"Well, when I got home it was 'bout one o'clock in the day. I been on patrol that mornin'--it was snowin' and thick. Wife had the baby up to the winder waitin' for me, and they all come out--Bill and my wife and my little Susie, she's five year old--and then we all went in and sat down, and I took the baby in my arms, and it looked at me kind o' skeered-like and cried; and Bill held out his hands and took the baby, and he stopped cryin' and laid kind o' contented in his arms, and my little Susie said, 'Pop, I guess baby thinks Uncle Bill's his father.' ... _I--tell--you--that--hurt!_" As the last words dropped from Tom's lips two of the surfmen--Jerry Potter and Robert Saul, who had been breasting the north-east gale--pushed open the door of the sitting-room and peered in, looking like two of Nansen's men just off an ice-floe. Their legs were clear of snow this time, the two having brushed each other off with a broom on the porch outside. Jerry had been exchanging brass checks with the patrol of No. 14, three miles down the beach, and Saul had been setting his clock by a key, locked in an iron box bolted to a post two miles and a half away and within sight of the inlet. Tramping the beach beside a roaring surf in a north-east gale blowing fifty miles an hour, and in the teeth of a snow-storm each flake cutting like grit from a whirling grindstone, was to these men what the round of a city park is to a summer policeman. Jerry peeled off his waterproofs from head, body, and legs; raked a pair of felt slippers from under a chair; stuck his stocking-feet into their comforting depths; tore a sliver of paper from the end of a worn-out journal, twisted it into a wisp, worked the door of the cast-iron stove loose with his marlin-spike of a finger, held the wisp to the blaze, lighted his pipe carefully and methodically; tilted a chair back, and settling his great frame comfortably between its arms, started in to smoke. Saul duplicated his movements to the minutest detail, with the single omission of those connected with the pipe. Saul did not smoke. Up to this time not a word had been spoken by anybody since the two men entered. Men who live together so closely dispense with "How d'yes" and "Good-bys." I was not enough of a stranger to have the rule modified on my account after the first salutations. Captain Shortrode looked up from his report and broke the silence. "That sluice-way cuttin' in any, Jerry?" Jerry nodded his head and replied between puffs of smoke: "'Bout fifty feet, I guess." The grizzled Captain took off his eye-glasses--he only used them in making up his report--laid them carefully beside his sheet of paper, stretched his long legs, lifting his body to the perpendicular, dragged a chair to my side of the room, and said with a dry chuckle: