Blow the Man Down - A Romance of the Coast
Page 244"The best of us get rattled," said the host, consolingly. "I'm not a
policeman, sheriff, or detective, mate. I'll report this case as Captain
Downs and so many souls saved from the schooner Alden. You'd better
trot along up to the city and face 'em as a man should. I'll rig you out
in some of my clothes. Your old friend, Wass, meant well by rushing
you away, but I've always found that in a man's fight you can't do much
unless you're close enough to t'other fellow to hit him when he reaches
for you."
A half-hour later, made presentable in the coast-guard captain's liberty
suit, Mayo walked through the kitchen. Bradish and the cook were still
The captain's wife, standing in a door which admitted to an inner room,
put up a finger to signal the young man and then nodded her head in
invitation. "The young lady wants to see you, sir," she informed him
in a whisper, when he stepped to her side. "Go in!" She closed the door
behind him and remained in the kitchen.
He stood in the middle of the room and gazed at the girl for some time,
and neither of them spoke. She was swathed in blankets and was huddled
in a big chair; her face was wan and her eyes showed her weariness. But
her voice was firm and earnest when she addressed him.
Tell me that you'll listen to me as you would listen to a man."
"I'm afraid--" he stammered.
"It's too bad that man and woman can seldom meet on the plane where man
and man meet. But I don't want to be considered a girl just now. I'm one
human being, and you're another, and I owe something to you which must
be paid, or I shall be disgraced by a debt which will worry me all my
life." She put out her hands and knotted the fingers together in appeal.
"Understand me--help me!"
He was ill at ease. He feared with all his soul to meet the one great
"When we thought we were going to die I told you it seemed as if I had
lived a life in a few hours--that I did not seem like the same person
as I looked into my thoughts. Captain Mayo, that is true. It is more
apparent to me now when I have had time to search my soul. Oh, I am not
the Alma Marston who has been spoiled and indulged--a fool leaping here
and there with every impulse--watching a girl in my set do a silly thing
and then doing a sillier thing in order to astonish her. That has been
our life in the city. I never knew what it meant to be a mere human
being, near death. You know you saved me from that death!"