“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.”