Blow the Man Down - A Romance of the Coast

"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."