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ADMIRAL’S LIGHT

ANNA HILLIARD
From a drawing by Martin Justice

ADMIRAL’S LIGHT

BY
HENRY MILNER RIDEOUT
Author of Beached Keels, The Siamese Cat, etc.

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1907

COPYRIGHT 1907 BY HENRY MILNER RIDEOUT
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
Published November 1907

To
NATHANIEL ALLISON, M. D.

CONTENTS

Note. The frontispiece is from a drawing by Martin Justice. The eleven half-titles are from drawings by Charles H. Woodbury.

ADMIRAL’S LIGHT

CHAPTER I
THE GYPSY MARE

Thrusting his tousled head through the trap-door, Miles made his third and last inspection for the night. Fierce yellow light flooded the glass cage; against the panes, like restless, irritated snowflakes, a few belated moths fluttered in vain. The circular base of the lamp cast downward a shadow so black as almost to appear a solid supporting cone. At the edge of this Miles reared his shoulders higher. Under the blue flannel shirt their weary movement was that of a sleepy boy; but his thin, dark face shone grave as a man’s. He sniffed the familiar smell of oil and hot brass, and glanced perfunctorily; the lamp burned as bright as it had three hours ago, at midnight, or as it would burn three hours hence, at sunrise,—with the same provoking virtue that made his nocturnal rounds a waste of labor and sleep.

“Some one has to,” he said aloud. “Burn away, Beast!” With this customary good-night, he clattered downstairs, locked the lighthouse door, caught up his lantern, and went whistling along the narrow path by the river. From below, to the left, stole the salt coolness of seaweed bared at low tide,—a sharp aroma that set him wide awake. From above, over a black phantom hill, peered Orion’s red shoulder-star. Hurtling shadows of undergrowth before his lantern rose magnified, parted in rout, wheeled slowly, fell prostrate and infinitely prolonged. The grass fringe of his smooth-beaten trail gleamed with a pearly rime of autumnal dew. “Nearly frost to-night,” thought the boy.

He raced down into a steep gully, drummed across a little foot-bridge, took by scrambling assault the other bank, and on the crest, suddenly, as their black wall yawned to engulf him, entered a low grove of pines and cedars. The cold wet bristles bedewed his hands, as he skipped along, now scuffing loudly on a worn ledge, now over a stretch of wet touch-wood, the full, fern-bordered length of a vanished log, that made him advance silent as a ghost.

A ghost—he often thought of that, for now came the one mild excitement. Three times every night, his grandfather’s unofficial deputy, he tramped this triangular beat, downhill, along the shore between the two fixed lights, uphill again to the farmhouse. At first a lark, this tramp had in the last year become dull monotony; his score, penciled in the back of his beloved atlas, showed over a thousand tours, on which nothing ever happened; and yet now and then, as he neared the Admiral’s deck, he felt the childhood presentiment that just ahead something would appear. Usually a nameless emotion, faint and swiftly obliterated, it came now, in the early morning darkness, almost as the pristine thrill.

At the place which had helped to name the whole shore, his path widened into a clearing beside a low bluff. The lantern twirled its shadow-ribs across a floor of rotten wood,—old ship’s planking, the few solid remnants auger-bored. Here, beside a stout rail which now tottered over the dark gulf, Admiral Bissant, the boy’s great-uncle, had walked the quarter-deck in his dotage. Miles’s grandfather never mentioned the tradition; but old Fisherman Bull had often told how, dropping down river in the Mystic Tie, he had seen an aged figure pacing the verge above, in faced uniform and cocked hat. “Givin’ orders he was,” said the fisher, “to nobody—trompin’ an’ mumblin’ amongst the trees, bossin’ hemlocks fer men.” To prove the story there remained uniform, cocked hat, and sword as well, rescued by Uncle Christopher when the old Bissant house burned, and now hung in the “front hall” of their cottage. And these mouldering planks still outlined the landfast quarter-deck. A ghost there must be, Ella said. Of course that was her nonsense. Only a faint breeze of dawn sighed through the drooping needles.

“Nothing ever happens,” thought Miles. He dived into a dark billow of firs, brushed along with now and then a gossamer damp across his cheeks, and following the outward curve of the shore, emerged on a tiny promontory, down which a ragged wall of Norway pines sloped to the second lighthouse,—another stunted white obelisk tipped with radiance. Here again his inspection was needless; and soon he climbed the homeward field, where fast encroaching fir-trees squatted like a thinned regiment of dwarfs.

At the farmhouse door he blew out his lantern; and tiptoeing from the stair-head past his grandfather’s room, undressed in the dark, and was soon abed and asleep.

Full flood of autumn sunshine woke him; and from a late breakfast alone, he went, as usual, straight to the “library.” Before a snapping beech-wood fire, his grandfather, a tall, spare man, whose ruddy, clean-shaven face was marked with severe wrinkles, paced in uncertain fidgets, both hands clasping a Bible at his back.

“Get your Testament, sir,” he commanded querulously, without turning his hook-nosed profile. Ella, the “girl” who had served their family these thirty years, looked up and nodded furtive encouragement, then bent to as furtive a study of the long words. Sitting beside her, Miles could see the fat fingers, white and puckered from hot water, faltering across the narrow columns, balking beneath Urbane, Stachys, Tryphena and Tryphosa. When her turn came to read aloud, she omitted them one and all, glibly, but with the air of a nervous knitter dropping stitches. The old man, standing braced before the fire, affected not to notice. It was one of his few compromises. He read on sonorously, his head uplifted before the portrait of his brother, the Admiral, who stared down from the canvas with the same ruddy face and close white curls, the same beaked severity and intolerant poise.

Their devotions ended, Ella went bustling to her kitchen, and the head of the Bissant family turned to its youngest survivor.

“Good-morning, sir! Are you any better prepared to-day?” With eyes of a confused, smoky brightness, he surveyed his grandson, then searched the few old books on the shelves. “Hmm! Sallust—yes, just so. Come, begin—where’s the lesson, eh?—No, not there, either, take it all!—Hmm!—Ah, here ’tis, boy: Volturcius interrogatus de itinere—”

“Please, sir,” said Miles humbly, “we don’t—it’s Saturday, grandfather.”

“Eh, what the devil?” complained the old man. “So ’tis, boy, so ’tis. Always Saturday.” Frowning vaguely, he thumped the book on the table. “Well, and how d’ye propose to waste your time to-day?”

“Shooting, sir, if you don’t mind,” ventured Miles. “The law’s off on patri—”

“Don’t let me hear that barbarism!” cried his grandfather bitterly. “Must we talk like rustics? If you will miscall the ruffed grouse, sir, call it p-a-r-t—partridge! Say it!”

“Partridge, sir,” mumbled the boy sheepishly.

“Louder!”

“Partridge.”

“Again!”

“Partridge, sir.”

“Now go,” commanded his grandfather, “and write out that word fifty times, before Monday’s lesson!—Come back here; who said I’d finished? Write it with a capital R!”

“Yes, sir,” said Miles, and slipped from the room. The door closed, and the rebuke vanished; for there stood the shotgun ready in the corner, and Ella packing his basket. As he stepped out into autumn sunshine, he repaid her with a promise,—

“I’ll bring home some good pat—partridges.”

“Fat ones?” she jeered, her freckled face again in the doorway. “Then you’ll have to feed ’em first. A high old hunter are you! They’re still in the lowlands a-stuffin’ alder-berries, thin as Macfarlane’s geese.”

“I didn’t say fat partridges, Ella,” he called back. A shrill protest pursued him: “O-o-h, Master Miles, you did, because I heard you!”

Behind their house the hillside rose, abrupt, and slippery with ripe yellow grass. After a brief climb Miles could look back over the warped roof and see the convex field plunge toward the river. Pausing again for breath, he could see the trunks of the two tall hackmatacks which stood before the door, green pillars of an imaginary gate. From between them two brown paths forked wide,—sides of the triangle described by his nightly tour. Pines and underbrush of solemn evergreen hid the distant base, but the twin lighthouses marked each extremity by a fat white column, low and red-capped. Beyond these, in the crisp air, the river shone steel-blue, streaked with tides, blackened with light squalls, and throughout the two miles of its width, empty, except for the dotted penciling of weirs, and for one dark fir knoll, the little midway island. Yellow birches, scarlet maples, flamed like bale-fires along the evergreen headlands on the other shore; but hay-fields of the American borderers, over there, still remained verdant squares, dressed in the living green of second crops.

He gained the crest, and shifting his gun, struck across a decrepit orchard toward the green wall of the woods. Suddenly a white fleck, through the pattern of gnarled boughs, stirred in the adjoining field. A horse whinnied. The boy stopped in astonishment. What were men and horses doing by the ruins of the old house? He changed his course.

Where the Admiral’s house, last sign of family prosperity, had long ago burned to the ground, the cellar yawned like a grassy crater in a pasture knoll. Hawthorns, a hedge grown high and wild, screened the mound on its river side; and framed in glossy leaves and scarlet clusters, a little man scrubbed vigorously the back of a tethered pony. The beast was curiously piebald, blotched with snow white and dingy gray.

Miles and the pony stared at each other. The man, without pausing, turned a swarthy face, scowled, and then grinned.

“Hello, Squair,” he called slyly, “don’t give a poor chap away now, will ye?”

“Give what away?” said Miles, wondering.

“Pipe-clay,” replied the stranger. He dangled a rag aloft, stirred it in a bucket on the grass, and smeared another snow-white patch down the pony’s flank. “How’s that, huh? Look a-here,”—his crafty black eyes twinkled,—“I’ll tell you what, Squair. If you won’t give me away, I’ll let ye finish the rest of him.”

Miles joyfully vaulted the rails. Horses, in his life, had been rare. Hardly had he begun this new, odd, and delectable employment, before the little man was seated on the mound of ruin, a luxurious critic.

“Don’t rub so hard.” He stuffed tobacco into a black pipe. “Ye ain’t curryin’. Coat her smooth and even.”

Pleasure gave way, at last, to curiosity.

“What’s it for?” asked the boy.

“Well, now, ’tain’t my fault,” rejoined the stranger candidly. “But our paterons do like to see a white horse. No use o’ talkin’, they do. Now Terry’s smart as the Old Sarpint, but he ain’t altogether a thorough white. Not thorough and complete, he ain’t.”

“Why, he’s a gray!” cried Miles, patting the inquisitive muzzle.

“I give ye credit for that!” approved the man. “To them that didn’t know him well, Terry would seem grayish. I don’t deny they’s mottles, suspicion o’ gray, in places, as you say.”

Behind the speaker, a black shape bounced up out of the ground. A large Newfoundland dog, leaping from the cellar, raced down the bank, frisked about Miles with wide-flung paws, made a kind of salmon leap into the air, turned an amazing somersault, and, rebounding from the grass, perched on the pony’s back. Next moment he sprang down again, and with forepaws on the boy’s shoulders, barked riotously in his face.

“Oh!” cried Miles, dazed and deafened. “So that’s it. You keep a show!”

The little man blew upward a cloud of smoke in the sunlight, and nodded lazily.

“Other side the hawthorn,” he grunted. “Go look.”

Spread to dry across the sheep-sorrel, long strips of canvas bore inscriptions red and blue: “Gypsy Fair,” “Abram the Magician,” “Performing Quadrupeds,” “Madge the Egyptian Seeress tells your Future,” “Equine Theatre,” “Terry the Horseflesh Wonder,” “Ride the Gypsy Mare.” The boy returned with round eyes alight. Here was the Romany Rye, not in grandfather’s book, but in real life.

“Do you—do you keep a seeress?” he cried. “And a real magician?”

“Come here,” said the man mysteriously. “What’s wrong with your nose?” He tweaked that organ viciously three times, and produced in swift succession a whittled square of black tobacco, a stag-horn knife, a blue cotton handkerchief. “Beats all,” he marveled. “Beats me, Squair, why ye ever stowed those up there! Gettin’ hunchback, too, ain’t ye? Bend over.” Miles felt the man’s hand slip beneath his collar, then something cold between the shoulder-blades. “Well, no wonder,” said the magician. There in his hand was a bell-mouthed flageolet, with tarnished German-silver keys.

“Are you Abram?” asked the boy, laughing, but a little daunted.

The other nodded. “Onhitch Terry. Now ye watch.” Putting the flageolet to his lips, he squealed forth a sprightly air. At the first notes the pipe-clayed pony reared on his little hind-legs, and, keeping rude time, staggered through a precarious pirouette.

“He can choose colors, too,” said his master, when Terry had dropped to all fours, “and add sums, and fire me a pistol, and play me a toon on bells.”

“And carry me on his back, standing up,” called a treble voice above them. A barefoot girl with strange light-colored hair, and a woman in gray calico, stood on the edge of the grassy crater.

“We’re campin’ in the cellar,” explained Abram,—“my little girl and my wife; she’s Madge the Seeress.”

“Are you—are you,” faltered Miles, fearing to give offense—“are you—Egyptians, please?”

“A descendant o’ Pharaoh,” said Abram gravely. “Born on the banks o’ the Nile. The Seeress’ll tell your fortune. Got any money?”

Miles grew cautious, remembering dark tales.

“No,” he said. “That is, hardly any. One twenty-cent piece and a lucky penny.”

“Heard some jingle when ye clumb the fence,” objected the wizard.

“That was cat—cartridges,” retorted Miles, drawing back uneasily.

“For shame, Abe!” interposed the woman. “For shame! We’re not in the tent now: no need lyin’ to innocents like that.—Come here, my boy,” she said kindly.

Miles climbed toward the Seeress, embarrassed and deeply disappointed. Her neat calico, her tired, honest face, smooth gray hair, and friendly eyes were a sore disillusion. Where were elf-locks and eldritch voice? He had hoped for Meg Merrilies.

“Did you ever hear tell of a Pharaoh named Tucker?” she asked, taking his hand. “Me neither, and that’s my husband’s name. And if the Nile ever flowed in Sagadahoc County, it run dry ’fore my day.” She smoothed his open palm. “No one can tell fortunes, sonny, but I can tell characters. This palm’s an honest palm; so take your time, go careful, and you’ll grow to be an honest man. And a clever palm. There’s gentle blood in the veins. That always speaks out. A good head, but the heart’ll run away with it. Master power o’ friendship, few friends. I guess there’s danger ahead o’ you, but else I’m much mistaken you come o’ people fond o’ danger. You’ll do better by others than yourself—”

“Are you coming to our show?” interrupted the girl. Miles turned shyly. Girls, at Admiral’s Light, were rare as horses. And though of about his own age, this was a strange little creature. Her luminous brown eyes seemed at once frank and shy; thoughtfulness in the tanned oval face was changed, by a circumflex arch of eyebrows, to a mischievous, almost elfin gravity; and her hair reminded him of oak leaves in winter, except that they were dead and dull, and this color shone exceedingly alive.

“Coming to our show?” she repeated: “this afternoon, uptown?”

“I can’t,” he stammered. “We’re too—We don’t go to many—many entertainments.”

Madge the Seeress gave him an odd, shrewd glance of approval.

“Never mind,” she said. “Most of our show you’ve seen already. Would you like to ride the Gypsy Mare, though?” The look on the boy’s face answered. “Abe, let him.”

The man rose, grumbling, “A free ride, when he’s got twenty cents?” but nevertheless disappeared behind the mound, and returned leading a beautiful sleek white mare, already saddled. “No pipe-clay there!” He tightened girth and shortened stirrups. “Up ye go, Squair!”

Miles had ridden Hab Belden’s plough-horse once or twice, but never a mount like this. The mare footed among the sorrel, swift and gentle as the fairy charger that cantered over eggs. He pulled up reluctantly, with face glowing.

“A born trooper,” said Abram. “Straight back, close seat, flat thigh, soople. Ye rode her like a gen’ral! Now would ye believe me, Squair, if I spoke but the two words, she’d throw ye like a rocket. Five dollars I offer in open tent for the man or boy that sticks her—and only two ever done it. Want to try? Shall I speak to her?”

“Why, I don’t know,” began Miles.

“Fraid-cat!” laughed the girl.

“Speak to her,” he ordered tartly.

“Throw him, Jubilee!” cried the conjurer.

Miles felt the white body tremble under him, as in terror. With a snort and a swoop, the mare plunged uncontrollably along the brow of the hill, head down, switching herself double from side to side, as a fish fights in a net. Losing his seat, Miles caught it again by blind miracle, just as she spun dizzily and reared in lightning estrapades. Hereditary instinct, the spirit of the cavalry captain, his father, served him well. Sick with fear—not of a broken neck, but of humiliation before that girl—he clung as in a desperate dream. He felt the back hump like a dromedary’s, the close-bunched hoofs pound the earth with quick, disintegrating jars. Some one shouted. He ducked. A hawthorn bough furiously swept his back. The bole of an elm flashed past, and he was conscious of powdered bark smeared on a smarting leg. Then they fought it out, raging mare and raging rider, till with a balk that nearly shot him over her neck, Jubilee stopped dead, and, trembling as when she began, seemed gradually to sink beneath him. He kicked out of stirrups, swung over, fell with a crushing pain in one ankle, and, through an interminable leisure in which he tasted sour sorrel, rolled clear from the flourishing hoofs.

Roaring blasphemy, the showman had snatched the bridle, and as the white mare rose, was beating her over the head with a cudgel.

“Stop that!” cried Miles, from the ground.

“Roll, will ye?” screamed Abram, showering blows insanely. “Roll, God nourish ye! Never learnt that trick o’ me! Roll, ye—Begin that once, an’ my theayter’s ruined! Roll, ye—”

The woman raised Miles to his feet. “Not hurt, are you? Poor boy! Much hurt?”

“No. Make him stop that!” he whimpered. A white-hot cord tied tighter round his ankle. He limped forward, but the woman seized and carried him toward the fence.

“Go home quick!” she whispered. “I know him. He’ll come at you or me next, if you vex him now. Can you walk? Quick, then, go home.—Here, Anna, see he gets back safe.”

Miles found himself in the orchard, dragging painfully, easing his weight by the gun. At each halt the girl eyed him strangely. On the slope above the house he suddenly lay down.

“Rest a minute,” he explained through clinched teeth. “I live down there—you needn’t come.” The tawny hillside swam. His foot seemed to shrink and swell, with alternating torture.

“A thorn’s in your cheek,” said the girl. “No, the other side.” He pulled the sharp point out mechanically. “Didn’t that hurt? What’s your name?”

“Miles Bissant,” he said indifferently. In a long stillness sounded the dry, faint click of grasshoppers, snapping upward in short arcs roundabout.

“Mine’s Anna Hilliard,” she volunteered; and after another silence, “I’m sorry I said—that. Good-by.”

By her voice, she was crying. Through half-opening eyes, he saw her hair glimmer. Something warm touched his cheek.

He sat up, indignant, rubbing the spot with more energy than if the thorn had stung. A hard patter of bare feet fled up the path.

“What a silly girl!” thought Miles, in disgust. “Glad nobody was round.”

CHAPTER II
CAPTAIN FLORIO

“Runagates,” said his grandfather, with mournful relish. “I had hoped you—but what’s in the blood will out. All runagates!”

Athwart the dim panes of the bedchamber, hackmatack boughs swayed to the chill drone of a dying wind. A rigid profile against twilight, the old man spoke as to some third presence. Often the boy had seen that profile, ploughing a furrow of thought which cast him aside; yet he stirred on his pillows uneasily, almost guiltily.

“So with Christopher,” continued the speaker, “and so with your father Godfrey. When they strayed off into the world, what did they become? A sailor to be drowned and a soldier to be killed. My sons were small comfort.”

“My father,” objected Miles, timid yet indignant, “was fighting for—”

“And what if he was?” exclaimed his grandfather, turning with a violent start. “Does that excuse you, sir, for scouring the country with gypsy thieves? Eh? And risking your neck at horse-jockey tricks? And lying useless abed this fortnight, while Ella and I do your work at the lights? Next you’ll slip off, like them, and then the contract for the light-keeping will be taken away, and I’ll become a pauper indeed. Runagates! Eh? What’s that? What did you mutter?”

“Nothing, sir,” said Miles. He understood now the old man’s gloom, and lay still, with long thoughts of pity and contrition. The rebuke was just: had he not been lying here, his head full of day-dreams, plans, vainglorious romance? He could ride—he had proved that; he loved the sea with an inborn longing. Which, then, was the better life, soldier’s or sailor’s? Dull peace at home, he had thought, was not to be endured. The brief spice of action, of danger, had so edged his fancy that the whole fortnight had passed among conjured shapes of adventure: brigantines navigated through seas not in the atlas, coral islands raised against the dawn, typhoons weathered, cannibals beaten off—were these better than a red whirl of cavalry, with trumpets, with sabres, with leather creaking like Jubilee’s saddle? The choice had seemed, at times, easy and immediate. And now grandfather had somehow scolded him to his senses. He could not put the new emotion into words, but in a flash he had seen that this pictured joy of living was the mere pride of life.

“What’s wrong?” grumbled the old man.

“Ankle twinged. Nothing,” replied Miles. He could not explain what brightness had died out.—Ella’s step mounted toward them, and the shadow spokes of banisters wheeled in a striped flange across the ceiling, before he spoke again.

“Don’t worry about all that, grandfather.”

The advice, the audacity, surprised them both; neither was aware that between boyhood and youth a door had closed forever.

Closed it had, nevertheless, and Miles, when afoot once more and outdoors, wondered vaguely at the change in his little world. Frost-bitten fields, white-caps on the border river, birch groves and maple shifting their bleak reticulation against a sky that threatened snow,—these formed a background for new and sober thoughts. He had lost the conviction that his future must be different, transplanted and transformed, bright with surprise, excitement, and good fortune. All that was nonsense. Here lay his life, studying by day, trudging by night down to the twin lamps; for variety, he wore now his threadbare reefer, now his mittens and great helmet of moth-eaten fur; now plodded on snowshoes over drifts, where powdered gold puffed upward, at each step, into the lantern-light; now cleared the tower windows of damp snowflakes; now waded in hip-boots through pools of freshet. One deeply starred spring night, he surprised himself recalling that the girl’s name was different from Abram’s. “Perhaps she was adopted,” he thought, as he sniffed the damp sweetness of reviving earth, “or an orphan, like me.” On the heels of this, he could excuse her folly: “I was hurt, of course, and she felt sorry that she’d stumped me. Perhaps Abram would beat her, too—” Why should he speculate, so long afterward, about persons whom he would never see again?

The next years saw him grow into a young man, silent, grave, with a tranquillity that a stranger might have mistaken for contentment. On one point, indeed, he was contented: his grandfather, who had rebuked his father’s memory, could find no major fault with the second generation.

One June evening he lay stretched on the mouldered planks of the Admiral’s deck, a book of next day’s lessons opened flat before him. A sunset swarm of midges, down-sifted by a breath of air, suddenly confused Euclid’s lines and dots with a dance of jigging motes. Miles swept an impatient hand, glanced off the page, and forgot both insects and trapezoids. A boat was making straight toward him,—a green “lap-streak” dinghy, rowed by some Yankee from across the river, and carrying on the stern thwart a jaunty passenger in light gray. No sooner had the boat nosed the undulating fringe of seaweed than the stranger sprang nimbly to the rocks, and scrambled over their slippery, tangled hummocks, in a diagonal course up the beach. He disappeared under a shoulder of the bank, and, as Miles still lay wondering, suddenly emerged from the firs beside the old quarter-deck.

“Hello!” he said, with an odd, pleasant intonation. “May I come in? Jolly little nook for reading, haven’t you? No, don’t get up. Just tell me how to strike the path to the house, above there, will you?”

Except the tender’s gig, no boat ever touched at Admiral’s Light. No such visitor, certainly, had landed within Miles’s recollection. Burly but active, with the body of a blacksmith or pugilist clad in pale gray flannels of a knowing, worldly cut, he seemed at once young and mature, sophisticated and breezily adventurous. The same hand which held two primly folded gloves bore on its back a foul anchor tattooed in blue. Bright gray eyes in a swarthy face, clean cutwater profile, reckless good-humor playing about the lips, bespoke one who had taken a man’s share of life with a boy’s share of amusement.

“Do you know the old gentleman that lives up there?” he continued. “Your grandfather, eh? Well, now, perhaps you can tell me. Had he a relative named Christopher?”

“That was my uncle,” said Miles, getting to his feet.

“The dickens! You!” cried the stranger, and grasped his hand. “You! Doesn’t that beat the merry Hell—elujah? You Kit Bissant’s nephew! He stood up for me when I was a prentice your size. Ever hear him tell about Florio? Tony Florio? No? That’s so, why should he? His nephew, by Jove! Isn’t it a funny little world, though?” With twinkling eyes, he studied the boy’s face, then turned abruptly. “I’m off to tackle the old gentleman. See you later!”

His footsteps rang hollow and distant on the gully foot-bridge. Miles, listening, felt unreasonably glad. Unreasonably, as often, in spite of all geography, a long hill suggests a hidden prospect of plain or ocean, as a turn of woodland road beckons to some joyful ambush or far-thought pilgrimage, so the landfall of this stranger, the alacrity and vigor of his contact, promised immediate events. Just what events, the youth, with all his eager surmise while climbing homeward through attenuate shadows, could not guess.

Their evening meal—a haddock usually, with cornbread, tea, berries, or cheese-cakes—the old man always called dinner, and further dignified by appearing in the crumpled broadcloth and linen of a bygone generation. To-night he entered with even greater solemnity, leading to their bare little table the sun-burned man in gray.

“My grandson Miles, Captain Florio,” he said. And bending his fierce old countenance toward the one flickering candle, he added in the same breath: “For the bounty of the present day, and of all days past and to come, we thank thee, O Lord, and now seek thy blessing.” With the same stiff ceremony, he did the honors for the haddock, presided over the raspberries, and ignored the flustered awkwardness of Ella.

The stranger appeared to enjoy both his fare and his company.

“Beautiful country hereabout, Mr. Bissant,” he declared heartily. “Beautiful, by George! Shore life for me, if ’twas all like this. I tell you, Miles, we’ll have a jolly time together. Show me your lighthouses to-morrow night, will you? Right! What are they, fixed? You know, once when I was wrecked off the Hook of Indramaiu—”

He rambled into stories of orient and tropic seas. Had they been of anthropophagi and antres vast, Miles could have listened no more hungrily; for even at second hand, this was the life which he once had dreamed. The sole incredibility was that such a brilliant tropic wanderer should now shine out in their gloomy, sequestered house. The mountain had come to Mahomet, the world to a captive. His grandfather, visiting Miles at bedtime, brought explanation.

“My boy,” he said—and for the first time in their life together he spoke with hesitation, almost as though making excuses to an equal—“my boy, Captain Florio is to be our—that is, hmm! well, our lodger.” Frowning at the candle flame, he brought out the word defiantly. “I should never consent to this—mercenary relation, but it seems—he was a friend of my son Christopher’s. He will stay with us for some time. It’s—it’s unnecessary to say more. Good-night.”

Humiliation underlay the speech—humiliation which Miles felt dimly, but could not share. A lodger’s money, even a damaged pride, counted little against the change from apathy to interest, from silence to fireside and table talk, from routine to variety. Next morning, indeed, five minutes after lessons, Miles had forgotten that the relation was mercenary.

“Hello,” Florio hailed him. In jersey and puttees, he looked like some heavy-weight amateur training in retirement. “Look here, how’s this? Caught Ella carrying water uphill from that gully below. There’s a spring above.” He waved up toward the site of the burned mansion.

“That hill’s too steep,” said Miles.

“Ho-ho!” laughed the other. “You’re a bright boy, aren’t you, now? Come along topside with me.”

Two joyful days followed, in which they built a little wooden aqueduct from the Admiral’s Spring down to a trough at Ella’s very door. When nails gave out, the seafarer joined their supports with marvelous temporary lashings. “Chinese trick,” he grinned. “Now we’ll run the flowage down into your gully. How’s that, señor?”

With ties no less secure he had bound Miles to admiration, as much by his manual cunning, his boyish enthusiasm for practical designs, as by his galloping accompaniment of strange tales. Hammering or sawing like a born carpenter, he recalled sharp, flashing pictures of life in antipodes,—pearl-divers in Polynesia, “sun-downers,” mutinous coolies at sea, plague-stricken pilgrims to Mecca dying like flies, aboard ship; midnight murderers in sampans.

“Damn it, no Captains and Misters!” he cried once. “There, I didn’t mean—your grandfather’ll ship me off for swearing! But call me Tony. Let’s be chums.”

Chums, therefore, they became, though not without capitulation. The lighthouses first showed them certain differences.

“Do you mean,” cried the wanderer, as they stood, one evening, in the glare of the lamp-room, “do you mean to say you leave a warm bed twice every night to watch these two tame lightning-bugs? Let ’em burn, boy! Get your sleep. What the devil, they’ll not go out; or if they did, who’d know? Must be as many as one schooner a fortnight pass that ledge after dark. Ho, ho! You stay in bed!”

“But it’s our agreement,” Miles protested.

The sailor’s gray eyes twinkled.

“Roman sentinel, eh? That’s nonsense, boy. Take your beauty sleep. Let ’em burn.”

“Why, ’twouldn’t be honest,” said the young keeper, somewhat shocked.

“Honest?” jeered Florio. Then his tone changed. “Oh, well, no harm done. Strict ideas—I s’pose somebody’s bound to have ’em. Tough on you, all the same.”

The upshot of their argument was that with high good-nature Tony insisted on making the last rounds himself. “I’m used to night work. This is my pidgin. You go to bed.”

The volunteer was faithful. Often thereafter, waking by force of habit at midnight or three in the morning, Miles rose from his pillow to watch, for a luxurious instant, the sailor’s lantern bobbing along through underbrush far below. He dropped asleep with drowsy gratitude. Yet in spite of kindness and the ascendency of experience, his new friend left something unfinished, dubious, unexplained. To grandfather, the man was another commercial contract like the light-keeping, a fender against evil days, a presence courteously tolerated; to Ella—and, through her, perhaps, to the outer world—a “visitin’ gentleman,” friend of the late Captain Christopher; to Miles, a frank companion and—what?

Why should a man in the thirties, ebullient and a rover, suddenly choose to vegetate? Grandfather had called him “Mercury Resting.” For all his cheerful enthusiasm, the sailor could care little about their northern valley, the sad, rugged beauty of their border. When Miles proposed a favorite tramp, he had replied: “Kilmarnock Brook? What’s to see there? Nothing but scenery.” Nor could books dull the edge of his restlessness. “No, thank you. Not much on reading,” he replied, when grandfather gave him the freedom of the meagre “library.” And later, out of doors, he explained to Miles: “Print’s nearly all lies. Now them, why, every day, right in the open air, you can meet live men that’ll tell you them—fresh lies, not old ones,—and act ’em out to boot. So why rack eyesight over print?” Meantime, he taught Miles to box, and with his aid rebuilt the kitchen chimney, pruned the deserted orchard, shored up the Admiral’s quarter-deck. Yet these employments could not last.

Again, he had said, “I’m alone in the world.” And yet after a tranquil month, he was plainly fretting about letters. He and Miles often traversed the river road, up hill and down, to the half-deserted village of Kilmarnock; and always on the final crest, the red granite ledge where, sudden as a night-hawk’s downward wheel, the freed vision of the climbers fell wide over a landward prospect, following toward the sunset alternate wedges of bright water and black crenelated headlands,—there, always, the sailor paused and sat down.

“I’ll smoke here,” he said. “Great view, eh? Land and water, land and water—in layers, like Ella’s chocolate pie o’ Sundays.” Then, nodding toward the slate-gray houses clustered far below in a meadow cove: “You go on down and ask. May be a letter, this time.”

Once, when Miles clambered up again, empty-handed as ever, the sailor sat musing.

“Can you keep a secret?” he asked, with a glance at once introverted and shrewd. “We’re mates, aren’t we? Right, then. You’re the sort a man can trust. If a stranger comes asking for me, or any foreign-looking man, you know, you keep your tongue at home, and come straight to me, first. I’ll tell you why, some day. Long story—”

He watched a slim pillar of smoke rising from a cottage chimney, out of evening shadow, to vanish in the breeze on their glowing height. Then he sprang up, and started briskly homeward.

“Sometimes, you know,” he said, when they had scrambled down hill for a furlong, “sometimes, at sea, a man makes enemies.”

CHAPTER III
THE SAFFRON MAN

As warmth in a dying man, so life in the village of Kilmarnock had retreated from the extremities. Gray cabins stood for the most part with sunken roof and yawning window; here and there, where a wall had fallen out, they exposed, as for the stage purposes of some unacted melodrama, the intimacy of all their little rooms at once,—the ragged wallpaper, the zigzag mounting scar of stairs long vanished, the hearthstones choked, in winter with snow, as now with autumn chickweed. Beyond these dead environs, a brook, with cool and hearty noises, tumbled out of its brown alder-shadow to halt, slacken, and wriggle in a delta of deep-channeled rivulets through seaweed and long mud-flats. And here, where fairy falls descended to that vile foreshore, the heart of the village beat feebly in a half-dozen houses, weather-silvered.

In the post-office,—a littered, gloomy shed which was also carpenter’s shop, wheel-wright’s factory, and woolen mill,—a few sad old men sat always, talking slowly and vaguely; while underneath, the roaring brook made the floor-boards vibrate, and flashed through chinks and knot-holes the whiteness of cascade foam.

“Mornin’, Miles,” wheezed Mr. Quinn, the postmaster. An elephantine man,—old Mr. Bissant called him Quinbus Flestrin, after the man-mountain Gulliver,—he rummaged with slow, fat hands in Her Majesty’s salt-box. “Here’s that letter you folks be’n waitin’ for,” he puffed. “Didn’t know you had relations over there, neither. Poor hand they write, I must say. Oh, now I ketch it! ‘A. Florio, Es-quair.’ That’s him that’s stayin’ up to your place, ain’t it?”

Miles nodded, all impatience.

“‘Care of Richard Bissant, Es-quair,’” read Quinbus gravely, holding the letter at different lengths of focus. “Say, they tell me he ain’t a boarder, after all! Now, I thought he might be a rusticator, like the city feller to Lovat’s that’s got the narvous prostrates. They say his fingers fidges dretful, that feller.”

Miles listened politically, and was at last rewarded with Tony’s letter.

“Hear ye got noo neighbors down your way,” began Quinbus, but his auditor escaped.

His news, moreover, went unheeded; for in three steps down the grass-ribbed street Miles overtook a surprise. A little man trundling a keg of nails in a barrow set down the handles with a sigh, and turned. His hair was grayer, his cheek engraved with deeper lines, his aspect less cheerful and thriving; but the swart face and shifting black eyes were those of Abram the Magician.

It was like a piece of boyhood restored. Halting, Miles ventured the question,—

“Isn’t your name Tucker, sir?”

“What if ’tis?” growled the man, defiant and suspicious.

“Oh, nothing,” rejoined Miles, taken aback. “Only I rode your mare Jubilee once—”

“Dessay,” snapped Abram. He spat on his hands, stooped to the shafts of his barrow, and growled, “Lots o’ lummockses did. Damn ’er hide! Dunno that’s reason to hender a man’s work.”

“Or to be uncivil,” Miles retorted stiffly, taking a leaf from his grandfather’s book of pride. But it was with a chuckle that he passed on, and swung into the path along the shore.

It was a bright Saturday morning of late September. Across the border a thin haze of forest fires, from “back lots” far behind the river hills, veiled the high, resolute contours of the American shore; but in all other quarters the air shone clear and buoyant, mellow but cordial, like the sweetness of a frosty apple. Goldenrod along his path had ripened to a higher, drier yellow; seaweed on the rocks below—that turned the broad flats into a “rookery” of shaggy forms, petrified in the act of basking—seemed to have lost the greenish tinge from its leathern brown; ahead, down the sparkling vista of the river, the bay, by a sleight of mirage, raised islands a hair’s-breadth above the horizon, till beneath them sea and sky joined with that pale, stretched continuity seen in downward-parting drops. A world unclouded and untroubled: yet the sky held the growing whiteness that foreruns autumnal wind, and a loon, winging high with bedlam laughter, steered his flight by the flight of an unrisen gale.

Miles loitered, yet was busy rather with thought than sight. What could bring Abram to Kilmarnock? The fat postmaster would have not only mentioned a “show,” but discussed it tediously; where, then, were Terry and Jubilee, and Madge the Seeress, and the little barefoot girl? His sudden sharp curiosity, above all on this last head, astonished him. Why should he care?—yet he continued to speculate.

His path skirted among sweet-fern, mullein, and pink granite. The little fir promontory, roughly double-serrate like the edge of an elm leaf, suddenly hid the upper lighthouse, for shore and path bent sharp into Alward’s Cove. Here a deserted house stood at the grassy mouth of an ancient watercourse; and behind it, a grove of slender white birches had already begun to shed yellow leaves, which so carpeted the dark, strait hollow that a sunlight seemed to glow faintly upward.

Suddenly Miles saw that new shingles patched the cabin, and that from the chimney curled blue wisps of smoke. A battered “punt” lay hauled above the thin rubbish line of high water. But what most deeply surprised him, the beginnings of a weir straggled down the beach. He laughed aloud. The stakes were freshly driven, but the cedar poles green-coated with many tides; on old material the builder had exerted an inexperience glaring even in these first few yards; and more than all, Alward’s Cove, a narrow cleft half a mile above low water, was for a weir the worst possible situation.

Glancing up at the patched house, he cut his laughter short. Behind the panes a girl’s face vanished into the gloom. The features he could not have sworn to, but the hair shone indubitably bright. Ashamed to be caught mocking her weir, he set out again briskly; and he had rounded the little promontory before confusion cleared into the surprising knowledge that he was glad of something. These were the neighbors of whom Quinbus would have told; the keg of nails was for that absurd, futile weir; and her hair was of the color of winter oak leaves. Why, again, should he care?—but care he did, even to excitement, with an obscure feeling that his acts, even his thoughts, now had as it were a witness, and that now any day could promise pleasant and unexpected turns. He could not account for this glowing satisfaction,—that some one had become mysteriously involved and identified, in his mind, with the bright, volatile strangeness of autumn.

On the doorsteps at home, Tony smoked his pipe.

“Ah, the beggar’s written at last,” he grumbled; then unfolding a single sheet, read it calmly, without comment. Miles, who had always vaguely connected this coming letter with “enemies made at sea,” was disappointed to see no more change in Florio’s dark face than in his later behavior.

Weeks passed without incident. Miles went daily to the village for mail which was never there, and of which the sailor declared no expectation. He returned down river always by the shore path—“to see how the weir gets along,” he told himself stubbornly. It got along slowly, from bad to worse. Sometimes he saw the magician, far out, ankle-deep in mud, hammering stakes, or weaving brush wattles into his foredoomed structure. Once the blue of a calico dress moved among the white birch pillars. Speech of his new neighbors, however, or nearer view, he did not get. No face lurked behind the window-pane. And at home the fir headland sundered them as effectually as the rim of a hemisphere.

One night, at his nine-o’clock visit to the upper light, he paused for a time in the lamp-room, his back to the glare, looking out into the dark. Something—perhaps the silence of the evening, the calm, so great that the other tower’s light pierced the water deeply, like an inverted point of exclamation—induced lonely and melancholy thoughts. As he stood thus, a sound rose through the open trap-door. Something stirred, thinly and dryly, on the stairs below.

At first like faintly tearing silk, or scuffing sand-paper, it mounted. Footsteps, thought Miles; yet such footsteps as he had never heard, uncertain, soft, and of a person neither shod nor barefoot.

They stopped. A harsh yet guarded call followed. If speech, it was no human tongue. Miles waited, in a profound silence. A voice called in strange sing-song; then nearer, chanting what sounded like a fragment of barbarous melody.

Portuguese and Italian sailors Miles had seen, on rare visits aboard some lumber schooner bound for Sicily or the Canary Islands. At Admiral’s Light, however, nothing could bring them ashore, still less up into the tower. And this sing-song gabble, as instinct told him, came from no Latin throat.

The dry, scuffing steps began once more. Suddenly, out of the darkness, claw-like fingers clutched the sides of the trap-door,—fingers of an impossible, horny yellow, ending in blue talons.

For one spasmodic instant, Miles, had he stood on open ground, might have bolted. Then as up from a pit, a reassuring black felt hat bobbed through the opening, and tilted back to disclose a human face. Eyes hard and bright as black glass peered from under lids curiously in-folded, of double thickness; the saffron cheeks were smooth as a babe’s; and indeed, in that strange face, as in a changeling’s, baby innocence conflicted with reptilian age and wisdom. Without alteration, without sound, it rested there for a moment, at the level of the floor, as though decapitated; then sank from sight.

Miles had stared in fascination. Waking to anger, part at his own fear, part at its cause, he shouted:—

“Stop! Who—what are you after?”

The light scuffing descended rapidly. Miles leapt for the black square, plunged through it, and down the twisting stair. The thin scantling shook and buckled under their double weight. He jumped the lower steps, just as the tower door slammed open to let a black figure bound out into the lantern light. A scurrying pair of thick white soles, as he caught up the lantern by the bail, guided his pursuit; he gained on them, and running his hardest to the gully bridge, gripped in his right hand the fluttering fullness of a silken jacket.

“Stop!” he cried. “You—”

The fugitive tugged, wriggled, surrendered, and turned a grinning face.

“No can do,” he panted, nodding and ducking amiably. The felt hat was gone, and his bobbing crown showed a high, shaven forehead, bound with neat black coils of braided hair. “But in pictures they hang down,” thought Miles. “A queue!” He had never before seen a Chinaman.

“What do you want?” he asked severely.

His captive, smiling and nodding, the calmer of the two, repeated,—

“No can do, no can do.”

Plainly, the man’s English went no further. Miles released his grip, and, feeling rather foolish, stepped back to consider. Like a spring released, and with instant, mechanical precision, the Chinaman vaulted the bridge-rail, landed on the steep bank below, and darted upward, crashing into the alders. His escape, like his first appearance, had the facility of acts in a dream.

Flushed and bewildered, Miles was halfway home before he regained the use of reason. At a clap the thought overtook him, What if this were Tony’s “foreign-looking” enemy? “I’d better make sure first,” he told himself; and sitting by the library fire, he kept as thoughtful a silence as his grandfather and the sailor, perched, with intent faces, over their chessmen.

At bedtime, he stepped across into Florio’s little room.

“News for you,” he began quietly, and continued in an undertone. Florio’s hard gray eyes watched him sharply across the candle flame, with a look which meant, if anything, impatient anger.

An explosive whisper was the only comment: “Damn the coolie!” Pocketing his big fists with one energetic shove, the sailor stared down at the floor.

“Thanks all the same, of course,” he said moodily. “Quite right. That’s the chap I was afraid might turn up. Thanks. Don’t speak of him to anybody else, till I say so, will you? Not a word? That’s right.”

He sat down on his bed, and unwound his leggings, neatly, methodically, as though the affair were dropped.

In some surprise, Miles continued it.

“Then I’ll do my turns to-night, and afterward—the lamps.”

“Eh?” The sailor looked up, half startled, half chagrined. “What’s that?—Oh,” he smiled indulgently, “not much! Get to bed, boy. What, I’m not afraid of that swine! Alone, isn’t he? Let me lay aboard him once, that’s all! Can catch! No, I won’t hear a word of it. Your watch below. To bed!”

By no persuasion would he forego his self-set labor, or accept company, even for the single night. “Dear chap, I have some pride,” he reiterated; and as he offered no confidences, Miles left him with disappointment. Yet his cool, stubborn attitude seemed, in a way, admirable; and—to judge from deep, contented breathing, across the corridor—he slept like a child.

Somewhere after midnight, Miles woke uneasily. Long security had broken the habit; but now he sat up once more, to watch the distant light of Tony’s lantern jerking in fitful eclipse among the firs. Near the second tower it disappeared, as usual; and as usual, after a short pause shining out again, returned down river, skipping and winking.

Suddenly it went out, and shone no more.

Miles crept from bed to window, and watched. He counted off three, four, five minutes, and saw not another gleam. Dismayed, blaming himself for suffering Tony to have his way, he wrestled into clothes, stole downstairs, and raced through the sharp night air. Thin fog, shoulder-high, had just begun to billow along the ground, concealing and magnifying, even by starlight. Each tussock, each baby fir, loomed like a waiting figure or stretched like a dead body. Silent over the wet grass, Miles ran downhill toward the spot where the light had ceased.

Nearing the shore, he brushed through the chill aspersion of bristling thickets, when suddenly the light gleamed again, fixed, through the lowest boughs. He stopped, listened, then slipped forward cautiously, toward a murmur of voices. Subdued but unmistakable, it was the broken sing-song of that speech from the other side of the world. He threaded without a sound the interstitial windings of the underbrush, and crouched at the edge of the clearing.

On the old quarter-deck, the lantern burned dimly. As in a luminous smoke, two men sat talking, with now and then a gesture that set enormous hands, outspread fingers, wavering on the magic-lantern screen of the fog. Their alien tones rose and fell, in a quiet, scolding incantation.

The more vehement speaker was Tony. Facing him, oddly squatting upon heels, the yellow man of the tower nodded continually, amicably, sagely, like a toy mandarin.

CHAPTER IV
PAN’S PIPES

At breakfast Tony discoursed readily as ever, smiled as engagingly, with glances no less frank, provocative, or droll. Twice he forced old Mr. Bissant to brighten his cloudy morning face, to smite with open palm his short white curls, and chuckle; once, even, to parry joke with joke. But Miles sat dazed and unhappy. Their little house, lacking so many things, had lacked also the presence of a lie; before that presence, now, he came awkwardly, and as it were with eyes averted. He heard Tony laugh, saw the white flash of his teeth, the quick, foreign heave of his burly shoulders, the nameless turns of speech and look by which friend signals to friend; he knew Tony for the same man of yesterday, challenging the same admiration; yet between himself and all this, a single night had stretched a dismal vacuum, a distance slight, but both intensive and insulating. The sudden change puzzled him abominably.

“An Italianate Englishman,” his grandfather descanted, “they used to call a devil incarnate. I leave it to fancy what an Italian who—”

“Aha, but I’m not!” cried Tony warmly. “I have you there. My father was Italian born, yes. That’s only half. And me, bless you, I sailed out on an English ship a twelve-year-old. Under the same flag ever since. An English deck is English soil. Come now, Mr. Bissant, to be honest—”

While their debate ran high, Miles slipped quietly from the room.

Last night’s fog had poured up the channel, overflowed the hills, and now submerged all but the smoky loom of the hackmatack pillars, as Miles passed between them. Sea-rime silvered his rough jacket; from beneath wet eyelashes he peered into motionless, white space; the very hill underfoot was a declivity felt, not seen. He wandered slowly down it, hands in pockets, head bent.

To be honest! Tony’s chance phrase recurred ironically; and after it, his saying on the hill above Kilmarnock, “You’re the sort a man can trust.” With what? thought Miles bitterly: with lies, calculated, shaped as confidences. He had not known, before, how utterly the older man had captured his liking; or how, divorced from belief, liking could become reproach. A raw simpleton, to lend a stranger his heart!

In this mood he found himself halting, without purpose, on the Admiral’s quarter-deck. From the rail he saw neither rocks nor river, but only the globular, spiny tufts of young Norway pines that stepped down toward the beach. Wind-slanted, rooted in crevices, they lent their fixity as a gauge to sight: their needles, carding sluggish vapor, freed the spellbound air; formlessness became texture; and fleecy filaments dissolving, twining, blending, thick as the smoke of wet brushwood, set the whole snowy void adrift in level motion. Somewhere, far below in the bay, a whistle mournfully bellowed. Nearer home, but deep in the fog, sounded the unsteady bumping of a single oar.

“Hallo-o-o!” The rowing stopped; and a moment later the same high, clear voice called, “Hallo-o-o!”

Miles trumpeted through his hands an answering hail.

“Oh!” cried the rower, with evident relief. “Hallo again. Are you a vessel or the shore?”

“I’m the shore,” laughed Miles. “What’s wrong?”

“I’m lost out here.” The voice, floating across the hidden surface, rang clear as from the throat of a singer. “One oar went overboard, and the more I pull, the faster this thing goes round and round. And the tide’s running down—out, I mean—and I’m frightened.” The bumping noise broke in again, and again ceased. “No use! Hallo! Why, now you’re clear round on the other side!”

“Stay where you are!” cried Miles eagerly. “Wait. There’s no danger. I’ll come out and tow you.”

He scrambled down to the beach, and along it to where Tony, for no apparent use, maintained a small boat moored on an endless rope. Hauling home till the black bow came cleaving the fog, he ordered peremptorily,—

“Keep on shouting, there! What’s the matter with you? How can I find—”

“I was just thinking,” replied the voice calmly, from no great distance. “If you come out, you may get lost, too.”

Miles cast off, and jumped in.

“On this river?” He laughed somewhat breathlessly, half at the warning, half at a strange excitement which had mastered him. This drifting voice he had known, from the first hail, to be a girl’s; what girl’s, he had nearly guessed from the second; and pulling vigorous oars, he was not surprised to see, after blind exploration and shouting, the square bow of the magician’s punt focusing from out the heavy smoke.

Bareheaded, half turned on a thwart, and peering anxiously through that smoke, sat a misty figure, whose light, strong lines of active youth not even a man’s cardigan jacket could muffle. She gave a little cry of deliverance.

“It’s fine of you—” Something cut her praise curiously short, just as gunwale swept gunwale.

“Come aboard,” said Miles. Sheepish, and suddenly flushed, he found himself out of all measure preoccupied with an unshipped oar. “Careful. Step in the middle,” he added mechanically. His outstretched hand met a warm, firm little grasp, in the same delighted instant that two ankles, quick and slender as the feathered ankles of mythology, whipped over into the bottom of the boat.

“Make fast your painter,” he ordered, shipping his oar in a dream.

“Make my what?” cried his passenger anxiously. He managed at last to look up, and saw her darting puzzled glances into the punt. Cold vapors wavered about her hair thinly, as though conquered and dispersed by lambent brightness.

“Tie the rope,” he translated.

“Oh, this!” She obeyed, her nimble fingers rosy with the cold, her shining head bent so zealously over the knot as to show but one brown cheek transparently aglow with exercise.

Watching this with unbounded pleasure, he gave way. The punt fell behind, swung dimly into their wake; the rope rose taut and dripping; and as though satisfied with her knot, the girl suddenly faced him, brushing from her forehead an obstinate tendril of bright hair.

“Thank you for coming,” she said quietly. “I don’t—I don’t know anything about boats.”

Again a fragment of boyhood restored: he met that look of elfin gravity, under the wide circumflex of eyebrows, more formidable than bows bent against him.

“How did you get lost?” he ventured in confusion; and, meaning kindness, was dismayed to hear the question ring like a rebuke.

“Weir-poles—a whole lot drifted out of our cove,” she answered, with a flutter of the same confusion. “He had worked so hard—It was a pity to lose so many. I had to come out after them. He was—isn’t very well.”

“Your father?” asked Miles.

“Yes,” replied the girl uncertainly. Another flush, a deeper color in her cheeks, allowed him to guess at Abram’s illness. “No; I call him that, but—he’s all I have; and she was so good to me—his wife. She sent me to school winters, and wouldn’t let—as long as she lived—”

Her words, lingering unfinished, her look penetrating the hidden distances of the fog, seemed to dismiss a memory down some long vista.

“Were you afraid?” said Miles, between strokes.

“Of course I was,” she laughed. Her instant change of mood, her glance swiftly returning to close quarters, but above all the radiant conflict about lips and eyes, the honest mischief and shy directness, struck him into a panic joy. No countenance had ever looked so quick with various meaning, so tremulous with color, so dangerously awake and alive, as her face now in this floating dawn, this cold, nebulous, elemental light of the sea mist. It was a discovery in his life, a mystery, and a power. He could have ferried her to the farthest continent.

“Afraid?” she said. “What else? I thought I was slipping out into the big ocean. And the fog all round! It was like—like sitting alone with a lot of years. I thought of my sins!”

“You can’t have many.” The words sprang from impulse, free admiration; he could have hammered out no compliments; but she willfully mistook him, and laughed his honesty aside.

“Ah now, what a tongue you have!” And with a provoking smile, bending aside her look, she studied the smoky water that drew astern. Under the gray cardigan jacket, her slight, active body in the blue calico reminded him oddly of nacre shining in some uncouth shell, or of hazelnuts when frost has split the rough beard.

A strange motive, as strong as it was new, forced him to say:—

“The first time I saw you—” All conclusion suddenly failed him. “Do you remember it?”

“Remember?” Again, and more deeply, she watched the slow sweep of the current; and more deeply her blood tinted the sun-burned, oval face. She tossed her head with a little shake, more of impatience than of denial. “No, I—I can’t remember.”

Disappointed, frustrated, he rowed for a space in silence, knowing that the full career of their speech had swerved awry. In a twinkling she had withdrawn to a lamentable distance.

“But Jubilee?” persisted Miles. “And Terry, and the dog—what became—”

“All sold,” answered the girl curtly. “When she died. Sold off. Poor little old Terry!” For a moment she sat alone with her thoughts; then suddenly lifting her head, listened.

“What’s that?” Her tone was hard as business. “Do you hear it?”

Miles heard, and not without anxiety. A steady, muffled puffing sound labored doggedly nearer through the fog. Against an ebb-tide that raced for the bay and open sea, he had rowed indifferently, his arms working, but his thoughts inclining to let the boat drift. In the charmed isolation of the fog, it had become, for the instant, a barge of glory, a shallop of dreams. Awake now, he recognized that the “back-eddy” which swept the shore toward Alward’s Cove had not yet seized their keel; that they were still in the channel; that the channel was none too wide, and the approaching noise none too far astern. He swung full power on his port oar.

“What is it?” repeated the girl, peering over her shoulder.

“Trim the boat,” he commanded. “Can’t tell. We’re all right.”

But of this he felt by no means sure. The steady “puff-puff” throbbed more and more distinct, and with it came a wide whisper of rushing water. The vagueness of all direction told him that to shout, in this thick obscurity, would only alarm his passenger. He tugged mightily across the current, hoping for the sudden wrench of the counter-eddy. It did not grasp them. Instead, the noise fought closer, truculent and panting; the whisper of rushing surfaces widened and sharpened, more and more sibilant.

A silent explosion seemed to hoist the laggard stern of the punt, which instantly, as though stung into live hatred, came crashing along their port side, crowding and struggling like a horse that fights his mate in harness. Struck by this trough of whirling suds, an oar shot into the air. With a stagger, the boat careened as to capsize, slewed violently on a soft upheaval. Through the mist, a pear-shaped bag of woven cordage stole past like a phantom, above a low black bulwark; at interminable intervals, three heavy stakes filed along, almost overhead,—fenders hanging parallel at the same forward slant. Their boat, righting dizzily, leaped once, cramped and awkward as a sheep jumping a wall. And they were left pitching on a foamy wake, smothered in the smell of steam, wrapped by a warm mist invisible in a cold.

“The oar! The oar!” cried Miles.

Long afterward, he admired her instant foresight. She had already caught the oar-blade, just as it bobbed past in hissing lather. The tug steadily puffed farther into the distance, and—now that their need was over—began again the hoarse bellowing which Miles had heard in the bay. For some moments, exchanging a queer smile that conveyed more than utterance, each saw the other’s face touched, through the gleaming fog, with a light still more pale and northern.

“Bail her out,” said Miles, nodding at the half-filled punt, while he wrestled with broken thole-pins. When at last they were under way, it was in silence.

And yet danger had advanced each in the other’s knowledge, by that shared experience which was more than words, presence, or time—so savage, so close upon the happy side of life, had flashed the traitorous. Hidden together on the river, in a privacy of space, they had heard the pipes of Pan the gracious, and now Pan the terrible had “stamped his hoof in the night thicket.”

The waves of their enemy’s wake broke widely along the shore, with a pleasant sound as of the sea, but roving and transitory. The eddy at last eased the laboring oars. And by some mystery of the air, the fog began to blur and dissolve, to rise from a clearing circle of water, from the shaggy, wallowing rocks, the pink granite walls, the sombre undergrowth, till the fir-tops reared like a parapet in the thick of a siege, with ragged embrasures and sharp merlons bosomed in the smoke of cannonades.

“Almost home,” said Miles. And while he spoke, numberless floating bladders of seaweed brushed beneath, clogged the speed of their boat, and then let it pass into clear water at Alward’s. The weir, a string of cedar poles, like the tops of a sunken fence, ran a broken parallel to their shoreward course.

“Stop a minute,” begged the girl.

Very willingly he backed water, then rested his oars.

“Before we get within hearing.” She eyed him with grave decision. “I’ve been worried, and I want your—somebody’s advice.” Lowering her voice, she glanced at the weir: “Could a man make his living by that?”

Miles shook his head gloomily.

“Never in the world. I’m sorry, but—”

“Thanks. I thought so,” she interrupted. “I told him, but he doesn’t seem to care. What will become—” Her smile was friendly but sad. “I’m breaking orders: the one thing he won’t let me do is to talk to strangers.”

“Are we?” said Miles, more gloomily.

“You know we are,” she answered, looking down. “In one way, no. If that thing had passed over us, out there—” The gray cardigan did not hide a passing shiver. For a time her bright head remained drooping. “No, we’re not. I’ll ask you. Do you know a man named Florio?”

“Do I?” he cried. “He lives with us, down there!”

“What is he?” she asked eagerly. “What does he do?”

“Nothing,” answered Miles, with a puzzled scowl. “I—I don’t know.”

“He and my father seem,” she began, then paused. “Has he anything to do with fish—with herring?”

“Except to eat them!” Laughing at her incongruous picture of Tony, Miles suddenly felt a new and curious pang. “Do you like him?”

She would not look up.

“I—I hate him!” Her answer trembled with vehemence. “Row, please. Quick, I must get home!”