breathless morning air.
On the near point of the half-moon stood Keyport Light,—an old-fashioned factory chimney of a Light,—built of brick, but painted snow-white with a black cigar band around its middle, its top surmounted by a copper lantern. This flashed red and white at night, over a radius of twenty miles. Braced up against its base, for a better hold, was a little building hiding a great fog-horn, which on thick days and nights bellowed out its welcome to Keyport’s best.
On the far point of the moon—the one opposite the Light, and some two miles away—stretched sea-meadows broken with clumps of rock and shelter-houses for cattle, and between these two points, almost athwart the mouth of the harbor, like a huge motionless whale lay Crotch Island, its backbone knotted with summer cottages. Beyond the island away out under the white glare of the risen sun could be seen a speck of purplish-gray fringed with bright splashes of spray glinting in the dazzling light. This was Shark’s Ledge.
As Sanford looked toward the site of the new Light a strange sensation came over him. There lay the work on which his reputation would rest and by which he would hereafter be judged. Everything else he had so far accomplished was, he knew, but a preparation for this his greatest undertaking. Not only were the engineering problems involved new to his experience, but in his attitude in regard to them he had gone against all precedents as well as against the judgments of older heads, and had relied almost exclusively upon Captain Joe’s personal skill and pluck. While it was true that he never doubted his ultimate success, there always came a tugging at his heartstrings and a tightening of his throat whenever he looked toward the site of the lighthouse.
Turning from the scene with a long drawn breath, he walked with slackened step down the slope that led to the long dock fronting the captain’s cottage. As he drew nearer he saw that the Screamer had been moored between the captain’s dock (always lumbered with paraphernalia required for sea-work) and the great granite-wharf, which was piled high with enormous cubes of stone, each as big as two pianos.
On her forward deck was bolted a hoisting-engine, and thrust up through the hatch of the forecastle was the smoke-stack of the boiler, already puffing trial feathers of white steam into the morning air. She had, too, the heavy boom and stout mast used as a derrick. Captain Joe had evidently seen no reason to change his mind about her, for he was at the moment on her after-deck, overhauling a heavy coil of manilla rope, and reeving it in the block himself, the men standing by to catch the end of the line.
When Sanford joined the group there was no general touching of hats,—outward sign of deference that a group of laborers on land would have paid their employer. In a certain sense, each man here was chief. Each man knew his duty and did it, quietly, effectually, and cheerfully. The day’s work had no limit of hours. The pay was never fixed by a board of delegates, one half of whom could not tell a marlinespike from a monkey-wrench. These men had enlisted for a war with winds and storms and changing seas, and victory meant something more to them than pay once a month and plum duff once a week. It meant hours of battling with the sea, of tugging at the lines, waist-deep in the boiling surf that rolled in from Montauk. It meant constant, unceasing vigilance day and night, in order that some exposed site necessary for a bedstone might be captured and held before a southeaster could wreck it, and thus a vantage-point be lost in the laying of the masonry.
Each man took his share of wet and cold and exposure without grumbling. When, by some accident, a cowardly and selfish spirit joined the force, Captain Joe, on the first word of complaint, handed the man his money and put him ashore. The severity of the work was never resented. It was only against their common enemies, the winds and the seas, that murmurs were heard. “Drat that wind!” one would say. “Here she’s a-haulin’ to the east’rd agin, an’ we ain’t got them j’ints [in the masonry] p’inted.” Or, “It makes a man sick to see th’ way this month’s been a-goin’ on,—not a decent clay since las’ Tuesday.”
Sanford liked these men. He was always at home with them. He loved their courage, their grit, their loyalty to one another and to the work itself. The absence of ceremony among them never offended him. His cheery “Good-morning” as he stepped aboard was as cheerily answered, but no other demonstration took place.
Captain Joe stopped work only long enough to shake Sanford’s hand and to present him to the newcomer, Captain Bob Brandt of the Screamer.
“Cap’n Bob!” he called, waving his hand.
“Ay, ay, sir!” came the ready response of his early training.
“Come aft, sir. Mr. Sanford wants ye.” The “sir” was merely a recognition of the captain’s rank.
A tall, straight, blue-eyed young fellow of twenty-two, with a face like an open book, walked down the deck,—one of those perfectly simple, absolutely fearless, alert men found so often on the New England coast, with legs and arms of steel, body of hickory, and hands of whalebone: cabin-boy at twelve, common sailor at sixteen, first mate at twenty, and full captain the year he voted.
Sanford looked him all over, from his shoes to his cap. He knew a round full man when he saw him. This one seemed to be without a flaw. Sanford saw too that he possessed that yeast of good nature without which the best of men are heavy and dull.
“Can you lift these blocks, Captain Brandt?” he asked in a hearty tone, more like that of a comrade than an employer, his hand extended in greeting.
“Well, I can try, sir,” came the modest reply, the young man’s face lighting up as he looked into Sanford’s eyes, where he read with equal quickness a ready appreciation, so encouraging to every man who intends to do his best.
Captain Brandt and every member of the gang knew that it was not the mere weight of these enrockment blocks which made the handling of them so serious a matter; twelve tons is a light lift for many boat-derricks. It was the fact that they must be loaded aboard a vessel not only small enough to be easily handled in any reasonable weather, but with a water-draught shoal enough to permit her lying safely in a running tide alongside the Ledge while the individual blocks were being lowered over her side.
The hangers-on about the dock questioned whether any sloop could do this work. All winter, in fact, they had discussed it about the tavern stoves.
“Billy,” said old Marrows, an assumed authority on stone-sloops, but not in Sanford’s employ, although a constant applicant, “I ain’t sayin’ nothin’ agin her beam, mind, but she’s too peaked forrud. ’Nother thing, when she’s got them stones slung, them chain-plates won’t hold ’er shrouds. I wouldn’t be s’prised to see that mast jerked clean out’er her.”
Bill Lacey, the handsome young rigger to whom the remark was addressed, leaned over the sloop’s rail, scanned every bolt in her plates, glanced up at the standing rigging, tried it with his hand as if it were a tight-rope, and with a satisfied air answered, “Them plates is all right, Marrows,—it’s her b’iler that’s a-worryin’ me. What do you say, Caleb?” turning to Caleb West, a broad-shouldered, grizzled man in a sou’wester, who was mending a leak in a diving-dress, the odor of the burning cement in a pan beside him mingling with the savory smell of frying pork coming up from the galley.
“Wall, I ain’t said, Billy,” replied Caleb in a cheery voice, stroking his bushy gray beard. “Them as don’t know better keep shet.”
There was a loud laugh at the young rigger’s expense, in which everybody except Lacey and Caleb joined. Lacey’s face hardened under the thrust, while Caleb still smiled, a quaint expression overspreading his features,—one that often came when something pleased him, and which by its sweetness showed how little venom lay behind his reproofs.
“These ’ere sloops is jes’ like women,” said George Nickles, the cook, a big, oily man, with his sleeves rolled up above his elbows, a greasy apron about his waist. He was dipping a bucket overboard. “Ye can’t tell nothin’ about ’em till ye tries ’em.”
The application of the simile not being immediately apparent,—few of Nickles’ similes ever were,—nobody answered. Lacey stole a look at Nickles and then at Caleb, to see if the shot had been meant