He sauntered up the beach, and in five minutes wondered how he had based such magniloquent ideas on a child out for a holiday. The fishermen on this solitary beach apparently made a holiday whenever Swendon and Jane came, and humored the latter in all her vagaries. No doubt they would have preferred to eat properly in their own kitchens, but the cloth was spread on the sand beside the fire. The captain, with the perspiration streaming, was broiling ham at the end of a long stick; Sutphen cleaned the crabs; Lantrim's wife cooked the perch, and Jane herself was making the coffee. "Don't speak to me: I'm counting," as Mr. Neckart stopped beside her. "Five, six, seven. You can't trifle when you make coffee," peering into the pot with the gravity of a judge on the bench. The smell of the broiling ham in the salt air suddenly brought back to Neckart a day when he had gone fishing with his mother in the old place in Delaware. How happy and hungry they were! "Give me your stick, captain. You are burning up," he said, sitting down on the log beside him. "You've been on this beach afore, sir?" said Sutphen, who was his neighbor, and felt it his duty to play host. "Never but once, when the Argyle went ashore." "You were here fur the Treasury Department?" "Yes. Did you know anything about that case?" eying him with sudden interest. "It was a muddled account that was sent up to Washington." "Likely. Yes, I knew. I've been in the wracking and life-saving service thirty years come June." When Jane came to that side of the fire twenty minutes later, none of the crabs were cleaned, and the ham and stick burned black together while Neckart held them in the fire. "I ought not to have allowed two men to sit together: I might have known they would gossip," she said. Mr. Neckart had just made up his mind that Sutphen and the two Lantrims were as shrewd, common-sensed witnesses as he had ever examined. He was hungry too, and as they ate together he borrowed Sutphen's clamp-knife, and told some capital stories, and handed about his cigars when they had all finished. "I misjudged that black-a-vised fellow," said Ichabod to Lantrim. "He's consid'able of a man." Lantrim nodded ponderously. One story or slow monologue followed another--of shipwrecks, frequent on that murderous coast, of rescues by wreckers, of "vyages" down the coast or to India, Africa, with plenty of sailors' superstition in it all. Neckart lay on his back smoking, his hands under his head. It seemed as if he were the boy he was on that day's fishing long ago. His blood quickened and heated at these tales of adventure, just as it used to do when he pored over La Perouse or the _History of Great Navigators_. The afternoon was darkening, raw and cold; their fire was a mere ruddy speck in the indistinct solitudes; a wall of gray mist moved down the marshes toward them.