It was very quiet again. The boot-heels of the new watch on deck, the rasping of the booms as the vessel jibed, the whistle of the rising gale, the slap of the sea outside them, the Skipper’s voice on deck, the atmosphere, stirred Martin again. “’Twas a night like this we swung the _Cromwell_ off to the west’ard. I shouldn’t wonder but what he’d be takin’ the mains’l off her soon, won’t he?”--this to the old watch, who had just come down the companion-way and was wringing his mitts out by the stove. “The mains’l, Martin?” repeated the watch in surprise. “Why, the mains’l’s been off her for hours--she’s under a trys’l and jumbo.” “The mains’l, Martin,” explained one, “was taken off her just after you and Johnnie were taken aboard. You were pretty tired and didn’t notice, maybe, at the time.” “Lord, I must’ve been tired--not to know it when the mains’l’s taken off a vessel I’m in. There was never a minute the night the _Cromwell_ was lost that I was tired as that. No, sir, not even when I laid on the cliff in the morning and looked down for George Hoodley’s body.” “Speakin’ of that, Martin, didn’t some of the bodies come ashore?” This from the cook, who incidentally, feeling a little less hurried, was putting a few shovels of coal into the stove before he should turn in for the night. “There were two bodies came ashore,” resumed Martin. “And that was a sad thing, too. I was going up to see if I couldn’t get some clothes to hide my nakedness, and maybe a pair of boots and a bite to eat and a bit of fire to warm up by somewhere, when I met a man. ’Twas good light by then. He was coming down a bit of beach behind the cliff. I told him my vessel had been wrecked, and I was all that was left of the crew. And he fixed me up as well as he could and came back with me to the beach, and there’s where the sad part came in. One of the _Cromwell’s_ crew, Angus MacPherson, had been fishing out of Gloucester twelve years, and every fall he said he was going home to see the old people. I knew that as well as I knew that he’d been sending money home regularly to the old people. If it hadn’t been for Angus they’d’ve had a hard time of it, I cal’late, those twelve years. Well, he never went home, as he said; but here was the very place Angus came from, and this was the way he came home at last. That same afternoon I helped to bury him and to carry his old mother away from the grave when she couldn’t carry herself. God help us, but there’s hard spots in life, ain’t there?