s inspection, “and I broke them ribs jes’ ’s Mis’ West
allers wants ’em. Then I wondered agin how ye could leave the Ledge at
all to-day. Mis’ Bell tol’ me yesterday the cap’n was goin’ to set
them derricks. I see ’em a-layin’ on the dock ’fore that Cape Ann
sloop loaded ’em, an’ they was monstrous, an’ no mistake. Have some
butter? She didn’t order none this mornin’, but I got some come in
this forenoon, sweet’s a nut,—four pounds for a dollar, an’”—

Caleb looked at him curiously. “Where did the wife say she was
a-goin’?” he interrupted.

“Wall, she didn’t say, ’cause I didn’t ketch up to her. I was comin’
down Nollins Hill over to Noank, when I see her ahead, walkin’ down
all in her Sunday rig, carryin’ a little bag like. I tho’t maybe she
was over to see the Nollins folks, till I left seven pounds fresh
mackerel nex’ door to Stubbins’s, an’ some Delaware eggs. Then I see
my stock of ice was nigh gone, so I druv down to the steamboat dock,
an’ there I catched sight of ’er agin jes’ goin’ aboard. I knowed
then, of course, she was off for Greenport an’ New York, an’ was jes’
sayin’ to myself, Wall, I’ll stop an’ see if anybody’s ter hum, an’ if
they’re all gone I won’t leave the meat, but”—

“Put the meat in the kitchen,” said Caleb, without rising from his
chair.

When the butcher drove off, the diver had not moved. His gaze was
fixed on the turn of the road. Beads of sweat stood out on his
forehead. A faint sickness unnerved him. Had he been cross or
impatient with her the last time he was at home, that she should serve
him so? Then a surge of anxiety swept over him, as he thought of Betty
going without letting him know. Why should she walk all the way to
Noank and take the boat across the Sound, twenty miles away, if she
wanted to go to New York? The railroad station was nearer and the fare
through was cheaper. He would have taken her himself, if he had only
known she wanted to go. He could have asked Captain Joe to give him a
couple of days off, and would have gone with her. If she had only left
some message, or sent some word by the men to the Ledge! Then, as his
thoughts traveled in a circle, catching at straws, his brain whirling,
his eye fell upon the clump of trees shading Captain Joe’s cottage.
Aunty Bell would know, of course; why had he not thought of that
before? Betty told Aunty Bell everything.

The busy little woman sat on the porch shelling peas, the pods popping
about her bright tin pan, as Caleb came up the board walk.

“Why, ye needn’t hev give yerself the trouble, Caleb, to come all the
way down!” she called out as he came within hearing. “Lonny Bowles’s
jest been here and told me cap’n ain’t comin’ home till Monday. I’m
’mazin’ glad them derricks is up. He ain’t done nothin’ but worrit
about ’em since spring opened, ’fraid somebody’d get hurted when he
set ’em. Took a lantern, here, night ’fore last, jest as we was goin’
to bed, after he’d been loadin’ ’em aboard the Screamer all day, an’
went down to the dock to see if Bill Lacey’d shrunk them collars on
tight enough. Guess Betty’s glad yer home. I ain’t see her to-day, but
I don’t lay it up agin her. I knowed she was busy cleanin’ up ’gin ye
come.”

Caleb’s heart leaped into his throat. If Betty had not told Aunty
Bell, there was no one else who would know her movements. It was on
his lips to tell her what the butcher had seen, when something in his
heart choked his utterance. If Betty had not wanted any one to know,
there was no use of his talking about it.

A man of different temperament, a nervous or easily alarmed or
suspicious man, would have caught at every clue and followed it to the
end. Caleb waited and kept still. She would telegraph or write him and
explain it all, he said to himself, or send some one to see him before
bedtime. So he merely answered he was glad Aunty Bell knew about
Captain Joe, nodded good-night, and passed slowly down the board walk
and up the road, his head on his chest, his big beard blowing about
his neck in the rising wind. He kept saying to himself that Betty
would telegraph or write and explain it all, or send some one to see
him before bedtime.

It was dark when he reached home. He lit the kerosene lamp and pulled
down the shades. He did not want passers-by to know he was alone. For
an hour or more he strode up and down the kitchen, his thumbs in his
suspenders, his supper untouched. Now and then he would stop as if
listening for a footfall, or fix his eye minutes at a time on some
crack in the floor or other object, gazing abstractedly at it, his
thoughts far away. Once he drew the lamp close and picked up the
evening paper, adjusting his big glasses; reading the same lines over
and over, until the paper fell of itself from his hands. Soon, worn
out with the hard fight of the day, he fell asleep in his chair,
awaking some hours after, his mind torn with anxiety. Then he took off
his shoes and crept upstairs in his stocking feet, holding to the
balustrade as a tired man will do, entered his bedroom, and dropped
into a chair.

All through the night he slept fitfully; waking with sudden starts,
roused by the feeling that some horrible shadow had settled upon him,
that something he could not name to himself was standing behind
him—always there, making him afraid to turn and look. When he was
quite awake, and saw the dim outlines of the untouched bed with its
smooth white pillows, the undefinable fear would slowly take shape,
and he would start up in his chair, and as if to convince himself he
would take a long look at the bed, with the relief of one able at last
to explain a horror the vagueness of which had tortured him. “Yes, I
know, Betty’s gone.” Then, overcome with fatigue, he would doze again.

With the breaking of the day he sprang from his chair, half dazed,
threw up the narrow sash to feel the touch of the cool, real world,
and peered between the slats of the shutters, listening to the wind
outside, now blowing a gale and dashing against the blinds.

None of the other houses were open yet. He was glad of that, glad of
their bare, cold, indifferent exteriors, blind to the outside world.
It was as though he felt his secret still safe from prying eyes, and
he meant to guard it always from them; to let none of them know what
his night had been, or that Betty had been away for so long without
telling him. When she came home again she would help, he knew, to
smooth away the marks of it all, the record of his pain. Her bright
face would look up into his, her little hands pat his cheeks, and he
would then know all about it, why she went and where, and he would
take the little girl wife in his arms, and comfort her in the
suffering that would surely come to her when she discovered that her
thoughtlessness had caused him any misery.

No! He would tell no one. He would simply wait, all day if necessary,
all day and another night. He could trust her. It was all right, he
knew. He did not even mind the waiting.

Then while he was still thinking, still determining to keep silent,
still satisfying himself that all was well, he turned rapidly and
tiptoed downstairs.

With nervous, trembling fingers he took a suit of tarpaulins and a
sou’wester from a hook behind the porch door, and walked down to the
dock. Some early lobstermen, bailing a skiff, saw him stand for a
moment, look about him, and spring aboard a flat-bottomed sharpie, the
only boat near by,—a good harbor boat, but dangerous in rough
weather. To their astonishment, he raised the three-cornered sail and
headed for the open sea.

“Guess Caleb must be crazy,” said one man, resting his scoop for a
moment, as he watched the boat dip almost bow under. “Thet sharpie
ain’t no more fittin’ for thet slop sea ’n ever was. What do ye s’pose
ails him, anyhow? Gosh A’mighty! see her take them rollers. If it was
anybody else but him he wouldn’t git to the P’int. Don’t make no
difference, tho’, to him. He kin git along under water jes’ ’s well’s
on top.”

As the boat flew past Keyport Light and Caleb laid his course to the
Ledge, the keeper, now that the dawn had come, was in the lantern
putting out his light and drawing down his shades. Seeing Caleb’s boat
tossing below him, he took down his glass.

“What blamed fool is that tryin’ to get himself measured for a
coffin?” he said.

The men were still asleep when Caleb reached the Ledge and threw open
the door of the shanty,—all but Nickles, who was preparing breakfast.
He looked at Caleb as if he had been an apparition, and followed him
to the door of Captain Joe’s cabin, a little room by itself. He wanted
to hear the dreadful news he brought. Unless some one was dead or
dying no man would risk such a sea alone,—not even an old sailor like
the diver.

Caleb opened the door of the captain’s little room and closed it tight
behind him, without a word to the cook. The captain lay asleep in his
bunk, one big arm under his head, his short curly hair matted close.

“Cap’n Joe,” said Caleb, laying his hand on the sleeping man’s
shoulder and shaking him gently,—“Cap’n Joe, it’s me,—Caleb.”

The captain raised his head and stared at him. Then he sat upright,
trying to collect his thoughts.

“Cap’n, I had to come for ye,—I want ye.”

“It ain’t Aunty Bell, is it?” said Captain Joe, springing to the
floor. The early hour, the sough of the wind and beating of the rain
on the roof of the shanty, Caleb dripping wet, with white drawn face,
standing over him, told him in a flash the gravity of the visit.

“No, it’s my Betty. She’s gone,—gone without a word.”

[Illustration: “No, it’s my Betty”]

“Gone! Who with?”

Caleb sunk on Captain Joe’s sea-chest, and buried his face in his
blistered hands. For a moment he dared not trust himself to answer.

“I don’t know—I don’t know”—The broken words came between his rough
fingers. Big tears rolled down his beard.

“Who says so? How do you know she’s gone?”

“The butcher seen ’er goin’ ’board the boat at Noank yesterday
mornin’. She fixed everythin’ at home ’fore she went. I ain’t been to
bed all night. I don’t know what ye kin do, but I had to come. I
thought maybe you’d go home with me.”

The captain did not answer. Little scraps of gossip that he had heard
now and then among the men floated through his memory. He had never
paid any attention to them, except once when he had rebuked Nickles
for repeating some slurring remark that Carleton had made one night at
table. But even as he thought of them Betty’s face rose before
him,—her sweet, girlish face with its dimples.

“It’s a dirty lie, Caleb, whoever said it. I wouldn’t believe it if I
see it myself. Ain’t no better gal ’n Betty ever breathed. Go with
you! Course I will’s soon’s I get my clo’es on.” He dressed hurriedly,
caught up his oilskins, 

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