“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.” “It's the way it often is in life. Whilst a man is looking up into the sky so as to see the big things and dodge 'em, he goes to work and stubs his toe over a knitting-needle.” “That's right,” Captain Mayo informed himself; “but I can't seem to help myself, somehow!” XII ~ NO PLACE POR THE SOLES OP THEIR FEET