"I was hoping you would stay over, Captain Mayo." She declared that with
frank delight.
"But you don't expect me to do anything, of course!"
"It's not that. You see, I'd like to go down to the island and--and
father is so odd he might not be willing to escort me," she explained,
trying to be matter-of-fact, her air showing that she regretted her
outburst.
"I volunteer, here and now."
She rose and put out her hand to him. "I have not thanked you for saving
my life--saving us all, Captain Mayo. It is too holy a matter to be
profaned by any words. But here is my hand--like a friend--like a
sister--no"--she held herself straight and looked him full in the face
through the gloom and tightened her hold on his fingers--"like a man!"
He returned her earnest finger-clasp and released her hand when her
pressure slackened. That sudden spirit, the suggestion that she desired
to assume the attitude of man to man with him, seemed to vanish from her
with the release of her fingers.
She quavered her "Good night!" There was even a hint of a sob. Then she
ran into the house.
Mayo stared after her, wrinkling his forehead for a moment, as if he had
discovered some new vagary in femininity to puzzle him. Then he resumed
his patrol with the slow stride of the master mariner. Hue and Cry
raised dim bulk in the harbor jaws, showing no glimmer of light. It was
barren, treeless, a lump of land which towns had thrust from them and
which county boundaries had not taken in. He admitted that the state had
good reasons for desiring to change conditions on Hue and Cry, but this
callous, brutal uprooting of helpless folks who had been attached to
that soil through three generations was so senselessly radical that
his resentment was stirred. It was swinging from the extreme of
ill-considered indulgence to that of utter cruelty, and the poor devils
could not in the least understand!
"There seem to be other things than a spiked martingale which can pick
a man up and keep him away from his own business," he mused. "What
fool notion possesses me to go out there to-morrow I cannot understand.
However, I can go and look on without butting into stuff that's no
affair of mine."
Two men were shuffling past in the road. In the utter silence of that
summer night their conversation carried far.
"Yes, sir, as I was saying, there he lays dead! When I was with him on
the Luther Briggs he fell from the main crosstrees, broke both legs
and one arm, and made a dent in the deck, and he got well. And a week
ago, come to-morrow, he got a sliver under his thumb, and there he lays
dead."