"Next mornin' we got the four of 'em all ready to start off to the depot on their way back to Philadelphy--there warn't no use o' their stayin', their schooner was all up and down the beach, and there was oysters 'nough 'long the shore to last everybody a month. Well, when the feller got his rig on he looked himself all over, and then he said he would like to have a hat. 'Bout a week before Tom here [Tom nodded now, and smiled] had picked up on the beach one o' these high gray stovepipe hats with a black band on it, blowed overboard from some o' them yachts, maybe. Tom had it up on the mantel there dryin', and he said he didn't care, and I give it to the nigger and off he started, and we all went out on the back porch to see him move. Well, sir, when he went up 'long the dunes out here toward the village, steppin' like a crane in them high-up pants and jacket and them Number 12s of Jerry's and that hat of Tom's 'bout three sizes too small for him, I tell ye he was a _show_!" Jerry and Saul chuckled, and Tom broke into a laugh--the first smile I had seen on Tom's face since he had finished telling me about the little baby at home. I laughed too--outwardly to the men and inwardly to myself with a peculiar tightening of the throat, followed by a glow that radiated heat as it widened. My mind was not on the grotesque negro cook in the assorted clothes. All I saw was a man fighting the surf, groping around in the blackness of the night for four water-soaked, terrified men until he got them, as he said, "all together." That part of it had never appealed to the Captain, and never will. Pulling drowning men, single-handed, from a boiling surf, was about as easy as pulling gudgeons out of a babbling brook. Saul now piped up: "Oughter git the Cap'n to tell ye how he got that lady ashore last winter from off that Jamaica brig." At the sound of Saul's voice Captain Shortrode rose quickly from his chair, picked up his report and spectacles, and with a deprecating wave of his hand, as if the story would have to come from some other lips than his own, left the room--to "get an envelope," he said. "He won't come back for a spell," laughed Jerry. "The old man don't like that yarn." "Old man" was a title of authority, and had nothing to do with the Captain's fifty years. I made no comment--not yet. My ears were open, of course, but I was not holding the tiller of conversation and preferred that someone else should steer. Again Saul piped up, this time to me, reading my curiosity in my eyes: