CHAPTER XVII.

CHAPTER XVII.A SOUL IN NEED.Two days after Walter’s fall in the night, he had leave of absence extending from sunrise to sunset. He did not care to take it, his time at the station was so brief, and especially as he was anxious to prove his purpose to be loyal to all obligations resting upon him.“It is your turn to be off, Walter,” said the keeper. “You are fairly entitled to it, and I want you to have what is yours. Be on hand at sunset. You may learn something in your favor, and you had better improve your chance.”With the keeper’s apparent kindness went an insinuation that Walter’s course had not entirely been swept clean of every shadow of suspicion, and if he could find a broom to do this sweeping, it was plainly suggested that he had better secure it. That remark decided Walterin his course. He left the station in no pleasant mood of mind, and the keeper’s words had occasioned it. “If I can, I will get that help,” thought Walter, walking off rapidly, “but—where?”He was puzzled. One memory came to him, however. It was what his father said once: “Walter, if things go wrong, if people say we are wrong and yet we know we are right, but can’t somehow show it and prove it, then wait and let God do the proving. He is as much interested in good character as we, more so even, and He will bring things round right. Tie up to that post.”“I will tie up to that post,” declared Walter.He did not go directly to his uncle’s, but took the road to The Harbor.“Walter!” said a voice as he was passing the post–office. He turned quickly. A young woman had just left Miss P. Green’s headquarters, and was calling to him. It was May Elliott. She looked at him in her earnest way, her blue eyes brightening as she said, “I only want to say that I hope you won’t care for those stories about you at the station. Your friends have confidence in you, and don’t believe what has been said against you.”“Thank you. That does me good. It’spretty hard to be accused when you are innocent.”“Well, you wait. The truth will come out; and when it comes, you will be justified. Oh, there is something else on my mind. Did you know that Chauncy Aldrich was sick?”“I only heard that he was indoors with some trouble.”“They say he is pretty sick, and Miss P. Green, where he is boarding, says he is low–spirited. I did not know but that you might like to call and see him.”Waiter declared that he would go at once. He found Chauncy in a little room with a single window. From this there was a view across the white snowfields to the blackish ocean, scowling angrily like an immense eye under a dark, heavy lid of cloud. Chauncy was lying on his bed, his head raised a little that he might look out upon the winter scenery. His eyes were bright but somber, and his hands were thin and white. That cold bath to which his uncle had unceremoniously treated him, and which he afterwards attempted to explain as a “little joke,” had provoked the sickness so bleaching and weakening and thinning the once vigorous young trader. Every feature showed the effect of the hard fever that hadattacked him. Even the knob of hair that was so accustomed to bristle on Chauncy’s head and silently to defy all the world, had now been humbled. His hair in a thick, tangled mass, suggested a fort in ruins.“Plympton, how are you? I’m real glad to see you. Sit down, old boy. Where have you been all this time?”“At the station, you know. They tie us pretty tight, but it is my day off. I’m real sorry you are sick, Aldrich.”“O thank you! Guess I shall pull through it, but it’s awful hard to be cooped up here,” and as he said this, he kicked at the bed–clothes with a sudden energy. “A business man, you know, that is used to stirring, can’t come down to this easily. I’m real glad you came in. Say, are you going up to your uncle’s?”“I thought I should.”“Well—”Chauncy hesitated. He wished to say something about his Uncle Bezaleel. He did not know very much about Baggs’ business relations to Boardman Blake. In spite of Baggs’ blustering display of confidence in his nephew, any ostentatious intimations that Chauncy knew everything about his business in general, Chauncy knew very little. One reason was that theuncle’s business, after all the brag, was very limited, and then Bezaleel knew that Chauncy had too much principle to back him in certain dishonest schemes. The young man now hesitated, impelled to say something about his uncle, and yet held back by an unwillingness to damage one with whom he had been associated.“I guess you had better go to your uncle’s, Plympton. There is going to be a conference there, I believe, my uncle and his lawyer, and your uncle and his lawyer, and oh, I don’t know what else. Miss Green told me; and bless me, what that mail–bag don’t know, isn’t worth the knowing. She will hold more news than an ocean steamer. Now mind, Plympton, I don’t know what is up. Take my word for it. But there is something to pay, and I would go there.”“I shall, most certainly,” and Walter’s eye flashed like that of a watch dog who starts in the night as he catches the stealthy step of a burglar. “I hope it is nothing serious with my uncle.”“I don’t know how it is; but two lawyers—that means a rush in the market, Plympton; yes, a rush.”Chauncy ceased talking. His efforts at conversation had already wearied him. He layupon his bed silently arguing a point. This “rush in the market” meant a very significant movement by his enterprising uncle, though its exact nature was a mystery to Chauncy. His uncle’s slippery ways had suggested to him one occasion when he himself had been false to Walter, and almost involuntarily he exclaimed, as one may do in sickness that weakens the control of the mind over itself,—”I don’t think I ever tried to deceive you, save once. I hope though you won’t hold it against me.”Walter caught this confession imperfectly; and what made him guess the occasion to which Chauncy referred? Was it a chance look out of the window toward the rocks of the Crescent, about which the surf had wound its scarf of snow? Walter thought of the day when he saw Bezaleel Baggs on the shore looking off toward the Chair. He was reminded of Bezaleel’s resemblance to the mysterious form he saw one morning in Boardman Blake’s store, that morning when Chauncy Aldrich so persistently tried to call off Walter’s attention from the store. Walter now turned suddenly to the invalid.“Aldrich, see here. What do you mean by saying you deceived me once? I can only think of one time when I guess you did try topull the wool over my eyes, and I want you to own up if it was so. Do you remember one morning when I first came this way to stop? I was opening my uncle’s store and you drove down in a wagon, and I came out to the door and saw you there, and I fancied I saw somebody else in the store?”Chauncy nodded his head in assent. Then he added slowly, “That’s—the time—I mean, too.”“Look here! Wasn’t that your uncle inside the store?”Chauncy hesitated. He spoke at last, and with sudden force. “Plympton, I don’t want to deceive you now; but I did then, and am sorry. It was my uncle in the store. Now, I don’t want to go back on anybody, sick as I am. He is my mother’s brother, if he isn’t what he ought to be.” His lip quivered. He was thinking of a mother, long ago at rest in death.“Perhaps you mean that you don’t want me to say anything about it, and that it will look as if you had turned against your uncle. I don’t think I need to speak of you. I saw him with my own eyes, though I don’t know what he was up to there in the store.”“I don’t,” whispered Chauncy.“It is a satisfaction to have you confirm myopinion, and as for yourself anything between us is all settled.”“Thank you.”“There, I have bothered you too long. I didn’t mean to stay here all this while.”“I kept you, I kept you. Don’t go. It’s fearful lonesome here, save when Green comes up; and then she may look at me and say I make her think of her brother who died, and cries—well, that don’t help a feller; and I stay here and think, you know. Say, Plympton!” Chauncy’s eyes shone out bright and sharp. “Say, I don’t want to die!”“Oh, I don’t believe you will. I am thinking of this: soon as I get off from the station,—and my time is up in a few days,—how would you like to have me be your nurse? I could sit with you, you know, and I am strong and could lift you easily when you wanted to change about.”Strong? The very sight of the young surfman so muscular and healthy was an elixir to Chauncy. He seemed to take strength from Walter at once, and certainly his own stock needed reinforcement, for he was very feeble.Walter pitied him; “Poor fellow!” he said, and Walter laid his hand on Chauncy’sforehead and gently stroked it. “I’m sorry for you, and I’ll help you.”The tears came in Chauncy’s eyes.“Weak, you see, Plympton, weak as a baby. I should like to have you come first rate. You make—me—think—of my mother when she was alive—she did that—put her hand there, you know.” The tears came faster now.“Now I would be quiet,” said Walter soothingly.“Oh, this don’t hurt me, only when Green comes and looks at me, as much as to say: ‘A bad bargain, a bad bargain!’ See here, Plympton! Do you remember May Elliott’s composition at the Academy?”“Yes, I’m sure I do.”“Well, I have thought of that a lot. You might not think so, but I have, driving round you know, a business man, watching the market, you know. She said the life—what was it?”“The life that does not take others into account, God and another life—that’s the idea—was making a great mistake.”“Yes, that’s it; and lying here, I have said to myself, ‘Aldrich, you’ve made a mistake. You are buying stock that will fetch precious little. Yes, a mistake.’”“Well, Aldrich, I won’t keep you talking; but before I go, why not take God into account, let me ask? Why not tell Him how much you need Him, that you are sorry, and want Him to help you to a better life, and that you give yourself to Him?”“He’d get a tremendous poor bargain if He took me. All run down now.”“God knows all that. Let’s see. What is that verse about God commending His love toward us, saying while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us?”“Christ died for us! That does me good. That’s like cold water when the fever is on and you are fearful thirsty,” and Chauncy moved his lips as if drinking.“Then there is another verse—I don’t know as I say it exactly, but I can give the idea—that when we were without strength, Christ died for the ungodly.”“Yes, yes,” and again a thirsty soul drank of this cool goblet of good news.“Plympton, I say!”He spoke with much emphasis, as if he had a matter of great importance to relate or a favor to ask.“I don’t know as you have a prayer handy you could say, have you?”Walter hesitated. What prayer could he say that would help another? There was the Lord’s Prayer, though. He could say that. Kneeling and holding Chauncy by the hand—how tightly Chauncy clung to that strong, friendly hand—Walter began, “Our Father!”“Our Father,” repeated Chauncy, and then followed Walter through the prayer.Walter added a few more words in which he tried to approach an ever present, ever willing Saviour, beseeching that Chauncy might be helped right there to give himself entirely up to God; braiding into his words, the touching, solemn collect: “Assist us mercifully, O Lord, in these our supplications and prayers.”Walter then rose from his knees.“That was another good drink,” Chauncy said.“I did not mean to stay so long, Aldrich. Why, the tide is almost in,” said Walter, glancing out of the window. “The Crescent is pretty well covered.”“Oh, don’t go!”“Pretty well covered! What’s that verse? It is about God’s forgiveness. I read it in the Psalter last Sunday; ‘And covered all their sins.’ That is the way it is with God’s mercy.”And Walter thought of the tide coming ineverywhere, and everywhere covering and hiding the black rocks, the long, sandy bars, the unsightly flats of mud, burying all under its bright, shining, softly singing current.Chauncy appreciated Walter’s meaning; and when the latter left, Chauncy with a smile in his face was looking afar and watching the tide coming in.CHAPTER XVIII.DARK DEPTHS UNCOVERED.When Walter left Miss Green’s, he turned away from the sea and walked rapidly in the direction of his uncle’s. A sleigh with jingling bells went by him. The driver of the team was well protected against the cold, and the style as well as the extent of the protection—the rich buffalo robe snugly tucked about his person, the handsome cap of fur that could not wholly conceal his gray hair, the warm, heavy, riding gloves of fur—showed that the driver of the team did not have a mean and scanty share of this world’s goods. The bright, sharp, intelligent eyes under the rich cap of fur gave evidence that the owner of the team was smart enough and shrewd enough to hold whatever he had gained and also add to it.“Do you know that man?” Walter said to Jabez Wherren, who, twisted up by the cold, was moving slowly, shiveringly, over the road.“That man! He’s Squire Tuck, your uncle’s lawyer. He lives in Groveton.”“He looks as if he knew something.”“Knows suthin! For what he knows, I wouldn’t swap all the clams ’tween here and Novy Scoshy,” replied Jabez, who was a famous clam digger, and all his estimates of value were determined by one famous standard, a clam.“Then,” thought Walter, “Squire Tuck is on his way to that meeting at uncle’s that Chauncy spoke about. That is my guess.”He soon came in sight of the well–known buildings so associated with his life the past autumn. There was the old–fashioned house from whose big, red chimney lazily drifted the purplish smoke. There was the store. There was the sign above the door. And there at the post before the door, was Squire Tuck’s horse.“And there’s another team at the other post,” said Walter. “Guess that is Baggs’ team.”When he entered the store, he noticed that a row of nails near the door opening into the sitting–room had been already covered with hats and coats. And who was the thief that Walter saw near one of the coats, lifting its folds and examining them with such intentness of lookthat the ringing of the bell above the door as Walter entered, was scarcely noticed?“Guess those bright eyes don’t see me,” thought Walter. “I can say, ‘Caught at last.’ I’ll make the door–bell tap again.”Jingle, jingle, jingle!“Massy, Walter! how you skat me! Where did you come from? Now you’ll say you’ve got me a–peekin’ at folkses’ clothes. I don’t care if you have. Jest come here!” and Aunt Lydia mysteriously beckoned with a piece of cloth. Lifting the skirt of a blue frock conspicuously ornamented with big silver buttons, Aunt Lydia fitted this bit of cloth into the torn lining.“There!” said she triumphantly. “The myst’ry is out. I haven’t ben a–savin’ this all this time for nothin’.”“Why, whose coat is this?”“It is thatThing’s, that Bel–ze–bub’s!”“Baggs’? Oh, yes, I’ve seen him with it on. I remember now.”“I suppose you want to know what I’m up to. Do you remember the fust mornin’ you were clerk and opened the store? Wall, that mornin’ I seed that Bel–ze–bub at the settin’–room winder, as ef he were a–lookin’ in, though he seemed to be a good way in; and arter that,I found this piece of cloth on the blind. Now I think he was not so much a–lookin’ in as a–gittin’ out, and tore his linin’ while he was a–tryin’ to accomplish that gentlemanly action; and ef—and ef—” said the old lady, dropping her voice, but intensifying her emphasis, “ef he don’t keep out of my settin’–room, I’ll—I’ll scald him! There!”Walter was as much excited as his Aunt Lydia.“There, Aunt, that just confirms me in what I believe and know, that Baggs was in the store that morning when I had stepped out on to the doorstep.”“In the store? Where? To buy suthin’?”“Back of the counter, where uncle keeps those books—that Bible, you know, and so on. He went out from the store into the sitting–room, and then through the window undoubtedly.” Walter told the story of the strange appearance in the store, the first morning of his clerkship. While Aunt Lydia was expressing her amazement, exclaiming, “Oh dear!” “Did you ever!” “Pizen!” the door into the store from the sitting–room opened, and there was the driver of the sleigh that Walter had so particularly noticed that morning, Squire Tuck. His sharp, keen eyes searched the store rapidly, and he said, “Ah, Mrs. Blake, you here? Iwanted to see you one moment and ask you about a matter. Won’t you walk in, please?”Aunt Lydia stepped toward the opened door, and with one hand that she held behind her back, she beckoned to Walter to follow. Walter did not wait for a second flourish from that mute object, but walked after Aunt Lydia and stood silently behind her, as if a special bodyguard to attend her and see that she suffered no harm.It was an unusual scene witnessed that morning in the old–fashioned sitting–room. There on one side of a large square table in the center of the room, sat Baggs. He was very smiling, and when Aunt Lydia entered he very politely said, “Good mornin’, Miss Blake.” Near him sat his lawyer, who looked somewhat like Baggs, a stout individual with crafty eyes, who signed himself “P. Allston Varney.” If the middle name had been “All–stone,” somebody once said, it would have been an appropriate title. Opposite Baggs was his victim, Uncle Boardman, and he sat there with an astonished air. The vacant chair near Uncle Boardman had been occupied by Squire Tuck. After calling Aunt Lydia, he did not resume his seat, but remained standing, and proceeded to address the lady he had admitted.“Mrs. Blake,” he said courteously—Squire Tuck always had a dignified, stately way of addressing the ladies, bowing slightly as he spoke,—“I wish to ask you about this note.”P. Allston Varney closely watched Squire Tuck as he picked up a document lying before Baggs. It was a piece of paper in the form of a money–note, long and narrow. Walter’s attention was arrested immediately by the discovery of a blot in the corner of the note, and it made him think of the document he saw in the store the morning of Baggs’ visit, carrying in one corner a blot like a pig.“There’s that pig again,” he was saying to himself, when Squire Tuck remarked, “Before asking the question I have in mind, let me make an explanation. Your husband, Mrs. Blake, gave Mr. Baggs a note for five hundred dollars in return for money lent him that he might build the saw–mill. That is all he had against—I mean all that Mr. Baggs had against your husband, so the latter asserts. It became due the other day, and your husband went to pay it. I suppose you know this, and that it was paid also.”Aunt Lydia nodded assent.“And you know that Baggs presented another note—this one for fifteen hundred dollars,which indeed is in your husband’s handwriting, he allows, but says he never gave it, and can’t explain it. This you know?”“I know what Baggs says, but my husband don’t owe him any sich sum.”“Indeed!” exclaimed P. Allston Varney provokingly, while Baggs looked towards his lawyer with an amused air, as much as to say, “Only think of it!”“As you generally know about your husband’s affairs, Mrs. Blake, what I wished to ask was, if you knew of any such document—but you have already implied that you did not—and could throw any light in any way upon this subject, and you might look at this and examine it.”Baggs and Varney both stirred in their chairs and half arose, as if to intercept the passage of the precious document into Mrs. Blake’s hands.“Oh,” said the Squire, “I will guarantee that no harm comes to the note. I will hold it and you can stand by and watch every thing done.”As the note was thus held before Aunt Lydia’s sharply scrutinizing spectacles, her bodyguard in the rear looked over her shoulders and quickly read it.“There is that pig!” thought Walter. “Yes,it’s the same sort of looking document, only the other said five hundred, and not fifteen.”The sun outdoors had been endeavoring to pierce the clouds and succeeded for a few moments, and a bright, needle–like ray darted through the window and fell on the note.“Doesn’t that ‘fifteen’ have a scratched look?” thought Walter. An idea came to him as if into his brain also a sunray had darted, making a sudden light there. It was not Walter’s nature to conceal anything, and he burst out saying, “Squire, may I call attention—”Baggs immediately grew red in the face and nudged his lawyer, who sprang upon his feet at once.“Who’s this talking? I object, Squire. He was not asked here!” shouted Varney.“Oh, it is all right,” rejoined Squire Tuck, his tone and manner quieting and assuring. “Let the young man speak. You know, Squire Varney, it wouldn’t look well to shut him up. He may have something valuable to say, and truth will always stand criticism.”Amid grunting by Varney and head–shaking by Baggs, Walter proceeded: “I wanted to call attention to this note. I saw it the first morning I was here, and I know it was that by thatblot which it seemed to me looked like a pig.”“Pig!” ejaculated Varney, with a sneer. “Some folks see themselves in everything they look at.”“Ha—ha!” roared Baggs.“Let the young man proceed,” calmly remarked Squire Tuck.Walter was not used to encounters of this kind, and he felt as if a head–wind had struck him. He recovered himself, though, and began to speak again.A saucy answer was on the end of his tongue, but he remembered something his father said once, that in a discussion the man more likely to come out ahead is the man who can control his tongue as well as use it. He held to his point like a vessel to its course and said, “I saw something on that note which it may be wished I had not seen. The words ‘five hundred’ were then on it, not ‘fifteen hundred,’ and—and—that ‘fifteen’ to me has a scratched look.”Everything was in intense confusion. Uncle Boardman jumped upon his feet, crying, “Let me see! I lost one note and gave another.” Varney shouted, advancing towards Walter, “Do you mean to say that my clientis a forger? that Bezaleel Baggs is guilty of scratching notes?”Walter had no opportunity to reply, for a woman’s sharp voice piped forth, “Well, I mean to say that Beelzebub is equal to scratchin’ notes.”“Who, madame?” politely asked Squire Tuck. “Undoubtedly that person is equal to the operation.”“I mean—him!” declared Aunt Lydia, boldly pointing toward B. Baggs. “Before we came in here, my nephew here and me were a–comparin’ idees, and from what he says and the way this note looks, I think Beelzebub—I think—yes, I’ll stick to it, that’s his name—came into the store, took that note where he must have found out my husband kept sich things, his Bible in the store—”“You certainly did know, Mr. Baggs,” said Uncle Boardman. “I remember you asked me about the time I gave the note, if I had a safe where I kept things, and I said I was apt to tuck notes and things into my Bible in the store,—a careless way I allow.”“From his Bible, took the note,” resumed Aunt Lydia, “cleared out through the winder in my sittin’–room, and there’s the rag your coat—now in the entry—left behind when youclimbed out and tore the linin’!” Here Aunt Lydia held up before Baggs the little rag that she had so carefully retained.All but Baggs had risen and were eagerly scrutinizing the note. Inwardly, Baggs was in a turmoil; outwardly, his face was flushed and his crooked eye was rolling like a vessel in a storm. When he spoke, he showed great self–control. His voice was placid as ever, and he waved his great, fat hands as if quieting an unnecessary tumult.“Now, ladies and gentlemen, what’s all this fuss for? I have doc—doc—doc—”“Doctor?” suggested Varney, wishing to help up his stumbling client. “Want the doctor?”“No—no! What kind of evidence do you call it? Doc—doc—”“Documentary?” suggested Squire Tuck.“Thank you, Squire,” said Baggs, bowing low. “I have dockermentry evidence about this note, and it’s in the coat that Madame Blake spoke about.”Here Baggs bowed toward “Madame Blake.”“And,” he continued, “if you will permit me, I will bring the very coat, and splain that rag business too.”Here he triumphantly looked about upon hisauditors as if he were carrying a point in the town meetings, where he had been famous as an orator.“Yes, I will bring the coat, this very moment”—and as he spoke, he rose and stepped toward the door into the store—“and no one need feel s’cluded from the investigation. All please stay here. Our young friend there”—he pointed toward Walter—“may remain. I will satisfy all—yes—I will—” and he was gone.“Well,” declared Squire Tuck, “this is interesting business,” and he looked toward Varney.“Yes, but just wait and give the man a chance to speak for himself. It’s a serious thing to charge a man with forgery.”“I should think, sir,” roared Uncle Boardman, “to take away a man’s property was a pretty serious matter also!”“Yes; serious, vile, imperdent, reskelly—” Aunt Lydia stood with opened mouth pouring out a torrent of hot adjectives, when Squire Tuck interrupted her and interrupted also the tumult that had become general, saying, shouting rather, “Now all be quiet! We want to hear from Baggs. He ought to have got that coat by this time.”The Squire stepped to the door into the store and opened it, wishing to assist the tardy Baggs.“Allow me, Brother Tuck, the pleasure of helping you,” said Varney with much politeness, and he followed the Squire who had stepped out into the store. Those in the sitting–room now heard one word from the Squire and it came in no gentle tones: “Gone!” What a rush there was from that sitting–room!“Oh!” exclaimed Aunt Lydia, “why didn’t I hold on to that coat while I had the chance!”“I know now why he was so willing that ‘our young friend’ should stay in the sitting–room,” remarked Walter.“But how did he get out?” inquired Uncle Boardman. “We did not hear the door–bell ring.”“There!” shouted the Squire, pointing at an opened window. “He was cunning enough not to ring that door–bell.”“Then he’s used to climin’ through folks’ winders,” said Aunt Lydia sarcastically.“Why didn’t I arrest him on the spot? Scatter, everybody, and chase hard! Come out here!” cried the Squire, and his gray hairs led off in the scramble made for the store door. The little bell rang violently now, and out they rushed, Aunt Lydia as forward as any.“He didn’t take any sleigh, you see, for we would have noticed that from the windows ofthe sitting–room. You come too!” said the Squire to Don Pedro, who, bare–headed, chanced to be coming from the direction of the kitchen. He had been almost asleep in a snug warm corner back of the stove, but the late banging of the door and that violent ringing of the door–bell had fully aroused him. He had hastily come out to see what the matter was. Wishing to avoid the company in the sitting–room, he had not tried to reach the store from that quarter, and trying another way, he succeeded in meeting the company by the doorstep.“What fur?” asked Don Pedro, with widening eyes.“To chase that rascal, Baggs,” said Squire Tuck.“Dis moment I’m ready! I’ll go for him! Whar?”“Get a hat! Be awful spry.”Interpreting a hat as meaning any hat, Don Pedro went into the store, and took the first hat he saw in the line where Baggs and others had hung their wearing apparel.“Mr. Blake,” said Squire Tuck, “you go along the road through the woods, rousing neighbors and making inquiries. I’ll take my team and dash down to The Harbor and rouse them there. Walter, you take the woods themselves,striking in at the left; and you, boy,” (addressing Don Pedro) “take the woods over here at the right. If you see Baggs, grip him and then shout for help, but hold him!”Off went this police force, Uncle Boardman impressing into his constabulary force his patient old mare that chanced to be already harnessed to a red pung, and standing in a shed at the rear of the house. Squire Tuck sprang into his sleigh, eagerly caught up the reins and was about to dash off, when he said to Varney, “The counsel on the other side can join in the pursuit, if he wishes.”Varney’s answer was a look of scorn. He went to a corner of the house that gave him a short view of this interesting chase, and there watched Uncle Boardman who urged on the old mare as if a whirlwind were after him. Aunt Lydia was anxious to have a hand in the hunt. Closing and locking the store door, securing all others, even the back door, as she passed out, lest “the pest” might get in again, she determined to search the barn. Armed with a pitchfork, she visited every corner she could think of, prudently sending her fork ahead and thoroughly “jabbing” the darkness of any nook before giving it personal examination. No enemy could be found. If one had been there, aftersuch a reconnoissance with the pitchfork, he would have come out more dead than alive. Aunt Lydia chanced to think of one more place that might hide the fugitive. It was a little tool closet. She had laid down her weapon of search, as the door required a tug with both hands. The door yielded and flew open. And there in one corner, she spied a pair of sharp, black eyes!“Massy!” exclaimed Aunt Lydia, turning to flee, but stumbling and falling. “Oh—h—h!” she screamed. “It’s he! Help—p!”The next moment, she was conscious that a spring had been made over her shoulders, and out of the barn–door went Billy, the old black cat, mad to think he had been carelessly shut up twenty–four hours in that hungry place. And Aunt Lydia, who had previously thought she would be so glad to find Baggs, was just as glad now that this occupant of the tool closet was not Baggs, and went into the house thoroughly satisfied. The others still kept up the pursuit. Squire Tuck roused The Harbor after a fashion not known for years. Uncle Boardman stirred up every farmhouse on his road. Walter and Don Pedro searched the woods, but in silence. The command had been not to shout until a seizure had been made andhelp was needed. The snow was not very deep in the woods, and progress was not difficult.“I don’t see anything!” thought Walter. “A fox has been along there, I guess, and those are a man’s tracks; but they are old ones.”Through the silent forest, under the green roof of the pines, across a frozen brook, Walter vigorously pushed. He saw nothing suspicious, heard nothing. “Caw—caw!” went an occasional crow overhead, but it was not Baggs forsaking his feet and taking to wings. Walter reached at last a low but vigorous young growth of spruce. Above their tops, did he see a gray stove–pipe hat? Did not Baggs wear such a hat that day? Walter’s heart leaped within him.“It’s Baggs’ hat!” he excitedly declared. “Now if he don’t see me and dodge me, and if I can just follow him without his noticing me a few moments, I’ll slip up to him so near that though he may dodge all he pleases, I—shall have him!”Suddenly, the hat—was it turning? Did Baggs see Walter, possibly? Walter stooped, then rose again, only to declare that the wearer was turning to make an observation. Several times this was done, and each time Walter slightly bowed himself to escape observation. Then the hat began to move rapidly.“He’s running!” thought Walter. “Now, go for him sharp!”It was a furious chase, but Walter did not gain on that violently bobbing gray hat as he anticipated. “He runs the fastest I ever saw, for a short, fat man!” declared Walter. “I’ll have him though.” He knew the woods well enough to be aware that somewhere beyond the low spruce growth was a swamp, and a bad one. He had heard Uncle Boardman say that the swamp was not frozen, lately.“That feller,” thought Walter, “will find he can’t cut through that swampy place so easily. It won’t hold him, and he will have to keep to the edge of the spruces and come out down here to the left, and I will aim for that point and meet him there, surprise and welcome him, and say, ‘How do you do, Mr. Baggs? Fine day!’ Ha—ha!”Would Walter’s confident predictions be successful? That agitated old hat of gray was forced by the yet yielding swamp to keep to the left, only to be met by Walter, who in turn found under the hat a surprise, even—Don Pedro!“Why, Don, you—booby, I’ve been chasing you all this time?”Don Pedro’s eyes were large and staring.“Walter, you—jes’ frighten me—a heap! My—breff—clean gone—honey! Ef I didn’t t’ink you’se a robber. Why—didn’t—you—holler, an’ show—who you was?”“Holler! We were told not to, till we got something to holler about. It would have frightened the game. What have you got on Baggs’ hat for? Oh dear—ha! ha! ha!” And Walter leaned against a tree and laughed till he was sore.“Me got Baggs’ hat? Squire said I might hab any, an’ I tuk the fus’ one handy. And do you want to know why I ran so hard? Back dar a piece I met a man, and he looked bad, and he was a handlin’ a knife sort ob careless, a bad looking knife.”Don Pedro rolled his eyes about tragically as he told his story, deepening his voice as he went on.“I axed him ef he had seen a man by de name ob Baggs who had probed hisself to be a reskel, an’ we was a–hantin’ fur him. He opened his knife and felt the edge sort ob careless an’ tole me I’d better leab; dat ef he foun’ me in dese woods agin, I’d nebber hab a chance to leab ’em. Dat Baggs he said was whar I couldn’t tech him, an’ he ’vised me fur to go hum. When I saw you, I s’posed it was him,an’ didn’t I run! I jest saw a hat and didn’t s’pose you was under it, but dat man, an’ it took de bref out ob me! What will ye do now?”“The hunt for Baggs, I guess, is up. However, we will make sure and go to the end of the woods, and there are two or three houses along there. The people will tell us if any sign of Baggs has been seen.”The end of the wood–lot was reached and inquiries were made at the farmhouses. No footprint of the runaway could be discovered anywhere, and Walter told Don Pedro they would go no farther.“We might as well take to the woods again on our way back. I’d like to see who that fellow is round with a knife and telling what he will do. We will stop that nonsense.” Don Pedro only needed a leader to be as brave a soldier as ever followed a flag, and he readily assented. Nothing came from the return search. No object more hostile than a squirrel was seen, and he gave a very friendly wink with his bright eyes as he peeped out of his snug quarters for the winter. Don Pedro’s use of the wrong hat was not the only case of the kind that occurred. Miss Green called the evening of that day.“Oh, Miss Blake, you ought to have seen thatlawyer, that Varney, to–day. He came riding by the post–office with a handkerchief tied round his head, and somebody said they saw him prancing round your house, trying every door, and he was as bare–headed as a bean when it has been shelled. I believe he borrowed a hat round here.”“There!” said Aunt Lydia, “I must have locked that man out afore I went to the barn! But there was no hats left on the nails where his things had been, for I looked up to ’em myself and there was nothin’ there when I went to the barn.”No, there were only naked nails in the wall. As for Varney’s hat, it had gone off on the head of Baggs, who had seized the first hat he met in his hasty exit, a conclusion the lawyer himself reached when making subsequent inquiries.Guilty Baggs had gone—nobody knew where. And the mystery of that man with the knife, in the woods? It was minutely discussed at the station, where Joe Cardridge had suddenly disappeared, leaving only a message for the keeper saying he would be back soon and prove that Walter Plympton was “a good deal wuss than he ought to be.” Joe coolly wished also to have his place kept for him.“I guess not,” remarked the keeper. “Aman going off that way without a notice, will have to wait a long time before he has a notice that he is wanted again. I will fill his place at once. Tucker Jones is home from his winter fishin’, and I will get him.”Tucker Jones, a big–boned, rugged young fisherman, was quickly established in the vacant berth.“Walter,” said Tom Walker, “putting all things together, I think it was Joe Cardridge that scared Don Pedro in the woods. He was a–hangin’ round the store somebody said. Probably he knew what was goin’ on, and followed his master, that Baggs. They were seen together by a man five miles from here. It is good that he has gone.”Nobody lamented his departure, not even his family. His wife and children could manage without him, and far more agreeably. At the station, the only element of dissension in the crew was now taken away. All noticed the harmony that marked the station life.“It only takes one stone in a fellow’s shoe,” remarked Tom Walker, “to upset everything, and Joe Cardridge has been the stone in the shoe.”Walter now fully enjoyed his life. True, there were rough, wild beats before him, butthe warm, cheerful shelter followed them. Then there was the constant sense of danger from that vast, uneasy sea, to give flavor to a life that might otherwise become insipid.“I am sorry,” he thought, “that my time at the station is almost up. It’s up in a few days, and I wonder when the district superintendent will be here to investigate my trouble. I don’t care for it. Let them hunt. I am right.”Yes, let slanders and envy hunt through our lives, and if we are right, who cares?Keeper Barney had said, “Joe’s goin’ off leaves Walter without an accuser, and I can’t easily believe he is wrong, but there is that bottle! What about that?”Yes, the flask, what about that? Joe had gone, but the flask remained on a shelf, and Walter still was confronted by this dumb, black accuser.CHAPTER XIX.A WILD STORM.At a life saving station, there are various drills in which the surfmen are exercised. There is the beach apparatus drill. “Open boat–room doors! Man the beach wagon!” shouts the keeper. Every man knows his place, the doors are opened, and the cart is rushed out. “Forward!” cries the keeper, and each man knows just where to station himself and pull. Then come the other orders. “Halt! Action!” A pole representing a wreck, the men proceed as if attempting a rescue, sending a line to the wreck. Then come other orders. “Man weather whip! Haul out! Man lee whip!”“Haul ashore!” and the buoy for conveying the crew supposed to be wrecked, travels backward and forward as often as desired. Then there is the boat practice, and the boat must be launched through the surf, and the mendrilled in the management of the oars. The crew must also practice with signals. Stations may be near enough to communicate with one another, and this is done in the day time with flags and in the night with star rockets and Coston lights. An example would be the showing of a red flag by day and the burning of a red Coston light and firing of a red rocket by night. It is the danger signal, and means that a wreck has been seen, or a vessel is discovered to be in need of help. By means of the box of flags that every station keeps under its roof, the crew can talk with any vessel off shore and needing assistance. The crew must also be practiced in methods of restoring the apparently drowned. It was one dreary, rainy day that Keeper Barney was drilling the crew in these last methods. Cook Charlie had offered himself as a subject on whom the crew might practice. The keeper commenced a list of questions, asking: “What first is to be done to the patient?” Cook Charlie stretched upon the floor submitted patiently to the pressing and pounding and other parts of the process of resuscitation.It was not a practice that on a dreary winter day when the sea was wrathfully roaring, could be classified as pleasantly suggestive.While they were resuscitating Cook Charlie, Walter glanced occasionally out of the window. The sea rapidly roughened, and huge waves were launching on the sands broken and angry masses of surf. A ragged curtain of fog was drawn across the rim of the sea, but it was only ragged near the shore. Farther out, its denseness was without a seam. The day ended with many jokes about Cook Charlie, the resuscitated mariner, but mingled with the laughter were dismal cries of the storm. The rain could be heard splashing against the window panes, and occasionally the whole window shook as if a violent hand had been laid upon it. All the while, there was the wrathful thunder of the sea as if over some invisible bridge just above the station, the heavy squadrons of the storm were gloomily marching. Still, around the old cook stove whose fire burnt jollily, echoed the laughter of the surfmen as they cracked their jokes and told humorous stories of the sea. So the evening wore away. The storm yet raged. As the different patrolmen arrived, they came with dripping hats, with faces wet by the storm, with clothes that hung stiffly about them.“It’s a howlin’ night,” reported Tom Walker, slamming his lantern on the table.“Just so at my end of the beach,” saidWoodbury Elliott, who immediately followed Tom. “Whew—w—w! An old–fashioned nor’easter!” “You saw nothin?” inquired Capt. Barney. And each patrol said, “Not a thing.”“I hope it will stay so, for I think it’s goin’ to be the wust of the season. Come, boys, all pile upstairs early. There’s some hard trampin’ to be done ’fore daybreak.”“Wall, we can say we have resuscitated one man to–day,” said Slim Tarleton.“Ah, but we may have some real cases to–morrow. God forbid!”It was Walter’s watch in the morning, from four till sunrise. He slept uneasily till his watch, vexed by dreams of wreck and rescue, of dead men’s faces and living wives’ sorrow. Rising, he dressed himself hurriedly a little before four. How the building shook in the wind, while the sea without was furious in its uproar!“I’d like to stay in that warm bed. Booh! That cold walk makes me shiver! No help for it,” thought Walter, as he moved reluctantly toward the stairway and then descended it.In the kitchen, dripping like a fish just pulled out of the water, was Slim Tarleton. He had finished his watch and Walter was his successor.“I’d like to go for you, Walter, but it’s fournow, and morning’s not such a terrible way off.”“All quiet?”“Everything except the sea, and that acts as bad as it can. Oh, I don’t imagine there will be any trouble.”“Here is your Coston light, time–detector and so on,” said Keeper Barney. “Dress snug, for it blows; and dress thick, for it is cold. If anything happens, let us know.”“Aye, aye, Cap’n!” and out into the dark and the cold and the rain, strode our young knight, looking in his storm gear more like an Eskimo than a representative of any knightly age. The north–east wind blew at him as if it wanted to push this meddler back into the station; but with one arm around his lantern as if it were a baby that he wished to shield, he struggled over the rocks down to the strip of sand not yet covered by the tide. He saw nothing ten feet away, but he heard—no pen can describe the bellowing of this monster plunging and frothing at his feet. The lantern shot little gleams of light on the confused masses of foam along the edge of the shore, and he knew that there was a tumbling wall of ghastly white just beyond.“What if my lantern should go out!” he exclaimed nervously. He turned from the windand unbuttoning his outside coat, folded it around his lantern, letting out only enough light to show him where to plant his feet. Then he struggled on. It was a hard walk in a storm that had no mercy. He was pushing ahead, when, lifting his face to the wild rain and attempting to look through it, he saw—a jagged line of fire curving up into the air! The next moment, he trembled with excitement.“A wreck!” was the thought flashing through his mind. That one glance at the rocket above the sea seemed to change into an antelope the slowly plodding surfman. He sprang over the rocks that lined the beach. There was an ice wall that had bothered him a minute ago, but he now mastered it and climbed to high ground. Drawing out his signal, he fired it, and then waving madly this crimson answer of hope to a mariner’s prayer of fire, he ran to the station. Over fragments of ice, into pools of water, along sharp ledges, he flew as if some kindly power had withdrawn his cowhide boots and furnished him with wings instead; but how much faster he did want to go! If he were only electricity, or light itself, and could shoot to the station at once! He reached it though, finally. Keeper Barney was sitting by the stove trying to read, when Walter threw openthe kitchen door, and burst in, waving his lantern and crying, “A wreck! Quick!”“Heavens, boy! In this storm! All hands turn out!” he screamed, even before he reached the foot of the stairs leading up to the crew’s room. He must have repeated it half a dozen times, on his way to their beds. The next moment there were several bounces upon the floor. After a hurried dressing, there was a confused rushing for the stairs. Men appeared wearing one boot and lugging the other, or with half their clothes in their arms, while Tucker Jones, the man who took Joe Cardridge’s place, was trying to work his arms through the legs of his pants, thinking he was handling his jacket. Seavey Lowd, the other patrol, now arrived, or rather came rushing in, shouting and confirming the news. The little living–room was confused with excitement, the men hurrying here and there, trying to find hat or jacket or coat; and several were trying hard to find their senses. Keeper Barney had his, now, and he spoke coolly to the men.“Now listen, boys! Steady! It will be useless to take the boat. We must go out with the beach apparatus. Do as well as you can. You all know your places. Hit as high a mark as you can.” As he spoke, he lead the wayinto the boat–room, and then he issued the familiar order: “Open boat–room doors! Man the beach wagon!”How those young Titans worked! The outer doors flew open, and a strong, cold draft of wintry air rushed in. Every man knew his place in hauling. Two gripped the shafts, four laid hold of the drag ropes.“Forward!” rang out the word of command from the keeper, who followed with his lantern.Through the thick slush or over masses of ice, the cart was dragged to the sands which the tide had not flooded.“There’s the wreck!” some one shouted, or tried to shout amid the roar of the surf. An arrow of fire shooting up into the night shadows still lingering on the sea, showed the crew that they must go farther down the beach. What a wearisome journey with the cart it was!“Cheer ’em up with a Coston light, boys!” the keeper would occasionally shout. At last, when he judged they were about opposite the wreck, he cried, “Halt!” There was a waiting for the light, that the exact location of the wreck might be declared, and in the meantime all possible preparations for the rescue were made.The surf men knew what to do, as there had been many drills in the handling of the apparatus. Each man, according to his number, had his particular piece of work. It was the place of No. 4, Seavey Lowd, to throw the breeches buoy off the cart, and Seavey did it. Walter, as No. 6, was one of those that removed the sand anchor, pick and shovel. The keeper, and No. 1, Tom Walker, took the gun down. Nos. 2 and 3, Slim Tarleton and Woodbury Elliott, removed the shot–line box.“Bury the sand anchor up here!” called out the keeper. The sand anchor consisted of two stout pieces of hard wood, each six feet long, two inches thick and eight wide. These were crossed at their centers and securely fastened together. A stout iron ring projected from the center of the sand anchor. How rapidly pick and shovel were worked, and a deep trench dug in which the anchor was laid and there firmly imbedded! This buried anchor was designed to secure the shore end of the hawser to be sent out to the wreck. The hawser terminated in a double pulley–block, by which it could be tightened, and a short rope gripped the block and the anchor, binding them together. The “crotch” was made of two stout pieces of wood ten feet long. Near the top, these were crossed andwhen set up suggested an X. It was No. 4, Seavey Lowd, who looked after the crotch, and at the proper time he was to set it up on the beach. It was Seavey’s duty also to carry the end of the hawser to the foot of the crotch over which it was to be stretched to the sand anchor.In the meantime the captain and Tom Walker were supposed to look after the gun, while Slim Tarleton and Woodbury Elliott were expected to deposit the shot–line box about three feet from the gun. The line had been coiled about pins in a frame, and the latter was so arranged that it could be removed, leaving the line wound in diagonal loops, and at liberty to fly after the shot to which it was to be attached. During the interim of waiting, the life–car was also brought from the station. That dismal wreck could at last be plainly seen, about three hundred feet from the shore. The spray boiled about the dark hull as if it had been set in the crater of a volcano. The excitement among the surfmen increased. The keeper had loaded the gun, and the shot had been inserted and the line tied to an eye in the shank protruding from the shot. The keeper stood in the rear of the gun, and was sighting over it, shouting to Nos. 1 and 2, “Right!” or “Left!” And they trained the muzzle accordingly.“Well!” he cried, and the gun came to a rest.It was pointing at the wreck. The necessary elevation was then given to the gun, and the primer inserted. When everything was arranged, the keeper shouted, “Ready!”Whizz—z—bang—g—g!Away went the shot, the line faithfully following. How its flight was watched! Would it fall short of the wreck and uselessly drop into the water? No! it had fallen across the vessel and the crew quickly seized it. A shout went up from the surfmen: “Hur—rah—h! Hurrah—h—h!” To the shot–line, was now tied the “whip.” This was reeved through a single pulley–block, making what is termed an endless line. To it was attached a tally board carrying printed directions in English and French, telling those on board how to properly secure this “whip” or endless line. Keeper Barney was now signaling to the wreck.“He means to have them haul the whip on board,” thought Walter.Quickly the whip line was going out to the vessel, and was there made fast.“They are signaling to us to go ahead, and do the next thing,” thought Walter. All the surfmen knew what that next thing was. The whip had been secured to the sand anchor, andnow Nos. 1 and 2, Tom Walker and Slim Tarleton were handling the hawser, a still stouter line, and they attached it to the whip. As the keeper paid out the hawser, others manned the whip and hauled off to the wreck the new sturdy friend coming to the rescue. The men on the vessel guided by a tally board attached to the hawser, secured it to the mast a foot and a half higher than the hauling line or whip. On shore, the hawser had been stretched across the crotch and connected with the sand anchor. There now swung above the frothing breakers, reaching from shore to ship, this stout hawser four inches in circumference, and below it was the endless line or whip. The breeches buoy was now brought forward. This buoy consisted of a cork life–preserver, circular, from which hung canvas breeches with very short legs. Four ropes that gripped the circle of cork, met above in a ring of iron, and this was connected with a block called a “traveler.” This block was “snapped on to the hawser,” and the ends of the whip were also bent into the block–strap and secured. Then the buoy began its travels to the wreck, the men hauling on the whip. “Somebody has jumped into that buoy,” cried Tom Walker as he watched the wreck. Strong hands were laid on the whip, and above the breakers danced the breeches buoy, a man’s head and body now rising above it while his legs dangled below.“Strong hands were laid on the whip”(p.320).“Here she comes!” sung out Slim Tarleton.“Herehecomes, I guess,” suggested Woodbury Elliott.Come, he did, nearer, nearer, the surfmen steadily hauling on the line; and at last the breeches buoy was in the midst of the brave circle of rescuers.“How are ye?” called out the occupant of the buoy, a sharp–nosed, red–headed man. “Much obleeged.”“Oh, you’re welcome!” said Keeper Barney.“How are all the folks at sea?” inquired Tom Walker.“Does it look nat’ral round here?” asked Seavey Lowd.“Altogether too nat’ral for me,” replied the arrival by this ocean air–line. “Ef we didn’t have a tough night!”The man had now disembarked from this canvas–and–cork ship, and stood on the sands.The keeper was hurriedly giving the order to “haul out,” when the stranger asked, “Haven’t ye suthin’ bigger and snugger ye could send out? Some of the folks there are awful weak.”“Passengers?” inquired the keeper.“Jest so.”“All right. We will put on the life–car soon as we get some of the crew ashore. People can ride snug in that life–car. How long will your craft hold together?”“She’s a good deal smashed, Cap’n, but she can stand it a while longer.”“Man the weather–whip! Haul out!” the keeper was shouting. Out to the wreck, the breeches buoy traveled, and then returned with its freight of a second man.“Haul the hawser taut there!” cried the keeper to Walter and Woodbury, who stood near the sand anchor and handled the tackle for tightening the hawser. Each rescued man proved a rescuer, going to work at once. There were three more brought ashore by the buoy, and then the keeper ordered the life–car forward. The buoy was quickly removed, and in its place above the roaring surf hung the life–car, riding along the hawser on its way to the wreck. The life–car was shaped like a boat, made of galvanized sheet iron. It was about eleven feet long, three deep, and over four wide, and would carry a load of six or seven persons. It was roofed over, and its cargo was received through a hatch which was securely covered, but little openings in the top admitted the air. The car had now gone to the wreck, had received its load, and in response to the keeper’s “haul ashore!” was traveling landward along the hawser. It was a feeble, shivering lot of mortals who crawled through the hatch at the end of the trip.“Come he did, nearer, nearer!”(p.321).“Any more?” asked the keeper. “Two and the captain,” said an old man. Once more the life–car was hauled out to the wreck, while Walter was sent to the station with the chilled passengers and a sailor whom the storm had overcome. As Walter walked along the sands, he watched the terrible agitation of the water near him.The sea would swell into long folds of angry green, and these would rush toward the shore, swelling, threatening, more and more angry, greener, perhaps tipped with a scanty wreath of foam, only to roll over menacingly, tumbling, crashing in furious uproar, breaking into a million bits of foam. As an opposing rock was struck by a wave, this would be thrown up into a huge mound of froth that broke all along its summit into a delicate, misty veil of lace. This wave was only the front rank of an army whose name was legion, rolling, rushing in wrath toward the land, breaking and foaming, clambering up the high shore–ledges to vainly tearat them, smothering and drowning what could not be rooted up and borne away. In what faultless curves they turned over, these gigantic billows when they struck the shore, rings of emerald, wheels of porphyry, arcs of spheres of crystal! Down, down, down, then plunged the water, and these cataracts met their doom in a hopeless swirl of surf. All along the beach was the frothing tumble of these cascades of the ocean. Beyond the shore–waves it was one confusing mass of ghostly water, of white hands lifted and white faces raised,—in pity and prayer? No, in an anger where all color disappears, where is only the aspect, of a wrath, ghastly and awful. Occasionally some log would come out of this wild whirlpool of the demons, some fragment of a ship torn by the storm as if an animal, limb from limb, and flung in scorn upon the shore. What a tale each fragment could have told! Perhaps it was a handful of moss plucked from a rock, or a starfish, or the tiniest mussels gathered up from the bottom of the sea and then shot landward.How the sea roared! It seemed as if into that wild chorus all the notes of angry winds and mad torrents, and the crash of thunder, and the voices of men in their human wrath, and the shouts of demons in their satanic fury had beengathered, and now were let loose with all the confusion of the fiercest hurricane. Now and then, Walter thought he caught the dismal groan of a fog–horn attached to a buoy at the mouth of the river, and intended to warn mariners of the nearness of sand bar and rockledge. It was an illusion though, for who in the storm could hear any such agency piping out its feeble little note of warning?In the meantime, the car had brought from the wreck its last load. The captain was a part of it, a stout, heavy, dark–bearded man.“You all here?” asked Keeper Barney.“All that started,” replied the captain. “Two men—they were passengers—left on a life–savin’ mattress. We told ’em to wait any way till daylight, but they said the tide was right and would drift ’em ashore and they’d risk it. They was fearful skittish lest the vessel might break up. Massy! The sea gobbled ’em up less than no time, is my ’pinion. They left some time ago.”“Well, boys, I’ll have the beach patrolled, of course, and something may be seen of the men. Those whose watch it is are off already, and the rest of you pack up what things are here, and go back to the station, and Cook Charlie will have a hot breakfast ready for the menfrom the wreck, and for the rest too, soon as possible.”While hot coffee and dry clothes were making every one comfortable at the station, it was Tom Walker, one of the surfmen out patrolling, that hurried into the living–room, startling the station crew with the announcement, “There’s a man in the Chair!”If a rocket from some wreck at sea had come up through the floor of the station and made its hideous, fiery racket in the very midst of the station crew, a greater excitement could not have followed. Clinging to the jagged rocks at the Crescent, was some poor soul thrown up by the sea, piteously looking in helpless appeal to the houses not so very far away and yet separated from him by a channel of foaming wrath! Every surfman could seem to make out in his thoughts a pale face frantically appealing to him through the wild storm, and they began to dress again for their perilous work.“Cap’n Barney,” said Tom Walker to the keeper, “if I may suggest it, I think we might get somewhere near him with our surf–boat. We couldn’t have touched the wreck, and can’t now, out there on Split Ledge, but we might get our boat up to the village and then launch her in the river, and so work her down towardthe Chair. The tide has turned, and every moment, there is less water ’tween the Crescent and the shore, and that will help us.”“Good idea, Tom,” replied the keeper. “And instead of getting horses, as it will take so much time, there are so many of us here and all will take hold, we can make better time to haul the boat–carriage ourselves. What say? It is a man’s life at stake.”“Aye, aye!” was the deep, hearty chorus in response from all.As the boat made its appearance in the village volunteers appeared also, who dragged heartily on the ropes of the carriage. It was a strange sight in the little village, that stormy morning, the lengthening file of rough, strong–handed men pulling on the rope of the carriage while the boys shouted away and thrust in their small hands wherever any chance for grasping the rope showed itself, and some of the women that came out hurriedly from their homes, their shawls pinned over their heads, also joined the procession. The water was reached and the boat launched.When, manned by a stalwart crew,—volunteers from The Harbor taking the place of the absent patrols,—the boat moved off into the river, cheers arose from those on shore. Butwhat about the man all this time in the Chair? Did he see the boat coming, and did he cheer also?“Can you see him now?” eagerly asked the men of Keeper Barney, who was skillfully managing his steering oar amid the heavy swash of the current.The keeper nodded his head in assent.The boat cleared the last house in the village, and from this point the Chair could be more distinctly seen.“See him now, Cap’n?”The keeper nodded his head. The boat tossed more uneasily now, for the harbor here began to open into the sea, and the full strength of the wind from the stormy north–east smote it. The upper end of the Crescent was very near, and its first ledges, black and stubborn, rose out of the white, angry tumult. Any one seeking refuge here would not have found broad standing room, while at the Chair the exposure was far greater. The man, though, still maintained his hold.“He’s there, is he?” some one would shout through the noise of the storm, and Keeper Barney would silently nod assent.I wonder what the man in the Chair was thinking of, as he grasped that rocky projection,that little low fence between him and death! He was one of the two men who had trusted their chances to that life–preserver. God alone knew where the second man was in this hellish tumult of wind and sea. The man in the Chair had been flung into it by a violent wave and he had gripped it with all the energy he could possibly rally. He did not want to die. The sea looked cold and deep, and the white foam beating upon him, to his imagination had teeth that threatened to fasten into him and tear him. He could sometimes, when his back was half turned to the sea, catch the outlines of the big billows as they rolled up and rolled toward him, and they came on with such fury that he shrank closer to this rock, and he clung more tenaciously even when some of them failed to reach him. Occasionally a huge billow would strike him and drench him, and then he would shiver and throw off the foam as if trying to recover from some murderous blow given by an animal. It would have been easy to have yielded to one of those waves and allowed it to sweep him away into a swift death, but who does not cling to life? A wild sky, a pitiless rain, and only a black rock in a maelstrom—better this than a grave in that maelstrom. So the man felt. As he held on, his thoughts would go back in spite of him. Notthat he cared to think. He would gladly have given the subject a grave in that sea from which he shrank, but if he had tried to throw it off and drop it there, it would have had a resurrection and come up. He thought of the time when he was a little boy in this very neighborhood, visiting here, one far off summer. His younger sister was with him. He could easily recall her blue eyes that framed a constant smile. He heard the happy ring of her laugh, even out there in the noisy waters. He did not want to hear it, but hear it he did. There had been a quarrel with her one day, and he resolved in a mood of anger that was almost insane, to punish her. The quarrel had occurred at the Chair which he knew sometimes was a bad place to be in, the older people had told him. When the tide was high, and behind it was a storm pushing violently the waters landward, that lonely piece of rock, the Chair, was a dangerous position to occupy. There was a gray, misty sky that day, when the boy led his sister, at low tide, across the sands to the Crescent ledges. He pleasantly told her to stay at the Chair and he would come for her in a little while. “The waves were pretty,” he said, “and she could watch them till he came back.” Then he left her. In half an hour he knew the tide wouldflood the sands and isolate the Chair. He would be absent, he said to himself, perhaps two hours. That would give her a good fright and would be enough to satisfy him. But he did not get back to the shore so soon as two hours. Something had detained him. In the meantime, the fog came on. The rain began to beat down. The men were almost all of them away on fishing cruises. Only a few decrepit fishermen were at home, and they did not like to venture off into the uneasy waters now enclosing the Crescent ledges unless it was some special reason urging them, and as the boy was ashamed to confess that he had left his sister at the Chair, no rough but friendly hand of any seaman was reached out to grasp her. In the morning though, his conscience frightened him into an explanation of his urgency, and a relief party of old men went at once. The Chair however was empty. That morning, there came ashore a sweet little face with closed eyes, and it confirmed the story told by that vacant Chair. So many, many years ago, did this all happen, and now it was coming back as a sad thing of yesterday.“She’s a–lookin’ at me!” said the man in the Chair. “I can see her eyes!”Yes, through the veil of the storm theyseemed to penetrate and reproachfully search his heart.“I will look another way,” he thought, but they seemed to follow him. Tender and full of sorrow, they looked at him on every side. He saw the waves rushing at him and he shrank from them only to meet the eyes that he little cared to behold. He avoided these, but there were the billows rushing at him again. So he was pursued. It seemed to him as if he must lose his mind, and then would he not lose his hold on the rock? That tormented him anew.But—but—look! Amid the ragged mass of flying foam jutting above the walls of the angrily rising waves, he saw a boat! Yes, he could make out the heads of the men that were rowing! They were coming to rescue him! He had enemies on shore who would seize him and put him behind stone walls, and these men in the boat might hand him over to those enemies, but no matter, he would be rescued from the place of torment he was in. Anything to be saved from that, and those men would save him! The rush of exultant feeling was so great that it affected him even as a wave threatening to carry him away, but he tightened his loosened grasp and looked up again. Yes, they were coming nearer. He could see them, countthem,—one, two, three, four, five, six, besides the man steering. And they saw him! Yes, they all saw him. To reach him, the boat slightly changed its course, and now all the crew looking sidewise could see this castaway. It was Walter who recognized him. Raising his head, straining his vision to catch a fuller view of the man bending over and half veiled by the misty spray thrown up above the Chair there came before Walter once more the form that he had seen that morning in his uncle’s store when the note so mysteriously disappeared, that form which he had seen again when patrolling the beach off the Crescent, one wild November day.“Baggs!” he now shouted to the crew in the surf–boat. “It is Baggs!” As by a common impulse, every man ceased rowing and rested on his oar, the keeper holding the boat with his long steering–oar.“Yes, yes!” “That is the man!” “It’s Baggs!” were the various exclamations that broke from the crew’s lips.“He’s waving a hand to us!” said Walter.“Let him wave and die!” some one exclaimed.“No, I’d save a dog off in that place!” said the keeper.“That’s so!” replied Walter.“That’s so!” said several.It was not so much an expression of opinion by one man or several, as the voice rather of that noble spirit which has its embodiment in our entire Life Saving Service and proves it by its yearly record.“Row away, men!” shouted the keeper. “He’s there! I see him.”But Baggs changed his position. He knew that it would be difficult to rescue him even with that boat, such a raging sea broke all about the rock to which he clung. The boat must be held off at a little distance from the ledge and then a rope thrown to him. He must stand his chances of grasping this only hope of safety. The tide had begun to subside, and another part of the ledge was now jutting above the surf. Whether he thought he could be rescued better from this second position and so tried to reach it, or whether in the increasing nearness of the rescue–party he grew careless, and accidentally slipped out of the Chair and was quickly, eagerly, seized by a wave and hurried away, who could say? It was Slim Tarleton who just before had said to the keeper, “He’s holdin’ on, Cap’n, ain’t he?” And the keeper nodded yes with his head.“Is he there now, Cap’n?” asked Seavey Lowd the next minute. The keeper’s head did not move—he only fastened his eyes steadily on the ledge fringed by the surf, as if trying to determine a fact with certainty, and then rising in his seat, said solemnly, “I—b’lieve—he’s—gone! Yes, gone!”Gone, and he left no more trace behind than a leaf falling through the air. Gone into that whirling, eddying sea, into that deep, dark grave so long clutching at him, and which now buried him under its waves forever! The boat could not possibly reach him. Gone, gone!“Well, men,” said the keeper to the crew, who resting on their oars looked with sober faces at the empty Chair into which the waves now mockingly flung their spray as its only occupant, “we might take a turn round and then go home, but that hunt is all up. Don’t see a sign of him.”The bow of the surf–boat was headed for The Harbor, after a season of waiting. And strong arms steadily pulled it home.That afternoon, the captain of the wrecked vessel walking on the sands at low tide, reported at the station that a body had come ashore. “It’s t’other passenger,” he said, “who came ashore as I told you. You know two started on a life–savin’ thing. It’s ’bout two hundred feet from here.”Keeper Barney and Walter followed him to the designated spot, and there lying on the beach, his long dark hair hanging in a tangle over his face as if trying to veil from the world some dishonored object, was Joe Cardridge. The body was removed to a shed in a field that skirted the shore–rocks. Various articles were found upon the body, and they were removed by the keeper for preservation. “What is this?” asked the keeper, as he took from an inner pocket of the blouse that Joe had worn, an envelope. “A letter inside this,” said the keeper, “and it is directed to me!”The address was worn and the water had affected it, and yet the superscription could be made out.“A letter for me, brought by a strange mail–carrier,” said the keeper. “I will see what it is.”“Why,” he exclaimed, “that is a letter from our district superintendent! Yes, it is the missin’ one that Walter couldn’t find! There is the date. That clears Walter.”“I guess he was cleared afore,” declared Tom Walker, who was present.Another mystery was solved that day.Many people were attracted to the beach by the tragedy of the wreck, and among them came Miss P. Green, Aunt Lydia, and other women. Some of Joe Cardridge’s family were at the station. The blouse that he had worn, was drying before the stove.“What’s that?” queried Aunt Lydia, who had come to the station. Her sharp bright eyes were fastened on a sleeve of the blouse, turned back at the wrist. “If there ain’t that blue W that I tucked away in the white linin’ of Walter’s blouse!”“Where?” asked Tom Walker.“There!” replied Aunt Lydia. “That is Walter’s coat, I know.”“Walter’s coat?” asked Keeper Barney, who had joined the circle of inspection.“Yes,” replied Aunt Lydia, “I sewed a blue W on to the white linin’ of Walter’s sleeve, and here it is.”“Humph!” said the keeper. “Joe Cardridge exchanged blouses with Walter, that is what he did, and carried off the missin’ letter.”“But—but—” said little Charlie Cardridge who was present, and overhearing the conversation wished to show that some of the property in the room did belong to his father, “that’s father’s. Looks like his, anyway.” He waspointing at the flask found in Walter’s pocket and now standing on the sill of a window in the station. The flask was handed to Charlie. Turning it over, he exclaimed, “There’s a C! That is father’s.”In the bottom of the flask the letter C had been blown, and it now proved who the real owner of that mysterious property had been.“No doubt about it!” declared Tom Walker, who with others of the crew had come into the kitchen. “No doubt about it! There was an exchange of blouses by the owner of the flask, and the latter was left by Joe as a witness agin Walter. A pretty deep game! Walter, give us your hand. I knew before though that you were all right.”Tom gripped Walter’s hand as if it were a pump–handle on a dry, hot, thirsty day. Others congratulated Walter, and none more readily than the keeper.There was no investigation by the district superintendent when he arrived, and the news of the wreck brought him the next day.

CHAPTER XVII.A SOUL IN NEED.Two days after Walter’s fall in the night, he had leave of absence extending from sunrise to sunset. He did not care to take it, his time at the station was so brief, and especially as he was anxious to prove his purpose to be loyal to all obligations resting upon him.“It is your turn to be off, Walter,” said the keeper. “You are fairly entitled to it, and I want you to have what is yours. Be on hand at sunset. You may learn something in your favor, and you had better improve your chance.”With the keeper’s apparent kindness went an insinuation that Walter’s course had not entirely been swept clean of every shadow of suspicion, and if he could find a broom to do this sweeping, it was plainly suggested that he had better secure it. That remark decided Walterin his course. He left the station in no pleasant mood of mind, and the keeper’s words had occasioned it. “If I can, I will get that help,” thought Walter, walking off rapidly, “but—where?”He was puzzled. One memory came to him, however. It was what his father said once: “Walter, if things go wrong, if people say we are wrong and yet we know we are right, but can’t somehow show it and prove it, then wait and let God do the proving. He is as much interested in good character as we, more so even, and He will bring things round right. Tie up to that post.”“I will tie up to that post,” declared Walter.He did not go directly to his uncle’s, but took the road to The Harbor.“Walter!” said a voice as he was passing the post–office. He turned quickly. A young woman had just left Miss P. Green’s headquarters, and was calling to him. It was May Elliott. She looked at him in her earnest way, her blue eyes brightening as she said, “I only want to say that I hope you won’t care for those stories about you at the station. Your friends have confidence in you, and don’t believe what has been said against you.”“Thank you. That does me good. It’spretty hard to be accused when you are innocent.”“Well, you wait. The truth will come out; and when it comes, you will be justified. Oh, there is something else on my mind. Did you know that Chauncy Aldrich was sick?”“I only heard that he was indoors with some trouble.”“They say he is pretty sick, and Miss P. Green, where he is boarding, says he is low–spirited. I did not know but that you might like to call and see him.”Waiter declared that he would go at once. He found Chauncy in a little room with a single window. From this there was a view across the white snowfields to the blackish ocean, scowling angrily like an immense eye under a dark, heavy lid of cloud. Chauncy was lying on his bed, his head raised a little that he might look out upon the winter scenery. His eyes were bright but somber, and his hands were thin and white. That cold bath to which his uncle had unceremoniously treated him, and which he afterwards attempted to explain as a “little joke,” had provoked the sickness so bleaching and weakening and thinning the once vigorous young trader. Every feature showed the effect of the hard fever that hadattacked him. Even the knob of hair that was so accustomed to bristle on Chauncy’s head and silently to defy all the world, had now been humbled. His hair in a thick, tangled mass, suggested a fort in ruins.“Plympton, how are you? I’m real glad to see you. Sit down, old boy. Where have you been all this time?”“At the station, you know. They tie us pretty tight, but it is my day off. I’m real sorry you are sick, Aldrich.”“O thank you! Guess I shall pull through it, but it’s awful hard to be cooped up here,” and as he said this, he kicked at the bed–clothes with a sudden energy. “A business man, you know, that is used to stirring, can’t come down to this easily. I’m real glad you came in. Say, are you going up to your uncle’s?”“I thought I should.”“Well—”Chauncy hesitated. He wished to say something about his Uncle Bezaleel. He did not know very much about Baggs’ business relations to Boardman Blake. In spite of Baggs’ blustering display of confidence in his nephew, any ostentatious intimations that Chauncy knew everything about his business in general, Chauncy knew very little. One reason was that theuncle’s business, after all the brag, was very limited, and then Bezaleel knew that Chauncy had too much principle to back him in certain dishonest schemes. The young man now hesitated, impelled to say something about his uncle, and yet held back by an unwillingness to damage one with whom he had been associated.“I guess you had better go to your uncle’s, Plympton. There is going to be a conference there, I believe, my uncle and his lawyer, and your uncle and his lawyer, and oh, I don’t know what else. Miss Green told me; and bless me, what that mail–bag don’t know, isn’t worth the knowing. She will hold more news than an ocean steamer. Now mind, Plympton, I don’t know what is up. Take my word for it. But there is something to pay, and I would go there.”“I shall, most certainly,” and Walter’s eye flashed like that of a watch dog who starts in the night as he catches the stealthy step of a burglar. “I hope it is nothing serious with my uncle.”“I don’t know how it is; but two lawyers—that means a rush in the market, Plympton; yes, a rush.”Chauncy ceased talking. His efforts at conversation had already wearied him. He layupon his bed silently arguing a point. This “rush in the market” meant a very significant movement by his enterprising uncle, though its exact nature was a mystery to Chauncy. His uncle’s slippery ways had suggested to him one occasion when he himself had been false to Walter, and almost involuntarily he exclaimed, as one may do in sickness that weakens the control of the mind over itself,—”I don’t think I ever tried to deceive you, save once. I hope though you won’t hold it against me.”Walter caught this confession imperfectly; and what made him guess the occasion to which Chauncy referred? Was it a chance look out of the window toward the rocks of the Crescent, about which the surf had wound its scarf of snow? Walter thought of the day when he saw Bezaleel Baggs on the shore looking off toward the Chair. He was reminded of Bezaleel’s resemblance to the mysterious form he saw one morning in Boardman Blake’s store, that morning when Chauncy Aldrich so persistently tried to call off Walter’s attention from the store. Walter now turned suddenly to the invalid.“Aldrich, see here. What do you mean by saying you deceived me once? I can only think of one time when I guess you did try topull the wool over my eyes, and I want you to own up if it was so. Do you remember one morning when I first came this way to stop? I was opening my uncle’s store and you drove down in a wagon, and I came out to the door and saw you there, and I fancied I saw somebody else in the store?”Chauncy nodded his head in assent. Then he added slowly, “That’s—the time—I mean, too.”“Look here! Wasn’t that your uncle inside the store?”Chauncy hesitated. He spoke at last, and with sudden force. “Plympton, I don’t want to deceive you now; but I did then, and am sorry. It was my uncle in the store. Now, I don’t want to go back on anybody, sick as I am. He is my mother’s brother, if he isn’t what he ought to be.” His lip quivered. He was thinking of a mother, long ago at rest in death.“Perhaps you mean that you don’t want me to say anything about it, and that it will look as if you had turned against your uncle. I don’t think I need to speak of you. I saw him with my own eyes, though I don’t know what he was up to there in the store.”“I don’t,” whispered Chauncy.“It is a satisfaction to have you confirm myopinion, and as for yourself anything between us is all settled.”“Thank you.”“There, I have bothered you too long. I didn’t mean to stay here all this while.”“I kept you, I kept you. Don’t go. It’s fearful lonesome here, save when Green comes up; and then she may look at me and say I make her think of her brother who died, and cries—well, that don’t help a feller; and I stay here and think, you know. Say, Plympton!” Chauncy’s eyes shone out bright and sharp. “Say, I don’t want to die!”“Oh, I don’t believe you will. I am thinking of this: soon as I get off from the station,—and my time is up in a few days,—how would you like to have me be your nurse? I could sit with you, you know, and I am strong and could lift you easily when you wanted to change about.”Strong? The very sight of the young surfman so muscular and healthy was an elixir to Chauncy. He seemed to take strength from Walter at once, and certainly his own stock needed reinforcement, for he was very feeble.Walter pitied him; “Poor fellow!” he said, and Walter laid his hand on Chauncy’sforehead and gently stroked it. “I’m sorry for you, and I’ll help you.”The tears came in Chauncy’s eyes.“Weak, you see, Plympton, weak as a baby. I should like to have you come first rate. You make—me—think—of my mother when she was alive—she did that—put her hand there, you know.” The tears came faster now.“Now I would be quiet,” said Walter soothingly.“Oh, this don’t hurt me, only when Green comes and looks at me, as much as to say: ‘A bad bargain, a bad bargain!’ See here, Plympton! Do you remember May Elliott’s composition at the Academy?”“Yes, I’m sure I do.”“Well, I have thought of that a lot. You might not think so, but I have, driving round you know, a business man, watching the market, you know. She said the life—what was it?”“The life that does not take others into account, God and another life—that’s the idea—was making a great mistake.”“Yes, that’s it; and lying here, I have said to myself, ‘Aldrich, you’ve made a mistake. You are buying stock that will fetch precious little. Yes, a mistake.’”“Well, Aldrich, I won’t keep you talking; but before I go, why not take God into account, let me ask? Why not tell Him how much you need Him, that you are sorry, and want Him to help you to a better life, and that you give yourself to Him?”“He’d get a tremendous poor bargain if He took me. All run down now.”“God knows all that. Let’s see. What is that verse about God commending His love toward us, saying while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us?”“Christ died for us! That does me good. That’s like cold water when the fever is on and you are fearful thirsty,” and Chauncy moved his lips as if drinking.“Then there is another verse—I don’t know as I say it exactly, but I can give the idea—that when we were without strength, Christ died for the ungodly.”“Yes, yes,” and again a thirsty soul drank of this cool goblet of good news.“Plympton, I say!”He spoke with much emphasis, as if he had a matter of great importance to relate or a favor to ask.“I don’t know as you have a prayer handy you could say, have you?”Walter hesitated. What prayer could he say that would help another? There was the Lord’s Prayer, though. He could say that. Kneeling and holding Chauncy by the hand—how tightly Chauncy clung to that strong, friendly hand—Walter began, “Our Father!”“Our Father,” repeated Chauncy, and then followed Walter through the prayer.Walter added a few more words in which he tried to approach an ever present, ever willing Saviour, beseeching that Chauncy might be helped right there to give himself entirely up to God; braiding into his words, the touching, solemn collect: “Assist us mercifully, O Lord, in these our supplications and prayers.”Walter then rose from his knees.“That was another good drink,” Chauncy said.“I did not mean to stay so long, Aldrich. Why, the tide is almost in,” said Walter, glancing out of the window. “The Crescent is pretty well covered.”“Oh, don’t go!”“Pretty well covered! What’s that verse? It is about God’s forgiveness. I read it in the Psalter last Sunday; ‘And covered all their sins.’ That is the way it is with God’s mercy.”And Walter thought of the tide coming ineverywhere, and everywhere covering and hiding the black rocks, the long, sandy bars, the unsightly flats of mud, burying all under its bright, shining, softly singing current.Chauncy appreciated Walter’s meaning; and when the latter left, Chauncy with a smile in his face was looking afar and watching the tide coming in.

A SOUL IN NEED.

Two days after Walter’s fall in the night, he had leave of absence extending from sunrise to sunset. He did not care to take it, his time at the station was so brief, and especially as he was anxious to prove his purpose to be loyal to all obligations resting upon him.

“It is your turn to be off, Walter,” said the keeper. “You are fairly entitled to it, and I want you to have what is yours. Be on hand at sunset. You may learn something in your favor, and you had better improve your chance.”

With the keeper’s apparent kindness went an insinuation that Walter’s course had not entirely been swept clean of every shadow of suspicion, and if he could find a broom to do this sweeping, it was plainly suggested that he had better secure it. That remark decided Walterin his course. He left the station in no pleasant mood of mind, and the keeper’s words had occasioned it. “If I can, I will get that help,” thought Walter, walking off rapidly, “but—where?”

He was puzzled. One memory came to him, however. It was what his father said once: “Walter, if things go wrong, if people say we are wrong and yet we know we are right, but can’t somehow show it and prove it, then wait and let God do the proving. He is as much interested in good character as we, more so even, and He will bring things round right. Tie up to that post.”

“I will tie up to that post,” declared Walter.

He did not go directly to his uncle’s, but took the road to The Harbor.

“Walter!” said a voice as he was passing the post–office. He turned quickly. A young woman had just left Miss P. Green’s headquarters, and was calling to him. It was May Elliott. She looked at him in her earnest way, her blue eyes brightening as she said, “I only want to say that I hope you won’t care for those stories about you at the station. Your friends have confidence in you, and don’t believe what has been said against you.”

“Thank you. That does me good. It’spretty hard to be accused when you are innocent.”

“Well, you wait. The truth will come out; and when it comes, you will be justified. Oh, there is something else on my mind. Did you know that Chauncy Aldrich was sick?”

“I only heard that he was indoors with some trouble.”

“They say he is pretty sick, and Miss P. Green, where he is boarding, says he is low–spirited. I did not know but that you might like to call and see him.”

Waiter declared that he would go at once. He found Chauncy in a little room with a single window. From this there was a view across the white snowfields to the blackish ocean, scowling angrily like an immense eye under a dark, heavy lid of cloud. Chauncy was lying on his bed, his head raised a little that he might look out upon the winter scenery. His eyes were bright but somber, and his hands were thin and white. That cold bath to which his uncle had unceremoniously treated him, and which he afterwards attempted to explain as a “little joke,” had provoked the sickness so bleaching and weakening and thinning the once vigorous young trader. Every feature showed the effect of the hard fever that hadattacked him. Even the knob of hair that was so accustomed to bristle on Chauncy’s head and silently to defy all the world, had now been humbled. His hair in a thick, tangled mass, suggested a fort in ruins.

“Plympton, how are you? I’m real glad to see you. Sit down, old boy. Where have you been all this time?”

“At the station, you know. They tie us pretty tight, but it is my day off. I’m real sorry you are sick, Aldrich.”

“O thank you! Guess I shall pull through it, but it’s awful hard to be cooped up here,” and as he said this, he kicked at the bed–clothes with a sudden energy. “A business man, you know, that is used to stirring, can’t come down to this easily. I’m real glad you came in. Say, are you going up to your uncle’s?”

“I thought I should.”

“Well—”

Chauncy hesitated. He wished to say something about his Uncle Bezaleel. He did not know very much about Baggs’ business relations to Boardman Blake. In spite of Baggs’ blustering display of confidence in his nephew, any ostentatious intimations that Chauncy knew everything about his business in general, Chauncy knew very little. One reason was that theuncle’s business, after all the brag, was very limited, and then Bezaleel knew that Chauncy had too much principle to back him in certain dishonest schemes. The young man now hesitated, impelled to say something about his uncle, and yet held back by an unwillingness to damage one with whom he had been associated.

“I guess you had better go to your uncle’s, Plympton. There is going to be a conference there, I believe, my uncle and his lawyer, and your uncle and his lawyer, and oh, I don’t know what else. Miss Green told me; and bless me, what that mail–bag don’t know, isn’t worth the knowing. She will hold more news than an ocean steamer. Now mind, Plympton, I don’t know what is up. Take my word for it. But there is something to pay, and I would go there.”

“I shall, most certainly,” and Walter’s eye flashed like that of a watch dog who starts in the night as he catches the stealthy step of a burglar. “I hope it is nothing serious with my uncle.”

“I don’t know how it is; but two lawyers—that means a rush in the market, Plympton; yes, a rush.”

Chauncy ceased talking. His efforts at conversation had already wearied him. He layupon his bed silently arguing a point. This “rush in the market” meant a very significant movement by his enterprising uncle, though its exact nature was a mystery to Chauncy. His uncle’s slippery ways had suggested to him one occasion when he himself had been false to Walter, and almost involuntarily he exclaimed, as one may do in sickness that weakens the control of the mind over itself,—”I don’t think I ever tried to deceive you, save once. I hope though you won’t hold it against me.”

Walter caught this confession imperfectly; and what made him guess the occasion to which Chauncy referred? Was it a chance look out of the window toward the rocks of the Crescent, about which the surf had wound its scarf of snow? Walter thought of the day when he saw Bezaleel Baggs on the shore looking off toward the Chair. He was reminded of Bezaleel’s resemblance to the mysterious form he saw one morning in Boardman Blake’s store, that morning when Chauncy Aldrich so persistently tried to call off Walter’s attention from the store. Walter now turned suddenly to the invalid.

“Aldrich, see here. What do you mean by saying you deceived me once? I can only think of one time when I guess you did try topull the wool over my eyes, and I want you to own up if it was so. Do you remember one morning when I first came this way to stop? I was opening my uncle’s store and you drove down in a wagon, and I came out to the door and saw you there, and I fancied I saw somebody else in the store?”

Chauncy nodded his head in assent. Then he added slowly, “That’s—the time—I mean, too.”

“Look here! Wasn’t that your uncle inside the store?”

Chauncy hesitated. He spoke at last, and with sudden force. “Plympton, I don’t want to deceive you now; but I did then, and am sorry. It was my uncle in the store. Now, I don’t want to go back on anybody, sick as I am. He is my mother’s brother, if he isn’t what he ought to be.” His lip quivered. He was thinking of a mother, long ago at rest in death.

“Perhaps you mean that you don’t want me to say anything about it, and that it will look as if you had turned against your uncle. I don’t think I need to speak of you. I saw him with my own eyes, though I don’t know what he was up to there in the store.”

“I don’t,” whispered Chauncy.

“It is a satisfaction to have you confirm myopinion, and as for yourself anything between us is all settled.”

“Thank you.”

“There, I have bothered you too long. I didn’t mean to stay here all this while.”

“I kept you, I kept you. Don’t go. It’s fearful lonesome here, save when Green comes up; and then she may look at me and say I make her think of her brother who died, and cries—well, that don’t help a feller; and I stay here and think, you know. Say, Plympton!” Chauncy’s eyes shone out bright and sharp. “Say, I don’t want to die!”

“Oh, I don’t believe you will. I am thinking of this: soon as I get off from the station,—and my time is up in a few days,—how would you like to have me be your nurse? I could sit with you, you know, and I am strong and could lift you easily when you wanted to change about.”

Strong? The very sight of the young surfman so muscular and healthy was an elixir to Chauncy. He seemed to take strength from Walter at once, and certainly his own stock needed reinforcement, for he was very feeble.

Walter pitied him; “Poor fellow!” he said, and Walter laid his hand on Chauncy’sforehead and gently stroked it. “I’m sorry for you, and I’ll help you.”

The tears came in Chauncy’s eyes.

“Weak, you see, Plympton, weak as a baby. I should like to have you come first rate. You make—me—think—of my mother when she was alive—she did that—put her hand there, you know.” The tears came faster now.

“Now I would be quiet,” said Walter soothingly.

“Oh, this don’t hurt me, only when Green comes and looks at me, as much as to say: ‘A bad bargain, a bad bargain!’ See here, Plympton! Do you remember May Elliott’s composition at the Academy?”

“Yes, I’m sure I do.”

“Well, I have thought of that a lot. You might not think so, but I have, driving round you know, a business man, watching the market, you know. She said the life—what was it?”

“The life that does not take others into account, God and another life—that’s the idea—was making a great mistake.”

“Yes, that’s it; and lying here, I have said to myself, ‘Aldrich, you’ve made a mistake. You are buying stock that will fetch precious little. Yes, a mistake.’”

“Well, Aldrich, I won’t keep you talking; but before I go, why not take God into account, let me ask? Why not tell Him how much you need Him, that you are sorry, and want Him to help you to a better life, and that you give yourself to Him?”

“He’d get a tremendous poor bargain if He took me. All run down now.”

“God knows all that. Let’s see. What is that verse about God commending His love toward us, saying while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us?”

“Christ died for us! That does me good. That’s like cold water when the fever is on and you are fearful thirsty,” and Chauncy moved his lips as if drinking.

“Then there is another verse—I don’t know as I say it exactly, but I can give the idea—that when we were without strength, Christ died for the ungodly.”

“Yes, yes,” and again a thirsty soul drank of this cool goblet of good news.

“Plympton, I say!”

He spoke with much emphasis, as if he had a matter of great importance to relate or a favor to ask.

“I don’t know as you have a prayer handy you could say, have you?”

Walter hesitated. What prayer could he say that would help another? There was the Lord’s Prayer, though. He could say that. Kneeling and holding Chauncy by the hand—how tightly Chauncy clung to that strong, friendly hand—Walter began, “Our Father!”

“Our Father,” repeated Chauncy, and then followed Walter through the prayer.

Walter added a few more words in which he tried to approach an ever present, ever willing Saviour, beseeching that Chauncy might be helped right there to give himself entirely up to God; braiding into his words, the touching, solemn collect: “Assist us mercifully, O Lord, in these our supplications and prayers.”

Walter then rose from his knees.

“That was another good drink,” Chauncy said.

“I did not mean to stay so long, Aldrich. Why, the tide is almost in,” said Walter, glancing out of the window. “The Crescent is pretty well covered.”

“Oh, don’t go!”

“Pretty well covered! What’s that verse? It is about God’s forgiveness. I read it in the Psalter last Sunday; ‘And covered all their sins.’ That is the way it is with God’s mercy.”

And Walter thought of the tide coming ineverywhere, and everywhere covering and hiding the black rocks, the long, sandy bars, the unsightly flats of mud, burying all under its bright, shining, softly singing current.

Chauncy appreciated Walter’s meaning; and when the latter left, Chauncy with a smile in his face was looking afar and watching the tide coming in.

CHAPTER XVIII.DARK DEPTHS UNCOVERED.When Walter left Miss Green’s, he turned away from the sea and walked rapidly in the direction of his uncle’s. A sleigh with jingling bells went by him. The driver of the team was well protected against the cold, and the style as well as the extent of the protection—the rich buffalo robe snugly tucked about his person, the handsome cap of fur that could not wholly conceal his gray hair, the warm, heavy, riding gloves of fur—showed that the driver of the team did not have a mean and scanty share of this world’s goods. The bright, sharp, intelligent eyes under the rich cap of fur gave evidence that the owner of the team was smart enough and shrewd enough to hold whatever he had gained and also add to it.“Do you know that man?” Walter said to Jabez Wherren, who, twisted up by the cold, was moving slowly, shiveringly, over the road.“That man! He’s Squire Tuck, your uncle’s lawyer. He lives in Groveton.”“He looks as if he knew something.”“Knows suthin! For what he knows, I wouldn’t swap all the clams ’tween here and Novy Scoshy,” replied Jabez, who was a famous clam digger, and all his estimates of value were determined by one famous standard, a clam.“Then,” thought Walter, “Squire Tuck is on his way to that meeting at uncle’s that Chauncy spoke about. That is my guess.”He soon came in sight of the well–known buildings so associated with his life the past autumn. There was the old–fashioned house from whose big, red chimney lazily drifted the purplish smoke. There was the store. There was the sign above the door. And there at the post before the door, was Squire Tuck’s horse.“And there’s another team at the other post,” said Walter. “Guess that is Baggs’ team.”When he entered the store, he noticed that a row of nails near the door opening into the sitting–room had been already covered with hats and coats. And who was the thief that Walter saw near one of the coats, lifting its folds and examining them with such intentness of lookthat the ringing of the bell above the door as Walter entered, was scarcely noticed?“Guess those bright eyes don’t see me,” thought Walter. “I can say, ‘Caught at last.’ I’ll make the door–bell tap again.”Jingle, jingle, jingle!“Massy, Walter! how you skat me! Where did you come from? Now you’ll say you’ve got me a–peekin’ at folkses’ clothes. I don’t care if you have. Jest come here!” and Aunt Lydia mysteriously beckoned with a piece of cloth. Lifting the skirt of a blue frock conspicuously ornamented with big silver buttons, Aunt Lydia fitted this bit of cloth into the torn lining.“There!” said she triumphantly. “The myst’ry is out. I haven’t ben a–savin’ this all this time for nothin’.”“Why, whose coat is this?”“It is thatThing’s, that Bel–ze–bub’s!”“Baggs’? Oh, yes, I’ve seen him with it on. I remember now.”“I suppose you want to know what I’m up to. Do you remember the fust mornin’ you were clerk and opened the store? Wall, that mornin’ I seed that Bel–ze–bub at the settin’–room winder, as ef he were a–lookin’ in, though he seemed to be a good way in; and arter that,I found this piece of cloth on the blind. Now I think he was not so much a–lookin’ in as a–gittin’ out, and tore his linin’ while he was a–tryin’ to accomplish that gentlemanly action; and ef—and ef—” said the old lady, dropping her voice, but intensifying her emphasis, “ef he don’t keep out of my settin’–room, I’ll—I’ll scald him! There!”Walter was as much excited as his Aunt Lydia.“There, Aunt, that just confirms me in what I believe and know, that Baggs was in the store that morning when I had stepped out on to the doorstep.”“In the store? Where? To buy suthin’?”“Back of the counter, where uncle keeps those books—that Bible, you know, and so on. He went out from the store into the sitting–room, and then through the window undoubtedly.” Walter told the story of the strange appearance in the store, the first morning of his clerkship. While Aunt Lydia was expressing her amazement, exclaiming, “Oh dear!” “Did you ever!” “Pizen!” the door into the store from the sitting–room opened, and there was the driver of the sleigh that Walter had so particularly noticed that morning, Squire Tuck. His sharp, keen eyes searched the store rapidly, and he said, “Ah, Mrs. Blake, you here? Iwanted to see you one moment and ask you about a matter. Won’t you walk in, please?”Aunt Lydia stepped toward the opened door, and with one hand that she held behind her back, she beckoned to Walter to follow. Walter did not wait for a second flourish from that mute object, but walked after Aunt Lydia and stood silently behind her, as if a special bodyguard to attend her and see that she suffered no harm.It was an unusual scene witnessed that morning in the old–fashioned sitting–room. There on one side of a large square table in the center of the room, sat Baggs. He was very smiling, and when Aunt Lydia entered he very politely said, “Good mornin’, Miss Blake.” Near him sat his lawyer, who looked somewhat like Baggs, a stout individual with crafty eyes, who signed himself “P. Allston Varney.” If the middle name had been “All–stone,” somebody once said, it would have been an appropriate title. Opposite Baggs was his victim, Uncle Boardman, and he sat there with an astonished air. The vacant chair near Uncle Boardman had been occupied by Squire Tuck. After calling Aunt Lydia, he did not resume his seat, but remained standing, and proceeded to address the lady he had admitted.“Mrs. Blake,” he said courteously—Squire Tuck always had a dignified, stately way of addressing the ladies, bowing slightly as he spoke,—“I wish to ask you about this note.”P. Allston Varney closely watched Squire Tuck as he picked up a document lying before Baggs. It was a piece of paper in the form of a money–note, long and narrow. Walter’s attention was arrested immediately by the discovery of a blot in the corner of the note, and it made him think of the document he saw in the store the morning of Baggs’ visit, carrying in one corner a blot like a pig.“There’s that pig again,” he was saying to himself, when Squire Tuck remarked, “Before asking the question I have in mind, let me make an explanation. Your husband, Mrs. Blake, gave Mr. Baggs a note for five hundred dollars in return for money lent him that he might build the saw–mill. That is all he had against—I mean all that Mr. Baggs had against your husband, so the latter asserts. It became due the other day, and your husband went to pay it. I suppose you know this, and that it was paid also.”Aunt Lydia nodded assent.“And you know that Baggs presented another note—this one for fifteen hundred dollars,which indeed is in your husband’s handwriting, he allows, but says he never gave it, and can’t explain it. This you know?”“I know what Baggs says, but my husband don’t owe him any sich sum.”“Indeed!” exclaimed P. Allston Varney provokingly, while Baggs looked towards his lawyer with an amused air, as much as to say, “Only think of it!”“As you generally know about your husband’s affairs, Mrs. Blake, what I wished to ask was, if you knew of any such document—but you have already implied that you did not—and could throw any light in any way upon this subject, and you might look at this and examine it.”Baggs and Varney both stirred in their chairs and half arose, as if to intercept the passage of the precious document into Mrs. Blake’s hands.“Oh,” said the Squire, “I will guarantee that no harm comes to the note. I will hold it and you can stand by and watch every thing done.”As the note was thus held before Aunt Lydia’s sharply scrutinizing spectacles, her bodyguard in the rear looked over her shoulders and quickly read it.“There is that pig!” thought Walter. “Yes,it’s the same sort of looking document, only the other said five hundred, and not fifteen.”The sun outdoors had been endeavoring to pierce the clouds and succeeded for a few moments, and a bright, needle–like ray darted through the window and fell on the note.“Doesn’t that ‘fifteen’ have a scratched look?” thought Walter. An idea came to him as if into his brain also a sunray had darted, making a sudden light there. It was not Walter’s nature to conceal anything, and he burst out saying, “Squire, may I call attention—”Baggs immediately grew red in the face and nudged his lawyer, who sprang upon his feet at once.“Who’s this talking? I object, Squire. He was not asked here!” shouted Varney.“Oh, it is all right,” rejoined Squire Tuck, his tone and manner quieting and assuring. “Let the young man speak. You know, Squire Varney, it wouldn’t look well to shut him up. He may have something valuable to say, and truth will always stand criticism.”Amid grunting by Varney and head–shaking by Baggs, Walter proceeded: “I wanted to call attention to this note. I saw it the first morning I was here, and I know it was that by thatblot which it seemed to me looked like a pig.”“Pig!” ejaculated Varney, with a sneer. “Some folks see themselves in everything they look at.”“Ha—ha!” roared Baggs.“Let the young man proceed,” calmly remarked Squire Tuck.Walter was not used to encounters of this kind, and he felt as if a head–wind had struck him. He recovered himself, though, and began to speak again.A saucy answer was on the end of his tongue, but he remembered something his father said once, that in a discussion the man more likely to come out ahead is the man who can control his tongue as well as use it. He held to his point like a vessel to its course and said, “I saw something on that note which it may be wished I had not seen. The words ‘five hundred’ were then on it, not ‘fifteen hundred,’ and—and—that ‘fifteen’ to me has a scratched look.”Everything was in intense confusion. Uncle Boardman jumped upon his feet, crying, “Let me see! I lost one note and gave another.” Varney shouted, advancing towards Walter, “Do you mean to say that my clientis a forger? that Bezaleel Baggs is guilty of scratching notes?”Walter had no opportunity to reply, for a woman’s sharp voice piped forth, “Well, I mean to say that Beelzebub is equal to scratchin’ notes.”“Who, madame?” politely asked Squire Tuck. “Undoubtedly that person is equal to the operation.”“I mean—him!” declared Aunt Lydia, boldly pointing toward B. Baggs. “Before we came in here, my nephew here and me were a–comparin’ idees, and from what he says and the way this note looks, I think Beelzebub—I think—yes, I’ll stick to it, that’s his name—came into the store, took that note where he must have found out my husband kept sich things, his Bible in the store—”“You certainly did know, Mr. Baggs,” said Uncle Boardman. “I remember you asked me about the time I gave the note, if I had a safe where I kept things, and I said I was apt to tuck notes and things into my Bible in the store,—a careless way I allow.”“From his Bible, took the note,” resumed Aunt Lydia, “cleared out through the winder in my sittin’–room, and there’s the rag your coat—now in the entry—left behind when youclimbed out and tore the linin’!” Here Aunt Lydia held up before Baggs the little rag that she had so carefully retained.All but Baggs had risen and were eagerly scrutinizing the note. Inwardly, Baggs was in a turmoil; outwardly, his face was flushed and his crooked eye was rolling like a vessel in a storm. When he spoke, he showed great self–control. His voice was placid as ever, and he waved his great, fat hands as if quieting an unnecessary tumult.“Now, ladies and gentlemen, what’s all this fuss for? I have doc—doc—doc—”“Doctor?” suggested Varney, wishing to help up his stumbling client. “Want the doctor?”“No—no! What kind of evidence do you call it? Doc—doc—”“Documentary?” suggested Squire Tuck.“Thank you, Squire,” said Baggs, bowing low. “I have dockermentry evidence about this note, and it’s in the coat that Madame Blake spoke about.”Here Baggs bowed toward “Madame Blake.”“And,” he continued, “if you will permit me, I will bring the very coat, and splain that rag business too.”Here he triumphantly looked about upon hisauditors as if he were carrying a point in the town meetings, where he had been famous as an orator.“Yes, I will bring the coat, this very moment”—and as he spoke, he rose and stepped toward the door into the store—“and no one need feel s’cluded from the investigation. All please stay here. Our young friend there”—he pointed toward Walter—“may remain. I will satisfy all—yes—I will—” and he was gone.“Well,” declared Squire Tuck, “this is interesting business,” and he looked toward Varney.“Yes, but just wait and give the man a chance to speak for himself. It’s a serious thing to charge a man with forgery.”“I should think, sir,” roared Uncle Boardman, “to take away a man’s property was a pretty serious matter also!”“Yes; serious, vile, imperdent, reskelly—” Aunt Lydia stood with opened mouth pouring out a torrent of hot adjectives, when Squire Tuck interrupted her and interrupted also the tumult that had become general, saying, shouting rather, “Now all be quiet! We want to hear from Baggs. He ought to have got that coat by this time.”The Squire stepped to the door into the store and opened it, wishing to assist the tardy Baggs.“Allow me, Brother Tuck, the pleasure of helping you,” said Varney with much politeness, and he followed the Squire who had stepped out into the store. Those in the sitting–room now heard one word from the Squire and it came in no gentle tones: “Gone!” What a rush there was from that sitting–room!“Oh!” exclaimed Aunt Lydia, “why didn’t I hold on to that coat while I had the chance!”“I know now why he was so willing that ‘our young friend’ should stay in the sitting–room,” remarked Walter.“But how did he get out?” inquired Uncle Boardman. “We did not hear the door–bell ring.”“There!” shouted the Squire, pointing at an opened window. “He was cunning enough not to ring that door–bell.”“Then he’s used to climin’ through folks’ winders,” said Aunt Lydia sarcastically.“Why didn’t I arrest him on the spot? Scatter, everybody, and chase hard! Come out here!” cried the Squire, and his gray hairs led off in the scramble made for the store door. The little bell rang violently now, and out they rushed, Aunt Lydia as forward as any.“He didn’t take any sleigh, you see, for we would have noticed that from the windows ofthe sitting–room. You come too!” said the Squire to Don Pedro, who, bare–headed, chanced to be coming from the direction of the kitchen. He had been almost asleep in a snug warm corner back of the stove, but the late banging of the door and that violent ringing of the door–bell had fully aroused him. He had hastily come out to see what the matter was. Wishing to avoid the company in the sitting–room, he had not tried to reach the store from that quarter, and trying another way, he succeeded in meeting the company by the doorstep.“What fur?” asked Don Pedro, with widening eyes.“To chase that rascal, Baggs,” said Squire Tuck.“Dis moment I’m ready! I’ll go for him! Whar?”“Get a hat! Be awful spry.”Interpreting a hat as meaning any hat, Don Pedro went into the store, and took the first hat he saw in the line where Baggs and others had hung their wearing apparel.“Mr. Blake,” said Squire Tuck, “you go along the road through the woods, rousing neighbors and making inquiries. I’ll take my team and dash down to The Harbor and rouse them there. Walter, you take the woods themselves,striking in at the left; and you, boy,” (addressing Don Pedro) “take the woods over here at the right. If you see Baggs, grip him and then shout for help, but hold him!”Off went this police force, Uncle Boardman impressing into his constabulary force his patient old mare that chanced to be already harnessed to a red pung, and standing in a shed at the rear of the house. Squire Tuck sprang into his sleigh, eagerly caught up the reins and was about to dash off, when he said to Varney, “The counsel on the other side can join in the pursuit, if he wishes.”Varney’s answer was a look of scorn. He went to a corner of the house that gave him a short view of this interesting chase, and there watched Uncle Boardman who urged on the old mare as if a whirlwind were after him. Aunt Lydia was anxious to have a hand in the hunt. Closing and locking the store door, securing all others, even the back door, as she passed out, lest “the pest” might get in again, she determined to search the barn. Armed with a pitchfork, she visited every corner she could think of, prudently sending her fork ahead and thoroughly “jabbing” the darkness of any nook before giving it personal examination. No enemy could be found. If one had been there, aftersuch a reconnoissance with the pitchfork, he would have come out more dead than alive. Aunt Lydia chanced to think of one more place that might hide the fugitive. It was a little tool closet. She had laid down her weapon of search, as the door required a tug with both hands. The door yielded and flew open. And there in one corner, she spied a pair of sharp, black eyes!“Massy!” exclaimed Aunt Lydia, turning to flee, but stumbling and falling. “Oh—h—h!” she screamed. “It’s he! Help—p!”The next moment, she was conscious that a spring had been made over her shoulders, and out of the barn–door went Billy, the old black cat, mad to think he had been carelessly shut up twenty–four hours in that hungry place. And Aunt Lydia, who had previously thought she would be so glad to find Baggs, was just as glad now that this occupant of the tool closet was not Baggs, and went into the house thoroughly satisfied. The others still kept up the pursuit. Squire Tuck roused The Harbor after a fashion not known for years. Uncle Boardman stirred up every farmhouse on his road. Walter and Don Pedro searched the woods, but in silence. The command had been not to shout until a seizure had been made andhelp was needed. The snow was not very deep in the woods, and progress was not difficult.“I don’t see anything!” thought Walter. “A fox has been along there, I guess, and those are a man’s tracks; but they are old ones.”Through the silent forest, under the green roof of the pines, across a frozen brook, Walter vigorously pushed. He saw nothing suspicious, heard nothing. “Caw—caw!” went an occasional crow overhead, but it was not Baggs forsaking his feet and taking to wings. Walter reached at last a low but vigorous young growth of spruce. Above their tops, did he see a gray stove–pipe hat? Did not Baggs wear such a hat that day? Walter’s heart leaped within him.“It’s Baggs’ hat!” he excitedly declared. “Now if he don’t see me and dodge me, and if I can just follow him without his noticing me a few moments, I’ll slip up to him so near that though he may dodge all he pleases, I—shall have him!”Suddenly, the hat—was it turning? Did Baggs see Walter, possibly? Walter stooped, then rose again, only to declare that the wearer was turning to make an observation. Several times this was done, and each time Walter slightly bowed himself to escape observation. Then the hat began to move rapidly.“He’s running!” thought Walter. “Now, go for him sharp!”It was a furious chase, but Walter did not gain on that violently bobbing gray hat as he anticipated. “He runs the fastest I ever saw, for a short, fat man!” declared Walter. “I’ll have him though.” He knew the woods well enough to be aware that somewhere beyond the low spruce growth was a swamp, and a bad one. He had heard Uncle Boardman say that the swamp was not frozen, lately.“That feller,” thought Walter, “will find he can’t cut through that swampy place so easily. It won’t hold him, and he will have to keep to the edge of the spruces and come out down here to the left, and I will aim for that point and meet him there, surprise and welcome him, and say, ‘How do you do, Mr. Baggs? Fine day!’ Ha—ha!”Would Walter’s confident predictions be successful? That agitated old hat of gray was forced by the yet yielding swamp to keep to the left, only to be met by Walter, who in turn found under the hat a surprise, even—Don Pedro!“Why, Don, you—booby, I’ve been chasing you all this time?”Don Pedro’s eyes were large and staring.“Walter, you—jes’ frighten me—a heap! My—breff—clean gone—honey! Ef I didn’t t’ink you’se a robber. Why—didn’t—you—holler, an’ show—who you was?”“Holler! We were told not to, till we got something to holler about. It would have frightened the game. What have you got on Baggs’ hat for? Oh dear—ha! ha! ha!” And Walter leaned against a tree and laughed till he was sore.“Me got Baggs’ hat? Squire said I might hab any, an’ I tuk the fus’ one handy. And do you want to know why I ran so hard? Back dar a piece I met a man, and he looked bad, and he was a handlin’ a knife sort ob careless, a bad looking knife.”Don Pedro rolled his eyes about tragically as he told his story, deepening his voice as he went on.“I axed him ef he had seen a man by de name ob Baggs who had probed hisself to be a reskel, an’ we was a–hantin’ fur him. He opened his knife and felt the edge sort ob careless an’ tole me I’d better leab; dat ef he foun’ me in dese woods agin, I’d nebber hab a chance to leab ’em. Dat Baggs he said was whar I couldn’t tech him, an’ he ’vised me fur to go hum. When I saw you, I s’posed it was him,an’ didn’t I run! I jest saw a hat and didn’t s’pose you was under it, but dat man, an’ it took de bref out ob me! What will ye do now?”“The hunt for Baggs, I guess, is up. However, we will make sure and go to the end of the woods, and there are two or three houses along there. The people will tell us if any sign of Baggs has been seen.”The end of the wood–lot was reached and inquiries were made at the farmhouses. No footprint of the runaway could be discovered anywhere, and Walter told Don Pedro they would go no farther.“We might as well take to the woods again on our way back. I’d like to see who that fellow is round with a knife and telling what he will do. We will stop that nonsense.” Don Pedro only needed a leader to be as brave a soldier as ever followed a flag, and he readily assented. Nothing came from the return search. No object more hostile than a squirrel was seen, and he gave a very friendly wink with his bright eyes as he peeped out of his snug quarters for the winter. Don Pedro’s use of the wrong hat was not the only case of the kind that occurred. Miss Green called the evening of that day.“Oh, Miss Blake, you ought to have seen thatlawyer, that Varney, to–day. He came riding by the post–office with a handkerchief tied round his head, and somebody said they saw him prancing round your house, trying every door, and he was as bare–headed as a bean when it has been shelled. I believe he borrowed a hat round here.”“There!” said Aunt Lydia, “I must have locked that man out afore I went to the barn! But there was no hats left on the nails where his things had been, for I looked up to ’em myself and there was nothin’ there when I went to the barn.”No, there were only naked nails in the wall. As for Varney’s hat, it had gone off on the head of Baggs, who had seized the first hat he met in his hasty exit, a conclusion the lawyer himself reached when making subsequent inquiries.Guilty Baggs had gone—nobody knew where. And the mystery of that man with the knife, in the woods? It was minutely discussed at the station, where Joe Cardridge had suddenly disappeared, leaving only a message for the keeper saying he would be back soon and prove that Walter Plympton was “a good deal wuss than he ought to be.” Joe coolly wished also to have his place kept for him.“I guess not,” remarked the keeper. “Aman going off that way without a notice, will have to wait a long time before he has a notice that he is wanted again. I will fill his place at once. Tucker Jones is home from his winter fishin’, and I will get him.”Tucker Jones, a big–boned, rugged young fisherman, was quickly established in the vacant berth.“Walter,” said Tom Walker, “putting all things together, I think it was Joe Cardridge that scared Don Pedro in the woods. He was a–hangin’ round the store somebody said. Probably he knew what was goin’ on, and followed his master, that Baggs. They were seen together by a man five miles from here. It is good that he has gone.”Nobody lamented his departure, not even his family. His wife and children could manage without him, and far more agreeably. At the station, the only element of dissension in the crew was now taken away. All noticed the harmony that marked the station life.“It only takes one stone in a fellow’s shoe,” remarked Tom Walker, “to upset everything, and Joe Cardridge has been the stone in the shoe.”Walter now fully enjoyed his life. True, there were rough, wild beats before him, butthe warm, cheerful shelter followed them. Then there was the constant sense of danger from that vast, uneasy sea, to give flavor to a life that might otherwise become insipid.“I am sorry,” he thought, “that my time at the station is almost up. It’s up in a few days, and I wonder when the district superintendent will be here to investigate my trouble. I don’t care for it. Let them hunt. I am right.”Yes, let slanders and envy hunt through our lives, and if we are right, who cares?Keeper Barney had said, “Joe’s goin’ off leaves Walter without an accuser, and I can’t easily believe he is wrong, but there is that bottle! What about that?”Yes, the flask, what about that? Joe had gone, but the flask remained on a shelf, and Walter still was confronted by this dumb, black accuser.

DARK DEPTHS UNCOVERED.

When Walter left Miss Green’s, he turned away from the sea and walked rapidly in the direction of his uncle’s. A sleigh with jingling bells went by him. The driver of the team was well protected against the cold, and the style as well as the extent of the protection—the rich buffalo robe snugly tucked about his person, the handsome cap of fur that could not wholly conceal his gray hair, the warm, heavy, riding gloves of fur—showed that the driver of the team did not have a mean and scanty share of this world’s goods. The bright, sharp, intelligent eyes under the rich cap of fur gave evidence that the owner of the team was smart enough and shrewd enough to hold whatever he had gained and also add to it.

“Do you know that man?” Walter said to Jabez Wherren, who, twisted up by the cold, was moving slowly, shiveringly, over the road.

“That man! He’s Squire Tuck, your uncle’s lawyer. He lives in Groveton.”

“He looks as if he knew something.”

“Knows suthin! For what he knows, I wouldn’t swap all the clams ’tween here and Novy Scoshy,” replied Jabez, who was a famous clam digger, and all his estimates of value were determined by one famous standard, a clam.

“Then,” thought Walter, “Squire Tuck is on his way to that meeting at uncle’s that Chauncy spoke about. That is my guess.”

He soon came in sight of the well–known buildings so associated with his life the past autumn. There was the old–fashioned house from whose big, red chimney lazily drifted the purplish smoke. There was the store. There was the sign above the door. And there at the post before the door, was Squire Tuck’s horse.

“And there’s another team at the other post,” said Walter. “Guess that is Baggs’ team.”

When he entered the store, he noticed that a row of nails near the door opening into the sitting–room had been already covered with hats and coats. And who was the thief that Walter saw near one of the coats, lifting its folds and examining them with such intentness of lookthat the ringing of the bell above the door as Walter entered, was scarcely noticed?

“Guess those bright eyes don’t see me,” thought Walter. “I can say, ‘Caught at last.’ I’ll make the door–bell tap again.”

Jingle, jingle, jingle!

“Massy, Walter! how you skat me! Where did you come from? Now you’ll say you’ve got me a–peekin’ at folkses’ clothes. I don’t care if you have. Jest come here!” and Aunt Lydia mysteriously beckoned with a piece of cloth. Lifting the skirt of a blue frock conspicuously ornamented with big silver buttons, Aunt Lydia fitted this bit of cloth into the torn lining.

“There!” said she triumphantly. “The myst’ry is out. I haven’t ben a–savin’ this all this time for nothin’.”

“Why, whose coat is this?”

“It is thatThing’s, that Bel–ze–bub’s!”

“Baggs’? Oh, yes, I’ve seen him with it on. I remember now.”

“I suppose you want to know what I’m up to. Do you remember the fust mornin’ you were clerk and opened the store? Wall, that mornin’ I seed that Bel–ze–bub at the settin’–room winder, as ef he were a–lookin’ in, though he seemed to be a good way in; and arter that,I found this piece of cloth on the blind. Now I think he was not so much a–lookin’ in as a–gittin’ out, and tore his linin’ while he was a–tryin’ to accomplish that gentlemanly action; and ef—and ef—” said the old lady, dropping her voice, but intensifying her emphasis, “ef he don’t keep out of my settin’–room, I’ll—I’ll scald him! There!”

Walter was as much excited as his Aunt Lydia.

“There, Aunt, that just confirms me in what I believe and know, that Baggs was in the store that morning when I had stepped out on to the doorstep.”

“In the store? Where? To buy suthin’?”

“Back of the counter, where uncle keeps those books—that Bible, you know, and so on. He went out from the store into the sitting–room, and then through the window undoubtedly.” Walter told the story of the strange appearance in the store, the first morning of his clerkship. While Aunt Lydia was expressing her amazement, exclaiming, “Oh dear!” “Did you ever!” “Pizen!” the door into the store from the sitting–room opened, and there was the driver of the sleigh that Walter had so particularly noticed that morning, Squire Tuck. His sharp, keen eyes searched the store rapidly, and he said, “Ah, Mrs. Blake, you here? Iwanted to see you one moment and ask you about a matter. Won’t you walk in, please?”

Aunt Lydia stepped toward the opened door, and with one hand that she held behind her back, she beckoned to Walter to follow. Walter did not wait for a second flourish from that mute object, but walked after Aunt Lydia and stood silently behind her, as if a special bodyguard to attend her and see that she suffered no harm.

It was an unusual scene witnessed that morning in the old–fashioned sitting–room. There on one side of a large square table in the center of the room, sat Baggs. He was very smiling, and when Aunt Lydia entered he very politely said, “Good mornin’, Miss Blake.” Near him sat his lawyer, who looked somewhat like Baggs, a stout individual with crafty eyes, who signed himself “P. Allston Varney.” If the middle name had been “All–stone,” somebody once said, it would have been an appropriate title. Opposite Baggs was his victim, Uncle Boardman, and he sat there with an astonished air. The vacant chair near Uncle Boardman had been occupied by Squire Tuck. After calling Aunt Lydia, he did not resume his seat, but remained standing, and proceeded to address the lady he had admitted.

“Mrs. Blake,” he said courteously—Squire Tuck always had a dignified, stately way of addressing the ladies, bowing slightly as he spoke,—“I wish to ask you about this note.”

P. Allston Varney closely watched Squire Tuck as he picked up a document lying before Baggs. It was a piece of paper in the form of a money–note, long and narrow. Walter’s attention was arrested immediately by the discovery of a blot in the corner of the note, and it made him think of the document he saw in the store the morning of Baggs’ visit, carrying in one corner a blot like a pig.

“There’s that pig again,” he was saying to himself, when Squire Tuck remarked, “Before asking the question I have in mind, let me make an explanation. Your husband, Mrs. Blake, gave Mr. Baggs a note for five hundred dollars in return for money lent him that he might build the saw–mill. That is all he had against—I mean all that Mr. Baggs had against your husband, so the latter asserts. It became due the other day, and your husband went to pay it. I suppose you know this, and that it was paid also.”

Aunt Lydia nodded assent.

“And you know that Baggs presented another note—this one for fifteen hundred dollars,which indeed is in your husband’s handwriting, he allows, but says he never gave it, and can’t explain it. This you know?”

“I know what Baggs says, but my husband don’t owe him any sich sum.”

“Indeed!” exclaimed P. Allston Varney provokingly, while Baggs looked towards his lawyer with an amused air, as much as to say, “Only think of it!”

“As you generally know about your husband’s affairs, Mrs. Blake, what I wished to ask was, if you knew of any such document—but you have already implied that you did not—and could throw any light in any way upon this subject, and you might look at this and examine it.”

Baggs and Varney both stirred in their chairs and half arose, as if to intercept the passage of the precious document into Mrs. Blake’s hands.

“Oh,” said the Squire, “I will guarantee that no harm comes to the note. I will hold it and you can stand by and watch every thing done.”

As the note was thus held before Aunt Lydia’s sharply scrutinizing spectacles, her bodyguard in the rear looked over her shoulders and quickly read it.

“There is that pig!” thought Walter. “Yes,it’s the same sort of looking document, only the other said five hundred, and not fifteen.”

The sun outdoors had been endeavoring to pierce the clouds and succeeded for a few moments, and a bright, needle–like ray darted through the window and fell on the note.

“Doesn’t that ‘fifteen’ have a scratched look?” thought Walter. An idea came to him as if into his brain also a sunray had darted, making a sudden light there. It was not Walter’s nature to conceal anything, and he burst out saying, “Squire, may I call attention—”

Baggs immediately grew red in the face and nudged his lawyer, who sprang upon his feet at once.

“Who’s this talking? I object, Squire. He was not asked here!” shouted Varney.

“Oh, it is all right,” rejoined Squire Tuck, his tone and manner quieting and assuring. “Let the young man speak. You know, Squire Varney, it wouldn’t look well to shut him up. He may have something valuable to say, and truth will always stand criticism.”

Amid grunting by Varney and head–shaking by Baggs, Walter proceeded: “I wanted to call attention to this note. I saw it the first morning I was here, and I know it was that by thatblot which it seemed to me looked like a pig.”

“Pig!” ejaculated Varney, with a sneer. “Some folks see themselves in everything they look at.”

“Ha—ha!” roared Baggs.

“Let the young man proceed,” calmly remarked Squire Tuck.

Walter was not used to encounters of this kind, and he felt as if a head–wind had struck him. He recovered himself, though, and began to speak again.

A saucy answer was on the end of his tongue, but he remembered something his father said once, that in a discussion the man more likely to come out ahead is the man who can control his tongue as well as use it. He held to his point like a vessel to its course and said, “I saw something on that note which it may be wished I had not seen. The words ‘five hundred’ were then on it, not ‘fifteen hundred,’ and—and—that ‘fifteen’ to me has a scratched look.”

Everything was in intense confusion. Uncle Boardman jumped upon his feet, crying, “Let me see! I lost one note and gave another.” Varney shouted, advancing towards Walter, “Do you mean to say that my clientis a forger? that Bezaleel Baggs is guilty of scratching notes?”

Walter had no opportunity to reply, for a woman’s sharp voice piped forth, “Well, I mean to say that Beelzebub is equal to scratchin’ notes.”

“Who, madame?” politely asked Squire Tuck. “Undoubtedly that person is equal to the operation.”

“I mean—him!” declared Aunt Lydia, boldly pointing toward B. Baggs. “Before we came in here, my nephew here and me were a–comparin’ idees, and from what he says and the way this note looks, I think Beelzebub—I think—yes, I’ll stick to it, that’s his name—came into the store, took that note where he must have found out my husband kept sich things, his Bible in the store—”

“You certainly did know, Mr. Baggs,” said Uncle Boardman. “I remember you asked me about the time I gave the note, if I had a safe where I kept things, and I said I was apt to tuck notes and things into my Bible in the store,—a careless way I allow.”

“From his Bible, took the note,” resumed Aunt Lydia, “cleared out through the winder in my sittin’–room, and there’s the rag your coat—now in the entry—left behind when youclimbed out and tore the linin’!” Here Aunt Lydia held up before Baggs the little rag that she had so carefully retained.

All but Baggs had risen and were eagerly scrutinizing the note. Inwardly, Baggs was in a turmoil; outwardly, his face was flushed and his crooked eye was rolling like a vessel in a storm. When he spoke, he showed great self–control. His voice was placid as ever, and he waved his great, fat hands as if quieting an unnecessary tumult.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen, what’s all this fuss for? I have doc—doc—doc—”

“Doctor?” suggested Varney, wishing to help up his stumbling client. “Want the doctor?”

“No—no! What kind of evidence do you call it? Doc—doc—”

“Documentary?” suggested Squire Tuck.

“Thank you, Squire,” said Baggs, bowing low. “I have dockermentry evidence about this note, and it’s in the coat that Madame Blake spoke about.”

Here Baggs bowed toward “Madame Blake.”

“And,” he continued, “if you will permit me, I will bring the very coat, and splain that rag business too.”

Here he triumphantly looked about upon hisauditors as if he were carrying a point in the town meetings, where he had been famous as an orator.

“Yes, I will bring the coat, this very moment”—and as he spoke, he rose and stepped toward the door into the store—“and no one need feel s’cluded from the investigation. All please stay here. Our young friend there”—he pointed toward Walter—“may remain. I will satisfy all—yes—I will—” and he was gone.

“Well,” declared Squire Tuck, “this is interesting business,” and he looked toward Varney.

“Yes, but just wait and give the man a chance to speak for himself. It’s a serious thing to charge a man with forgery.”

“I should think, sir,” roared Uncle Boardman, “to take away a man’s property was a pretty serious matter also!”

“Yes; serious, vile, imperdent, reskelly—” Aunt Lydia stood with opened mouth pouring out a torrent of hot adjectives, when Squire Tuck interrupted her and interrupted also the tumult that had become general, saying, shouting rather, “Now all be quiet! We want to hear from Baggs. He ought to have got that coat by this time.”

The Squire stepped to the door into the store and opened it, wishing to assist the tardy Baggs.“Allow me, Brother Tuck, the pleasure of helping you,” said Varney with much politeness, and he followed the Squire who had stepped out into the store. Those in the sitting–room now heard one word from the Squire and it came in no gentle tones: “Gone!” What a rush there was from that sitting–room!

“Oh!” exclaimed Aunt Lydia, “why didn’t I hold on to that coat while I had the chance!”

“I know now why he was so willing that ‘our young friend’ should stay in the sitting–room,” remarked Walter.

“But how did he get out?” inquired Uncle Boardman. “We did not hear the door–bell ring.”

“There!” shouted the Squire, pointing at an opened window. “He was cunning enough not to ring that door–bell.”

“Then he’s used to climin’ through folks’ winders,” said Aunt Lydia sarcastically.

“Why didn’t I arrest him on the spot? Scatter, everybody, and chase hard! Come out here!” cried the Squire, and his gray hairs led off in the scramble made for the store door. The little bell rang violently now, and out they rushed, Aunt Lydia as forward as any.

“He didn’t take any sleigh, you see, for we would have noticed that from the windows ofthe sitting–room. You come too!” said the Squire to Don Pedro, who, bare–headed, chanced to be coming from the direction of the kitchen. He had been almost asleep in a snug warm corner back of the stove, but the late banging of the door and that violent ringing of the door–bell had fully aroused him. He had hastily come out to see what the matter was. Wishing to avoid the company in the sitting–room, he had not tried to reach the store from that quarter, and trying another way, he succeeded in meeting the company by the doorstep.

“What fur?” asked Don Pedro, with widening eyes.

“To chase that rascal, Baggs,” said Squire Tuck.

“Dis moment I’m ready! I’ll go for him! Whar?”

“Get a hat! Be awful spry.”

Interpreting a hat as meaning any hat, Don Pedro went into the store, and took the first hat he saw in the line where Baggs and others had hung their wearing apparel.

“Mr. Blake,” said Squire Tuck, “you go along the road through the woods, rousing neighbors and making inquiries. I’ll take my team and dash down to The Harbor and rouse them there. Walter, you take the woods themselves,striking in at the left; and you, boy,” (addressing Don Pedro) “take the woods over here at the right. If you see Baggs, grip him and then shout for help, but hold him!”

Off went this police force, Uncle Boardman impressing into his constabulary force his patient old mare that chanced to be already harnessed to a red pung, and standing in a shed at the rear of the house. Squire Tuck sprang into his sleigh, eagerly caught up the reins and was about to dash off, when he said to Varney, “The counsel on the other side can join in the pursuit, if he wishes.”

Varney’s answer was a look of scorn. He went to a corner of the house that gave him a short view of this interesting chase, and there watched Uncle Boardman who urged on the old mare as if a whirlwind were after him. Aunt Lydia was anxious to have a hand in the hunt. Closing and locking the store door, securing all others, even the back door, as she passed out, lest “the pest” might get in again, she determined to search the barn. Armed with a pitchfork, she visited every corner she could think of, prudently sending her fork ahead and thoroughly “jabbing” the darkness of any nook before giving it personal examination. No enemy could be found. If one had been there, aftersuch a reconnoissance with the pitchfork, he would have come out more dead than alive. Aunt Lydia chanced to think of one more place that might hide the fugitive. It was a little tool closet. She had laid down her weapon of search, as the door required a tug with both hands. The door yielded and flew open. And there in one corner, she spied a pair of sharp, black eyes!

“Massy!” exclaimed Aunt Lydia, turning to flee, but stumbling and falling. “Oh—h—h!” she screamed. “It’s he! Help—p!”

The next moment, she was conscious that a spring had been made over her shoulders, and out of the barn–door went Billy, the old black cat, mad to think he had been carelessly shut up twenty–four hours in that hungry place. And Aunt Lydia, who had previously thought she would be so glad to find Baggs, was just as glad now that this occupant of the tool closet was not Baggs, and went into the house thoroughly satisfied. The others still kept up the pursuit. Squire Tuck roused The Harbor after a fashion not known for years. Uncle Boardman stirred up every farmhouse on his road. Walter and Don Pedro searched the woods, but in silence. The command had been not to shout until a seizure had been made andhelp was needed. The snow was not very deep in the woods, and progress was not difficult.

“I don’t see anything!” thought Walter. “A fox has been along there, I guess, and those are a man’s tracks; but they are old ones.”

Through the silent forest, under the green roof of the pines, across a frozen brook, Walter vigorously pushed. He saw nothing suspicious, heard nothing. “Caw—caw!” went an occasional crow overhead, but it was not Baggs forsaking his feet and taking to wings. Walter reached at last a low but vigorous young growth of spruce. Above their tops, did he see a gray stove–pipe hat? Did not Baggs wear such a hat that day? Walter’s heart leaped within him.

“It’s Baggs’ hat!” he excitedly declared. “Now if he don’t see me and dodge me, and if I can just follow him without his noticing me a few moments, I’ll slip up to him so near that though he may dodge all he pleases, I—shall have him!”

Suddenly, the hat—was it turning? Did Baggs see Walter, possibly? Walter stooped, then rose again, only to declare that the wearer was turning to make an observation. Several times this was done, and each time Walter slightly bowed himself to escape observation. Then the hat began to move rapidly.

“He’s running!” thought Walter. “Now, go for him sharp!”

It was a furious chase, but Walter did not gain on that violently bobbing gray hat as he anticipated. “He runs the fastest I ever saw, for a short, fat man!” declared Walter. “I’ll have him though.” He knew the woods well enough to be aware that somewhere beyond the low spruce growth was a swamp, and a bad one. He had heard Uncle Boardman say that the swamp was not frozen, lately.

“That feller,” thought Walter, “will find he can’t cut through that swampy place so easily. It won’t hold him, and he will have to keep to the edge of the spruces and come out down here to the left, and I will aim for that point and meet him there, surprise and welcome him, and say, ‘How do you do, Mr. Baggs? Fine day!’ Ha—ha!”

Would Walter’s confident predictions be successful? That agitated old hat of gray was forced by the yet yielding swamp to keep to the left, only to be met by Walter, who in turn found under the hat a surprise, even—Don Pedro!

“Why, Don, you—booby, I’ve been chasing you all this time?”

Don Pedro’s eyes were large and staring.

“Walter, you—jes’ frighten me—a heap! My—breff—clean gone—honey! Ef I didn’t t’ink you’se a robber. Why—didn’t—you—holler, an’ show—who you was?”

“Holler! We were told not to, till we got something to holler about. It would have frightened the game. What have you got on Baggs’ hat for? Oh dear—ha! ha! ha!” And Walter leaned against a tree and laughed till he was sore.

“Me got Baggs’ hat? Squire said I might hab any, an’ I tuk the fus’ one handy. And do you want to know why I ran so hard? Back dar a piece I met a man, and he looked bad, and he was a handlin’ a knife sort ob careless, a bad looking knife.”

Don Pedro rolled his eyes about tragically as he told his story, deepening his voice as he went on.

“I axed him ef he had seen a man by de name ob Baggs who had probed hisself to be a reskel, an’ we was a–hantin’ fur him. He opened his knife and felt the edge sort ob careless an’ tole me I’d better leab; dat ef he foun’ me in dese woods agin, I’d nebber hab a chance to leab ’em. Dat Baggs he said was whar I couldn’t tech him, an’ he ’vised me fur to go hum. When I saw you, I s’posed it was him,an’ didn’t I run! I jest saw a hat and didn’t s’pose you was under it, but dat man, an’ it took de bref out ob me! What will ye do now?”

“The hunt for Baggs, I guess, is up. However, we will make sure and go to the end of the woods, and there are two or three houses along there. The people will tell us if any sign of Baggs has been seen.”

The end of the wood–lot was reached and inquiries were made at the farmhouses. No footprint of the runaway could be discovered anywhere, and Walter told Don Pedro they would go no farther.

“We might as well take to the woods again on our way back. I’d like to see who that fellow is round with a knife and telling what he will do. We will stop that nonsense.” Don Pedro only needed a leader to be as brave a soldier as ever followed a flag, and he readily assented. Nothing came from the return search. No object more hostile than a squirrel was seen, and he gave a very friendly wink with his bright eyes as he peeped out of his snug quarters for the winter. Don Pedro’s use of the wrong hat was not the only case of the kind that occurred. Miss Green called the evening of that day.

“Oh, Miss Blake, you ought to have seen thatlawyer, that Varney, to–day. He came riding by the post–office with a handkerchief tied round his head, and somebody said they saw him prancing round your house, trying every door, and he was as bare–headed as a bean when it has been shelled. I believe he borrowed a hat round here.”

“There!” said Aunt Lydia, “I must have locked that man out afore I went to the barn! But there was no hats left on the nails where his things had been, for I looked up to ’em myself and there was nothin’ there when I went to the barn.”

No, there were only naked nails in the wall. As for Varney’s hat, it had gone off on the head of Baggs, who had seized the first hat he met in his hasty exit, a conclusion the lawyer himself reached when making subsequent inquiries.

Guilty Baggs had gone—nobody knew where. And the mystery of that man with the knife, in the woods? It was minutely discussed at the station, where Joe Cardridge had suddenly disappeared, leaving only a message for the keeper saying he would be back soon and prove that Walter Plympton was “a good deal wuss than he ought to be.” Joe coolly wished also to have his place kept for him.

“I guess not,” remarked the keeper. “Aman going off that way without a notice, will have to wait a long time before he has a notice that he is wanted again. I will fill his place at once. Tucker Jones is home from his winter fishin’, and I will get him.”

Tucker Jones, a big–boned, rugged young fisherman, was quickly established in the vacant berth.

“Walter,” said Tom Walker, “putting all things together, I think it was Joe Cardridge that scared Don Pedro in the woods. He was a–hangin’ round the store somebody said. Probably he knew what was goin’ on, and followed his master, that Baggs. They were seen together by a man five miles from here. It is good that he has gone.”

Nobody lamented his departure, not even his family. His wife and children could manage without him, and far more agreeably. At the station, the only element of dissension in the crew was now taken away. All noticed the harmony that marked the station life.

“It only takes one stone in a fellow’s shoe,” remarked Tom Walker, “to upset everything, and Joe Cardridge has been the stone in the shoe.”

Walter now fully enjoyed his life. True, there were rough, wild beats before him, butthe warm, cheerful shelter followed them. Then there was the constant sense of danger from that vast, uneasy sea, to give flavor to a life that might otherwise become insipid.

“I am sorry,” he thought, “that my time at the station is almost up. It’s up in a few days, and I wonder when the district superintendent will be here to investigate my trouble. I don’t care for it. Let them hunt. I am right.”

Yes, let slanders and envy hunt through our lives, and if we are right, who cares?

Keeper Barney had said, “Joe’s goin’ off leaves Walter without an accuser, and I can’t easily believe he is wrong, but there is that bottle! What about that?”

Yes, the flask, what about that? Joe had gone, but the flask remained on a shelf, and Walter still was confronted by this dumb, black accuser.

CHAPTER XIX.A WILD STORM.At a life saving station, there are various drills in which the surfmen are exercised. There is the beach apparatus drill. “Open boat–room doors! Man the beach wagon!” shouts the keeper. Every man knows his place, the doors are opened, and the cart is rushed out. “Forward!” cries the keeper, and each man knows just where to station himself and pull. Then come the other orders. “Halt! Action!” A pole representing a wreck, the men proceed as if attempting a rescue, sending a line to the wreck. Then come other orders. “Man weather whip! Haul out! Man lee whip!”“Haul ashore!” and the buoy for conveying the crew supposed to be wrecked, travels backward and forward as often as desired. Then there is the boat practice, and the boat must be launched through the surf, and the mendrilled in the management of the oars. The crew must also practice with signals. Stations may be near enough to communicate with one another, and this is done in the day time with flags and in the night with star rockets and Coston lights. An example would be the showing of a red flag by day and the burning of a red Coston light and firing of a red rocket by night. It is the danger signal, and means that a wreck has been seen, or a vessel is discovered to be in need of help. By means of the box of flags that every station keeps under its roof, the crew can talk with any vessel off shore and needing assistance. The crew must also be practiced in methods of restoring the apparently drowned. It was one dreary, rainy day that Keeper Barney was drilling the crew in these last methods. Cook Charlie had offered himself as a subject on whom the crew might practice. The keeper commenced a list of questions, asking: “What first is to be done to the patient?” Cook Charlie stretched upon the floor submitted patiently to the pressing and pounding and other parts of the process of resuscitation.It was not a practice that on a dreary winter day when the sea was wrathfully roaring, could be classified as pleasantly suggestive.While they were resuscitating Cook Charlie, Walter glanced occasionally out of the window. The sea rapidly roughened, and huge waves were launching on the sands broken and angry masses of surf. A ragged curtain of fog was drawn across the rim of the sea, but it was only ragged near the shore. Farther out, its denseness was without a seam. The day ended with many jokes about Cook Charlie, the resuscitated mariner, but mingled with the laughter were dismal cries of the storm. The rain could be heard splashing against the window panes, and occasionally the whole window shook as if a violent hand had been laid upon it. All the while, there was the wrathful thunder of the sea as if over some invisible bridge just above the station, the heavy squadrons of the storm were gloomily marching. Still, around the old cook stove whose fire burnt jollily, echoed the laughter of the surfmen as they cracked their jokes and told humorous stories of the sea. So the evening wore away. The storm yet raged. As the different patrolmen arrived, they came with dripping hats, with faces wet by the storm, with clothes that hung stiffly about them.“It’s a howlin’ night,” reported Tom Walker, slamming his lantern on the table.“Just so at my end of the beach,” saidWoodbury Elliott, who immediately followed Tom. “Whew—w—w! An old–fashioned nor’easter!” “You saw nothin?” inquired Capt. Barney. And each patrol said, “Not a thing.”“I hope it will stay so, for I think it’s goin’ to be the wust of the season. Come, boys, all pile upstairs early. There’s some hard trampin’ to be done ’fore daybreak.”“Wall, we can say we have resuscitated one man to–day,” said Slim Tarleton.“Ah, but we may have some real cases to–morrow. God forbid!”It was Walter’s watch in the morning, from four till sunrise. He slept uneasily till his watch, vexed by dreams of wreck and rescue, of dead men’s faces and living wives’ sorrow. Rising, he dressed himself hurriedly a little before four. How the building shook in the wind, while the sea without was furious in its uproar!“I’d like to stay in that warm bed. Booh! That cold walk makes me shiver! No help for it,” thought Walter, as he moved reluctantly toward the stairway and then descended it.In the kitchen, dripping like a fish just pulled out of the water, was Slim Tarleton. He had finished his watch and Walter was his successor.“I’d like to go for you, Walter, but it’s fournow, and morning’s not such a terrible way off.”“All quiet?”“Everything except the sea, and that acts as bad as it can. Oh, I don’t imagine there will be any trouble.”“Here is your Coston light, time–detector and so on,” said Keeper Barney. “Dress snug, for it blows; and dress thick, for it is cold. If anything happens, let us know.”“Aye, aye, Cap’n!” and out into the dark and the cold and the rain, strode our young knight, looking in his storm gear more like an Eskimo than a representative of any knightly age. The north–east wind blew at him as if it wanted to push this meddler back into the station; but with one arm around his lantern as if it were a baby that he wished to shield, he struggled over the rocks down to the strip of sand not yet covered by the tide. He saw nothing ten feet away, but he heard—no pen can describe the bellowing of this monster plunging and frothing at his feet. The lantern shot little gleams of light on the confused masses of foam along the edge of the shore, and he knew that there was a tumbling wall of ghastly white just beyond.“What if my lantern should go out!” he exclaimed nervously. He turned from the windand unbuttoning his outside coat, folded it around his lantern, letting out only enough light to show him where to plant his feet. Then he struggled on. It was a hard walk in a storm that had no mercy. He was pushing ahead, when, lifting his face to the wild rain and attempting to look through it, he saw—a jagged line of fire curving up into the air! The next moment, he trembled with excitement.“A wreck!” was the thought flashing through his mind. That one glance at the rocket above the sea seemed to change into an antelope the slowly plodding surfman. He sprang over the rocks that lined the beach. There was an ice wall that had bothered him a minute ago, but he now mastered it and climbed to high ground. Drawing out his signal, he fired it, and then waving madly this crimson answer of hope to a mariner’s prayer of fire, he ran to the station. Over fragments of ice, into pools of water, along sharp ledges, he flew as if some kindly power had withdrawn his cowhide boots and furnished him with wings instead; but how much faster he did want to go! If he were only electricity, or light itself, and could shoot to the station at once! He reached it though, finally. Keeper Barney was sitting by the stove trying to read, when Walter threw openthe kitchen door, and burst in, waving his lantern and crying, “A wreck! Quick!”“Heavens, boy! In this storm! All hands turn out!” he screamed, even before he reached the foot of the stairs leading up to the crew’s room. He must have repeated it half a dozen times, on his way to their beds. The next moment there were several bounces upon the floor. After a hurried dressing, there was a confused rushing for the stairs. Men appeared wearing one boot and lugging the other, or with half their clothes in their arms, while Tucker Jones, the man who took Joe Cardridge’s place, was trying to work his arms through the legs of his pants, thinking he was handling his jacket. Seavey Lowd, the other patrol, now arrived, or rather came rushing in, shouting and confirming the news. The little living–room was confused with excitement, the men hurrying here and there, trying to find hat or jacket or coat; and several were trying hard to find their senses. Keeper Barney had his, now, and he spoke coolly to the men.“Now listen, boys! Steady! It will be useless to take the boat. We must go out with the beach apparatus. Do as well as you can. You all know your places. Hit as high a mark as you can.” As he spoke, he lead the wayinto the boat–room, and then he issued the familiar order: “Open boat–room doors! Man the beach wagon!”How those young Titans worked! The outer doors flew open, and a strong, cold draft of wintry air rushed in. Every man knew his place in hauling. Two gripped the shafts, four laid hold of the drag ropes.“Forward!” rang out the word of command from the keeper, who followed with his lantern.Through the thick slush or over masses of ice, the cart was dragged to the sands which the tide had not flooded.“There’s the wreck!” some one shouted, or tried to shout amid the roar of the surf. An arrow of fire shooting up into the night shadows still lingering on the sea, showed the crew that they must go farther down the beach. What a wearisome journey with the cart it was!“Cheer ’em up with a Coston light, boys!” the keeper would occasionally shout. At last, when he judged they were about opposite the wreck, he cried, “Halt!” There was a waiting for the light, that the exact location of the wreck might be declared, and in the meantime all possible preparations for the rescue were made.The surf men knew what to do, as there had been many drills in the handling of the apparatus. Each man, according to his number, had his particular piece of work. It was the place of No. 4, Seavey Lowd, to throw the breeches buoy off the cart, and Seavey did it. Walter, as No. 6, was one of those that removed the sand anchor, pick and shovel. The keeper, and No. 1, Tom Walker, took the gun down. Nos. 2 and 3, Slim Tarleton and Woodbury Elliott, removed the shot–line box.“Bury the sand anchor up here!” called out the keeper. The sand anchor consisted of two stout pieces of hard wood, each six feet long, two inches thick and eight wide. These were crossed at their centers and securely fastened together. A stout iron ring projected from the center of the sand anchor. How rapidly pick and shovel were worked, and a deep trench dug in which the anchor was laid and there firmly imbedded! This buried anchor was designed to secure the shore end of the hawser to be sent out to the wreck. The hawser terminated in a double pulley–block, by which it could be tightened, and a short rope gripped the block and the anchor, binding them together. The “crotch” was made of two stout pieces of wood ten feet long. Near the top, these were crossed andwhen set up suggested an X. It was No. 4, Seavey Lowd, who looked after the crotch, and at the proper time he was to set it up on the beach. It was Seavey’s duty also to carry the end of the hawser to the foot of the crotch over which it was to be stretched to the sand anchor.In the meantime the captain and Tom Walker were supposed to look after the gun, while Slim Tarleton and Woodbury Elliott were expected to deposit the shot–line box about three feet from the gun. The line had been coiled about pins in a frame, and the latter was so arranged that it could be removed, leaving the line wound in diagonal loops, and at liberty to fly after the shot to which it was to be attached. During the interim of waiting, the life–car was also brought from the station. That dismal wreck could at last be plainly seen, about three hundred feet from the shore. The spray boiled about the dark hull as if it had been set in the crater of a volcano. The excitement among the surfmen increased. The keeper had loaded the gun, and the shot had been inserted and the line tied to an eye in the shank protruding from the shot. The keeper stood in the rear of the gun, and was sighting over it, shouting to Nos. 1 and 2, “Right!” or “Left!” And they trained the muzzle accordingly.“Well!” he cried, and the gun came to a rest.It was pointing at the wreck. The necessary elevation was then given to the gun, and the primer inserted. When everything was arranged, the keeper shouted, “Ready!”Whizz—z—bang—g—g!Away went the shot, the line faithfully following. How its flight was watched! Would it fall short of the wreck and uselessly drop into the water? No! it had fallen across the vessel and the crew quickly seized it. A shout went up from the surfmen: “Hur—rah—h! Hurrah—h—h!” To the shot–line, was now tied the “whip.” This was reeved through a single pulley–block, making what is termed an endless line. To it was attached a tally board carrying printed directions in English and French, telling those on board how to properly secure this “whip” or endless line. Keeper Barney was now signaling to the wreck.“He means to have them haul the whip on board,” thought Walter.Quickly the whip line was going out to the vessel, and was there made fast.“They are signaling to us to go ahead, and do the next thing,” thought Walter. All the surfmen knew what that next thing was. The whip had been secured to the sand anchor, andnow Nos. 1 and 2, Tom Walker and Slim Tarleton were handling the hawser, a still stouter line, and they attached it to the whip. As the keeper paid out the hawser, others manned the whip and hauled off to the wreck the new sturdy friend coming to the rescue. The men on the vessel guided by a tally board attached to the hawser, secured it to the mast a foot and a half higher than the hauling line or whip. On shore, the hawser had been stretched across the crotch and connected with the sand anchor. There now swung above the frothing breakers, reaching from shore to ship, this stout hawser four inches in circumference, and below it was the endless line or whip. The breeches buoy was now brought forward. This buoy consisted of a cork life–preserver, circular, from which hung canvas breeches with very short legs. Four ropes that gripped the circle of cork, met above in a ring of iron, and this was connected with a block called a “traveler.” This block was “snapped on to the hawser,” and the ends of the whip were also bent into the block–strap and secured. Then the buoy began its travels to the wreck, the men hauling on the whip. “Somebody has jumped into that buoy,” cried Tom Walker as he watched the wreck. Strong hands were laid on the whip, and above the breakers danced the breeches buoy, a man’s head and body now rising above it while his legs dangled below.“Strong hands were laid on the whip”(p.320).“Here she comes!” sung out Slim Tarleton.“Herehecomes, I guess,” suggested Woodbury Elliott.Come, he did, nearer, nearer, the surfmen steadily hauling on the line; and at last the breeches buoy was in the midst of the brave circle of rescuers.“How are ye?” called out the occupant of the buoy, a sharp–nosed, red–headed man. “Much obleeged.”“Oh, you’re welcome!” said Keeper Barney.“How are all the folks at sea?” inquired Tom Walker.“Does it look nat’ral round here?” asked Seavey Lowd.“Altogether too nat’ral for me,” replied the arrival by this ocean air–line. “Ef we didn’t have a tough night!”The man had now disembarked from this canvas–and–cork ship, and stood on the sands.The keeper was hurriedly giving the order to “haul out,” when the stranger asked, “Haven’t ye suthin’ bigger and snugger ye could send out? Some of the folks there are awful weak.”“Passengers?” inquired the keeper.“Jest so.”“All right. We will put on the life–car soon as we get some of the crew ashore. People can ride snug in that life–car. How long will your craft hold together?”“She’s a good deal smashed, Cap’n, but she can stand it a while longer.”“Man the weather–whip! Haul out!” the keeper was shouting. Out to the wreck, the breeches buoy traveled, and then returned with its freight of a second man.“Haul the hawser taut there!” cried the keeper to Walter and Woodbury, who stood near the sand anchor and handled the tackle for tightening the hawser. Each rescued man proved a rescuer, going to work at once. There were three more brought ashore by the buoy, and then the keeper ordered the life–car forward. The buoy was quickly removed, and in its place above the roaring surf hung the life–car, riding along the hawser on its way to the wreck. The life–car was shaped like a boat, made of galvanized sheet iron. It was about eleven feet long, three deep, and over four wide, and would carry a load of six or seven persons. It was roofed over, and its cargo was received through a hatch which was securely covered, but little openings in the top admitted the air. The car had now gone to the wreck, had received its load, and in response to the keeper’s “haul ashore!” was traveling landward along the hawser. It was a feeble, shivering lot of mortals who crawled through the hatch at the end of the trip.“Come he did, nearer, nearer!”(p.321).“Any more?” asked the keeper. “Two and the captain,” said an old man. Once more the life–car was hauled out to the wreck, while Walter was sent to the station with the chilled passengers and a sailor whom the storm had overcome. As Walter walked along the sands, he watched the terrible agitation of the water near him.The sea would swell into long folds of angry green, and these would rush toward the shore, swelling, threatening, more and more angry, greener, perhaps tipped with a scanty wreath of foam, only to roll over menacingly, tumbling, crashing in furious uproar, breaking into a million bits of foam. As an opposing rock was struck by a wave, this would be thrown up into a huge mound of froth that broke all along its summit into a delicate, misty veil of lace. This wave was only the front rank of an army whose name was legion, rolling, rushing in wrath toward the land, breaking and foaming, clambering up the high shore–ledges to vainly tearat them, smothering and drowning what could not be rooted up and borne away. In what faultless curves they turned over, these gigantic billows when they struck the shore, rings of emerald, wheels of porphyry, arcs of spheres of crystal! Down, down, down, then plunged the water, and these cataracts met their doom in a hopeless swirl of surf. All along the beach was the frothing tumble of these cascades of the ocean. Beyond the shore–waves it was one confusing mass of ghostly water, of white hands lifted and white faces raised,—in pity and prayer? No, in an anger where all color disappears, where is only the aspect, of a wrath, ghastly and awful. Occasionally some log would come out of this wild whirlpool of the demons, some fragment of a ship torn by the storm as if an animal, limb from limb, and flung in scorn upon the shore. What a tale each fragment could have told! Perhaps it was a handful of moss plucked from a rock, or a starfish, or the tiniest mussels gathered up from the bottom of the sea and then shot landward.How the sea roared! It seemed as if into that wild chorus all the notes of angry winds and mad torrents, and the crash of thunder, and the voices of men in their human wrath, and the shouts of demons in their satanic fury had beengathered, and now were let loose with all the confusion of the fiercest hurricane. Now and then, Walter thought he caught the dismal groan of a fog–horn attached to a buoy at the mouth of the river, and intended to warn mariners of the nearness of sand bar and rockledge. It was an illusion though, for who in the storm could hear any such agency piping out its feeble little note of warning?In the meantime, the car had brought from the wreck its last load. The captain was a part of it, a stout, heavy, dark–bearded man.“You all here?” asked Keeper Barney.“All that started,” replied the captain. “Two men—they were passengers—left on a life–savin’ mattress. We told ’em to wait any way till daylight, but they said the tide was right and would drift ’em ashore and they’d risk it. They was fearful skittish lest the vessel might break up. Massy! The sea gobbled ’em up less than no time, is my ’pinion. They left some time ago.”“Well, boys, I’ll have the beach patrolled, of course, and something may be seen of the men. Those whose watch it is are off already, and the rest of you pack up what things are here, and go back to the station, and Cook Charlie will have a hot breakfast ready for the menfrom the wreck, and for the rest too, soon as possible.”While hot coffee and dry clothes were making every one comfortable at the station, it was Tom Walker, one of the surfmen out patrolling, that hurried into the living–room, startling the station crew with the announcement, “There’s a man in the Chair!”If a rocket from some wreck at sea had come up through the floor of the station and made its hideous, fiery racket in the very midst of the station crew, a greater excitement could not have followed. Clinging to the jagged rocks at the Crescent, was some poor soul thrown up by the sea, piteously looking in helpless appeal to the houses not so very far away and yet separated from him by a channel of foaming wrath! Every surfman could seem to make out in his thoughts a pale face frantically appealing to him through the wild storm, and they began to dress again for their perilous work.“Cap’n Barney,” said Tom Walker to the keeper, “if I may suggest it, I think we might get somewhere near him with our surf–boat. We couldn’t have touched the wreck, and can’t now, out there on Split Ledge, but we might get our boat up to the village and then launch her in the river, and so work her down towardthe Chair. The tide has turned, and every moment, there is less water ’tween the Crescent and the shore, and that will help us.”“Good idea, Tom,” replied the keeper. “And instead of getting horses, as it will take so much time, there are so many of us here and all will take hold, we can make better time to haul the boat–carriage ourselves. What say? It is a man’s life at stake.”“Aye, aye!” was the deep, hearty chorus in response from all.As the boat made its appearance in the village volunteers appeared also, who dragged heartily on the ropes of the carriage. It was a strange sight in the little village, that stormy morning, the lengthening file of rough, strong–handed men pulling on the rope of the carriage while the boys shouted away and thrust in their small hands wherever any chance for grasping the rope showed itself, and some of the women that came out hurriedly from their homes, their shawls pinned over their heads, also joined the procession. The water was reached and the boat launched.When, manned by a stalwart crew,—volunteers from The Harbor taking the place of the absent patrols,—the boat moved off into the river, cheers arose from those on shore. Butwhat about the man all this time in the Chair? Did he see the boat coming, and did he cheer also?“Can you see him now?” eagerly asked the men of Keeper Barney, who was skillfully managing his steering oar amid the heavy swash of the current.The keeper nodded his head in assent.The boat cleared the last house in the village, and from this point the Chair could be more distinctly seen.“See him now, Cap’n?”The keeper nodded his head. The boat tossed more uneasily now, for the harbor here began to open into the sea, and the full strength of the wind from the stormy north–east smote it. The upper end of the Crescent was very near, and its first ledges, black and stubborn, rose out of the white, angry tumult. Any one seeking refuge here would not have found broad standing room, while at the Chair the exposure was far greater. The man, though, still maintained his hold.“He’s there, is he?” some one would shout through the noise of the storm, and Keeper Barney would silently nod assent.I wonder what the man in the Chair was thinking of, as he grasped that rocky projection,that little low fence between him and death! He was one of the two men who had trusted their chances to that life–preserver. God alone knew where the second man was in this hellish tumult of wind and sea. The man in the Chair had been flung into it by a violent wave and he had gripped it with all the energy he could possibly rally. He did not want to die. The sea looked cold and deep, and the white foam beating upon him, to his imagination had teeth that threatened to fasten into him and tear him. He could sometimes, when his back was half turned to the sea, catch the outlines of the big billows as they rolled up and rolled toward him, and they came on with such fury that he shrank closer to this rock, and he clung more tenaciously even when some of them failed to reach him. Occasionally a huge billow would strike him and drench him, and then he would shiver and throw off the foam as if trying to recover from some murderous blow given by an animal. It would have been easy to have yielded to one of those waves and allowed it to sweep him away into a swift death, but who does not cling to life? A wild sky, a pitiless rain, and only a black rock in a maelstrom—better this than a grave in that maelstrom. So the man felt. As he held on, his thoughts would go back in spite of him. Notthat he cared to think. He would gladly have given the subject a grave in that sea from which he shrank, but if he had tried to throw it off and drop it there, it would have had a resurrection and come up. He thought of the time when he was a little boy in this very neighborhood, visiting here, one far off summer. His younger sister was with him. He could easily recall her blue eyes that framed a constant smile. He heard the happy ring of her laugh, even out there in the noisy waters. He did not want to hear it, but hear it he did. There had been a quarrel with her one day, and he resolved in a mood of anger that was almost insane, to punish her. The quarrel had occurred at the Chair which he knew sometimes was a bad place to be in, the older people had told him. When the tide was high, and behind it was a storm pushing violently the waters landward, that lonely piece of rock, the Chair, was a dangerous position to occupy. There was a gray, misty sky that day, when the boy led his sister, at low tide, across the sands to the Crescent ledges. He pleasantly told her to stay at the Chair and he would come for her in a little while. “The waves were pretty,” he said, “and she could watch them till he came back.” Then he left her. In half an hour he knew the tide wouldflood the sands and isolate the Chair. He would be absent, he said to himself, perhaps two hours. That would give her a good fright and would be enough to satisfy him. But he did not get back to the shore so soon as two hours. Something had detained him. In the meantime, the fog came on. The rain began to beat down. The men were almost all of them away on fishing cruises. Only a few decrepit fishermen were at home, and they did not like to venture off into the uneasy waters now enclosing the Crescent ledges unless it was some special reason urging them, and as the boy was ashamed to confess that he had left his sister at the Chair, no rough but friendly hand of any seaman was reached out to grasp her. In the morning though, his conscience frightened him into an explanation of his urgency, and a relief party of old men went at once. The Chair however was empty. That morning, there came ashore a sweet little face with closed eyes, and it confirmed the story told by that vacant Chair. So many, many years ago, did this all happen, and now it was coming back as a sad thing of yesterday.“She’s a–lookin’ at me!” said the man in the Chair. “I can see her eyes!”Yes, through the veil of the storm theyseemed to penetrate and reproachfully search his heart.“I will look another way,” he thought, but they seemed to follow him. Tender and full of sorrow, they looked at him on every side. He saw the waves rushing at him and he shrank from them only to meet the eyes that he little cared to behold. He avoided these, but there were the billows rushing at him again. So he was pursued. It seemed to him as if he must lose his mind, and then would he not lose his hold on the rock? That tormented him anew.But—but—look! Amid the ragged mass of flying foam jutting above the walls of the angrily rising waves, he saw a boat! Yes, he could make out the heads of the men that were rowing! They were coming to rescue him! He had enemies on shore who would seize him and put him behind stone walls, and these men in the boat might hand him over to those enemies, but no matter, he would be rescued from the place of torment he was in. Anything to be saved from that, and those men would save him! The rush of exultant feeling was so great that it affected him even as a wave threatening to carry him away, but he tightened his loosened grasp and looked up again. Yes, they were coming nearer. He could see them, countthem,—one, two, three, four, five, six, besides the man steering. And they saw him! Yes, they all saw him. To reach him, the boat slightly changed its course, and now all the crew looking sidewise could see this castaway. It was Walter who recognized him. Raising his head, straining his vision to catch a fuller view of the man bending over and half veiled by the misty spray thrown up above the Chair there came before Walter once more the form that he had seen that morning in his uncle’s store when the note so mysteriously disappeared, that form which he had seen again when patrolling the beach off the Crescent, one wild November day.“Baggs!” he now shouted to the crew in the surf–boat. “It is Baggs!” As by a common impulse, every man ceased rowing and rested on his oar, the keeper holding the boat with his long steering–oar.“Yes, yes!” “That is the man!” “It’s Baggs!” were the various exclamations that broke from the crew’s lips.“He’s waving a hand to us!” said Walter.“Let him wave and die!” some one exclaimed.“No, I’d save a dog off in that place!” said the keeper.“That’s so!” replied Walter.“That’s so!” said several.It was not so much an expression of opinion by one man or several, as the voice rather of that noble spirit which has its embodiment in our entire Life Saving Service and proves it by its yearly record.“Row away, men!” shouted the keeper. “He’s there! I see him.”But Baggs changed his position. He knew that it would be difficult to rescue him even with that boat, such a raging sea broke all about the rock to which he clung. The boat must be held off at a little distance from the ledge and then a rope thrown to him. He must stand his chances of grasping this only hope of safety. The tide had begun to subside, and another part of the ledge was now jutting above the surf. Whether he thought he could be rescued better from this second position and so tried to reach it, or whether in the increasing nearness of the rescue–party he grew careless, and accidentally slipped out of the Chair and was quickly, eagerly, seized by a wave and hurried away, who could say? It was Slim Tarleton who just before had said to the keeper, “He’s holdin’ on, Cap’n, ain’t he?” And the keeper nodded yes with his head.“Is he there now, Cap’n?” asked Seavey Lowd the next minute. The keeper’s head did not move—he only fastened his eyes steadily on the ledge fringed by the surf, as if trying to determine a fact with certainty, and then rising in his seat, said solemnly, “I—b’lieve—he’s—gone! Yes, gone!”Gone, and he left no more trace behind than a leaf falling through the air. Gone into that whirling, eddying sea, into that deep, dark grave so long clutching at him, and which now buried him under its waves forever! The boat could not possibly reach him. Gone, gone!“Well, men,” said the keeper to the crew, who resting on their oars looked with sober faces at the empty Chair into which the waves now mockingly flung their spray as its only occupant, “we might take a turn round and then go home, but that hunt is all up. Don’t see a sign of him.”The bow of the surf–boat was headed for The Harbor, after a season of waiting. And strong arms steadily pulled it home.That afternoon, the captain of the wrecked vessel walking on the sands at low tide, reported at the station that a body had come ashore. “It’s t’other passenger,” he said, “who came ashore as I told you. You know two started on a life–savin’ thing. It’s ’bout two hundred feet from here.”Keeper Barney and Walter followed him to the designated spot, and there lying on the beach, his long dark hair hanging in a tangle over his face as if trying to veil from the world some dishonored object, was Joe Cardridge. The body was removed to a shed in a field that skirted the shore–rocks. Various articles were found upon the body, and they were removed by the keeper for preservation. “What is this?” asked the keeper, as he took from an inner pocket of the blouse that Joe had worn, an envelope. “A letter inside this,” said the keeper, “and it is directed to me!”The address was worn and the water had affected it, and yet the superscription could be made out.“A letter for me, brought by a strange mail–carrier,” said the keeper. “I will see what it is.”“Why,” he exclaimed, “that is a letter from our district superintendent! Yes, it is the missin’ one that Walter couldn’t find! There is the date. That clears Walter.”“I guess he was cleared afore,” declared Tom Walker, who was present.Another mystery was solved that day.Many people were attracted to the beach by the tragedy of the wreck, and among them came Miss P. Green, Aunt Lydia, and other women. Some of Joe Cardridge’s family were at the station. The blouse that he had worn, was drying before the stove.“What’s that?” queried Aunt Lydia, who had come to the station. Her sharp bright eyes were fastened on a sleeve of the blouse, turned back at the wrist. “If there ain’t that blue W that I tucked away in the white linin’ of Walter’s blouse!”“Where?” asked Tom Walker.“There!” replied Aunt Lydia. “That is Walter’s coat, I know.”“Walter’s coat?” asked Keeper Barney, who had joined the circle of inspection.“Yes,” replied Aunt Lydia, “I sewed a blue W on to the white linin’ of Walter’s sleeve, and here it is.”“Humph!” said the keeper. “Joe Cardridge exchanged blouses with Walter, that is what he did, and carried off the missin’ letter.”“But—but—” said little Charlie Cardridge who was present, and overhearing the conversation wished to show that some of the property in the room did belong to his father, “that’s father’s. Looks like his, anyway.” He waspointing at the flask found in Walter’s pocket and now standing on the sill of a window in the station. The flask was handed to Charlie. Turning it over, he exclaimed, “There’s a C! That is father’s.”In the bottom of the flask the letter C had been blown, and it now proved who the real owner of that mysterious property had been.“No doubt about it!” declared Tom Walker, who with others of the crew had come into the kitchen. “No doubt about it! There was an exchange of blouses by the owner of the flask, and the latter was left by Joe as a witness agin Walter. A pretty deep game! Walter, give us your hand. I knew before though that you were all right.”Tom gripped Walter’s hand as if it were a pump–handle on a dry, hot, thirsty day. Others congratulated Walter, and none more readily than the keeper.There was no investigation by the district superintendent when he arrived, and the news of the wreck brought him the next day.

A WILD STORM.

At a life saving station, there are various drills in which the surfmen are exercised. There is the beach apparatus drill. “Open boat–room doors! Man the beach wagon!” shouts the keeper. Every man knows his place, the doors are opened, and the cart is rushed out. “Forward!” cries the keeper, and each man knows just where to station himself and pull. Then come the other orders. “Halt! Action!” A pole representing a wreck, the men proceed as if attempting a rescue, sending a line to the wreck. Then come other orders. “Man weather whip! Haul out! Man lee whip!”

“Haul ashore!” and the buoy for conveying the crew supposed to be wrecked, travels backward and forward as often as desired. Then there is the boat practice, and the boat must be launched through the surf, and the mendrilled in the management of the oars. The crew must also practice with signals. Stations may be near enough to communicate with one another, and this is done in the day time with flags and in the night with star rockets and Coston lights. An example would be the showing of a red flag by day and the burning of a red Coston light and firing of a red rocket by night. It is the danger signal, and means that a wreck has been seen, or a vessel is discovered to be in need of help. By means of the box of flags that every station keeps under its roof, the crew can talk with any vessel off shore and needing assistance. The crew must also be practiced in methods of restoring the apparently drowned. It was one dreary, rainy day that Keeper Barney was drilling the crew in these last methods. Cook Charlie had offered himself as a subject on whom the crew might practice. The keeper commenced a list of questions, asking: “What first is to be done to the patient?” Cook Charlie stretched upon the floor submitted patiently to the pressing and pounding and other parts of the process of resuscitation.

It was not a practice that on a dreary winter day when the sea was wrathfully roaring, could be classified as pleasantly suggestive.

While they were resuscitating Cook Charlie, Walter glanced occasionally out of the window. The sea rapidly roughened, and huge waves were launching on the sands broken and angry masses of surf. A ragged curtain of fog was drawn across the rim of the sea, but it was only ragged near the shore. Farther out, its denseness was without a seam. The day ended with many jokes about Cook Charlie, the resuscitated mariner, but mingled with the laughter were dismal cries of the storm. The rain could be heard splashing against the window panes, and occasionally the whole window shook as if a violent hand had been laid upon it. All the while, there was the wrathful thunder of the sea as if over some invisible bridge just above the station, the heavy squadrons of the storm were gloomily marching. Still, around the old cook stove whose fire burnt jollily, echoed the laughter of the surfmen as they cracked their jokes and told humorous stories of the sea. So the evening wore away. The storm yet raged. As the different patrolmen arrived, they came with dripping hats, with faces wet by the storm, with clothes that hung stiffly about them.

“It’s a howlin’ night,” reported Tom Walker, slamming his lantern on the table.

“Just so at my end of the beach,” saidWoodbury Elliott, who immediately followed Tom. “Whew—w—w! An old–fashioned nor’easter!” “You saw nothin?” inquired Capt. Barney. And each patrol said, “Not a thing.”

“I hope it will stay so, for I think it’s goin’ to be the wust of the season. Come, boys, all pile upstairs early. There’s some hard trampin’ to be done ’fore daybreak.”

“Wall, we can say we have resuscitated one man to–day,” said Slim Tarleton.

“Ah, but we may have some real cases to–morrow. God forbid!”

It was Walter’s watch in the morning, from four till sunrise. He slept uneasily till his watch, vexed by dreams of wreck and rescue, of dead men’s faces and living wives’ sorrow. Rising, he dressed himself hurriedly a little before four. How the building shook in the wind, while the sea without was furious in its uproar!

“I’d like to stay in that warm bed. Booh! That cold walk makes me shiver! No help for it,” thought Walter, as he moved reluctantly toward the stairway and then descended it.

In the kitchen, dripping like a fish just pulled out of the water, was Slim Tarleton. He had finished his watch and Walter was his successor.

“I’d like to go for you, Walter, but it’s fournow, and morning’s not such a terrible way off.”

“All quiet?”

“Everything except the sea, and that acts as bad as it can. Oh, I don’t imagine there will be any trouble.”

“Here is your Coston light, time–detector and so on,” said Keeper Barney. “Dress snug, for it blows; and dress thick, for it is cold. If anything happens, let us know.”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n!” and out into the dark and the cold and the rain, strode our young knight, looking in his storm gear more like an Eskimo than a representative of any knightly age. The north–east wind blew at him as if it wanted to push this meddler back into the station; but with one arm around his lantern as if it were a baby that he wished to shield, he struggled over the rocks down to the strip of sand not yet covered by the tide. He saw nothing ten feet away, but he heard—no pen can describe the bellowing of this monster plunging and frothing at his feet. The lantern shot little gleams of light on the confused masses of foam along the edge of the shore, and he knew that there was a tumbling wall of ghastly white just beyond.

“What if my lantern should go out!” he exclaimed nervously. He turned from the windand unbuttoning his outside coat, folded it around his lantern, letting out only enough light to show him where to plant his feet. Then he struggled on. It was a hard walk in a storm that had no mercy. He was pushing ahead, when, lifting his face to the wild rain and attempting to look through it, he saw—a jagged line of fire curving up into the air! The next moment, he trembled with excitement.

“A wreck!” was the thought flashing through his mind. That one glance at the rocket above the sea seemed to change into an antelope the slowly plodding surfman. He sprang over the rocks that lined the beach. There was an ice wall that had bothered him a minute ago, but he now mastered it and climbed to high ground. Drawing out his signal, he fired it, and then waving madly this crimson answer of hope to a mariner’s prayer of fire, he ran to the station. Over fragments of ice, into pools of water, along sharp ledges, he flew as if some kindly power had withdrawn his cowhide boots and furnished him with wings instead; but how much faster he did want to go! If he were only electricity, or light itself, and could shoot to the station at once! He reached it though, finally. Keeper Barney was sitting by the stove trying to read, when Walter threw openthe kitchen door, and burst in, waving his lantern and crying, “A wreck! Quick!”

“Heavens, boy! In this storm! All hands turn out!” he screamed, even before he reached the foot of the stairs leading up to the crew’s room. He must have repeated it half a dozen times, on his way to their beds. The next moment there were several bounces upon the floor. After a hurried dressing, there was a confused rushing for the stairs. Men appeared wearing one boot and lugging the other, or with half their clothes in their arms, while Tucker Jones, the man who took Joe Cardridge’s place, was trying to work his arms through the legs of his pants, thinking he was handling his jacket. Seavey Lowd, the other patrol, now arrived, or rather came rushing in, shouting and confirming the news. The little living–room was confused with excitement, the men hurrying here and there, trying to find hat or jacket or coat; and several were trying hard to find their senses. Keeper Barney had his, now, and he spoke coolly to the men.

“Now listen, boys! Steady! It will be useless to take the boat. We must go out with the beach apparatus. Do as well as you can. You all know your places. Hit as high a mark as you can.” As he spoke, he lead the wayinto the boat–room, and then he issued the familiar order: “Open boat–room doors! Man the beach wagon!”

How those young Titans worked! The outer doors flew open, and a strong, cold draft of wintry air rushed in. Every man knew his place in hauling. Two gripped the shafts, four laid hold of the drag ropes.

“Forward!” rang out the word of command from the keeper, who followed with his lantern.

Through the thick slush or over masses of ice, the cart was dragged to the sands which the tide had not flooded.

“There’s the wreck!” some one shouted, or tried to shout amid the roar of the surf. An arrow of fire shooting up into the night shadows still lingering on the sea, showed the crew that they must go farther down the beach. What a wearisome journey with the cart it was!

“Cheer ’em up with a Coston light, boys!” the keeper would occasionally shout. At last, when he judged they were about opposite the wreck, he cried, “Halt!” There was a waiting for the light, that the exact location of the wreck might be declared, and in the meantime all possible preparations for the rescue were made.

The surf men knew what to do, as there had been many drills in the handling of the apparatus. Each man, according to his number, had his particular piece of work. It was the place of No. 4, Seavey Lowd, to throw the breeches buoy off the cart, and Seavey did it. Walter, as No. 6, was one of those that removed the sand anchor, pick and shovel. The keeper, and No. 1, Tom Walker, took the gun down. Nos. 2 and 3, Slim Tarleton and Woodbury Elliott, removed the shot–line box.

“Bury the sand anchor up here!” called out the keeper. The sand anchor consisted of two stout pieces of hard wood, each six feet long, two inches thick and eight wide. These were crossed at their centers and securely fastened together. A stout iron ring projected from the center of the sand anchor. How rapidly pick and shovel were worked, and a deep trench dug in which the anchor was laid and there firmly imbedded! This buried anchor was designed to secure the shore end of the hawser to be sent out to the wreck. The hawser terminated in a double pulley–block, by which it could be tightened, and a short rope gripped the block and the anchor, binding them together. The “crotch” was made of two stout pieces of wood ten feet long. Near the top, these were crossed andwhen set up suggested an X. It was No. 4, Seavey Lowd, who looked after the crotch, and at the proper time he was to set it up on the beach. It was Seavey’s duty also to carry the end of the hawser to the foot of the crotch over which it was to be stretched to the sand anchor.

In the meantime the captain and Tom Walker were supposed to look after the gun, while Slim Tarleton and Woodbury Elliott were expected to deposit the shot–line box about three feet from the gun. The line had been coiled about pins in a frame, and the latter was so arranged that it could be removed, leaving the line wound in diagonal loops, and at liberty to fly after the shot to which it was to be attached. During the interim of waiting, the life–car was also brought from the station. That dismal wreck could at last be plainly seen, about three hundred feet from the shore. The spray boiled about the dark hull as if it had been set in the crater of a volcano. The excitement among the surfmen increased. The keeper had loaded the gun, and the shot had been inserted and the line tied to an eye in the shank protruding from the shot. The keeper stood in the rear of the gun, and was sighting over it, shouting to Nos. 1 and 2, “Right!” or “Left!” And they trained the muzzle accordingly.

“Well!” he cried, and the gun came to a rest.

It was pointing at the wreck. The necessary elevation was then given to the gun, and the primer inserted. When everything was arranged, the keeper shouted, “Ready!”

Whizz—z—bang—g—g!

Away went the shot, the line faithfully following. How its flight was watched! Would it fall short of the wreck and uselessly drop into the water? No! it had fallen across the vessel and the crew quickly seized it. A shout went up from the surfmen: “Hur—rah—h! Hurrah—h—h!” To the shot–line, was now tied the “whip.” This was reeved through a single pulley–block, making what is termed an endless line. To it was attached a tally board carrying printed directions in English and French, telling those on board how to properly secure this “whip” or endless line. Keeper Barney was now signaling to the wreck.

“He means to have them haul the whip on board,” thought Walter.

Quickly the whip line was going out to the vessel, and was there made fast.

“They are signaling to us to go ahead, and do the next thing,” thought Walter. All the surfmen knew what that next thing was. The whip had been secured to the sand anchor, andnow Nos. 1 and 2, Tom Walker and Slim Tarleton were handling the hawser, a still stouter line, and they attached it to the whip. As the keeper paid out the hawser, others manned the whip and hauled off to the wreck the new sturdy friend coming to the rescue. The men on the vessel guided by a tally board attached to the hawser, secured it to the mast a foot and a half higher than the hauling line or whip. On shore, the hawser had been stretched across the crotch and connected with the sand anchor. There now swung above the frothing breakers, reaching from shore to ship, this stout hawser four inches in circumference, and below it was the endless line or whip. The breeches buoy was now brought forward. This buoy consisted of a cork life–preserver, circular, from which hung canvas breeches with very short legs. Four ropes that gripped the circle of cork, met above in a ring of iron, and this was connected with a block called a “traveler.” This block was “snapped on to the hawser,” and the ends of the whip were also bent into the block–strap and secured. Then the buoy began its travels to the wreck, the men hauling on the whip. “Somebody has jumped into that buoy,” cried Tom Walker as he watched the wreck. Strong hands were laid on the whip, and above the breakers danced the breeches buoy, a man’s head and body now rising above it while his legs dangled below.

“Strong hands were laid on the whip”(p.320).

“Strong hands were laid on the whip”(p.320).

“Strong hands were laid on the whip”(p.320).

“Here she comes!” sung out Slim Tarleton.

“Herehecomes, I guess,” suggested Woodbury Elliott.

Come, he did, nearer, nearer, the surfmen steadily hauling on the line; and at last the breeches buoy was in the midst of the brave circle of rescuers.

“How are ye?” called out the occupant of the buoy, a sharp–nosed, red–headed man. “Much obleeged.”

“Oh, you’re welcome!” said Keeper Barney.

“How are all the folks at sea?” inquired Tom Walker.

“Does it look nat’ral round here?” asked Seavey Lowd.

“Altogether too nat’ral for me,” replied the arrival by this ocean air–line. “Ef we didn’t have a tough night!”

The man had now disembarked from this canvas–and–cork ship, and stood on the sands.

The keeper was hurriedly giving the order to “haul out,” when the stranger asked, “Haven’t ye suthin’ bigger and snugger ye could send out? Some of the folks there are awful weak.”

“Passengers?” inquired the keeper.

“Jest so.”

“All right. We will put on the life–car soon as we get some of the crew ashore. People can ride snug in that life–car. How long will your craft hold together?”

“She’s a good deal smashed, Cap’n, but she can stand it a while longer.”

“Man the weather–whip! Haul out!” the keeper was shouting. Out to the wreck, the breeches buoy traveled, and then returned with its freight of a second man.

“Haul the hawser taut there!” cried the keeper to Walter and Woodbury, who stood near the sand anchor and handled the tackle for tightening the hawser. Each rescued man proved a rescuer, going to work at once. There were three more brought ashore by the buoy, and then the keeper ordered the life–car forward. The buoy was quickly removed, and in its place above the roaring surf hung the life–car, riding along the hawser on its way to the wreck. The life–car was shaped like a boat, made of galvanized sheet iron. It was about eleven feet long, three deep, and over four wide, and would carry a load of six or seven persons. It was roofed over, and its cargo was received through a hatch which was securely covered, but little openings in the top admitted the air. The car had now gone to the wreck, had received its load, and in response to the keeper’s “haul ashore!” was traveling landward along the hawser. It was a feeble, shivering lot of mortals who crawled through the hatch at the end of the trip.

“Come he did, nearer, nearer!”(p.321).

“Come he did, nearer, nearer!”(p.321).

“Come he did, nearer, nearer!”(p.321).

“Any more?” asked the keeper. “Two and the captain,” said an old man. Once more the life–car was hauled out to the wreck, while Walter was sent to the station with the chilled passengers and a sailor whom the storm had overcome. As Walter walked along the sands, he watched the terrible agitation of the water near him.

The sea would swell into long folds of angry green, and these would rush toward the shore, swelling, threatening, more and more angry, greener, perhaps tipped with a scanty wreath of foam, only to roll over menacingly, tumbling, crashing in furious uproar, breaking into a million bits of foam. As an opposing rock was struck by a wave, this would be thrown up into a huge mound of froth that broke all along its summit into a delicate, misty veil of lace. This wave was only the front rank of an army whose name was legion, rolling, rushing in wrath toward the land, breaking and foaming, clambering up the high shore–ledges to vainly tearat them, smothering and drowning what could not be rooted up and borne away. In what faultless curves they turned over, these gigantic billows when they struck the shore, rings of emerald, wheels of porphyry, arcs of spheres of crystal! Down, down, down, then plunged the water, and these cataracts met their doom in a hopeless swirl of surf. All along the beach was the frothing tumble of these cascades of the ocean. Beyond the shore–waves it was one confusing mass of ghostly water, of white hands lifted and white faces raised,—in pity and prayer? No, in an anger where all color disappears, where is only the aspect, of a wrath, ghastly and awful. Occasionally some log would come out of this wild whirlpool of the demons, some fragment of a ship torn by the storm as if an animal, limb from limb, and flung in scorn upon the shore. What a tale each fragment could have told! Perhaps it was a handful of moss plucked from a rock, or a starfish, or the tiniest mussels gathered up from the bottom of the sea and then shot landward.

How the sea roared! It seemed as if into that wild chorus all the notes of angry winds and mad torrents, and the crash of thunder, and the voices of men in their human wrath, and the shouts of demons in their satanic fury had beengathered, and now were let loose with all the confusion of the fiercest hurricane. Now and then, Walter thought he caught the dismal groan of a fog–horn attached to a buoy at the mouth of the river, and intended to warn mariners of the nearness of sand bar and rockledge. It was an illusion though, for who in the storm could hear any such agency piping out its feeble little note of warning?

In the meantime, the car had brought from the wreck its last load. The captain was a part of it, a stout, heavy, dark–bearded man.

“You all here?” asked Keeper Barney.

“All that started,” replied the captain. “Two men—they were passengers—left on a life–savin’ mattress. We told ’em to wait any way till daylight, but they said the tide was right and would drift ’em ashore and they’d risk it. They was fearful skittish lest the vessel might break up. Massy! The sea gobbled ’em up less than no time, is my ’pinion. They left some time ago.”

“Well, boys, I’ll have the beach patrolled, of course, and something may be seen of the men. Those whose watch it is are off already, and the rest of you pack up what things are here, and go back to the station, and Cook Charlie will have a hot breakfast ready for the menfrom the wreck, and for the rest too, soon as possible.”

While hot coffee and dry clothes were making every one comfortable at the station, it was Tom Walker, one of the surfmen out patrolling, that hurried into the living–room, startling the station crew with the announcement, “There’s a man in the Chair!”

If a rocket from some wreck at sea had come up through the floor of the station and made its hideous, fiery racket in the very midst of the station crew, a greater excitement could not have followed. Clinging to the jagged rocks at the Crescent, was some poor soul thrown up by the sea, piteously looking in helpless appeal to the houses not so very far away and yet separated from him by a channel of foaming wrath! Every surfman could seem to make out in his thoughts a pale face frantically appealing to him through the wild storm, and they began to dress again for their perilous work.

“Cap’n Barney,” said Tom Walker to the keeper, “if I may suggest it, I think we might get somewhere near him with our surf–boat. We couldn’t have touched the wreck, and can’t now, out there on Split Ledge, but we might get our boat up to the village and then launch her in the river, and so work her down towardthe Chair. The tide has turned, and every moment, there is less water ’tween the Crescent and the shore, and that will help us.”

“Good idea, Tom,” replied the keeper. “And instead of getting horses, as it will take so much time, there are so many of us here and all will take hold, we can make better time to haul the boat–carriage ourselves. What say? It is a man’s life at stake.”

“Aye, aye!” was the deep, hearty chorus in response from all.

As the boat made its appearance in the village volunteers appeared also, who dragged heartily on the ropes of the carriage. It was a strange sight in the little village, that stormy morning, the lengthening file of rough, strong–handed men pulling on the rope of the carriage while the boys shouted away and thrust in their small hands wherever any chance for grasping the rope showed itself, and some of the women that came out hurriedly from their homes, their shawls pinned over their heads, also joined the procession. The water was reached and the boat launched.

When, manned by a stalwart crew,—volunteers from The Harbor taking the place of the absent patrols,—the boat moved off into the river, cheers arose from those on shore. Butwhat about the man all this time in the Chair? Did he see the boat coming, and did he cheer also?

“Can you see him now?” eagerly asked the men of Keeper Barney, who was skillfully managing his steering oar amid the heavy swash of the current.

The keeper nodded his head in assent.

The boat cleared the last house in the village, and from this point the Chair could be more distinctly seen.

“See him now, Cap’n?”

The keeper nodded his head. The boat tossed more uneasily now, for the harbor here began to open into the sea, and the full strength of the wind from the stormy north–east smote it. The upper end of the Crescent was very near, and its first ledges, black and stubborn, rose out of the white, angry tumult. Any one seeking refuge here would not have found broad standing room, while at the Chair the exposure was far greater. The man, though, still maintained his hold.

“He’s there, is he?” some one would shout through the noise of the storm, and Keeper Barney would silently nod assent.

I wonder what the man in the Chair was thinking of, as he grasped that rocky projection,that little low fence between him and death! He was one of the two men who had trusted their chances to that life–preserver. God alone knew where the second man was in this hellish tumult of wind and sea. The man in the Chair had been flung into it by a violent wave and he had gripped it with all the energy he could possibly rally. He did not want to die. The sea looked cold and deep, and the white foam beating upon him, to his imagination had teeth that threatened to fasten into him and tear him. He could sometimes, when his back was half turned to the sea, catch the outlines of the big billows as they rolled up and rolled toward him, and they came on with such fury that he shrank closer to this rock, and he clung more tenaciously even when some of them failed to reach him. Occasionally a huge billow would strike him and drench him, and then he would shiver and throw off the foam as if trying to recover from some murderous blow given by an animal. It would have been easy to have yielded to one of those waves and allowed it to sweep him away into a swift death, but who does not cling to life? A wild sky, a pitiless rain, and only a black rock in a maelstrom—better this than a grave in that maelstrom. So the man felt. As he held on, his thoughts would go back in spite of him. Notthat he cared to think. He would gladly have given the subject a grave in that sea from which he shrank, but if he had tried to throw it off and drop it there, it would have had a resurrection and come up. He thought of the time when he was a little boy in this very neighborhood, visiting here, one far off summer. His younger sister was with him. He could easily recall her blue eyes that framed a constant smile. He heard the happy ring of her laugh, even out there in the noisy waters. He did not want to hear it, but hear it he did. There had been a quarrel with her one day, and he resolved in a mood of anger that was almost insane, to punish her. The quarrel had occurred at the Chair which he knew sometimes was a bad place to be in, the older people had told him. When the tide was high, and behind it was a storm pushing violently the waters landward, that lonely piece of rock, the Chair, was a dangerous position to occupy. There was a gray, misty sky that day, when the boy led his sister, at low tide, across the sands to the Crescent ledges. He pleasantly told her to stay at the Chair and he would come for her in a little while. “The waves were pretty,” he said, “and she could watch them till he came back.” Then he left her. In half an hour he knew the tide wouldflood the sands and isolate the Chair. He would be absent, he said to himself, perhaps two hours. That would give her a good fright and would be enough to satisfy him. But he did not get back to the shore so soon as two hours. Something had detained him. In the meantime, the fog came on. The rain began to beat down. The men were almost all of them away on fishing cruises. Only a few decrepit fishermen were at home, and they did not like to venture off into the uneasy waters now enclosing the Crescent ledges unless it was some special reason urging them, and as the boy was ashamed to confess that he had left his sister at the Chair, no rough but friendly hand of any seaman was reached out to grasp her. In the morning though, his conscience frightened him into an explanation of his urgency, and a relief party of old men went at once. The Chair however was empty. That morning, there came ashore a sweet little face with closed eyes, and it confirmed the story told by that vacant Chair. So many, many years ago, did this all happen, and now it was coming back as a sad thing of yesterday.

“She’s a–lookin’ at me!” said the man in the Chair. “I can see her eyes!”

Yes, through the veil of the storm theyseemed to penetrate and reproachfully search his heart.

“I will look another way,” he thought, but they seemed to follow him. Tender and full of sorrow, they looked at him on every side. He saw the waves rushing at him and he shrank from them only to meet the eyes that he little cared to behold. He avoided these, but there were the billows rushing at him again. So he was pursued. It seemed to him as if he must lose his mind, and then would he not lose his hold on the rock? That tormented him anew.

But—but—look! Amid the ragged mass of flying foam jutting above the walls of the angrily rising waves, he saw a boat! Yes, he could make out the heads of the men that were rowing! They were coming to rescue him! He had enemies on shore who would seize him and put him behind stone walls, and these men in the boat might hand him over to those enemies, but no matter, he would be rescued from the place of torment he was in. Anything to be saved from that, and those men would save him! The rush of exultant feeling was so great that it affected him even as a wave threatening to carry him away, but he tightened his loosened grasp and looked up again. Yes, they were coming nearer. He could see them, countthem,—one, two, three, four, five, six, besides the man steering. And they saw him! Yes, they all saw him. To reach him, the boat slightly changed its course, and now all the crew looking sidewise could see this castaway. It was Walter who recognized him. Raising his head, straining his vision to catch a fuller view of the man bending over and half veiled by the misty spray thrown up above the Chair there came before Walter once more the form that he had seen that morning in his uncle’s store when the note so mysteriously disappeared, that form which he had seen again when patrolling the beach off the Crescent, one wild November day.

“Baggs!” he now shouted to the crew in the surf–boat. “It is Baggs!” As by a common impulse, every man ceased rowing and rested on his oar, the keeper holding the boat with his long steering–oar.

“Yes, yes!” “That is the man!” “It’s Baggs!” were the various exclamations that broke from the crew’s lips.

“He’s waving a hand to us!” said Walter.

“Let him wave and die!” some one exclaimed.

“No, I’d save a dog off in that place!” said the keeper.

“That’s so!” replied Walter.

“That’s so!” said several.

It was not so much an expression of opinion by one man or several, as the voice rather of that noble spirit which has its embodiment in our entire Life Saving Service and proves it by its yearly record.

“Row away, men!” shouted the keeper. “He’s there! I see him.”

But Baggs changed his position. He knew that it would be difficult to rescue him even with that boat, such a raging sea broke all about the rock to which he clung. The boat must be held off at a little distance from the ledge and then a rope thrown to him. He must stand his chances of grasping this only hope of safety. The tide had begun to subside, and another part of the ledge was now jutting above the surf. Whether he thought he could be rescued better from this second position and so tried to reach it, or whether in the increasing nearness of the rescue–party he grew careless, and accidentally slipped out of the Chair and was quickly, eagerly, seized by a wave and hurried away, who could say? It was Slim Tarleton who just before had said to the keeper, “He’s holdin’ on, Cap’n, ain’t he?” And the keeper nodded yes with his head.

“Is he there now, Cap’n?” asked Seavey Lowd the next minute. The keeper’s head did not move—he only fastened his eyes steadily on the ledge fringed by the surf, as if trying to determine a fact with certainty, and then rising in his seat, said solemnly, “I—b’lieve—he’s—gone! Yes, gone!”

Gone, and he left no more trace behind than a leaf falling through the air. Gone into that whirling, eddying sea, into that deep, dark grave so long clutching at him, and which now buried him under its waves forever! The boat could not possibly reach him. Gone, gone!

“Well, men,” said the keeper to the crew, who resting on their oars looked with sober faces at the empty Chair into which the waves now mockingly flung their spray as its only occupant, “we might take a turn round and then go home, but that hunt is all up. Don’t see a sign of him.”

The bow of the surf–boat was headed for The Harbor, after a season of waiting. And strong arms steadily pulled it home.

That afternoon, the captain of the wrecked vessel walking on the sands at low tide, reported at the station that a body had come ashore. “It’s t’other passenger,” he said, “who came ashore as I told you. You know two started on a life–savin’ thing. It’s ’bout two hundred feet from here.”

Keeper Barney and Walter followed him to the designated spot, and there lying on the beach, his long dark hair hanging in a tangle over his face as if trying to veil from the world some dishonored object, was Joe Cardridge. The body was removed to a shed in a field that skirted the shore–rocks. Various articles were found upon the body, and they were removed by the keeper for preservation. “What is this?” asked the keeper, as he took from an inner pocket of the blouse that Joe had worn, an envelope. “A letter inside this,” said the keeper, “and it is directed to me!”

The address was worn and the water had affected it, and yet the superscription could be made out.

“A letter for me, brought by a strange mail–carrier,” said the keeper. “I will see what it is.”

“Why,” he exclaimed, “that is a letter from our district superintendent! Yes, it is the missin’ one that Walter couldn’t find! There is the date. That clears Walter.”

“I guess he was cleared afore,” declared Tom Walker, who was present.

Another mystery was solved that day.Many people were attracted to the beach by the tragedy of the wreck, and among them came Miss P. Green, Aunt Lydia, and other women. Some of Joe Cardridge’s family were at the station. The blouse that he had worn, was drying before the stove.

“What’s that?” queried Aunt Lydia, who had come to the station. Her sharp bright eyes were fastened on a sleeve of the blouse, turned back at the wrist. “If there ain’t that blue W that I tucked away in the white linin’ of Walter’s blouse!”

“Where?” asked Tom Walker.

“There!” replied Aunt Lydia. “That is Walter’s coat, I know.”

“Walter’s coat?” asked Keeper Barney, who had joined the circle of inspection.

“Yes,” replied Aunt Lydia, “I sewed a blue W on to the white linin’ of Walter’s sleeve, and here it is.”

“Humph!” said the keeper. “Joe Cardridge exchanged blouses with Walter, that is what he did, and carried off the missin’ letter.”

“But—but—” said little Charlie Cardridge who was present, and overhearing the conversation wished to show that some of the property in the room did belong to his father, “that’s father’s. Looks like his, anyway.” He waspointing at the flask found in Walter’s pocket and now standing on the sill of a window in the station. The flask was handed to Charlie. Turning it over, he exclaimed, “There’s a C! That is father’s.”

In the bottom of the flask the letter C had been blown, and it now proved who the real owner of that mysterious property had been.

“No doubt about it!” declared Tom Walker, who with others of the crew had come into the kitchen. “No doubt about it! There was an exchange of blouses by the owner of the flask, and the latter was left by Joe as a witness agin Walter. A pretty deep game! Walter, give us your hand. I knew before though that you were all right.”

Tom gripped Walter’s hand as if it were a pump–handle on a dry, hot, thirsty day. Others congratulated Walter, and none more readily than the keeper.

There was no investigation by the district superintendent when he arrived, and the news of the wreck brought him the next day.

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