“Wall, it was so damn sudden. Fust thing I knowed I wuz in the water with th’ wind knocked out’er me, an’ the next wuz when I come to an’ they bed me in here an’ the doctor a-fixin’ me up. I’m all right, ye see, only I’m drier’n a lime-kiln. Say, cap,”—he looked over toward the water-bucket, and called to one of the men standing near the door,—“fetch me a dipper.” To call a landsman “cap” around Keyport is to dignify him with a title which he probably does not possess, but which you think would please him if he did. “Let me get you a drink,” said the major, rising from the bed with a quick spring indicative of his hearty desire to serve him. He clipped the floating tin in the bucket and brought it to the thirsty man. Bowles drained the contents to its last drop. “He ain’t no preach an’ he ain’t no sawbones,” he said to himself, as he returned the empty tin to Slocomb with a “Thank ye,—much obleeged.” Somehow the reply satisfied the major far more than the most elaborately prepared speech of thanks which he remembered ever to have received. Then the two men continued to talk freely with each other, the one act of kindness having broken down the barrier between them. The Pocomokian, completely forgetting himself, told of his home on the Chesapeake, of his acquaintance with Sanford, of his coming up to look after Mrs. Leroy. The major’s tone of voice was as natural and commonplace as if he had been conversing with himself alone. “Couldn’t leave a woman without protection, you know,” to which code of etiquette Bowles bobbed his head in reply; the genuine, unaffected sympathy of the rough man before him seemed to have knocked every fictitious prop from under his own personality. The quarryman, in turn, talked about the Ledge, and what a rotten season it had been,—nothing but southeasters since work opened; last week the men only got three days’ work. It was terrible rough on the boss (the boss was Sanford), paying out wages to the men and getting so little back; but it wasn’t the men’s fault,—they were standing by day and night, catching the lulls when they came; they’d make it up before the season was over; he and Caleb West had been up all the night before getting ready for the big derricks that Captain Joe was going to set up as soon as they were ready; didn’t know what they were going to do now with that Screamer all tore up: a record of danger, unselfishness, loyalty, pluck, hard work, and a sense of duty that was a complete revelation to Slocomb, whose whole life had been one prolonged loaf, and whose ideas of the higher type of man had heretofore been somehow inseparably interwoven with a veranda, a splint-bottomed chair, a palm-leaf fan, and somebody within call to administer to his personal wants.