# The Popular Magazine/Volume 23/Number 2/Chain-Driven

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1 Feb 1912, pp. 1-56.
There is a lot of poetry about the sea, but when it comes to a financial proposition the mate of a shaft-driven ship finds he isn't in it with the skipper of a chain-driven auto.
Chain-Driven
By Henry C. Rowland Author of “The Bloodhound,” “The Make-Believe Man,” Etc..
(A Complete Novel)

### CHAPTER I.

You'd hardly expect a young man who'd followed the sea all his life to quit it when he was holding down a first mate's billet and turn private chauffeur. Yet that's exactly what I did, and I can't say that I've ever come to regret it.
I'd been first mate of the little Clarendon, carrying wheat in bulk from Montreal to Leith and bringing back woolens and jute and Scotch whisky. I'm American, of course, and hail from Portland, Maine, and got the billet through my mother's sister, who married the head clerk in the agent's office. He had often told me that if I kept on like I was going, I'd be master at thirty, and, as I was going on twenty-six, it didn't seem very long to wait. And then I chucked my billet of my own free will and accord and turned chauffeur. And this is how it came about.
The ship was to lie over a trip for some repairs, and I'd got leave and run across to Portland to see my mother. The train was due to reach Portland about midnight, and I noticed there weren't many passengers, and most of what there were got out at the first stop.
Not long after we started, I went up into the dining car to get something to eat, and while I was sitting there, two fellows came in and took the table in front of me. They were drummers, I reckoned, and that was nothing against them, either, but there was something in their loud way of talking and joshing the waiter and grabbing all the grub in sight that sort of went against my grain. Both were mighty well dressed and good-looking enough, so far as their lines went, and one of them seemed to consider himself something of a bucko, for he started in to tell the other how he'd slugged a hotel porter the day before because the porter was careless with his trunk.
What they were saying didn't interest me any, but the big fellow had one of those harsh, raw voices that reach everywhere and with a sort of thick accent to it, like he might have been used to speaking German or the like. Pretty soon, says he:
“She's gettin' off at Deering, same as us. I seen her ticket.”
“Oh, there ain't nothin' doin' there, I don't believe,” says the other fellow. “She's one of them shy, country flickers, and would be scairt to death if you was to speak to her.”
“Say,” says the other man, “that corn-fed kind is the easiest goin', bec'us' they ain't got the nerve to call you down. Say, you watch me. Bettcha a cigar I'm sittin' alongside listenin' to why she left the farm within the next hour.” And then they both laughed, and I wished that I had the pair of 'em aboard a sailing ship for about fifteen minutes.
Anyway, it was none of my business, so I went back to my seat, and just before I got there I happened to look down the aisle, and there, just behind my billet, was the sort of face that I've raised sometimes out of the murk toward the end of my watch on the bridge.
Young fellows most of the time at sea often fancy such faces, I reckon, and in my case they've always been sort of sweet looking and appealing, with eyes to make a man hungry in his heart and lips that droop a little. But somehow these dream faces had always been a lot prettier than any real, live women I ever saw, and so it gave me sort of a shock when I saw those tender, appealing eyes, the soft cheeks and tired, drooping mouth.
She must have seen something strange in my look, for she turned to the window, and I slipped into my seat, ashamed that I'd stared at her that way. And it seems foolish to say, but it's the Lord's truth that when I sat down and for some little time afterward my heart was hammering like a circulating pump, and there was a nice, warm feeling all through me. Thought I: “Then there are such faces, after all, and one of them is right here, close behind me.”
I'd meant to curl up and sleep the rest of the run, but somehow I felt as if I'd been asleep all my life and had only just waked up. Besides, I was pretty tired, and I was afraid that my head might flop over and put a kink in my neck and make me red and gurgly and plain looking. Not that I'm any beauty, but a heavy-boned man like me has a sort of top-heavy look when he goes to sleep in his seat. Besides, I wanted to stay awake and think about the face behind me. I'd have given the price of my ticket for another look, but I could feel myself getting red around the gills at the idea of turning to stare.
So there I sat, thinking about her, and pretty soon the two drummers came into the car, and as they swaggered down the aisle I saw the big one nudge the other, and they both stared my way. Would you believe it, for the second it never struck me that it was the girl behind me that they were goggling at with their beery eyes! In fact, I'd forgotten all about them, and my thoughts were up soaring around the topmast truck, hunting for that face in the fog, and I might not have got below for some time if the short cuss hadn't said to the other, just as he got abreast of me:
“Guess I win a cigar, all right. Nothin' doin' in the ladies' shirt-waist line.”
“Oh, I don't know,” says the other, who was chewing a toothpick. “You can't ever tell until you've had a chance to examine the goods.”
It sounded harmless enough, seeing as I was probably about the only man in that car that wasn't selling goods. But the bet of a cigar that I'd overheard them make in the dining car flashed across my mind, and I suddenly realized that the girl behind me was the one they'd been talking about. And just as this idea got stowed in my head locker, the big fellow slid into the seat behind the girl, and hauled open the window, for the car was hot, and it was along the first week in June.
If my back hair had been straight instead of having a curl to it, the people behind me might have seen the bristles lifting like those on the back of a trapped timber wolf. Here was a girl, the mere sight of whose face had set my heart to milling like a bull cachalot in his flurry. She was my best dream come true, and I was afraid to turn around for fear I might wake up and lose her. And then here came this chunk of pork that wasn't fit to bait a shark hook betting bum cigars that inside an hour she'd be telling him the story of her life!
The little devils began to dance, and I could feel things hauling taut inside me. I knew that the lubber belonged down somewhere in the after end of the car because I'd noticed him pass when I went in to eat. It was plain enough he'd run into the slip behind the girl to get in his gay work.
Well, I couldn't very well get up and say: “Shift your berth, my matey; you're in the wrong slip.” He had a right to sit where he liked so long as there was plenty of room, and by this time there weren't but half a dozen people left in the car. So I sat there and suffered; yes, I really suffered.
There's nothing a decent sailorman hates as much as getting mixed up in any sort of trouble where the water's shoal. Along the beach it don't matter so much; your ship's there, and they understand things better. But to fall foul of an inland party usually means that the seafaring man gets the worst of it. Mind you, I'm speaking of the final results, not the immediate ones, and there's planted in me a streak of Yankee prudence which makes me take soundings a mite before I go charging in at full speed ahead.
So there I sat, worried and anxious as a dog that sees a skunk in the yard—and knows the breed. Only I didn't have to wait long, for pretty soon Mister Drummer leans over and says in a voice like crude molasses:
“Pahdon me, but is the drawft from the window too strong?”
I looked back then, and saw that he had his flipper hooked over the back of the seat and his red jowl almost against her hair. The girl leaned forward, as I looked, turning at the same time so that I saw her profile.
Yes, there was no doubt about that being the face that I'd been dreaming of from the time that I began to think at all about girls. The forehead was low and the eyebrows ran 'way back, turning up a little at the end, and her little nose had just the right tilt, and her lips were soft and delicate as the wing of a petrel.
I'd expected to hear her say yes or no, rather short, and finish the business, it was so plain why he'd slipped in behind her and opened the window, instead of heaving ahead to where he belonged. But the girl never seemed to realize this, for she said in a voice like running water:
“Oh, not at all, thank you. I like the air—if nobody else objects——” And she looked back with a little smile.
Talk about molasses! This time there wasn't as much sugar in a Matanzas tank steamer as oozed out under his butcher's mustache.
“Nevertheless,” says he, “I fawncy I had better close it.” You see he was in a beer sweat himself, and afraid of a sore throat or a rush of malt to the liver, for the night air is sharp up there, even in June. “I see that your hayre is blo-owing, tu——” I couldn't imitate the son of a stoker. “You are going cleaw through?” says he, and I could guess that, having a toothpick route in the Dominion, he was trying to splice a lime-juice accent onto his American, which was the Canuck kind, I thought.
“I'm getting off at Deering, just this side of Portland,” says she, and I wondered that she could talk to him. Mind you, her tone was no more than civil—but there was a sweetness in it, too.
The drummer shut the window, then slithered out of his seat. I could hear him doing it.
“Permit me to turn the seat for you since you got such a long way to go,” says he, as slick as fresh paint. “The gentleman in front of us wouldn't mind moving up, I am sure.”
“Oh, no, thank you,” she answered; “I am very comfortable as it is,” and I could hear her give a sort of uneasy little squirm.
“Just as you like,” says he, in his thick, oily voice. “Ever been over this line before?”
“Never,” she answered.
“You're English, ain't you?” he goes on, no more discouraged at her short way of speaking than a slop-shop dealer. “You got a real English accent.”
“I am Scotch Canadian,” she answered, and there was another rustle, and I guessed that she'd turned to the window. When the fellow spoke again, his voice sounded lower and nearer, as if he'd leaned forward.
“Funny, I get off at Deering, too. If you don't happen to be acquainted there, I could give you the name of the best hotel——”
“My room has been engaged for me,” she answered, and there was a sort of tremble in her voice, but whether it was because she was angry or afraid, I couldn't tell. You can bet I was getting mighty restless myself. It was plainer than whales that she wanted to get rid of him, but was afraid of being rude.
“What hotel was it?” he asked. “I usually put up at the Portland House. Was that the one, maybe?”
This time her answer was slower to come. “I—I think so,” she said, as if she hated to admit it.
“Good!” says he. “That's the best, and the proprietor is an old friend o' mine. Always shows me special attention when I put up there.”
I heard him moving about, and was in hope that he was going to leave her alone a spell, now that he'd seemed to win his bet about talking to her. But not a bit of it. Up he gets, and starts to slide in alongside of her.
“You don't mind if I sit beside you a little while?” he says, and before she can answer he goes on: “It sort of helps to pass the time on a long journey like this.”
“I'm—I'm—afraid it would be rather crowded——” she begins, and her voice sounded like she was going to cry. But Mister Hog Fat cuts in with that oleomargarine voice of his.
“I'll turn the seat,” says he, and then steps up alongside me. “You don't mind changing your seat, I'm shuah, sir” he begins.
I hove myself around, and looked at the girl, Something about her face made me almost catch my breath. It seemed like she was the woman I'd always been waiting for; always been saving myself for. That was the face I'd been looking to see these many months; the big, tender, appealing eyes, blue as violets, but darker and as clear as the Gulf Stream. The soft, pretty cheeks, and the straight mouth with the red of both lips turned out—it seemed as if I knew her. Then her eyes caught mine, and I recognized that pleading look. “Help me!” she seemed to say.
Mister Drummer noticed the long stare I gave her. An ugly look came around his eyes, and his mouth got hard under his big, curled mustache.
“If you don't mind changing,” says he, “I'd like to turn this seat.”
“I was just about to change, anyway,” I answered, and got onto my feet and stepped out into the aisle. The girl gave me a sort of hopeless look. Mr. Hog Fat shoved past me to turn the seat, and as he did so I slipped in behind him and sat down beside the girl. She gave me a quick, startled look, then bit her lip, and turned to the window.
But the drummer was knocked all of a heap, and for a moment he just stared with his jowl hanging down, and I heard a snicker or two come from here and there around the car. Then the blood came surging into his face.
“I beg your pardon,” he growls, “but that seat's mine.”
“Nothing of the sort,” I answered. “It belongs to this lady. There's your seat in the after end of the car, abaft your friend.”
He began to get purple. “S'ppose this lady doesn't care to have you share her seat,” says he.
“Then all she's got to do is to say so,” I answered, “and I'll find another billet. I'm not the man to crowd myself in where I'm not wanted.”
He shoved out his jaw. “Might you be meanin' anything personal?” he asks, “'N who in blazes are you, anyway?”
“Stow that,” said I, not raising my voice. “I'm Mr. Jason Seagrave, first mate o' the freighter Clarendon, and I'm putting up to-night at the Portland House at Deering. If you've got anything to say to me, you can say it to me there.”
You might have heard a pin drop in that car for all the noise any passenger made. Mister Hog Fat hung in the wind a moment, then says: “We'll fix this up later, young feller,” and went lurching off down the aisle.
The girl had turned her shoulder to me, and was staring out of the window, though the night was too dark to see anything. The fine lines of her throat and cheek and forehead came against the black of the windowpane, and something in the soft curves and the white, velvety skin set my heart to swelling again until I thought it would burst.
Folks say there's nothing in love at first sight, and maybe there isn't for some, any more than there would be for a crocodile or snapping turtle. But if I wasn't in love with that girl from the second my eyes fell on her, then there's no such thing.
She made me want to laugh and cry at the same time, and I wanted most of all to soothe her and see the color come back in her cheeks and hear her laugh and breathe quietly and without those long, shuddering breaths.
As for Mister Hog Fat, if we three had stood on some naked beach instead of in that stuffy car with a parcel of goggling passengers, he'd have never walked away alive.
When I told him that I was going to the Portland House at Deering, I told him no lie. I was. I'd no more have let that girl go there alone after what had happened than I'd have struck her adrift in a ship's boat. Bloated land sharks like him were no new fish to me. I knew the mean, sly eyes of him and the cruel mouth, and I sort of felt that under his slick ways he had the stubbornness of a hog. So I just made up my mind to see her safely to her berth and then put a flea in the ear of the folks that ran the place.
But there was plenty of time before Deering, and she was still upset, as I could tell by the way she breathed, so I hauled a magazine out of my pocket, and settled back and pretended to read, though what was in front of my eyes might have been the love songs of a stoker or the report of the British Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Whales, for all the sense of it I got.
It was enough just to be close to her and to feel that I was clamped down there like a steel bulkhead between trouble and this sweet girl that I somehow felt was meant for me. So I didn't try to talk to her nor even to so much as look at her until by and by I heard a sort of gentle little sound like a sigh and then easy, regular breathing.
She had fallen asleep sitting straight up in her seat. Her hat was hanging from a hook overhead, so that didn't bother her any, but her hair was so thick that it acted sort of like a fender, and kept her head from resting easily against the back of the seat, and every little lurch of the car shifted it from side to side in a way that looked mighty strained and uncomfortable. She certainly had lots of hair, and it was a sort of smoky black, very fine and wispy, with a natural curl in it.
I stole a look at her face, and reckoned she must be pretty tired, for there were dark shadows under her eyes, and the blood seemed to have gone away from all but her lips, so that her cheek looked almost hollow. Her forehead was broad and low, and the dampness of sleep was on it, so that the hair that grew down a mite in the middle was in snug little curls.
My, but as I looked at her, something seemed to swell up in my throat and nigh choke me. I wondered what billet she held in this big sea of life, and knew that it couldn't be a very fat one, for, though just as neat as a pin and all the cut of the lady about her both in hull and rigging, her clothes were of the cheapest sort, I reckon, and her little straw hat up above might have cost a dollar. Not only that, but she looked actually hungry; not the hunger that comes of a missed meal, but the pinched look that comes of a long run on slim rations. I wondered if she'd had any dinner. She hadn't been in the dining car, and there was no sign of any lunch basket or even so much as a few crumbs about her seat.
The train swung around a curve, and her head began to slip down on the back of the seat. Lower it came, and still lower, till presently it landed on my shoulder, without so much as wakening her. On the contrary, she gave a little whispering sigh, as if from comfort, and her body settled against me in a nestling sort of way. Her fine hair was against my neck and cheek, and I could feel her breathing against my throat.
About everybody in the car was calked off now. There were snores coming from here and there, and the place was hot and stuffy. My little girl slept on like a baby, and the very peacefulness of having her there quieted me down, and I got a little nap myself, as I hadn't slept at all the night before, bringing the ship in.
Her head must have been on my shoulder for a good hour and a half, when suddenly she waked up with a gasp.
“Oh!” says she, and reaches for her hair, which had tumbled over me a mite.
There was no fault to find with the color in her face now. She looked like a poppy.
“I didn't know that I was leaning against you,” says she. “Why didn't you wake me?
“I heard you say that you were getting off at Deering,” I answered, “and that won't be for three hours yet. You'd better put your feet up and take a nice nap. You look awful tired.”
“I was almost dead.” She gave me a quick, curious look. “You see, I've come all the way from the Soo.”
“Sault Sainte Marie?”
“Yes.”
“It's a long pull. I hope you didn't mind my interfering a little while ago,” said I. “As a rule, I try to mind my own business, but he was trying to carry things a mite too far, it seemed to me. Besides I heard him making a bet in the dining car that he'd get to know you before the end of the run.”
“Nasty brute!” There was a flash in her eyes now. “I suppose he saw that I wasn't used to traveling.” She gave me a straight look, then said, rather shyly: “This is the first time I've ever been farther from home than Montreal.”
“Do you live at the Soo?” I asked.
“My mother lives there. I've been teaching school at Montreal. Now I'm going to take a position for the summer as governess with some Boston people who have a place near Portland. I've been home to see my mother, and decided to come straight through.”
“Is anybody going to meet you at the train?” I asked.
“Mrs. Newell wrote that she would try to send an automobile for me, but that if the chauffeur were not there I was to go to the Portland House, where she would telephone them to be on the lookout for me. Their country place is over on Casco Bay, but it is shorter to cut directly across than to follow the shore around to the city. I believe the road is better, too. Mrs. Newell said that if there was nobody to meet me to-night, she would send the car at about nine to-morrow morning.”
“Are you acquainted with these Newells?” I asked.
“No. I have never seen any of them, but I know all about them through a chum of mine who was governess last year and left them to get married. They are rich Bostonians, and very good people, I believe.”
“I'm mighty glad of that,” I answered, feeling a heap relieved.
The chances were, I thought, that Mister Hog Fat would shift his course when he got to the hotel and found out that the girl he'd been pestering was consigned to a millionaires family. Just the same, I made up my mind on two things—one was that I'd hang on and off until she was safe in the hands of her friends; the other was that I'd make bold to ask her to write and tell me of her safe arrival, and maybe drop me a line now and then afterward. It may sound foolish, but I had a sort of feeling that this girl and I hadn't crossed each other's tracks just to exchange signals and hold on our separate courses.
Maybe she saw something of this in my face, for her color got a little brighter, and she said, as if to get the talk away from herself:
“Are you really a sailor?”
“Yes,” I answered, “I'm the mate of a ship running from Montreal to Leith and Dundee. Were lying up for repairs, and I'm off on leave to see my folks in Portland, where I hail from.”
This started us talking, and before long I learned that her name was Grizel McNair, and she was twenty-two years old. Her father had been a civil engineer, and had got drowned about five years before, leaving his widow and three children, Grizel the eldest. Since then her life had been spent in helping her mother make both ends meet and give the children an education. Her brother was due to graduate that month from school, and was then going to work with a chief engineer who had been a friend of the father's. The other daughter was studying to be a trained nurse.
Grizel tried to keep her part of it under hatches, but it was plain enough that she'd been the mainstay. She'd worked her way through college in Montreal, and gone right to teaching, and was now taking this governess job for the summer, because she couldn't afford to be idle. I was glad to learn that it was only for the summer, as in that case there was some chance of my seeing her when in port.
Then Grizel got to asking me questions about the sea and the different ports I'd visited, and seemed surprised to learn that I'd made a whaling voyage around the world and banged around considerable on windjammers. She seemed downright fascinated at a yarn I spun her about getting dismasted in a typhoon and the story of the wreck of the bark Etta Jaynes.
It seems the extent of her travels was Montreal. She'd never even been to Chicago, and, as for New York, that seemed to her like talking about the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
Meanwhile we'd quite forgot our friend, Mister Hog Fat, and when pretty soon he came lurching down the aisle from the smoker—he must have gone up there when we were both asleep, and I wondered how he liked the picture—Grizel took one look at his ugly mug, and shrank a little closer to me.
“He's an awful-looking man,” said she.
“Don't let that bother you,” I answered. “I've had as many as ten at a time like that to lick into shape. Besides, I'm going to see you to your hotel.”
She straightened up, and opened her blue eyes wide.
“Indeed, you're going to do nothing of the sort,” says she.
“Of course I am,” I answered. “Didn't you hear me tell him that if he wanted any back slack, he could get it at the Portland House?”
“Yes, but I thought at the time that you did that to avoid an ugly scene here in the car—on my account. Really, Mr. Seagrave, I could not think of letting you do such a thing. Besides, there mustn't be any more trouble. Think how badly it would look for me if there were to be a fight and you should hurt this man seriously.”
“It would be worse for you,” said I, “if he were to get nasty at the hotel. Men like that would just as soon work off a grudge on a girl as not. Besides, you've got to get from the station to the hotel, and it's a bad, rainy night, and nobody about. Anyway, if I didn't put up at a hotel here, I'd put up at one in Portland, as my mother lives a little way out on the shore and the trolley cars will have stopped running. This place is so near the city that it makes no difference.”
She gave in then, especially as I said that if I saw the chauffeur on the platform I would turn her over to him and stay aboard the train, even if it did make me look like a quitter.
Grizel was glad, I think, even if she did pretend to be put out. She shoved out her pretty chin, and said that she wasn't afraid and that she was old enough by this time to take care of herself, and that it was an outrage to make me break my journey just to save a perfect stranger from the chance of being spoken to, and a lot more like that. But there was a look in her blue eyes and a curve to her lips that made me feel as if there was no such thing as the laws of gravity.
Pretty soon a sleepy brakeman came through, and hollered the station, and we got our gear together. As the train slid in and came to a stop, I saw that there was no chauffeur on the platform. It had stopped raining, and in the glare of the station lights we made out the bus from the Portland House.
Out we got, and as I turned to help her down, I saw the two drummers right behind. I put Grizel in the bus, and gave the driver her checks, and as I did it I saw the other two start to walk away from the depot.
I turned to Grizel. “You stay in the bus,” I said. “I'm going to walk.”

### CHAPTER II.

It wasn't that I was hunting trouble, or anything like that. My only idea was that if there had to be any trouble, it was better, for Grizel's sake, not to have it in the hotel. So I gripped the handle of my valise, and went across the platform and down the steps in the wake of the two ahead.
Just on the corner of a big, deserted street, I overhauled them, intending to walk straight past without a word, unless they tried to stop me. To tell the truth, I didn't think they would, as there isn't much fight in that sort. But whether because he'd been “sucking the monkey” across the State of Maine or because he thought he had to square himself in the eyes of his friend, I don't know, but at any rate, as I forged up alongside, he looked back over his shoulder, then stepped in front of me. “Hold on a minute, my friend,” says he; “I want a little word with you.”
I fetched up, and set down my valise.
“Heave ahead,” said I; “that's what I'm here for.”
He set down his own luggage, and the short, thickset fellow with him did the same. They both started to walk up to me.
“That'll do,” said I, and pushed my hand straight out in front of me; “you don't need to whisper it.”
They stopped, then gave each other a look that made me think it was fixed up between them for Shorty to lend a hand. Just then the bus rattled by, and I caught a glimpse of a white face at the window. The sight of it took the patience out of me.
“Now, then, you bum,” said I, “if you're lookin' for a lickin', come to me. It'll hurt, but it may do you good, and the sooner you get it over with, the better.”
I don't think he cared much for his job, but that fetched him. He waltzed up, and made a jab, and a second or two later he found himself out in the middle of the wet street. And he stayed there, too, in pretty much of a heap. His friend started to go to him, but I waved him back.
“You keep out o' this,” said I, “or you'll think you've shipped aboard a whaler.” And I walked over to where my man was struggling to sit up, his head in both hands.
“That's a good place for you,” said I. “You're a man o' mud. You let that be a lesson to you, and before you pester another woman or try to stand up in front of another man, go somewhere, and learn to handle yourself. Why, you swab, any Sidney larrikin fattened on rotgut and maggoty junk is a better man than what you are. If I'd ha' known you were full o' duff, I'd taken a spoon to you——”
I was giving him a bit of this whale-fishing talk, when suddenly there came a blaze of bright light, and I looked up to see two big acetylene reflectors on us. Wop—wop! went a horn, and then the whine of a brake, and all we could see were the two blazing eyes.
“Well, gents,” said a cheerful voice, that somehow struck me as familiar, “if the first round's over, maybe you wouldn't mind gettin' back to your corners, and let a feller pass.”
Surely I knew that voice, though for the life of me I couldn't place it. I wasn't long guessing, though, for, as I stared up half blinded by the glare, the fellow in the car sings out:
“Darned if it ain't Jase Seagrave. Hello, Jase; what's the row?” And he stopped his motor and got down, to lend me a hand, if need be.
I knew him, then. It was Billy Maguire, a Portland boy, and we'd been shipmates when I was in the Maine Steamship Line; my first steam billet on the old Cottage City. Billy and I had always been mighty good chums, but I hadn't seen him now for a couple of years.
“What's the trouble, Jase?” Billy asked, and looked over at Mister Hog Fat, who'd got onto his feet and was standing there growling and cussing. His friend was waiting for him on the sidewalk, and Billy looked over at him as he'd like to get in the game himself.
“Oh, just a little scrap that started in the train,” I answered; “nothing worth speaking of. What you doing driving a big car, Billy? Quit the sea?”
“I have, Jase, and I'm proud of it,” says he, “and the sooner you follow my example, the better off you'll be. Let me tell you, son, there's nothing in it. It's the only profession that hasn't kept up with the times, and seafarin' men are all suckers. But what are you doing here at this time o' night, Jase?”
The two drummers had moved along, and Billy and I were standing by the motor. There was scarcely anybody in sight, but down the street a piece were some lights, which I reckoned must come from the hotel.
“Well, you see,” said I, feeling sort o' foolish, “there was a mighty nice young lady on the train, and this bum I just soaked tried to get gay with her. I broke it up, and then, being afraid he might try to make trouble for her, I landed here, instead of going on to Portland.”
Billy gave a low whistle.
“She must be the party I came over to get,” says he.
“What!” said I. “Are you working for Mr. Newell?”
“That's what. I'd have been there to meet her, but I fell into a well in the middle of the road, and dished my fore wheel on the starboard side. Been running on dead slow ever since, and now I've got to wait until morning to get her off and have a look to see if I can heat her up and straighten her or have got to get a new casting. It's soft steel, and so long as it ain't opened any, I can fix it up, all right. Look here, Jase, did you notice anybody else getting off the train besides you and the lady and those two drummers?”
“No,” I answered, “that was all, I think.”
“Are you sure those fellers are drummers?” he asked.
“No,” I answered; “they might be con men or walking delegates, for all I can say. Why?”
Billy scratched his ear. “Well,” says he, “and so they might. But do you know, Jase, I've got a sort of hunch that this gent you've been using for a punchin' bag is the skipper of the boss' seagoin' pleasure packet.”
I must have gaped at him, for he began to laugh.
“Haul taut on your jaw tackle, matey,” says he. “That's who it was, all right. He was coming to-night or to-morrow morning, and the boss told me to look out for him. Hes a Canuck ex-pilot, and hails from Quebec, and the other cuss is a mate that he was goin' to bring back with him. This here skipper's a new one especially recommended to the boss by some friend o' his. The old skipper he had before was forced to quit, 'count o' the rheumatism.”
But I'd got over my shock, and was beginning to pull myself together again.
“That's all slush, Billy,” said I. “Those two fellows are no more sailormen than I am a chauffeur. They are sunburnt a mite, I know, but they probably got that in barrooms and riding around in open buggies selling green goods to farmers. And they may be a mite husky so far as looks go, but that's just beer and sauerkraut. Sailormen? If you told me they were Mormon recruiting officers, I might believe it, Billy, especially as Maine ought to be a promising field for those corby crows to work up, but not sailormen, Billy.”
“Well,” says he, “jump into the car, and we'll go on to the hotel and find out. The lady has probably gone to bed, and we might as well get a berth for the night, too.”
Billy started his motor, and we got in, and went on to the hotel. The driver of the bus was unhitching out in the stable, so we told the porter, who was closing up, to wait for us, and then went out and found a billet for the car under a shed.
“I'll go in and find out about those fellers, and get us a couple of rooms, Jase,” says Billy, “and then come back here and we'll get that wheel off and see what the damage is.”
So I waited, and pretty soon he came out, laughing.
“That was Captain Volger you pasted, Jase,” says he, “and the other feller's the mate, just as I said. His name is Landois, both Scotiamen and known around here. They're short chops, Jase; the bay and gulf and lakes and the like. Excursion-steamer gents and long on pointing out the porpoises to the lady tourists and riggin' swings for the kids from the awning ridgepole. He told the night clerk that you came up behind and hit him when he wasn't looking.”
I've never been a profane man, but nobody would have guessed it just then. So this tub of gurry I'd been maltreating was no one else than the captain of Mr. Newell's seagoing yacht, and the other joker his mate. And of course the family would be a lot aboard the yacht and Grizel with them, sort of standing watch over the two youngsters—my, but it made me sick just to think about it.
“If I'd known that,” I growled to Billy, “I'd have sent him to hospital.”
Billy grinned. “'Stead of which,” says he, “I've got to take the three of them for a joy ride to-morrow morning.” He gave me a keen look. Billy Maguire was one of the quickest fellows I ever knew. “What's the matter, Jase?” he asks. “You look like you'd started a bedplate.”
I felt like it, too. It was bad enough to think I might have to wait until fall before I got sight of her again. But to have to leave her in the neighborhood of Captain Volger and his mate Landois nigh drove me crazy.
“Look here, Billy,” 'said I, “we've been good friends and shipmates, 'spite the fact that you were engine room and I belonged to the deck gang. But we played together as kids, and I'm just going to own up and ask your help. I've never met a woman that just naturally got under my ribs first heave like this Miss McNair. I'm hard hit, Billy.” And I went on to tell him of how I'd first heard the two talking on the train, and then had interfered when Volger tried to shove in, alongside Grizel afterward. I told him, too, of the talk we'd had and what she'd told me about herself and the struggle she'd had for the last five years.
“That's the kind of woman she is,” I finished up, “and you've only got to see her to understand the rest. I don't want to lose her, Billy, and, worse than that, I don't want her pestered by any such mud shark as this Volger.”
I'd rather thought that Billy would josh me a bit, as he was pretty fond of that sort of business. Instead, he seemed to be thinking hard and not paying very close attention. to what I was saying. Finally, says he:
“Look here, Jase; how'd you like my billet at the Newells'?”
“Your billet?” I tooted, like an echo off Grand Menan.
“Sure. My billet as chauffeur. A hundred dollars a month and all found. Three cars to look after, but no washing or dirty work. The stable sweeps do all that. I eat with the head gardener, and have a nice room over the garage. It's a cinch, Jase, and double what you draw down now. You fellers that chase seagoin' freight cars back and forth across the pond are a lot of marks. Four hours on and four off, on the bridge or sweating below, bum grub, a rotten little bunk to sleep in, wastin' the best part of your life to make money for everybody but yourself. Seafarin' men are the worst suckers alive. There's nobody gives so much for so little. Nowadays seafarin' men ought to be the crips, shy a leg or a fin, or old, like the lightship gang. There's nothin' aboard ship for able-bodied huskies like you and me—but there's a lot ashore. When they get five-thousand-ton transatlantic aryoplanes and need keen, nervy men to run 'em at a high salary, then we can get back in the game again. But waddlin' out across the wet at ten knots for a little over a plunk and a half a day? Shucks!”
“That's all right, Billy,” said I, “but s'ppose you're trained to that, and don't know anything else?”
“Oh, rats!” says Billy; “you can't be trained to anything that takes intelligence and not know something else. I was a well-trained shovel engineer; third, I was, aboard the Cottage City, and when I left her a couple o' years ago to tackle the gasoline game in a Boston garage, old Wishart, the chief, took me aside, and talked to me as if I'd been contemplatin' suicide. In six months' time I was drawing as much as he was, counting in perfectly square rake-offs and tips and all. And now I've got a little interest in a new garage in Portland, and I'm about to leave Mr. Newell to go on my own—and if you want the job, I think I can fix it for you.”
“But how you talk, Billy!” said I. “What in tarnation do I know about automobiles?”
“You may not know an awful lot about 'em just this minute,” said Billy, “but you've had some experience with machinery, and you're useful and handy, like all good sailors, and you've got a steady head and a good eye. I can send you to our garage in Portland, and in a week you'll be all right on the road, and it won't take long to learn the works of a machine. Look at the goops that run their own cars. They have to build 'em fool proof these days. Look here, Jase; I'm not joshin' you. Here's a chance to double your pay and live ashore and see life and be near your ladylove. What if this mutt Volger does captain the yacht? Yacht skippers don't rate any higher than what chauffeurs do, and you can work up a lot more sensation behind the steerin' wheel of a big six, like this, than you can on the bridge of an old wind barge like the Nahma. Chuck your sad billet on that seagoin' dough packet, and I'll hang on for a couple of weeks while you are learning the ropes. Then I'll resign in your favor, and go to work in the garage, and you can send all your work our way. Just you think it over. And now let's get this wheel off and have a look.”
And without waiting to hear what I had to say about it, Billy peeled off his blouse, and went to work.

### CHAPTER III.

That night before going to sleep, I wrote a letter to Grizel, in which I told her that I had met Mr. Newell's chauffeur on the street, and found him to be an old friend and shipmate. I went on to say that he had been telling me how much better a man could do in the motor business than at sea, and that I had about made up my mind to give up my present profession for the sake of something better, and was going to start in right off to learn the business in a garage at Portland. I wound up by saying:
It seems that the man who tried to bother you on the train is the captain of Mr. Newell's yacht, and the man with him his mate. When I see lubbers like these two holding billets as ship's officers it makes me want to hunt a new job. However, Captain Volger is not apt to bother you again, and the best way is for you to say nothing about the trouble to any one, as I'm sure he won't.
Billy promised to give Grizel the note and to tell her on the quiet his plans for working me into his job without letting her think that she herself had anything to do with it. It was natural enough, after all, that a man should jump at the chance of exchanging a sea billet for a land one at twice the pay.
I thought it better not to see Grizel the next morning, but to get out early on the five-o'clock local. Billy gave me a note to the garage, telling them as much as was necessary of the facts of the case, and asking them to put me right on the job and to teach me as much as they could in the shortest possible time.
“You see, Jase,” says he, “this works in all right for me. They need me at the garage, as everything points to a busy season. I've only hung on with Newell because I liked the people, and don't want to see their cars in the hands of some slob. Besides, the next man might take the business to another shop. The boss gets everything through me, and I give him a discount, at that.”
So in I went the next morning early, and hurried right home, where I found my mother, and told her what I was going to do. She was mighty pleased of course to have me so near home, but she hung in the wind a mite at the prospect of my being a private chauffeur.
“It seems like sort of a come-down, Jason,” says she. “Your father and grandfather were both masters of the finest ships that floated in their days. There was your grandfather, Abram Seagrave, who commanded a Blackball clipper, and many a voyage he sat at the head of his table with a duke on his right and lords and ladies and statesmen and scholars on either side. And your father captained an East Indiaman, one of the fastest tea ships afloat.”
“And went down with her,” said I, “and left his wife and child dependent on relations. Just the same, I know it's a come-down, mother. But the days when the captain of a sailing ship was entertained by the nobility are past. Billy's right about the sea as a profession nowadays. It's money that counts in the world we live in, and there's none to be got by following the sea. I don't expect to stay a private chauffeur any very great while. Just as soon as I can save up a little, I'll do what Billy has, and start in business on my own, if not in automobiles maybe in motor boats, or something of the sort.”
Mother allowed that maybe I was right, but she never for a second suspected that there might be a girl at the bottom of it.
When I went up to the garage, I was surprised to find how much of a place it was and to see the amount of business they were doing. It seems that four young fellows, all ex-chauffeurs, had gone in together, each putting in a little money and hustling for what business they could get. Billy had the smallest cash interest, but he was the best mechanic of the lot, and they needed him badly, as the rich summer crowd was beginning to pour in, and there was a good deal of repair work to be expected. When I gave the manager Billy's letter, he was right pleased.
“All right, Seagrave,” says he, when he'd read it through. “Just shift into working clothes, and sail right in. With your experience, you'll be able to qualify in a week's time. We've got a couple of old wagons here, and I'll undertake to make a driver of you in three lessons.”
The third day that I was at the garage, Billy came around in a useful-looking car with two bucket seats.
“Hello, Jase,” says he; “how's she headin', matey?”
“Seagrave can qualify now, if you like,” said the manager. “He's a natural driver, and his hands have got fingers on 'em when it comes to adjustin'. We need you bad, Billy. Got a big French valveless here that nobody knows what to do with.”
“I got an hour,” says Billy. “Come over to meet a gent on the boat, and there's fog outside. Call up the wharf, Jimmie, and ask Skinner to give me a holler when she starts to make her turn.”
He soon put them right on the French car, then came over and took me aside.
“Say, Jase,” says he, “I'm awful sorry you and me are old chums. She's a flower garden. I'm fightin' myself a minute to keep from cuttin' your line.'
“You gave her the letter?” I asked.
“Yes, but I ain't told her anything. Fact is, I ain't so keen about chuckin' my job as I was.”
“Oh, you ain't,” said I, knowing quite well he was only kidding me. “That'd be a nice hand-out, when I've gone and chucked mine.”
“The family is crazy about her,” Billy goes on, “especially Mr. Edmond, the boss' younger brother. He's got mighty attached to his little nieces since she come——”
But I reached for a spanner, and he shifted over.
“I thought I'd let you tell her yourself, Jase,” said Billy. “She's coming in with me to-morrow to do a little shopping for the missus. I'll take a couple of hours, like as not”—he winked—“and you can take my place and go along with her to carry the parcels while I look over this Frenchman and see what sort of a job's been done. Mrs. Newell ain't in any hurry.”
“You're all right, Billy,” said I. “How about Volger?”
“He was set hard aback when he found she was consigned to the Newells as governess,” said Billy, with a grin, “but she acted like she'd never laid eyes on him. I saw the two of them talking last evening, though, and it seemed like she was sorta sorry for what had happened. They were down by the boat landing, and he was talking to her mighty earnest——”
I reached for the spanner again. That was the trouble with Billy. Good-hearted boy as ever drew breath, but he never knew when to slack down on a joke, and you couldn't ever tell how much was truth and how much his fire-room idea of fun, for Billy had started his technical education with a slicing bar, and was what steam people call a “shovel engineer.”
Just the same, it showed that he had sort of a delicate feeling to wait and let me tell Grizel myself that I was in hopes of getting a job at the Newells', and I was glad that he had because I wanted to see how she was going to take it. To tell the truth, it had been bothering me a mite to know just where a chauffeur stood with the family, and whether he rated as an officer, so to speak, or how. So I asked Billy about it.
“Where does a chauffeur stand?” says he. “Say, Jase, that's a question that ain't been answered yet. Everybody knows the place to put a butler or a coachman or a gardener and the like. But a chauffeur? That depends on the people you're workin' for. I'd rather be rated a servant in Mr. Newell's house than be one of the family with a good many, you see. The trouble is, Jase, most chauffeurs just lays themselves open to calldowns they wouldn't get if the boss could help it. All you've got to do is to 'tend to your business, just as you would aboard ship, and obey orders and keep your mouth shut, and you'll always get as much respect as you got comin' to you.”
The next time Billy came to the garage, it was in still another car, a light roadster with a torpedo body, and my heart gave an awful backfire as I looked up and saw Grizel in the stern sheets. She looked prettier than ever in her cute little motor hood, and her cheeks had a lot more color than when I had first seen her.
Her face sort of lighted up when she saw me, but that look only lasted a second, and she frowned and bit her lip. I wondered if Billy had told her anything.
“How do you do, Mr. Seagrave,” says she, as I walked out to the car, and her voice sounded stiff and as if she might have been speaking to somebody beneath her. She was sitting very straight in the car, and her eyes were like a pair of violets with the dew on them.
I said something, and then Billy slid down, and let her out, and asked her if shed mind if I piloted her around, instead of himself, as he had some work to do on the car. Of course she made no objection, so I went in and washed up, and slipped into clean white ducks, a summer uniform that I'd stripped of the braid.
When I went out, I found Grizel waiting by the car, talking to Sparkes, the manager. Nobody would have known her for the tired, dusty little girl that I'd befriended on the train. Somehow she looked taller and fuller of figure, and she had on a lovely white serge dress that gave her the fine free lines of a trim white yacht. There was none of that appealing look in her face, either, and, as I walked up to say that I was ready, I felt sort of cheeky and ashamed to think that I'd ever hoped to win such a girl as that.
Her face looked kinder as she turned from Sparkes to me. It seems that she'd been telling him that we'd got acquainted on the train, coming from Montreal, and that Billy had told her I was changing my trade.
“Mr. Sparkes says that you are a natural-born motorist, Mr. Seagrave,” says she. “Can you drive, already?”
“I'll let you judge that for yourself,” says Sparkes. “Here, Seagrave, take Miss McNair around to do her shopping in our runabout. I don't need it for a couple of hours.”
“You're not afraid to trust yourself to me?” I asked, looking at Grizel.
“Of course not,” she answered, and the rich color came into her cheeks; “I'm not afraid of anything.”
“Well,” says Billy, “that's one kind of a compliment.” And all four of us laughed.
So we got into the runabout, which was a handy little car, and started off. I'd been out in her every day with Sparkes, and could handle her like a whaleboat. Grizel seemed right surprised to find that we weren't going to climb any telegraph poles or try the sidewalk for a change, but she didn't say much. In fact, she was so quiet that I was a mite uncomfortable. She showed me the list of stores she wanted to go to, and I took her from one to the other, waiting outside while she bought what was wanted. It didn't take very long, and when she had finished, and suggested that we had better go back to the garage, I said:
“Maguire wanted a little time to look over a French car that has come in for repairs. Do you mind if I take you for a little turn? Mr. Sparkes wouldn't object.”
She turned her head a little, and gave me a steady look out of her blue eyes.
“I don't know anything about Mr. Sparkes and yourself,” says she, “but Maguire's time belongs to Mr. Newell, who employs him—and so does mine.”
There wasn't much to answer to that, so I turned around, and went straight for the garage. Presently Grizel said in a gentler voice:
“Have you resigned your position as mate on the Clarendon, Mr. Seagrave?”
“Yes,” I answered.
“Oh, why did you?” she cried, and there was a sort of ring in her voice. “In another three or four years, you might have been captain of a big, sea-going ship; absolute master, with the responsibility of the lives and property under your command. You would have taken your vessel out into the big, mysterious ocean and set your human skill and strength against storm and fog and treacherous tides—how could you give it all up for this?”
From the tone of her voice, you'd have thought I'd done something disgraceful. I was startled and surprised, and, to tell the truth, a mite angry, too.
“But what's the matter with this?” I asked. “It lets me see something of life and people and keep in the movement, to say nothing of paying me more money——”
“Nonsense,” she said, so sharply that I stopped short. “Do you call pottering around a garage, covered with black grease or perching behind a wheel in a maroon livery to serve the idle pleasure of some rich man 'seeing life'? There's no comparison. What difference does it make whether you've got a motor in front of you or a team of bays—except that in nine cases out of ten the bays would be more difficult to drive. For my part, I fail to see the difference between a coachman and a chauffeur, except that it's easier to learn about motors than it is to learn about horses, and motors are less dangerous, unless you take silly risks. Oh, Mr. Seagrave, when I read your letter I was so disappointed—especially after the stories you'd been telling me. Don't give up the sea. Just think! How many men, not sailors, could command a vessel? And anybody with two hands and two feet can soon learn to drive a car.”
Well, here was a nice state of affairs, wasn't it? For the moment I was tempted to drive to the nearest telegraph station and send a wire to Montreal, asking them to take me back if they hadn't got somebody else. But my pride wouldn't let me do that.
“That's one way of looking at it,” I answered, “but I see it differently. There's no future for the ship's officers of these little lines, and as for the big ones, well, I guess Billy Maguire picks up more in a year than the first officer of the biggest of 'em. And, whats more, he'll soon be his own master, and your sea captain never is. He's a servant of the company first and of his passengers afterward. What I'm trying for is not to be master of a ship, but master of myself and free to go and come as it pleases me.”
Maybe my tone was harsh, for I saw her color fade a little, and she bit her lip. She didn't answer, and pretty soon I said:
“What about Volger?”
“Captain Volger”—she put a little weight on the “captain”—“I'm afraid I did him an injustice, Mr. Seagrave. He spoke to me on the landing night before last, and explained that he really meant no harm on the train, but that, from having been the captain of a lake passenger steamer, he had no doubt got in the habit of taking too much for granted with strangers. He had no idea that I was annoyed, and he said that if he had suspected it for a minute he would never have spoken a second word to me. He is a little rough, perhaps, but very kind and well meaning, and I was awfully sorry for what happened.”
She turned to look at me, and pushed out her pretty chin a little. “He told me of your attack upon him going to the hotel, Mr. Seagrave, and I must say I was very much surprised. You might at least have given him a chance to defend himself.”
I could feel the blood pouring up under my collar. What Billy had told me wasn't all josh, after all, it seemed. I could just see Volger filling this innocent young girl chockablock with his dirty lies, and I could almost hear his fat, oily voice as he did it and catch the smirk of his near-gentleman way of talking.
But what Grizel told me made me all the more anxious for Billy's billet with the Newells. I was acquainted with the Volger sort, and I knew the curious sort of influence these slick, fat-necked, domineering brutes can sometimes have on the very sweetest women. Then his position as captain of the big yacht gave him a big jerk to windward with a romantic, imaginative girl like Grizel. No doubt they'd do some cruising through the summer, and I could see where Volger wasn't going to miss any tricks when she was on deck. He'd just make her think that he was the one and only big steel bulkhead between the whole ship's company and a watery grave.
“If Captain Volger feels that way about it, he will soon have a chance to get even,” I said.
“What do you mean?” she asked, quick as a flash.
“Maguire is going to leave Mr. Newell when his month is up,” I answered. “Hell probably give notice to-night. You see, he has an interest in this garage, as Mr. Newell knows, and they're so busy now that they need him. That's the reason I wanted to give him a little time this afternoon. He's going to try to get me his place, and he doesn't seem to think that there will be any trouble about it.”
Grizel leaned back without saying a word. We were almost to the garage, and I slowed a little, being anxious to learn how she was going to take it. Almost there, says she:
“When did you decide on this step, might I ask, Mr. Seagrave?”
“The night that I met him and he told me how well he was getting on. You can't tell; in five years' time he might be head of a big garage and making five or six thousand a year, where before he was making seventy-five a month. The sea is all right for unambitious people, Miss McNair, but I want to get on.”
I took a look at her face. Her pretty brows were knit, and her lips were pressed together. As we turned into the garage, she said:
“Of course, you know your own affairs better than I do. If it pleases you more to drive a car up and down the road than to take a big ship back and forth across the ocean, then no doubt you are better fitted for it. But”—and she turned her head and gave me a hundred-fathom look out of those deep, Gulf-Stream eyes of hers—“I would advise you not to count too much on the future, Mr. Seagrave.”

### CHAPTER IV.

Billy came into the garage a couple of days later to get some supplies.
“It's all right, Jase,” says he; “I've talked to the boss, and he's perfectly willing to take you on. Get in here with me, and drive this one around a little, just to get the feel of her. She's a lot easier to handle than these thrashin' machines of Sparkes, but you got to learn about where to shift your speeds.”
So I got in, and we ran around a little, and I found the dandy little car just as Billy had said, no end easier to handle than the old scrap heaps I'd learned on. Fact is, there was really no need for me to practice, and, seeing this, Billy told me to go back to the garage.
“Say, Jase,” says he, “what did you do to Flower Garden the other day? She's treated me like I was a plague victim ever since.”
“She don't like my quitting the sea for gasoline,” I answered.
Billy gave me one of his twisted squints. “Well,” says he, “she's sure stuck on the brine. Your friend, Cap'n Volger, takes her and the kids out in the knockabout 'most every day. Say, that dub knows almost as much about boat handlin' as I do about breakin' broncs, and that's a little less than nothin' at all.”
“Did you tell the boss I was a seafaring man?” I asked.
“Sure. He said: “So much the better; he can run the launch when the yacht is not here.” You're all hunk with the boss, Jase. But if I was you, I'd sit up nights worryin' about Flower Garden.”
That was exactly what I did until Billy's month was up. He came in the day before, and took me out to Otter Rocks, as the Newell estate was called. Sailing along the shore, I'd often seen the place, but never from the land side. It was mighty handsome—fine grounds with gardens and groves and a sheltered bathing beach, where there was a good-sized boathouse. The stables and garage were big and roomy, and the house was long and low, stone to the second story and then stucco with big beams laid in like you see in old English inns, all just as comfortable looking as it could be.
Mr. Newell was at home, and sent for me to come right up to his writing room. He was a handsome man of about fifty, tall, lean, with a long, narrow head, and ears set snug against the sides of it. His nose was high and thin, and his eyes were a cold gray, and had an expression that was polite rather than kind. There was a sort of dryness about him, as if he'd studied out beforehand exactly what he was going to say and how he would say it; and it struck me that he rather enjoyed hearing himself talk. But with all this, he was mighty high-bred and distinguished, and you somehow couldn't think of anybody treating him with anything but respect. He seemed to me more like an English gentleman than an American, and I noticed that he used a monocle.
He didn't ask me to sit down, but just leaned back in his chair, and gave me an inquiring but pleasant sort of look.
“Maguire tells me that you are a beginner, Seagrave,” said he, “but he tells me also that you are a very clear-headed and careful man. Personally, I don't object to beginners when they've got the latter qualities. I find that over-confidence is apt to be more dangerous than the tinge of caution that comes with a knowledge of one's inexperience. Don't you think?”
“Sailors say that a green hand never falls from aloft, sir,” I answered.
“Quite so. By the way, Maguire tells me you have been a sailor up to now—ah—the mate of a vessel, I believe?”
“Yes, sir.”
“So much the better. I usually send the yacht down to Newport for the use of my sister, Mrs. Ellery-Jones, for a month during the summer. Since you—ah—understand boats, we can depend on you to run the Seal, our sea-going motor boat, when the Nahma is not here. Now, if you will get the big car ready to go out, we will take a little spin around. I would like to satisfy myself in regard to your—ah—proficiency before intrusting my family to your care.”
So I took him over the road for an hour, and he seemed quite satisfied, the more so that I didn't try to show him how brilliant I was, but contented myself with a good average road gait and no chances. Then when we got back, I took Billy and his trunk to the depot, and here I was, a private chauffeur, at the beck and call and to serve the pleasure and convenience of a lot of rich and pampered people.
I didn't see Grizel at all that day, as I was busy cleaning up the garage, for Billy and I had different notions on what was shipshape. The head gardener's house was not far from my quarters, and I went there for my meals, and found them nice, respectable people, while the table was something that made me open my eyes, used as I was to seagoing grub.
The next morning at about ten my telephone rang, and the butler, a fat Englishman named Hobbs, told me that the “thirty” was wanted at the door in half an hour. She was all ready to go out, of course, so I shifted into my chauffeur's uniform, and when the bell rang drove up under the porte-cochère. There, standing on the steps, were Grizel and Captain Volger.
Grizel gave me a quick look, then pushed out her chin in a little way she had when displeased, and reached up to tie her veil. Volger's face wore a sort of smirk, and he drew down the corners of his mouth a little, and lifted his heavy, black eyebrows. He was dressed in his blue-serge uniform, with his captain's insignia and a smart yachting cap, and I could see how he'd pass with the women for a bluff, hearty sailorman.
Volger had one of those square-jowled faces that a good many women consider handsome, and his heavy mustache hid the mean, cruel lines around his mouth. His eyes were blue, but they were the wrong blue, too light and shifty, but the pale color gave them an intent look, set in his swarthy face with the thick, black hair over them. He was a well-knit man, a little above the average height, and in his smart uniform nobody would ever have guessed what a bag of duff he really was. There are lots like that, and they're always to be found in the soft billets: a yacht, excursion steamer, and the like that lay up through the nasty winter months.
I sat there like a figurehead, my eyes on the road and the engine turning over gently. My face don't show much of what's going on inside, but I could feel myself hardening up all over. The thirty was a new car, not exactly a torpedo model, but with a narrow body and no wider aft than forward; a “corset box,” as Billy called her. Two people just fitted nicely in the tonneau, and three made a jam. Volger opened the door for Grizel, and helped her in, then got in beside her.
“Trims the boat better, Miss McNair,” says he, in his hearty voice; “ain't that so, Seagrave?”
I turned a little in my seat. “Where to?” I asked.
“Let Miss McNair out at Darrow and Simpson's,” says he, “then take me down to Perkins' stores.”
I started off, and as I let in the clutch, I heard him say: “Nice morning for a little spin, Miss McNair.”
“Very,” she said; “there's no wind.”
“The breeze'll spring up with the turn of the tide,” says he. “We'll have enough air for a sail this afternoon. I'll give you a lesson in coming up to a mooring.”
The thirty ran like oil out of an oil can; no more noise than a swimming shark, and I had to listen to this sort of talk all the way into town. By the time I pulled up in front of the department store, I began to wonder how much my job was really worth. Miss McNair got out, and Volger said:
“Seagrave can take me down to the ship chandlers', then come back and wait for you. As soon as you get through, you can come down for me. I'll probably be some time, and if we arrange it this way, you can wait in the car.”
Grizel agreed to this, and Volger got back into the car. As we started off, he leaned forward.
“Look-a-here, Seagrave,” says he; “s'ppose we let bygones be bygones. After all, I'm the injured party. You made me look like a lollop on the train, and my jaw ain't right yet from our argument on the street. I won't say that if my foot hadn't slipped in the mud——”
“If that idea keeps you from enjoying your watch below, there's lots of chance to get it put right,” said I.
“Oh, come now, sport,” says he, in a sort of tired tone; “there's nothing in it for us to go startin' another rough-house. On the contr'y, there's a lot of reason for keepin' the peace. Mr. Newell is a nice man, and we've both got good billets, and what's the use of puttin' everything on the bum? I know the boss' kind; they are quiet and easygoin', and you never get a word out of 'em that you wouldn't hear at a high-life banquet, but if there's any trouble, it's just a case of git. Now, so far as you and me are concerned, I'm the one that's got the kick comin'. Nothin' was farther from my thought than to bother that little girl——”
“Miss McNair——” I interrupted.
“Right-o. Than to bother Miss McNair on the train. That part of it's fixed all right, and all we got to do now is to shake and call it square.”
“I don't like to let go the wheel,” said I.
Whether he caught my drift or not, I don't know. The chances are he did, for Volger was no fool. At any rate, he said:
“Oh, that's all right. I'll take the will for the deed. What I mean is that there's no use in us each tryin' to cut the other feller's throat, so to speak. 'Live and let live' is my motter.”
We were drawing up on Perkins' stores by this time, so I didn't answer, but fetched up to let him out.
“Come have a drink,” said Volger. “'Twon't take a minute. Here's a place opposite.”
“All right,” I answered, and stopped the motor, and got out.
It may seem funny that, I should have taken a drink with him, considering the way I felt, especially since I'd just refused to shake hands with him. But there was a reason for my doing what I did. I've always had a heap of contempt for the virtuous, storybook sort of fellow who would rather be skinned alive than have anything to do with the villain. They make me tired. Volger was pretty near right when he said that he was the injured party, after all. He certainly was, and I must have injured him considerably that first night of our acquaintance.
I knew well enough that he didn't like me now any better than he had that night, but he respected me, and he'd respect me even more if I was to go in and have a drink with him and not appear to sulk. Besides, he wouldn't be quite so much on his guard against me if he thought that I was willing to let things go and bury the hatchet.
And the last reason was that I was thirsty, and wanted a glass of beer.
“Young Perkins, a boy I went to school with, came out as we were stepping down from the car.
“Morning, captain,” says he, glancing at Volger's four stripes of braid. “Hello, Jase. What's this? Whats this? They told me you'd quit the sea and gone in for gasoline, but I couldn't believe it. Aimin' to follow in Billy Maguire's wake?”
“That's what,” I answered, and introduced him to Volger, who was over there for the first time. So far as I could make out, he'd only come because he knew that Grizel was going to do some shopping for Mrs. Newell, as all he wanted was a couple of snatch blocks for the boat falls, and I could have got those as well as not.
He told me that he thought it a lot snappier to lead his falls down to a snatch block on deck and let the hands walk straight away with them, the bo'sun giving the step with his pipe, than to have them heaving straight from the davit heads. It took twice the number of men to walk the boat up this way, but, as Volger said, and with a certain amount of truth, you've got to invent ways of keeping yacht sailors from getting too fat to squeeze through the hatch.
We went over to Delano's place across the street, and had our drink; beer for me, ginger ale for Perkins, and rye for Volger. I left them there to go back and get Grizel. She came out at the end of half an hour, and I got down to open the door for her. Somehow, she looked prettier and trimmer-rigged every time I saw her. This day she was wearing a sort of straw-colored pongee silk blouse with a square sailor collar and skirt to match. The skirt was a mite short, and showed her pretty ankles and dainty little feet in their yellow buckskin, rubber-soled shoes. A round hat made of Panama grass was smashed down on her fuzzy dark hair, and there was a sea-green scarf wound around it. The whole outfit had been given to her by the oldest daughter, whom I hadn't seen yet, and who was just about Grizel's build. But Grizel's lines had altered a lot since she'd been at the Newells', and in that loose-fitting sailor suit she looked a big girl and real plump. It was mighty becoming to her, and her lips and cheeks were blood-red.
Not only were her looks changed, but so was her expression and manner and everything. She was not the same girl that I'd met on the train, nor was the face she turned to me as she came out of that store one bit the face that I'd seen in the murk from the bridge. And yet I was wilder about her than ever, and as she paused and looked me over I found it sort of hard to get my breath.
What she said, though, was calculated to cool me down a lot.
“You look quite nice in your olive-drab livery,” says she. “In Boston you will wear a sort of deep maroon with a velvet collar. It must be very smart. When Mrs. Newell makes calls, the footman always goes along and sits beside you. His livery is exactly like yours. I should so like to see you in it—though really I think that the blue uniform that you were wearing when I met you on the train is more becoming to a man of your type—even if it did show the stains of sea water.” She got into the car, then said, with a sort of a lisp: “Go to Perkins' stores, Seagrave.”
It's a wonder we got away without stripping our cogs or busting the shaft or something. As it was, I must have nigh whipped her head off her shoulders, for I heard her gasp: “Oh!” and a man on the sidewalk grinned.
Thought I: “Folks are all the same; when they're down, they are as meek as Moses, but just fatten 'em up a bit, and they'll sass your head off.”
I hadn't thought it of Grizel, and I must say that I was right disappointed. Then I happened to think of the tough time she'd had in the last five years, and I was glad.
Poor little girl, it was her first taste of prosperity; rich, nourishing food, people to wait on her, nice clothes and no work to speak of—I felt like a dog to have been sore with her, even for a passing second.
Volger was waiting for us when we fetched up in front of Perkins' stores, and he came bustling out as important as if he owned the yacht and the car and the best part of Portland.
“Home, Seagrave,” says he, as he opened the door of the tonneau. Then maybe because it struck him that he was forging chain a mite, he changed his tone, and said: “S'ppose we go back along the shore, Seagrave, if it's all the same to you.”
“All right,” I answered, and we started off, Volger chattering away to Grizel about how he wished that Mr. Newell would take a good offshore cruise or make a run to Cowes.
There was nothing, he said, that got on his nerves like mud-holing along shore. With a big, able vessel like the Nahma, a man could go anywhere, and it was a shame to be lying at anchor all the time with the pond lilies sprouting from the spars. He was a deep-water man, he said, and hated mucking along the beach—and a lot more of the same sort.
After I'd listened to him for a while—and I couldn't help it because the car ran as smooth as a watch and Volger's ordinary voice was harsh—I began to wonder if the man had ever really been off soundings. I don't know just what it was, but something in the way he talked made me think that he'd never got beyond the hundred-fathom curve.
He was in a right talkative mood, Captain Volger, and from the sea he switched suddenly onto Grizel and her school-teaching. She happening to remark that she taught French, among other things, he opened up his mud valve, and spattered her with French Canadian, and she handed it back to him in the same lingo. After that they talked only French, and there they had it on me, speaking as I did only down-east Yankee.
That may seem strange, considering the chances I'd had for learning the language. But sailors never do take advantage of opportunities. They'll tell you that they speak French or German or Spanish or Portuguese, but as a matter of fact they don't. They know two or three phrases in most tongues, and that's all. In fact, I've been shipmates with men that had no real language whatever; men who'd picked up a smattering of several tongues without being really able to talk in any one of them. There are lots of fellows like this, and sailors usually speak of them as “Dutchmen,” because their tongues are a mite thick.
Volger seemed tickled to death to find that he could chin with Grizel in French, and from that time on they never spoke anything else. Canuck was Volger's mother tongue, I guess, for his English had a thick, sticky sort of accent, and if he didn't watch out he was apt to chop the ends of his words. What his blood might be, the Lord only knows, but I had an idea that he might be part French and part Scotch, and that would make just about the sort of mixture you might expect of red wine and whisky—peat-hag whisky, at that.
They chattered all the way home, and when I pulled up under the porte-cochère, Volger helped Grizel out, then turned to me, and said: “That's all, Seagrave,” in a tone that made me want to bounce a belaying pin on his black, curly head. I couldn't quite get onto his drift. Why should he want to patch things up with me, then turn around and try to rile me?
So when he said: “That's all, Seagrave,” I looked at Grizel.
“Miss McNair,” I said; “would you mind asking in the house if the car is wanted before lunch?”
She nodded, and went inside.
Volger got red in the face, then growled:
“No use in bein' so touchy. Nobody's tryin' to put it over you.”
The windows were open, and, thinking that there might be somebody in earshot, I didn't answer. Grizel came out to say that there was nothing until the afternoon, so I went on around to the garage. And for the second time, I couldn't help but wonder just what my job was really worth.

### CHAPTER V.

As I rolled into the garage, which was a big, well-found place with two pits, bench, lathe drill, and forge, I saw a man pottering around the big car.
“How d'ye do,” says he, in a sort of drawling voice. “You're Seagrave, I presume. I'm Mr. Newell's brother.”
“How d'you do, sir,' said I, and touched my cap, then got down.
“I've been wondering if another car in here would crowd you too much,” says he, and his accent was Englisher than most English people talk. “I've bought a sixty-horse-power swifty, and the freight agent has just sent me word that it's at the depot.”
“Oh, there's plenty of room, I reckon,” said I.
“Of course,” says Mr. Newell, and it suddenly occurred to me that this must be the “Mr. Edmond” that Billy said had got a mash on Grizel, “that makes one more car to keep in order. I always drive myself, and any gross reparations can be done at Maguire's place. But if you can find time to look after the oiling and adjusting and all that sort of thing, of course I should consider that as extra work and make it right with you accordingly.”
“That's not necessary——” I began, but he made a languid motion with his hand.
“Not a bit of it. Otherwise I'd feel that I ought to get a man of my own, and that's really not worth while. We'll call it an extra twenty-five a month. 'Pon my word, but that will make this family pretty well supplied with cars; four out here and an electric brougham in town, Really, it's the only way, though. You've got to have different cars for different purposes and change 'em just as you do your clothes. They wear better that way. Otherwise you're apt to use your old plug of a limousine to make a hurry call over a rotten road and do your shoppin' with a coughing, panting racer. Cars are like horses, rather; it's not the use that knocks 'em up, but the abuse and the man that drives with a light hand will get the most out of 'em, don't you agree with me?”
“The theory sounds good to me, sir,” I answered, and got a-hold of a wipe to clean some mud and water off the searchlights before it dried. Mr. Edmond watched me curiously.
“That's the scrub's work, ain't it?” he asked.
“I suppose it is,” I answered, “but he ain't here just this minute, and if that gritty stuff dries, you're apt to scratch the glass gettin' it off.”
He nodded. “Good man,” says he, “I'm glad you're a Yankee. We've had two Italians and two Frenchmen and a Swiss. Got 'em in Europe, and they didn't do well with the change of climate. Maguire was a perfectly good man, but he couldn't keep away from that garage of his, though he always asked if he might look in there. Trouble was his 'looking in' usually meant about an hour under a car.”
He lighted a cigarette, and threw the match where the cement was still wet from a little puddle of gasoline.
“Nothing like absolute cleanliness in a garage,” says he. “Now, if that gasoline hadn't been wiped up, I might have set the place afire.”
I gave him a curious look as he rambled along in his tired, drawling voice with the heavy English accent. He was a man of about my own age, I reckoned, though I would have passed anywhere as ten years older, thanks to hardship and exposure and having held down rough, responsible billets. But Edmond Newell didn't look so awful young, either, though the lines in his face came, I reckon, from a different sort of wear and tear than what I'd had.
He was over six feet, stoop-shouldered, and looked as if he'd just weathered a pretty bad famine. His nose was high, like his brother's, and his head long and narrow and breedy looking, with small, crisp ears and close-clipped hair with a bit of wave to it.
For all his slab-sidedness he was a sort of handsome man, especially when he braced up a little and tightened his jaw. Most of the time, though, he was loose and sprawly, and wore his chest between his shoulder blades, and acted like he was too tired to finish what he'd started to say. He wore a little mustache waxed up at the corners, and that seemed about the only thing that saved his face from sagging all out of shape.
Looking at him as he sat there on the end of the workbench with his back round and his shoulders hunched and his face like a wax mask that's been held in front of the fire, he didn't strike me as a very dangerous rival, for all his money. Grizel was the sort of girl that would want a man, or I'd miss my guess. Just at present, she seemed to think that Volger was a man, but he wasn't, and a girl as bright as she was would be sure to find him out sooner or later.
But it didn't seem possible that anybody could ever take Mr. Edmond for a man. Even his watery blue eyes looked sort of faded and washed out, I thought, and then to make sure, I took another squint. No, they weren't watery; they were just tired and faded looking, and the brows sagged down over the outer corners, like it was sort of an effort to keep them brailed up.
He was sitting there on a piece of newspaper, and his hunched shoulders and long neck and big beak put me in mind of an adjutant bird out on the end of a mud bar in the Irawadi. His arms were crossed in front of him, and he had his cigarette between two fingers, yellow as mustard, and he was toeing in, his long, slim feet about six inches off the floor. I wondered what he thought he was going to do with a racing car. A wheel chair seemed about his measure. The fact was, he didn't look like he had life enough to drive an old blind horse. His pants legs hung like there was nothing inside them.
But talk about clothes. Mr. Edmond sure knew how to crack on when it came to carrying canvas. I'd heard about fellows that dressed like that, but never had a good look at one, close up. It seems he never wore just the ordinary flannels and ducks and tweeds and serges that most people do, but always something smooth and slick and Frenchy.
He had on this day a suit of clothes about the color of a pale, gray pigeon, with the vest cut rather low and the coat falling almost like a shawl, the folds were so easy and graceful. His tie was a different shade of the same color, and so were his socks, and his shirt was lighter, like the bluestone they put on drives when it's dry. Yet there was nothing conspicuous about him. You sort of felt that he was mighty well dressed without noticing anything. In fact, you couldn't think of him as anything but perfectly dressed.
Maybe he saw my eyes piping down his rig, for he smiled in a sort of tired way, and said:
“You are more shipshape than Maguire, Seagrave. I wouldn't have dared sit on this bench before you came. There were grease spots and iron filings and all sorts of filthy rubbish lying about. It seems to me that neatness is the first requisite of efficiency. Still”—he took a deep suck at his cigarette, and held the smoke so long in his lungs that it came out almost colorless—“neatness isn't everything. I try always to be neat, but I can't remember ever having been efficient.”
“Maybe you never had to be,” said I.
He looked a bit surprised. I think that he was sort of talking to himself, and didn't expect an answer.
“Why, that's just it, I fancy,” says he, “and my earnest prayer is that I never will have to be. People are like the good Mother Earth that grows them, Seagrave. When a breed concentrates great productiveness in one generation, the land has to lie fallow for a while. Brilliant men are too apt to blame their sons for being incompetent. That is not fair, and they seem to forget that maybe the sons are resting up from the efforts of their fathers.”
He seemed to be talking to himself, so I didn't say anything, but got the feather duster, and began to flick off the car before putting on the cover. I could feel him watching me as I went about it.
“Don't you agree with me, Seagrave?” he asked.
“No, sir,” I answered.
He flicked away his cigarette. “Whats your point of view?” he asked.
“Your comparison don't strike me as accurate,” said I. “Good ground never has to lie fallow, no matter how rich the yield. I been a sailor most of my life, but I know a mite about farming, too. When there's been a good crop, 'tain't a question of just the soil; it's the conditions of climate, sun and rain and heat and cold and the like. Every farmer has a right to expect a good crop every year, otherwise he wouldn't have the courage to plow and plant. But bad crops——”
“Are the result of what the lawyers call 'hand of God'—and other public enemies,” he interrupted, in a sort of sneering voice.
Somehow his tone hit me just wrong. I've never been a religious man, and I've been used to hearing sailors swear and blaspheme and talk rotten. But there was something about the way this rich, well-dressed, educated man spoke that riled me.
Maybe he saw that I was put out, for he said:
“I'll admit that my point wasn't very well taken, Seagrave. Good ground really needn't lie fallow if the farmer is willing to spend a little on fertilizers—and God knows that rich men's sons are sufficiently fertilized. But, just the same, there is such a thing as being born tired—maybe as the result of a tremendous output of energy on the part of the father before he started in to raise a family.”
I took another look at him. All of the drawl had gone out of his voice, and a good bit of the heavy accent, too, and there was nothing watery about his eyes. It seemed, too, as if his back had stiffened a mite, and he didn't look so thin and flopsy. It struck me all of a sudden that maybe a bit of ginger was just what he needed, so I said:
“According to history, Napoleon Bonaparte was born pretty tired, but he managed to shift his weariness off onto most of Europe before he quit. General Wolfe captured a city called Quebec, two hundred and fifty miles north of here, and was a mighty sick man when he did it. Abraham Lincoln was never a real robust man, and one voyage across the Pacific I read about the only sea stories that ever struck me as being full of bull meat, and I learned afterward that the author was a man named Robert Louis Stevenson, and was dying of consumption when he wrote them. But maybe these folks' fathers had never been great and famous men,” I said, and I said it on purpose because I knew that his own father could never have been anything downright wonderful, or I must have heard of him. Chances are, he was the one big frog in some puddle that wouldn't need a dipsy lead to fetch bottom.
Mr. Edmond didn't answer right off. Then he gave a sort of short, little laugh.
“I imagine you've about struck it, Seagrave,” said he. “After all, so long as the crop hasn't been some poisonous product, like tobacco, there's no particular reason why the ground should rest—is there?”
“I don't know,” I answered, “but it seems to me that having rested for a while it ought to produce something pretty good.”
He slid off the bench, then sort of shook himself, and started for the door.
“Now you're starting to preach,” says he, sort of snappish. “I did think that I might duck that sort of thing in the garage.”
I didn't answer this, and at the door he said:
“Will you see about having the new car brought here from the depot? Let them bring it on a truck, and we'll go over it here and try a spin over the road. I promised Miss McNair, the children's governess, you know, that I'd take her out for the first run.” And he gave me a nod, and started off toward the boathouse.
I washed up for lunch, although it was still a little early, and was looking over the paper left by Mr. Edmond when I heard a sort of flutter in the doorway, and looked up to see a mighty pretty girl standing there smiling at me. Her little cap and apron showed that she was one of the help.
“Miss Newell sent me down to see if Mr. Edmond was here,” says she, and I knew from her accent that she was English.
“He was here,” I answered, “but he went down toward the boathouse about ten minutes ago.”
“Oh, then he's found her,” she answered, and sort of hesitated as if waiting for me to say something.
She was just as pretty as she could be with hair the color of ripe yellow corn, blue-gray eyes, skin like cream, and that rich coloring that doesn't seem to last long once out of the British Isles. She was a medium-sized girl, about twenty-two I should say, trim built as a new cutter, and she had a sort of mischievous look in her face that was mighty winsome.
“Mr. Edmond came down to tell me that he's bought a new car,” said I, as she half turned, giving me a backward look and another smile. “That'll make four in the garage.”
Her gray eyes opened as if I'd told her the most interesting thing in the world.
“Really,” says she. “What kind of a car?”
“A sixty racer. It's at the depot now,” I answered.
“Fancy!” says she. “What fun! Oh!”—she clasped her hands, and rolled up her eyes a little—“how I wish I were a chauffeur instead of a ladies' maid. How ripping, to go tearing over the road at the wheel of a big strong motor! And touring is such sport. Mrs. Newell took me with her all through France and Italy last summer. She chartered a car in Paris. The chauffeur was a Frenchman, and awfully smart. We got to be the best of friends, and I learned quite a bit of French from talking with him.”
“Do the Newells cross often?” I asked.
“Almost every year. They have been twice in the Nahma. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if they were to decide suddenly to go next month. You can never tell what they may do. Don't you think they're nice?” And she gave me a curious look.
“Just as nice as they can be,” I answered.
“I'm awfully keen about Mr. Edmond,” she said, and looked down at the toes of her little low shoes. “He's a bit of a crank, and likes to ape the English and pretend that he's all worn out from the effort of living, but he's really awfully kind. He's—he's been so nice to me.” She peeped out from under her long lashes to see how I was going to take this bit of news.
“Most men are pretty nice to you, I guess,” said I.
“Oh, now you're beginning to talk like Maguire. He was awfully funny—but not quite—h'm!” And she shrugged her shoulders a little.
“Maguire's all right,” said I, “only he had to shift for himself when he was about thirteen, and never had much of a chance to improve himself.”
She glanced back over her shoulder. “There goes Mr. Edmond,” says she. “We don't see much of him since Miss McNair has come. Mrs. Newell is getting rather worried about it. Mr. Edmond has a perfectly horrid reputation with women.” She dropped her voice. “He's been mixed up in some dreadful scandals.”
I picked up the clothes brush to dust myself off, more because I somehow disliked to listen to that sort of talk than because my clothes needed it. I'd slipped on a loose khaki coat that was cooler than the heavy tunic, and as I gave it a swipe with the brush, pop went a button.
“There,” says Miss Ladies' Maid, “you've pulled off the button. Give me a needle and thread, and I'll catch it on. I've a minute or two to spare.”
“Oh, don't bother,” I answered. “Sailors can all sew, and I was a sailor before I turned chauffeur.”
“Really? I love sailors. One of my brothers is an engine-room artificer in his majesty's navy,” says she.
I'd got out my little “housewife,” and was going to slip off the coat, but she stepped up and took the needle out of my hand. “Let me,” says she, and went about it as quick and dainty as you like. The button was soon fast, when what does she do but lean over and cut the thread with her teeth, and, so help me, just at that second who should pass in front of the door of the garage but Grizel, and behind her the two young ones.
Grizel glanced in, and it must have looked to her as if the girl had her head on my chest. Anyway, her own head spun around like a ship's wheel released with the helm hard aport. The next minute she'd passed the door, the children romping after her with a couple of spaniels.
The pretty ladies' maid looked up at me with a rather scared face.
“I wonder what she thought,” says she, then smiled and dimpled. Her face was close to mine, and she looked as if she expected something for services rendered. It was partly that and partly because I was hot and sore with Grizel. She'd done nothing but snub me ever since she'd learned that I was going to turn chauffeur, and now she no doubt took it for granted that I was caressing this ladies' maid. I've never been the man to suffer long in silence, nor was I ever much of a martyr when it came to getting the name without the game. So I said to the little English girl:
“The chances are she thought that I was doing this.” And I took her rosy cheeks between my two hands and kissed her. “And thank you for sewing on the button,” said I.
She sprang back, red as a peony. “How dare you!” she cried, then burst out laughing. “Do you think she'll tattle?” says she.
“No,” I answered, “and, anyway, I'll tell her—about the button,” I added, with a grin.
“Mind you stop there,” says she, and turned on her little high heels, and scampered up to the house, leaving me with the idea that, even if Grizel was inclined to be sassy, the job was not so bad, after all.

### CHAPTER VI.

Mr. Edmond's new car was sent over that afternoon, and, as everybody was off on the yacht, I went over her, and got everything ready for the road. She was certainly a beauty, so far as you could see, all the weight being in the motor, just two bucket seats and another behind that you could unship if you liked. The steering pillar was inclined to about twenty degrees, the seats well aft and everything about her rakish and swift. I couldn't help but wonder what use a car like that could be to such a man as Mr. Edmond. The only advantage, so far as I could see, was that he'd drive her practically lying on his back in bed, the cushions were that soft and the springs such as would let you run over a corduroy road like it was a skating rink.
I let the motor turn over for a while, and it was a delight to see how true and even it ran, just like a turbine, and the deep bass hum from the exhaust was a pleasure to hear. I was crazy to take her out for a little run over the road, but Mr. Edmond had told me only to see that the motor ran all right, without saying anything about taking the car out, so I thought I'd better not. It was just as well I didn't, too, for, while I was cleaning the spark plugs after the full slugs of oil I'd given her, he came into the garage. I'd though that he was off on the yacht with the others.
“How does she go?” he asked, in a snappy sort of voice.
“Slick as a torpedo boat, sir,” I answered.
“All greased up? Transmission, differential, steering gear, and everything?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered, “she's all ready for the road.”
“Then shift your clothes, and we'll try her,” says he.
I got into my uniform, and Mr. Edmond slipped on a sort of waterproof duster he kept in the garage and a skull-cap with a face mask. I'd never worn goggles, not liking the feel of them, and my eyes being used to wind and weather.
“Where are your goggles?” he asked.
“I don't use 'em, sir,” I answered.
He gave me a hard stare. I'd noticed that his tired, logy manner had sort of disappeared, and he seemed like a different man. He was keen and sharp, and instead of the slack lines around his eyes and cheeks and jaws, there were the hard ones you might see on the face of the mate of a whaler. His eyes had a snap to them, and he wore his chest in front. I wondered what had struck him.
“Seagrave,” said he, “you incline me to believe that you have never traveled over the road in a fast car. Either that, or you've got the eyes of a stuffed owl. Look in the pocket of the big car beside the driver's seat, and you will find some goggles. Put 'em on.”
I did as he told me, a mite irritated at what he said, though, to tell the truth, I never had done more than fifty an hour, and that only in short spurts. Considering the roads, though, I couldn't see how Mr. Edmond expected to do much better, even supposing he had the nerve, which I doubted. Until a man gets used to speed, he thinks he's going some at forty per.
Mr. Edmond took the wheel, I cranked her, and we started off. And before ever we'd got to the entrance gates, I could see that I was alongside a master driver. Mr. Edmond lounging around the garage and Mr. Edmond at the wheel of a racing car were two different people. It seemed like as if he got some force and power out of the sixty horses cramped down under that hood in front of him that his own complement entirely lacked.
I stole a sideways look at him as we went through the gate. There was a red flush in his lean cheeks, and his eyes were as hard and as bright as blue ice. Yet his hand on the lever was as light as a feather, and he went into his different speeds with a little click like cocking a gun. He was easy with his brakes, too, and slowed against his motor as much as possible. Sparkes had told me that this was faulty practice, but I learned afterward that with a good clutch it was the right thing to do, and saved no end of tires. Mr. Edmond did it all the time, and before we'd gone a mile I'd have backed him with all my money when it came to driving a car.
Talk about speed! Jiminy, I'd never thought a man could travel so fast unless he happened to be standing over an old-fashioned boiler when she blew up. There were stretches where I'll bet we never hit the road three times in a furlong. It wasn't anything to brag of as a road, but the beautiful springs on that car made it feel like asphalt. Mr. Edmond hated his horn as much as he did his brakes, and passed the people we overtook at such a clip that their cusses couldn't overhaul us. And yet he was careful, too, for all his awful hurry. Let a horse act up a little or a cow meander out into the road, and he was down to a footpace and creeping by as silent as the Flying Dutchman. I'll tell you, it was an education in driving just to sit there alongside him.
We tore off about twenty miles, and were back to the garage in a little over half an hour. Mr. Edmond slid out, pulled off his driving gear, and looked at me with his face dragged down and his eyes like those of a dead fish.
“What do you think of her, Seagrave?” he asked, in his tired, drawly voice, and fished out a cigarette.
“She seems to poke along all right on the levels, and she climbs right smart,” I answered, “but it strikes me that she's a mite sluggish downhill.”
He gave me a funny sort of stare, then cackled outright. You'd hardly have called it a laugh. It was so harsh, and sounded like it hurt him.
“You're quite right,” says he. “She runs away from her motor on the down grades. They are too steep. That car would be pretty near perfect on a French route where the grades seldom reach nine per cent and the curves are easy. She's too good for these rotten roads. Well, I must go up and get a drink. It gets on my nerves horribly to drive, and yet I rather like it, too. Trouble is, I'm just a bundle of nerves, anyway, and some sort of excitement like driving a swifty or following a hunt—not too far behind”—he grinned—“or stalking a tiger or something of the sort seems to be the only thing that rests 'em; that and an absinth now and then. Please go all over the car, Seagrave, and see that everything's shipshape for a run to-morrow afternoon. I've promised Miss McNair to take her out. She thinks it's the trial trip, so don't say anything about our little run to-day. I wanted to make sure that everything was hardened down, and that there was no danger of losing a front wheel or anything like that. And you might set one of the boys to work on the brasses, Seagrave.”
And with a short nod he went swaying off to the house as if they'd forgot to send his wheel chair, and he had to make the best weather of it that he could.
The rest of the afternoon I spent at work on the racing car, as there were a number of things needed adjusting, the brakes being a mite slack and the clutch stiffer than it ought to be. Then I got off the front wheels, and had a look to see what held them on, as that remark of Mr. Edmond's had sent sort of a shiver down my back. Think of losing a front wheel when you were doing about sixty-five or seventy an hour! A shipwreck would be a nursery game compared to it, and it has been known to happen, too.
I finished my work, and washed up, and was just putting the cover over the car when there came something between me and the light, and I looked up and saw Grizel standing in the doorway, looking at me without a word. She had on a little light-blue dress with puffy short sleeves that stopped above the elbow, and there was a pale-blue ribbon around her dark, smoky-looking hair. A little wicker basket was hanging from one of her pretty round arms, and she held a pair of long scissors in her hand. I guessed that they had asked her to get some flowers for the table.
“Mrs. Newell would like the big car at nine,” says she.
“At nine to-night?” I asked.
“Yes. They are going down to the Reading Room to play bridge.”
“Very good,” I answered. “It's all ready.”
She sort of hesitated for a moment.
“Ts that Mr. Edmond's new flyer?” she asked.
“Yes,” I answered. “You'll have a chance to see it to-morrow. He told me that, he was going to take you for a run.”
“He is, if Mrs. Newell permits,” she answered.
“Why shouldn't she?” I asked. “Especially as I'll be there to chaperon the party.”
She pushed out her chin. “Oh,” says she, “are you going, too?”
“Can you see Mr. Edmond shifting one of those big shoes single-handed?” I asked.
“He is not so helpless as you think,” she answered sharply. “A man mustn't always have been a sailor to be able to do things. Mr. Edmond seems very well able to do what he sets about.”
“That's his reputation, I believe,” I answered, “especially when it comes to pleasing the ladies.”
Grizel's blue eyes got bluer, and her red cheeks redder. Violets and roses, they were, and it struck me that she didn't need to go to the garden after her flowers.
“So you've been discussing his reputation,” says she. “Really, you are learning the tricks of the trade wonderfully fast, Seagrave.” I noticed she'd dropped the handle to my name. “And I suppose you got your information from the enterprising Mr. Maguire—or from Ethel, perhaps.”
“Who's Ethel?” I asked, for in talking to Grizel I clean forgot my little English primrose.
“What! You don't even know her name? Ethel is Mrs. Newell's maid. She is rather above her station, I believe, as her father is an engine driver on the Great Northern, and she never would have gone into service if it hadn't been that she wanted to see life. You and she would naturally have a good deal in common, being influenced by the same motive. No doubt you can be of considerable service to each other.”
“Shouldn't wonder,” I answered. “She was of considerable service to me this morning, sewing a button onto my blouse. She was biting of the thread just when you so kindly looked in to see how I was getting along in my new job.”
Grizel's cheeks got even redder, and her eyes looked downright dangerous.
“That was very nice of her. Only I'd advise you to be very careful, Seagrave, as Mrs. Newell is most particular about the conduct of her servants, and you wouldn't wish the poor girl to lose her place on your account. Of course, the man is seldom blamed in affairs of this sort.”
I could feel the blood coming up under my collar. “Especially if he happens to be tending to his business and the girl goes out of her way to stir him all up,” I said.
The color faded from Grizel's cheeks, and her eyes seemed to get black. She bit her lip, and I could see the shine of her white little teeth. There was no hint just then of the appealing face I used to see in the swirls of mist eddying around the foremast. She looked more as if she'd like to send the scissors into me up to their tortoiseshell handles.
“You are quite right, Seagrave,” says she, and her voice had a tremble in it. “I ought to know better myself than to stand here talking to the chauffeur. Especially as I have noticed that Ethel usually runs down this way just before meal time.”
“If it's too much of a comedown to talk to the chauffeur,” I answered, “and you feel like being sociable, I reckon you'll find Mr. Edmond over by the kennels. Or you might run into Volger down by the boathouse. I saw the launch come in not long ago. Either one ranks the chauffeur, to say nothing of having better manners.”
Her eyes blazed out like a blue pilot's light, and for a second I thought that she was going to heave the scissors at me. Then, without a word, she turned on her heel, and walked off toward the flower garden. “Flower Garden” was what Billy had called her. It struck me that maybe “Fireworks” would be a better name for her. Yet, just on account of the natural cussedness of things, I was so crazy about her, even when I was getting in all that knife work, that there was a sort of suffocated feeling under my ribs, and when she went away I could feel my throat tighten and the water coming into my eyes.
I know I ought to be ashamed of the way I behaved, but Grizel had no call to turn to and try to haze me. I'd acted honestly and according to my idea of what was right, where she was concerned, and there didn't seem to be any reason under heaven why she should flout me and try to stir up the mud in me like she did. I was mad in love with her, and knew it, but I hadn't troubled her about it, and why she should put herself out to make me sore and discontented was more than I could fathom. In fact, the only thing that kept me from telling myself that she was geting spoiled and stuck up from the fuss the womenfolks in the Newell family made about her, was a sort of curious little light in her eyes that I can't describe, but that gave, me the feeling of burning just for me; like the lantern that a fisherman's wife puts in the window of the cottage, up there on the coast of Scotland.
Maguire had told me how the Newells were trying their best to spoil Grizel. They'd given her clothes, and treated her almost like a daughter from the very start, and the little girls were crazy about her and wouldn't mind anybody else.
But I understood even better how Mrs. Newell felt that night when I took them to the “Reading Room,” as they called the yacht club. I was pretty tired after my day's work, and fell asleep on the front seat of the car along toward midnight. The car was lying off alongside the big piazza, and pretty soon I was awakened by people talking, as it seemed to me, almost in my ear.
I recognized the voice as Mrs. Newell's, and she said:
“You must remember, Edmond, that Grizel McNair is a very young and inexperienced girl. Also she's a working girl, and working girls are scarcely fair game for rich idlers like yourself.”
“But, my dear Madge,” says he—Mr. Edmond, of course—“why do you persist in trying to make me such a villain? You ought to write another book, and call it 'Governesses I Have Fired,' with a subtitle, 'The Lure of Gasoline.'”
“It's not amusing, Edmond,” says she.
“Why not call your book 'A Romance of Near Arcadia'? The Bay of Fundy lies in between, you see. Then this is the epoch of near things, and it ought to make a hit——”
“Don't be vulgar, Edmond,” says Mrs. Newell.
“I'm not,” says he. “I'm literal. The Bay of Fundy—with its eighty-foot tide in the affairs of men——”
She interrupted him mighty short and snappish. “Edmond,” says she, “what is it that you take? Morphine or cocaine? Now, don't try to lie about it.”
Eavesdropping was never much in my line. The only reason I'd kept quiet so far was because they'd been walking down the piazza and back, and I thought that they were going to turn the corner and go out of hearing range. But just here Mr. Edmond stopped and leaned over the rail, so I roused up and started to get down out of the car. I wasn't more than the distance you could chuck a heaving line, and the night was just as still as it could be. They both kept quiet as I got down, then Mrs. Newell says:
“Seagrave?”
“Yes, ma'am,” I answered, and walked over to the piazza.
“Have you been listening to our conversation?” she asked, in a voice like vinegar.
“Yes, ma'am,” I answered, and wished I was back on the old Clarendon.
“Why did you do that?” she asked. “Why did you not let us know that you were there?”
“I only woke up a minute ago, ma'am,” I answered, “about where you started to talk about Miss McNair. Just as soon as I saw that you were going to stop here I got down.”
They were both silent for a minute; then says Mr. Edmond:
“Very well, Seagrave.”
His voice was sharp and short, as if he'd been a deck officer. I touched my cap and went back to the car. Mrs. Newell said something in a low voice, and they both turned and went back into the clubhouse.
That is all there was to that. I brought them home about an hour later, then rolled into bed, almost wishing that it was my old cozy berth on the Clarendon, and that the worst thing that I had to think about was turning out in four hours to go on the bridge.
The next day I took Mr. and Mrs. Newell over to eat lunch with some friends that lived about five miles away, and brought them home about four o'clock. Mr. Edmond was out in the garage looking over his new car when I came in.
“I'm going to take Miss McNair out for a little spin, Seagraye,” said he. “Is everything in order?”
“Yes, sir,” I answered.
“Then crank up and get in,” said he, in a sort of a snappish tone. “We've been waiting for you to get back.”
So I started the motor, and got in behind, wondering how he had fixed it up with Mrs. Newell.
The first time that I'd gone out with Mr. Edmond it had seemed to me that he was tempting the Almighty to strike him dead for a speed-crazy lunatic that was tired of life and hadn't the nerve to go out and commit suicide shipshape and proper. But that run was a Sunday-afternoon trolley ride compared to what we got now. Grizel was masked and hooded so that she looked like a diver ready to go down, and she sat tight as a bur, waiting for her heavenly crown, while Mr. Edmond was a sort of devil in his black skullcap and mask. He certainly acted the part, for the moment we got outside the gates he turned loose his power until it seemed as if we were in tow of about sixty nightmares. Once, at the bottom of a long steep hill where we dropped like a dipsey lead, he twisted around in his seat with a sort of diabolical grin.
“She's picking up a little on the down grades, hey, Seagrave?” he hollered back.
“Don't forget there's a lady passenger,” I answered, though maybe I shouldn't have.
Mr. Edmond laughed, and unhooked a few more notches, and, looking over Grizel's shoulder, I saw the speed gauge jerking around between sixty-five and seventy as we struck a long tangent where the track was hard and level.
A little later I had a chance to see that Mr. Edmond wasn't all show. We swept around a curve at about fifty per, the road being good, but narrow and timbered thick with stunted pines on both sides. As we soared around, the siren screeching like a cow moose that's sad and lonely, here we came, slap-bang on a herd of cattle just pouring out onto the road from a trail leading into the woods.
No chance to brake against the motor Mr. Edmond reached for his hand brake, and, as he threw it on, there came a report like a six-pounder, and the car took a skid that nigh pitched me overboard. For a second I thought that we were going over—about eighteen times, but Mr. Edmond threw off the brake, and, straightening his direction with one hand, shot plump into the herd. How he got through will always be a wonder to me, but a second later here we were on the open road, the cattle astern, and, although I hadn't felt any jar, I looked back as he pulled up, and saw two cows floundering on their backs in the ditch.
Mr. Edmond pushed up his mask, and looked back.
“Tire down, Seagrave,” says he, in the brisk voice he used only when driving the car. “Break out another shoe.” He looked at Grizel, and laughed. “Like it?” he asked.
Grizel let out her breath. She'd held it since we sighted the cattle.
“I'm not sure,” says she. “What happened?”
“Nothing but a burst tire. Those cows aren't hurt; I simply shoved them off the road with the mud guards. Just the same, I'll go back, and give the man something for his fright and to buy tallow to grow the hair again.”
So back he went, and we heard a lively argument going on, which stopped mighty suddenly about the time a little money changed hands. Meanwhile I'd got out the jack, and hove up the wheel without a word from Grizel. I was getting off the torn shoe when Mr. Edmond came back, laughing.
“Sorry you couldn't hear his remarks,” says he. “They consisted of a sincerely expressed wish that the car had turned turtle, and mutilated the lot of us beyond recognition, then caught fire, and burned our bodies to a crisp. The only things lacking was that our parents might die of plague and the dogs defile the graves of everybody connected with us. And all because two of his silly cows were scraped a little along the ribs! He shut up, though, when I handed him a fiver and thanked him for his good wishes. I suppose now he'll be drivin' 'em in front of every car that comes along.” He held out his hand to Grizel. “Come, Miss McNair,” says he, “we'll take a little walk in the woods while Seagrave and our farmer friend shift the tire.”
He pulled off his driving coat, and threw it across the seat, then helped her down before she had a chance to make the objection which it was plain she meant to.
“There's a cliff not far from here from which you get a ripping view of the bay,” says Mr. Edmond. “We've just about time to stroll over there and back.”
Grizel hesitated, but Mr. Edmond still held out his hand. Grizel had pulled off her hood, and looked at me, and I couldn't help frowning. As she caught my eye, Grizel pressed her lips together, and shoved out her chin in the way she had when displeased.
“I should love to,” says she, and let him help her off with her wraps. Mr. Edmond led the way into the woods, and on the other side of the ditch he stopped and looked back.
“Start the motor, and give a few toots of the siren when you're ready, Seagrave,” says he, and off they went under the trees.
I've taken many a lee earing in a hard squall off the Cape, and I've wrestled a spare propeller blade that got adrift in the 'tween decks in a gale of wind, and I've cleared a whaleboat and got five hands swept overboard in a typhoon, but let me tell you I never got more of a hustle than I did to shift that tire. Nor, for that matter, did I ever strike aught that seemed fuller of the devil. Even with the farmer helping me, or maybe because of it, a good half hour had passed before I was ready to pump her up. The farmer was handy here, as he wanted to earn his fiver, and pretty soon the tire was hard, and I started the motor and made all the racket I knew how.
Even then it was a good ten minutes before they hove in sight. Mr, Edmond was lagging along, and Grizel's head was held very high, and her eyes looked dangerous.
“Well, Seagrave,” says Mr. Edmond, “there's no danger of getting lost in the woods with you in the car.”
I didn't answer. Something was boiling over inside me, and I wanted to grab him by his snipe neck and throw him over one of the pines. Maybe he felt it, for he didn't speak again, but wrapped Grizel up, and drove home like the devil was overhauling.

### CHAPTER VII.

Two months skimmed by like they were going the other way, and during that time quite a lot of things happened, some of them nice and others not so pleasant.
The best thing about my job was the work itself. I took to driving right from the start, and at the end of the first month Mr. Edmond told me one day that his brother had said at the table that he considered me the easiest driver on the car and on the passengers that he had ever ridden with, and that he had never seen me take a single chance that might result in an accident. This was good hearing, of course, and paid for a lot of unpleasant things I had to put up with.
The work was harder than any one had any idea of. With a lot of driving to do and four cars to keep in order, I had to keep hustling pretty lively. But I was well paid for it, and when there was something that I really didn't have time to get around to, I'd telephone over to Billy, and he'd hop on a motor cycle and run out to lend me a hand. Even then I was often working up to midnight, as some of the family were out most of the day, and even when Mr. Newell or Mr. Edmond drove I always went along.
The Newells had lots of company, and you wouldn't believe the way the tips I got mounted up. At first I thanked whoever wanted to make me a present, and said I'd rather not take it, but Mr. Edmond found out about it, and said to me one day:
“Why do you refuse to accept tips, Seagrave?”
“Seemed to me that Mr. Newell would rather I shouldn't take anything, sir,” I answered. “He pays me, and pays me well. I ain't working for these other people.”
“I'm glad that's the reason,” he drawls. “I was afraid it might be owing to Yankee pride and independence.”
“Maybe there's a mite of that, too,” I admitted.
“I fancy there is,” he answered, “and I think that you make a mistake, Seagrave. There's nothing in the social position of a chauffeur that prevents his taking a tip. Besides, it makes most people a little sore to have their presents refused, and the ones that are secretly glad you don't care about. Now, take Mr. Curtis, for instance; how much did he offer you?”
“Five dollars,” I answered.
“I'd have made it ten, in his place,” says Mr. Edmond, “seeing that he kept you out late several nights, playing bridge, and then drove the little car himself, and gave you a job readjusting the transmission, as a result. Then there's another thing. There are a good many men like Mr. Curtis who are what you might call 'professional guests.' I'll wager he doesn't pay a board and lodging bill four months in the year. He counts in his tips as a regular part of his living expenses, and when one is declined he's just that much ahead. He says to himself: 'Here's a blame' fool that is willing to pay five dollars to have me think he's above taking a tip.'”
I sort of scratched my head, and felt a little foolish.
“If that's the case, why, I'm sorry I didn't take it,” I answered.
“Take 'em all,” says Mr. Edmond. “You earn the money. I haven't come in after midnight once that you weren't on the job. When you get your sleep, I'm sure I don't know, but you seem to thrive at it.” He looked me over, from head to foot. “You've got a neck like a broncho and an arm like the oak knee of a sailing ship,” says he.
“Would you swap places, Mr. Edmond?” I asked.
He shook his head, slowly blowing the pale-blue smoke from his lungs halfway across the garage.
“No, Seagrave,” he answered. “I'm too fond of luxury. The mere thought of any kind of physical work is horrible to me. You may notice that I never play tennis, or swim, or row, or ride a horse. I loathe exertion. And yet it fascinates me to see a strong man at his job. That's the reason I hang around the garage so much. On the contrary, it disgusts me to see a big, burly brute like this Volger, floppin' around, and never so much as lifting a hand.”
“He's not a strong man,” said I; “he's full of mud.”
Mr. Edmond shook his head. “He's husky enough,” says he. “I saw him get a-hold of the end of a spar one day that two Swedes couldn't lift. He swung it up one-handed, and laid it aside. But he's such a lazy beggar.” He yawned, and slid down off the bench, then on the threshold, turned and looked back at me. “Volger's no friend of yours, Seagrave,” says he. “Look out that you don't give him any chance to do you a spiteful trick.”
“What's that, sir?” I asked quickly, laying down my hacksaw, for I was shortening up a bolt in the vise.
“Servants' tattle,” said Mr. Edmond, and shrugged. “I'd rather not repeat it.” And he lounged out of the garage and over toward the kennels. He was mighty fond of the dogs, and about the only one they had any respect for.
It was plain enough that he wanted to put me on my guard without seeming to mix up in the gossip.
“No doubt,” thought I, “Volger has been trying to stab me in the back while pretending that all is square between us, and that he asks nothing better than to be good friends.”
This thought made me all the madder because Volger had been going out of his way to show me good feeling, asking me out aboard the yacht a couple of times to meals and the like. He knew that Mr. Edmond had taken a sort of fancy to me, and the whole household—family, servants, and all—stood a mite in awe of Mr. Edmond. He had a keen way of going straight to the truth of anything that could be pretty bitter, for all his polite way of speaking and lazy, drawling, affected voice.
I wondered what Volger had been saying and where he'd been saying it. The chances were, I thought, that he'd been making some slurs about Ethel and me, as the Sunday before Mrs. Newell had sent the upper house servants out for a ride in the big car, Ethel sitting beside me, and another time I'd taken her and the housekeeper and butler out for a sail in the moonlight, with Mrs. Newell's permission, of course.
Mr, Newell's valet de chambre, a fellow named Albert, was pretty well gone on Ethel, and the chances were that Thompson, the new butler, had been trying to plague him a little by telling him how I was teaching her to steer and how she'd been making eyes at me, for Ethel was one of those bright, pretty, lively sort of girls that can no more help flirting than a bird can help singing.
I liked Ethel a whole lot, and, while deep down in the heart of me there was the feeling that I was logged never to care for another woman than Grizel, she'd been so stand-offish and far away that for a month I'd never got in signal range but once or twice, and then the message wasn't such as did me any great amount of good to read.
What possessed Grizel at this time, I couldn't have said. She was getting lovelier every day, as if she'd needed just that ease and luxury to develop the richness of her mind and body. So far as real work went, her duties amounted to nothing at all, for the little girls were just as good as they could be and adored Grizel, and all she had to do was to tell them what she wanted, and they went ahead and did it.
The older daughter, a mighty nice girl about eighteen, made a real chum out of Grizel, and Mrs. Newell treated her like a daughter. I doubted they'd let her go back to her school, they were all so fond of her, and, sure enough, they didn't.
Mr. Edmond was hard hit, too, but it seemed as if the two women threw a sort of torpedo net around Grizel, and it wasn't often, I guess, that he had a chance to speak to her alone. She liked him, too, but Grizel was a lady, and knew better than to get herself talked about. I saw her chinning with Volger a good many times, down by the boathouse, but nobody seemed to think anything about that. As for my part, there was hardly a day went by that she wasn't in the car, but, aside from that, she avoided me like I had yellow fever. Whenever she did find herself alone with me, she managed to get in a harpoon or two about my seeming to thrive on the soft, shore billet. And yet, there was always that little light in her eyes when they met mine.
Grizel acting like she did, it wasn't strange that I found a sort of contrary satisfaction in carrying on in a harmless sort of way with Ethel. Maybe I forged ahead a little stronger than was correct, considering that standing off and on like that with a girl is always maneuvering in shoal water, but I was sort of half miserable about Grizel all the time, and I certainly meant no harm to Ethel.
Besides, there was Albert, that I had about as much use for as I have for a stingaree. There was no good for Ethel in that skate, and what made me love him even less was his being a friend of Volger's. Mr. Newell always took him on the yacht, and whenever Volger came ashore he'd manage to meet up with Albert and get the handout of a cocktail, or the like. I piped down the two of them as pretty near the same breed of galley rangers, only Albert was even less of a man than Volger.
Thought I to myself: “Albert has carried some yarn about Ethel and me to Volger, and Volger has slung loose his jaw tackle. The best thing for me to do is to give Ethel a wide berth. When it comes to this sort of trouble, it's just as Grizel once said: 'It's always the girl that pays.'”
Now this was a right sensible point of view on my part, and if I'd managed to stick to it, things might have been different. But luck was against us. That summer was a mighty hot one, and the days were so sultry, come August, that by nightfall the help were pretty well tuckered out. Mrs. Newell, while mighty strict about behavior and all that, was a considerate woman, and she gave orders that we were all free to use the bathhouses and bathing beach before turning in, Mrs. Holbrooke, the housekeeper, always standing watch to see that things went shipshape and proper.
Now, Ethel was a regular mermaid, having grown up 'longshore and being naturally strong-limbed and full-chested. The very first night we went overboard she took a clean dive off the rail of the upper deck of the boathouse, and entered as slick as a porpoise. I followed her, and we struck out in the bridge of a big, full moon, with the ripples all around us like the scales of a fresh-hooked tarpon, and the land breeze bringing off warm, spicy smells that put me in mind of the cinnamon groves of Ceylon.
The water was warm, too, having simmered on the flats all day, and after the heat and work since early morning, it made you feel fresh and strong to stretch out in the cool brine, while the black depths underneath made you feel like you were a seal or grampus, and belonged in the sea, and nothing on shore mattered “a curse in a gale of wind,” as sailors say.
The rest of the party were splashing around in the shallow water, and Mrs. Holbrooke, a broad-beamed, easy-going woman with a mighty level head on her shoulders, was inside, reading the paper by the electric light.
“Where bound, matey?” I hailed, as I hauled up in Ethel's wake.
“Liverpool,” she answered, and kicked a shower of silvery spray into my face. “See my homeward-bound pennant?” And she flashed a tress of her long, yellow hair in the moonlight, for she didn't wear a bathing cap, and had let her hair fly adrift, once in the water. Ethel was a bit of a sailor lass herself, having grown up in Liverpool and being acquainted with a lot of seafaring people.
I forged up alongside, and together we swam straight out in the bright track of the moon.
Fortunately Mr. and Mrs. Newell were dining with some company out aboard the Nahma, and Albert had gone along to lend the steward a hand, otherwise he'd been hollering at us from the shore. But the others didn't bother us any, and Mrs. Holbrooke was good for an hour, reading the murder news and society scandals, so we started in for a good swim.
Half a mile out lay the Nahma, the light streaming from her portholes and dancing down from the riding light. She was a sturdy old packet, though I must say that there was something about the hogged lines of her sheer-strake that made me misdoubt the condition of her amidships frames, but just the same she looked mighty fine out there in the bridge of the moon.
Ethel, a regular duck in the water, no matter how cold it might be, rolled over on her side, and faced me.
“Lets swim around the yacht, Jason,” says she.
“Not much,” I answered. “Volger would sight us and run tattling to Mrs. Newell, and there'd be no more moonlight swims, let alone getting Mrs. Holbrooke in hot water.”
“We can give her a wide berth,” says she.
“What's the use?” I answered. “Let the schooner be. We'll swim out to Duck Island, if you like.”
“All right,” says she, and took a long, overhand stroke, her round white arm flashing like silver.
This Duck Island was no more than a round little clump of rocks and pine trees not more than a hundred yards across. It was about a quarter of a mile offshore, and bore to the southward, the Nahma's moorings being a little south of east from the boathouse. It wasn't much of a swim, but as we drew near the water got suddenly like ice, we having swum clear of the warmer belt over the flats.
“Jiminy,” said I, “we've struck the arctic current.”
Ethel gave a silvery laugh that rippled across the water, and seemed a part of the moonlight.
“Let's land and thaw out,” says she. “I'll race you to the beach.”
“For a kiss,” I answered back, and hand over we went, in for the beach, foaming, laughing, with a trail of moonlight and phosphorescence that looked like a comet's tail. I swarmed up on the beach like a seal, and, without rising to my feet, turned and reached out my arms to her as she came splashing in.
“Won by half a length,” I shouted; “pay up.”
Now, it happened that on that very afternoon Grizel had sent her knife into me again, up to the hilt, this time to tell me that Mrs. Newell had remarked at the table that I looked sort of used up and that she thought Mr. Edmond ought to get a chauffeur of his own, as his car took more time than the other three together, and that she hated to think that any of the “servants” were taxed beyond their strength. Grizel wound up by saying that she supposed it was Yankee thrift on my part. I had told her: “Yes, I'm trying to get enough ahead to have a home to offer to the girl who might be willing some day to marry me.” She had given me a hard little look at this, and gone out without a word.
So what with the freedom that comes of feeling that, after all, there's no use in trying, and the soft, creamy light of a harvest moon and the smell of pines mixed with salt grass, to say nothing of the prettiest sort of a girl with her yellow hair shining like old gold in that yellow moonlight and her eyes about a hundred fathoms deep, just waiting to be hauled up out of the sea to give you a salty kiss or two, it's no wonder that I put everything else out of mind. The spell of the night gripped us both, and we neither of us saw the coming of the gig from the Nahma, nor did we hear her bow grate on the beach. As it was, the first we knew that we were not alone, talking and resting up for our swim back, was when a greasy voice behind us said:
“Good evening. Aw-f'lly sorry to intrude, but Mrs. Newell sent me over to set you ashore.”
I swung around, and here was Volger looming up against the pale sky.
“Say,” says he, dropping his voice a mite, “what got into you to make so much noise? With this offshore draft, and still as it is, you might jus' as well have been alongside. Now, you've give the whole snap away.”
I looked out toward the schooner. She was a good quarter of a mile away, and I doubted that our voices would have carried to her, so that any one could tell who was talking. Still, it was possible.
Ethel never said a word. She was staring across the water toward the sea, her hands clasped around her knees. Presently, says she in a hard, even sort of voice:
“This does for me, I fancy. Well, after all, it might as well be sooner as later. I've done my best.” She looked up at me, and held out her hand. I was on my feet, of course, and I gave her a grip, and up she came, light as a feather.
“It's all my fault, Ethel,” said I, “and if there's anything that I can do to fix things up, you can just bet I'll do it.”
She shook her head. “It's not your fault at all,” says she. “I've only myself to thank—but I don't care——” And she gave a little laugh, and did a sort of fancy step across the tiny beach. “If I'm dismissed, I'll go on the stage.”
“Say,” says Volger, “that ain't such an awfully bad idea, neither. With that shape——”
“Stow all that,” said I. “There's no call for Mrs. Newell to interfere like this, and I'll tell her so, with all respect. We had our swim after hours and with permission. If we see fit to cruise offshore a mite, whats the harm?” I tried to look Volger in the eyes, for his face was in the shadow. “You say Mrs. Newell heard us talking and laughing?” I asked.
“Sure,” says he, bold as brass, but with a funny sort of note in his voice. “Why, you might ha' been alongside.”
That wasn't the place to argue it out, especially as I was getting to like Volger less and less every minute, from the way he was piping Ethel down. So I held out my hand.
“Come on, Ethel,” said I. “We'll go in with the captain, and to-morrow I'll ask leave to say a few words with Mrs. Newell.”
Volger took me by the arm.
“Don't you do it, Seagrave,” says he. “There's nothing foolisher than for a man to stick up for a girl to another woman. You keep out of it.”
Ethel laughed. “The captain's right,” says she. “You'd best keep out of it, Jason.”
So in we went, a mighty sad little swimming party, and found the rest of them still romping in the warm water and Mrs. Holbrooke asleep with a fashion paper on her lap. Volger went off aboard as soon as he had landed us, not giving me a chance to say a word to the Swede who was pulling the dinghy. Then, Mrs. Holbrooke woke up, and we all got dressed, and the rest of them went up to the house.
I hung around the landing, for I wasn't quite satisfied about what Volger had said, and wanted a word with somebody off the yacht. But there was no chance of this, as the party came ashore about midnight, and the launch went straight back alongside. So I turned in, dead tired, and mighty depressed.
The next morning I was broken out at about six by a Swede named Larsen, one of the quartermasters off the yacht, who came up after some gasoline.
“Larsen,” said I, “what quartermaster was on duty last night from eight to twelve?”
“That's me,” says Larsen. “I ban on deck for the first watch.”
“Did you hear us in swimming?” I asked.
He grinned. “Yas,” says he, “I ban hear a gell and fella over on Duck Island.”
“Who was on deck at the time?” I asked.
“Yust da skeeper and me,” he answered.
That was all I wanted to know. So this was a little game of Volger's. I warned Larsen not to tell that I'd questioned him, then gave him his gasoline and turned to. I was pottering around the cars when I saw one of the grooms going out with the station wagon. A little later I heard him leave the house, and I asked the coachman: “Who is leaving?”
“Ethel,” says he, “and a dommed shame, too.”
“Ethel!” I echoed, and felt sort of sick around the gizzard. “What for?”
“'Tis yourself should know,” says he, and turned on his heel and walked off into the harness room.
I went back to the garage mad clear through. The whole business was clear as the ship's bell. Volger, hearing Ethel and me laughing and talking over on Duck Island, tells Albert, and Albert contrives some way that Mrs. Newell shall know. Mrs. Newell sends Volger after us, and later on learns from Ethel that we two had swum out there by ourselves. That fixes Ethel. She probably gets a month's advance wages and a ticket to Boston. It was that way in the Newells' household. Never had any row nor talk; just the account settled and good-by. All the help drew half again as much wages as they would get most places, and were expected to toe the chalk line or find a new job.
Mr. Edmond came into the garage about half past ten. He must have seen that something was wrong, for pretty soon he said:
“What's the matter, Seagrave? You seem upset about something.”
So I gave it to him straight, man to man, telling him all about Volger's dirty trick and winding up with my free-born American opinion of the way Ethel had been used. Mr. Edmond listened without interrupting, but I saw his eyes narrow and harden a little, and reckoned that he didn't care much for my plain way of putting the case. When I'd finished, he took a long inhale of his cigarette, blew the smoke up at the ceiling, and said:
“I hate like the devil to do anything that might interfere with getting that man Volger a licking, Seagrave. Fact is, I'd give a lot to see it. Personally, I detest the brute. But as for Ethel, it's the best thing that could have happened to her. She was quite out of her element as a lady's maid, and was always getting in hot water, one way and another. Mrs. Newell only kept her on because she was so bright and willing and such a scrupulously neat girl.”
“But what will she do now?” I asked.
Mr. Edmond blew out another long, thin column of smoke.
“She is going on the stage,” says he. “That's been her ambition for a long time. She seems to have most of the requirements of a show girl, and I shouldn't wonder if she were to go a good way.”
“But how is she to get a start?” I asked, sort of doubtful.
Mr. Edmond flicked his cigarette into a puddle of grease, then turned to go out. In the doorway he paused, and looked back.
“There'll be no trouble about that,” says he. “I've got a good many friends in the theatrical world, and when Albert told me this morning that she was leaving, I gave her some letters, which will no doubt get her what she wants. I've always liked Ethel, and would be very glad to be of service to her.”
“Well,” said I, “that was very kind of you, Mr. Edmond, and of course it changes things, so far as Ethel is concerned. But it doesn't make what Volger did any different.”
Mr. Edmond shrugged. “Just the same, I'd let it drop, Seagrave,” says he. “Mr. Newell is sending the yacht to Newport to-morrow, and we won't be bothered with Volger for a month. I was going down with the schooner, but rather than be shipmates with the brute for a couple of days, I shall take the train. If you were to quarrel with him, it would probably cost you your place, and it's not a bad job, as jobs go. Next month you won't be worked so hard, as they will want you to run the Seal, and the cars are not used much through August.”
And with a little nod, he turned, and went out.

### CHAPTER VIII.

Mr. Edmond's advice seemed pretty good to me, and I thought that the best thing to do was to act on it. I always did hate to play the part of a bucko, and in such a high-toned, dignified sort of family it came all the harder. So I kept away from Volger, and that wasn't very hard, as he did all he could to help me.
The yacht sailed a couple of days later, and I think everybody was glad of it, unless maybe it was Albert. He had expected to go with Mr. Edmond, but got fooled, being left behind to make himself generally useless around the house. I often wished I had the lubber on a sailing ship in my watch. He'd have learned lots of things that it would have done me good to have him know.
Mr. Edmond was right when he said that the work was going to get easier. It was too easy, if anything, for what with long hours off and the good living, I began to put on flesh. Some days not a car would leave the garage, for it was an awful hot, dry summer with a cloud of dust hanging over the road. It took the air about half an hour to clear after a car had passed.
So, instead of running on wheels, the family did their errands in the Seal, a big, stanch hunting launch with a twenty-horse-power motor. That was a job I loved, and, knowing those waters like I did, I could be a lot of use, not only as engineer, but pilot. Most of the Newells' friends lived along the shore, some on the islands, and I knew a lot of cut-offs that none of the Bluenoses or squareheads off the yacht would have dared to tackle, especially when there was a mite of sea on.
The Seal was a dandy boat, laid down in Yarmouth, where they understood how to stick planks together. But her lines had been got out by some fellow that knew his business, and, while she looked something like a peasant's wooden shoe in the water, she could travel like a scared barracouta, and would stay out with the last of them. I brought her through a hole I knew between the Hen and Chickens and the Walrus one day, when it was blowing fresh from the southeast; and never a drop of water on deck.
It was while I was running the Seal that I came to know the real Grizel, I think. The girl had the real sea hunger. Nervous and snappy she might sometimes be ashore, but the moment she was afloat she became as sweet and soft as a night breeze off Sumatra. She'd crowd up against the coaming and push her pretty nose with its raking tip into the salty draft coming in off the sea and fill her chest with the fresh air and howl with delight when she caught a spray.
I noticed, too, that she set a lot of store for all the folks that got their living from the sea. She could be tart as lime juice with shore people, shopkeepers, and the like, but let a man be no more than a clam digger, and she seemed to find some use for him right off.
The sea did something to Grizel. I don't know what it was, but it seemed to have a sort of intoxicating effect on her. The Newells were all good sailors, having lived so much afloat, I reckon, and I doubt if Grizel had ever felt a ground swell until she came to Portland. The lake chop is quite different. Yet I've had a whole party out catching tautogs when Grizel was the only one in the boat that wasn't feeling squeamish, we being at anchor and a swell mounting a mite as it went over the reef. Yes, she took to the sea like a brant, hatched out under a hen somewhere in the alkali desert, and from the time I started in to run the Seal and took them through some swash channels where the water looked real wicked, though it wasn't, I noticed a change in her treatment of me.
It was not only that Grizel was crazy about the sea and everything and everybody connected with it, but she had a strong romantic streak where blue water was concerned. You could tell it by the look of her eyes when she was listening to some deep-sea yarn, and she was always reading sea stories.
Just to be a sailor was a good way of working to windward in Grizel's opinion, and as I came to understand that her love of the sea was something pretty real and not only a passing fancy, I could see how disgusted she must have been at the thought of a man giving up a mate's billet to become a dusty, greasy chauffeur. Grizel, like any other woman, could be thrilled enough by a swift run over the road, and she had the right amount of admiration for a really brilliant driver, like Mr. Edmond. But any gurry-smeared fisherman heaving on a warp looked more of a man to her than the winner of the Vanderbilt Cup.
That was a nice month, running around in the Seal, and it wasn't spoiled any for me when I learned that Volger had dragged the schooner across a rock down in Narragansett Bay, and that she'd have to be laid up so long for repairs that Mr. Newell decided to put her out of commission, it being then early in September.
Mrs. Newell had persuaded Grizel to stay on with her, which she was glad enough to do, I guess. Mr. Edmond had come back from Newport and gone up to get his camp on Moosehead Lake ready for the family, as the Newells always spent a month up there before returning to town. As they had several motor boats, they decided to take me along, and I must say it was all mighty pleasant, and I would have been happy as a king, except for the state of my feelings about Grizel.
There was no use boxhauling about, I was nigh sick from my want of the girl and the seeming hopelessness of it all. When a man like me gets hit that way, it's like a swat from a gybing main boom, and the chances are about nine to one that he gets knocked plumb overboard.
I fell in love with Grizel the first second my eyes rested on her, aboard the train, and ever since that moment, in spite of her harsh treatment of me and all the rest, I'd been sliding steadily to leeward. The picture of her sweet, eager face.and all the promise of the rich nature that it held just kept me in a sort of steady, low fever.
The trouble was, it all seemed so useless. We'd met first on terms of equality; she a school-teacher and I a ship's officer, and both of us from good, sound, respectable, God-fearing families. Since then, we seemed to have been gradually growing apart, so far as our social conditions were concerned.
Grizel was like one of the family now, and quite the fashionable lady, while I was chauffeur, boatman, general utility man, and mechanic. Why, the very first thing I did up there at the “camp,” as they called that log-built palace, was a plumbing job in one of the six bathrooms. The Newells had learned by this time that I wasn't one of these finicky fools that has to have his job fenced in by wire netting for fear of straying into the next man's. It was all one to me; I'd a heap rather work than soldier around, and the way I was feeling, the work was all that kept me from something worse; drink, maybe, though I was never an intemperate man.
Perhaps the hardest thing of all to stand was the gradual way in which Mr. Edmond was getting around Grizel. He'd bucked up a lot since the summer, and sometimes I was inclined to think that Grizel was the cause of it. There came a sort of intentness in his eyes when they rested on her, and a tinge of color in his lean cheeks, and it seemed like his whole body got some ginger into it.
There was no doubt but that he was a very handsome, thoroughbred-looking man, and, though I never saw him do a lick of real hard work, yet when he wanted to he could be downright athletic. He was the slickest hand with a billiard cue I ever saw, and Albert told me that he had all kinds of fencing medals and trophies, and I know that I never saw a better shot. He could ride a horse, too, and his dogs minded him better than most people's.
Yet everything he did was in the same sluggish, tired sort of way, as if he was just about able to finish what he was at before he'd have to take to his bunk and have his rations fetched him. The only time that I ever saw him anyway brisk was when he was with Grizel, and then I'd sometimes see the look in his eyes that you see in a dog's when he's looking at a pet doe.
I was pretty apt to make a third at their excursions, as they went out on the lake a good deal in the canoes or motor boats or in a St. Lawrence skiff that was quite a handy boat. Mr. Edmond had taken a sort of dislike to their regular guides, and seemed to want me to go along. He never insisted on it, but would say: “Seagrave, it's not in your line of work, but if you would like to take Miss McNair and myself out in the skiff, I can't think of any pleasanter way of spending a couple of hours.”
Or maybe it might be a canoe, and I'd sail or paddle, silent as an Indian, while those two chattered about anything that came into their heads. Mrs. Newell never insisted on a chaperon when I was along, and the fact is that Mr. Edmond had come to take possession, as you might say, so gradually and carefully that nobody interfered the least mite with what would never have been allowed at first. Besides, things were easier at the camp, and not so formal, and I will say of Mr. Edmond that I never saw him so much as touch Grizel with his hand. Even when she got in and out of the boats he'd usually say: “Grab Seagraves arm—he's steadier than I am.” And sometimes I used to wonder if he never guessed what it did to me when Grizel's firm little hand fell on my arm or wrist.
Yes, this was a mighty sad time for me, and all the beautiful surroundings, the lake and the fall woods and the laughing “campers” that came and went; pretty girls and nice, trim young fellows and the gay goings on seemed to make me worse instead of better. It's apt to be like that, I guess, when a man is crazy about a girl.
Yet with it all I never once regretted having quit the sea. Almighty! when I thought of that stumpy little Clarendon plugging away into a hard nor'wester at about five knots an hour and coming down from the bridge into a stuffy, musty little saloon to tuck away the same old leather-bound meat pie with lobscouse and tea, and that sad, tiresome sound of water swashing around overhead and overside, and the screw racing and spilling your tea every few minutes, then going to your berth to wallop around for about three hours before going up on the bridge to walk up and down, up and down, thinking of the money you're never going to make and the fun you're never going to have and the girls you're never going to know and all the other “never” things—shucks! I'd rather be a farm hand; he sees more of life.
No, that chapter was finished. Just as Billy Maguire said, one day, when they got five-thousand-ton aëroplanes, I'd make application for a billet to pilot one across. But there was nothing for a man with arms and legs, and a thought or two in chasing back and forth on seagoing freight cars, no matter how romantic it might seem to Grizel.
Meantime I'd salted down more money in three months than I'd ever been able to save in a year, and I figured it out, from what Billy told me one day, that I couldn't do better than to put it right into their business. They were doing a lot of good honest work, but had mighty little cash to run on, and while motor-supply people are easy when it comes to terms, still they have to protect themselves. I'd already turned over a couple of hundred to Billy, and Sparkes, who was a good, clear-headed business man, had issued to me stock in their little company, which looked pretty good to me.
So really, while I was getting farther away from Grizel, socially as you might say, I was coming nearer to her financially. It wouldn't have taken me more than a hundred years or so to have made her the sort of home I wanted to, if I'd stuck to the sea, but by that time things would have changed a mite.
Grizel had changed already, but I wasn't sure that I cared much for the change in her. She seemed to have got kinder and never tried to snub me any more. Trouble was, she treated me too much as Miss Newell did, to suit my taste. And yet there was always that little candle burning in the back of her eyes when she spoke to me—and sometimes when she looked at me. It burned brighter when we were in a boat, and I'd never seen it so bright as once in the Seal when we picked up a lobster buoy on the screw, and wound up the line so as to stop us, we drifting onto a mighty wicked ledge in what was left of a sou'westerly gale.
I knew that there was no use anchoring, as there was no good holding ground and the seas mounting as the tide dropped. So I went overboard with a knife and in under, and cleared the wheel and got her going, none too soon. After what I saw in Grizel's face that day, my disease got a lot worse.
Well, there didn't seem to be anything to do about it. I never had much experience of women, but I had common sense enough to know better than to go pestering Grizel with my symptoms when she was like one of the family, and I was the slob. So I just sort of stuck my head down, and plowed away like the old Clarendon in a westerly gale. Nobody could discover that she was getting to windward any, and sometimes the taffrail log would be hanging so plumb I'd haul it in for fear of getting it cut by the screw, yet she generally got to port inside of two weeks from the Butte o' Lewis.
After all, though, good and bad times are just matters of comparison. When we got back to Boston, I used to think about Moosehead Lake like it had been some sort of paradise. Once in town the distance between Grizel and me seemed almost out of range of wireless. Up in the country I'd been sort of a hired man, it's true, but my work had taken skill and judgment and a kind of natural ability. But here in town there was no call for anything like that.
I was perched on the bridge of a lumbering electric contraption, upholstered like a hearse on the inside, and able to do at least ten knots an hour, wind and tide permitting. Alongside me was a cockney scrub rigged out just as I was, his mission in life being to hop down with an umbrella when it rained, which it generally did, and to stand like a dummy with a rug over his arm, while Mrs. Newell and Grizel or Miss Newell and Grizel went inside the house. The worst of it was that there was nothing in the work itself. It takes more ability to handle a Fiji Island dugout in a flat calm than to run an electric, especially in Boston, where a cabby waits to be introduced before presuming to cross your bows.
This was the very worst time of my life, even while the easiest. I've been shipwrecked three times, made a whaling voyage, and spent a month in a Chilean jail, but nothing was ever so sort of bleak and cheerless as sitting on top of that electric in a Boston drizzle while the womenfolks made calls. It wasn't much of a job for a man used to bringing a ship up to Cape Charles and through the Straits of Belle Isle in a wicked nor'easter, then down through the gulf in a fog you could cut out in chunks and stack on deck, rounding East Cape by the echo against the lighthouse.
The only thing that tided me through the early winter was that while Grizel might be hull down for me, so far as speaking was concerned, she was where I could see her often and feel her near. Sometimes, too, I'd catch her eyes resting on me in a funny sort of way, part sad, part questioning, as if she was trying to study out what I did it for. It must have puzzled her a mite, because it was plain that I didn't care for those things that most chauffeurs are always hollering for. My stock was selling high in the Newell family by this time, and Mrs. Newell had even asked me to go to her church, which I was glad to do, the persuasion being the same as mine. It was all one to me what I did when off duty.
The best days I had were those when I made runs over the road with Mr. Edmond. Sometimes I almost thought that he took the sixty out as much for my sake as his own, he knowing how I hated the electric. It was a comfort to get in a real car, and the first few times we went alone, making fast runs to neighboring places, like Gloucester and Salem and Lynn or some country club. Mr. Edmond let me drive on these trips, and would sit there alongside and criticize my caution and try to devil me into killing us both. He had a mighty cross-grained streak in him, had Mr. Edmond, and yet I don't know when I ever struck a man so companionable. He was kind, too, and the only time we'd ever disagreed up to this was when I had flat refused to take his twenty-five dollars a month for doing no more than to look over the sixty about once a week.
Then, one fall day, or early winter it was, but warm, Mr. Edmond persuaded Mrs. Newell to let him take Grizel out for a fast run. Two or three days later, he took her out again, and this time they stopped at a road house for tea. I wondered at Grizel doing such a thing, or at his letting her, for he was always mighty particular about appearances. This happened several times, and I must say it made me mighty miserable.

### CHAPTER IX.

I noticed that Mr. Edmond's manner toward Grizel was beginning to change. Up at Moosehead he had always been slow and languid and easy-going, depending on his mind, which was really bright, to interest and amuse her, and never trying to call on the physical part of him, which didn't seem surprising when you came to look him over as a male animal.
But from now on, either because he was really gilled, or because he'd come to understand Grizel better, his whole line of attack began to change, gradually, of course, because Mr. Edmond never did anything with a jolt. He understood women, too, and I wondered in a sick sort of way how long a young, inexperienced girl with the love of life hot in her veins and her mind as fresh to grow new-planted ideas as a virgin soil is to grow alfalfa, how long she could possibly hold out against a rich, intelligent, thoroughbred man like Mr. Edmond.
The weak part of him, as I saw it, had always been his body, but now that Grizel had got him thoroughly awake, it seemed as if he'd got new springs in him. There was a stiffness to his back and a firmness to his jaw and a cut to his voice, and I noticed one day when he got impatient about something that I was doing to the car, that the strength in his fingers was unnatural. He twisted off a nut that I had tried to start, then taken a wrench to.
Every day he seemed to be getting a little closer to Grizel. And aside from his own skill, he was so rotten rich and did everything in such a princely way. I'd heard tell that the two brothers had inherited something over two hundred thousand a year apiece.
Yet, in spite of all, I was getting deeper and deeper in love with Grizel, and the only wonder is I didn't take sick and die of it. Then one day things seemed to brighten up.
Mr. Newell sent for me, and asked if I didn't think it would be feasible to dismount the body of the light thirty so as to carry the car on the yacht. His idea was to lash down both parts on different sides of the deck, both parceled snugly in tarpaulins. He was planning a cruise to Bermuda, Cuba, Porto Rico, and maybe a look into Ormond, and he thought of taking the car and me to run it. The schooner was being put in commission, and would go to Old Point Comfort to take the family aboard for the run across to the Bermudas, as it was then February, and as the Gulf Stream puts in to about thirty miles off Hatteras, the cold weather could be avoided.
You can just bet that I didn't find any drawbacks to this scheme. If he'd wanted to take the car to pieces and stow her in the forepeak, I'd have sworn there was nothing easier. And I'd have managed it, too.
This was good news, for Boston was wet and nasty, and whenever there came a bright day, Mr. Edmond would come and take Grizel for a walk. The servants' gossip was that the two were going to be married, and that the Newells were quite satisfied about it, liking Grizel and hoping she'd make a man of Mr. Edmond.
It may seem funny that with this sort of gossip going about, and good ground for it, too, so far as Mr. Edmond could furnish it, that I should have kept right on feeling the same about Grizel. Here was I, the chauffeur, lying awake nights to think about the same girl that this millionaire was in love with. It sounds pretty foolish on the face of it, especially as it was my first case, and I had about as much of an idea how to please a woman as a cat knows about the sextant. Here was Mr. Edmond that had only to lean over his shoulder and give an order for most things that a woman is apt to want, and here was I, a chauffeur, with nothing to offer but six feet of lean meat, and a sort of insanity about this one girl.
Then why did I keep at it? Just on account of that one thing that I've spoken of before—the little candle that was always burning in the back of Grizel's eyes, when she looked my way. I can't tell what it was that gave me the idea; certainly it was nothing that she ever did or said. But I could never get over the thought that she was meant for me from the very start.
Maybe it was this feeling that led me to act as I finally did just before we got away for Bermuda. This was early in February, and there had come a streak of clear, crisp weather after a soft, rainy winter. The roads were pretty good, as the frost hadn't started to come out of the ground, and there were only the frozen ruts to bother you, for that year we had practically no snow.
Mr. Edmond was always keen for a run when the chance offered, and he called me up at the garage one bright morning to tell me that he was going to take his niece and Miss McNair out for luncheon at the Golf Club at Manchester, and for me to bring the sixty around to Beacon Street as soon as possible. It didn't take me long to get everything ready, and then, just as I was about to leave the garage, there came another message to say that the party was off, but for me to be ready to go out with the racing car at about three o'clock.
At two, Mr. Edmond came into the garage.
“Crank up, Seagrave,” said he. “Miss Newell had to do some shopping for Bermuda, but I'm going to meet Miss McNair downtown and take her for a farewell spin over the road. Only we've got to hurry, as there's only about an hour and a half of daylight left.”
Everything was ready, so we went right out, and met Grizel at one of the big shops. Mr. Edmond drove, and I got in behind, and in twenty minutes we were well clear of the city on the road to Marblehead.
Mr. Edmond was driving like a lunatic that day and over those frozen ruts; I was just waiting to hear a tire go, and pretty soon, sure enough, one did. I was pretty useful at changing them by this time, and a workman that came along on a bicycle lent a hand, and we were ready to go on again before many minutes. But the devil seemed to be in it, for scarcely had we done three miles, when bang! we were flat again.
It had got mighty cold, for the wind had hauled into the north and the sun was down, and for all of their furs and hoods and masks, I guess all hands were feeling the nip of the frost all right. But, after all, there are lots worse things than a little cold.
“We'll go on about a mile,” said Mr. Edmond; “there's a place at the crossroads called the 'Ark,' where we can keep from freezing to death, and maybe get a nip of tea or something cheerfuler.”
Now, I knew all about this Ark, from the loose talk in the garage, according to which it was no place for a man to take a young lady. So when Mr. Edmond told me to start the motor, I said:
“It won't take long to shift a shoe, Mr. Edmond, and, if you're cold, I can soon manage to light a little fire here on the side of the road.”
“Thanks, Seagrave,” says he, and his voice was dry as punk; “I think we'll go on to the Ark, and you can shift your shoe in the garage.”
“It'll knock the rim all to pieces, sir, on this frozen road,” said I.
“Never mind the rims,” snapped Mr. Edmond; “there's plenty of time to ship a new wheel between now and April.”
“There's another thing, sir,” said I; “this Ark is a pretty rough sort of a tavern.”
“So they tell me,” said Mr. Edmond, in that same dry voice, “and yet I've eaten the best chicken lobsters and little-neck clams I ever tested there. The tea is good, too,” says he, in that sawdust voice that I'd come to hate. “Don't worry, Seagrave. Noah is an old friend of mine, and he'll give us a quiet corner where nobody can bother us.”
Grizel seemed to think that all of this was mighty funny. She was cold, too, I guess, for her laugh had a shiver in it, and I knew that she was just dying for a dish of hot tea, and wanted to warm up a bit. But this Ark place was one of the worst along the road, and I just took it on myself to interfere. Said I to Mr. Edmond:
“The Ark is no place for you to take a lady, sir. We hear more gossip in the garage than the owners do——” And I was going on to explain it, when Mr. Edmond cut in, and his voice was like a whip.
“That will do, Seagrave,” says he. “Will you start the motor?”
“No, sir,” I answered.
“Well, then,” says he, “I suppose I'll have to start it myself.” And he pulled off his fur coat, and came walking forward.
“Get out of my way,” says he; “I'm going to start the motor.”
“No, sir,' I answered. “With all due respect, you're not going to do anything of the sort.”
“This is what I get for mixing friendly and business relations, I suppose,” said Mr. Edmond. “My brother is quite right in saying that I am far too democratic.”
“You are too much of a gentleman, Mr. Edmond,” said I, “and too kind-hearted a man to do anything which might cost a young girl her reputation. No amount of money can pay for that, Mr. Edmond.”
He sort of hesitated for a second, and I had hopes that he was going to be man enough to own up that I was right. But he was too used to having his own way, and no doubt had come to believe, like most very rich folks, that he couldn't be in the wrong. Besides, there was a good deal that was hard as nails under that lackadaisical manner of his, and he couldn't stand being contraried by a hired hand, especially before a lady. The deep lines drew down either side of his mouth, and he stepped forward to get a-hold of the crank.
I saw that he meant business, and that if I wanted to prevent his starting the car I'd have to use force. Mr. Edmond meant fight, and what he couldn't do with his hands he'd try to do with a spanner, if need be. Naturally, nothing was farther from my wishes than this sort of thing, so I turned to Grizel.
“Miss McNair,” said I, “why don't you tell Mr. Edmond that you had rather not stop at this road house?”
She looked straight at me, her face white and her eyes big and dark, like they always got when she was put out.
“I think, Seagrave,” says she, in a very low voice, “that Mr. Edmond is a better judge of what I ought to do than either you or myself. And I think that you are wrong to try to interfere. It is hardly respectful. Mr. Edmond would be the very last person to let me go where I ought not be seen, unchaperoned.”
I touched my cap, then turned to Mr. Edmond.
“Shall I start the motor, sir?” I asked.
“No, Seagrave,” he answered, in a sort of oily voice. “It will never be necessary for you to do anything more for me. I will start the motor myself, and we will run on the rim as far as Lynn, and there we will leave the car in a garage and return on the train.”
He stepped to the crank, and the motor started with a roar, and she wasn't any too easy to start, either. Mr. Edmond got in, and took the wheel, and I tucked up Grizel.
“Get in, Seagrave,” said Mr. Edmond pleasantly, and I crawled in behind, feeling mighty uncomfortable. When we got to Lynn, I said:
“It won't take me but a few minutes to shift a tire here at the hotel, Mr. Edmond, and if you and Miss McNair——”
“Have you got any money about you?” he interrupted.
“Yes, sir,” I answered.
“Then take the train and go back to your job,” says he. “I'm not your employer, and I don't want anything more to do with you. I am leaving the car in the garage here, and Miss McNair and I are returning on the train. That's all, Seagrave.”
I touched my cap, and turned away. As I did so, my eyes met Grizel's, and somehow it seemed to me as if the candles were burning with a brighter, warmer flame than I'd ever seen before.
It's mighty disagreeable to lose a friend, and when I turned in that night I lay awake a long time thinking about Mr. Edmond and all the kindness he'd shown me, from the very start. Another man, perhaps not nearly as high-toned as Mr. Edmond, might very likely have thought the whole thing over, and decided that I was right and have made it up again. But something told me that Mr, Edmond would never do this. From the time I'd crossed him, he was bound to dislike me, ever afterward. These awful rich people are sort of like the kings that you read about in histories; they can stand almost anything but being crossed. But the difference is that a lot of those kings really stood ready to sacrifice themselves for their subjects, if necessary, while very rich people can't understand any sort of real sacrifice, as you might say. They haven't the herd to take care of, like they had in the old days, and that makes them mean and selfish.
That's the way I was feeling for some days after my disagreement with Mr. Edmond, so you can guess how glad I was when the time came to get ready for the cruise.
I had dismounted the body of the car in the garage and taken off the tires, parceling the wheels and everything that the wash across the deck might touch, after giving it a coat of composition. The body was laced up snugly in oiled duck, and I calculated that nothing short of dropping the whole business overboard could possibly do any damage. So naturally I was a mite put out when Mr. Newell sent for me and said:
“Captain Volger is trying his best to discourage the idea of taking the car on deck, Seagrave. Among other objections, he says that it is almost sure to be damaged either by the salt water or in getting foul of some of the gear, and he claims that there is no way of making it secure. He also says that there is really no room for it. I scarcely know what to do.”
“With all due respect to Captain Volger, sir,” I answered; “that's all nonsense. The yacht's deck is roomy as a coaster's, and there's plenty of room for the chassis abaft the launch. The body can go abaft the gig. It may be necessary to drop a couple of ringbolts through the deck on either side, but these can be unshipped when they are not needed and the holes pegged. As for the salt water, I'll guarantee that not a drop touches any part of the car, and if the little space taken up interferes with the handling of gear, Volger must have a crew of farmers aboard. No, sir; it's simply that he doesn't want the bother of loading and discharging.”
Mr. Newell gave me a sort of sharp look; then says he:
“I think that you are right. At any rate, we'll try it. I'll make you responsible for the whole undertaking, Seagrave, and give you a line to the captain to say that he is to leave the loading of the car entirely to you. Having been a sailor yourself, no doubt you know more about it than he does—especially as you are a merchantman.”
So down I went to the schooner with the car in a truck, and Volger welcomed me with as black a face as you'd care to see. I gave him Mr. Newell's order, which he read, then spat over the side.
“I thought you'd manage to squeeze into this chowder party somehow,” says he. “Go ahead, then, and be damned to you. Rip the decks offen her; I don't care.”
“That's easy to believe,” I answered, “seeing as you didn't mind ripping the bottom off her down in Narragansett Bay.”
Some of the crew snickered, and Volger growled out a curse, and walked away forward. I'd brought a ship's carpenter along, and we turned to, and soon had everything shipshape, with chocks for the wheels and a cradle for the body. When I'd got the tarpaulins laced snug and the whole business lashed down, it was as neat a job as you'd wish to see.
“Now,” said I to Volger, “if anything gets smashed, it'll be your own cursed clubfistedness. No doubt you'll try your best, but that's what I'm here to prevent, savvy?”
The blood came into his face. “Ho,” says he, “you are, hey? Well, then, let me tell you something, Mr. Chauffeur; I'm master here, and what I say goes, d'ye see? You made enough trouble fer me ashore with the owner and Mr. Edmond, but Albert tells me that Mr. Edmond is on to you now, you lantern-jawed lawyer, you. Give your kind rope enough, and it don't take 'em long to hang themselves in it.”
I got up quick from where I was pulling out a bight of the tarpaulin, where the lashing had pinched it, and walked up to him. Volger sort of changed color, but he stood fast. That wall-eyed mate of his, Landois, was standing close by, and there was a new bo'sun he'd shipped not far away. Otherwise the chances are he'd have fallen back a mite.
“Listen here, cappy,” said I, sweet as a thrush after a shower; “when it's time to talk about dodo's eggs—and rotten ones at that—don't forget that you're not the only liar in the world. There's always your hand-out friend, Albert. But when it comes to facts, try and call to mind a little swimming party you put on the bum. The recording angel has logged that, matey-o, and I'm his earthly correspondent. There's a bird that sailors call a 'stinker,' cappy, but I guess you never saw one, as they live out where the water's deep. That bird would be ashamed of himself if he could see you, you blighter. And now, if there's anything that might seem harsh in what I've said and you feel like you ought to protest, just step out here, man to man, and find out what a real licking feels like. The last I gave you was only a sample for the trade.”
For a moment I thought he was going to take me up—probably with the help of a few of his loose scrubs, as he'd manage to drive the good men all ashore, one by one, and had as rotten looking a bunch of beach combers aboard as I ever saw. But he thought better of it, maybe because he saw that it didn't matter much to me how many he called in to help. So he licked his lips, and growled:
“Aw, that's right, flap your jaw, now you know it's worth a man's job to lay hand to you. We gotta take a lot from psalm-singin' young churchgoers in a private job. Sit in Mrs. Newell's pew, don't ye? But just you wait, son; settlin' day may not be so far off yet——”
And with that he turned on his heel, and stumped off forward like he thought he had the best of it. But the look on the faces of the scrubs he'd collected to help him wreck the schooner seemed to show a different opinion. They were a scurvy parcel of whelps, so far as appearances went, but less tough than mean looking. Volger was a first-class bully, and it seemed likely enough that he'd been to some pains to pick out a crew he could browbeat, when nobody was around, of course. But sailors? I caught sight of one of them coiling down a rope against the clock, and, so help me, if another didn't burn his thumbs when the running end of the whip they were loading stores with got away from him.
They were all in about the same class, I reckoned. Volger went ashore by and by, and one of the hands came over and started to pass another lashing around the chassis of the car, the ones I'd already thrown around not being to his eye sufficient.
“Hold on, son,” said I. “You may know every knot they can teach you in the parcel department of the warehouse, but at sea we do them different. Besides, she's all fast now.”
We sailed a couple of days later, and I must say the run to Old Point wasn't exactly what the gasoline gang call a “joy ride,” so far as I was concerned. There's nothing gets on the nerves of a seafaring man like seeing a vessel badly handled, and for general rottenness, Volger certainly took the prize.
He had all sort of back-ended ways of doing things, and was forever nagging and ragging the hands, usually winding up by telling the steward to fetch a bottle of whisky and serve out drinks to the whole watch on deck. In this way he thought to keep his popularity and establish a reputation as a martinet and hard driver, but a good fellow underneath.
As I didn't bother to turn away my head to hide my grins, and as Volger himself kept his seams tight when the cabin folks weren't aboard, we were just on the verge of a Donnybrook all the way down. I didn't say anything; I just watched and grinned and sometimes laughed outright, but I guess my teeth might have shown a mite under the grin, and Volger never hove things up two blocks. He knew well enough, and so did I, for that matter, that if it had ever come to a knock-down and drag out, we'd both of us certainly lost our jobs.
Mr. Newell was mild of manner and sort of dry and precise, but he wasn't easy-going, by a long shot, when it came to the service which he got. He was always polite to the people that worked for him and paid them well, but he insisted on things running smooth and without friction. Old Hobbs, the butler at Otter Rocks when I first went to work there, was fired for no more than a few loud words.
No, Volger didn't want to lose his job any more than he wanted his face slewed around to port, so for a while he just grinned and bore it. To make matters worse for him, it got around that I was a deep-water man and had been second mate of a whaler, and this made Volger's roustabouts uneasy when I watched them at their flumduddery.
Then, the second day out, I put it over Volger in a way there was no getting around. He'd been running with the wind on the end of his main boom, and by and by he thought he'd like it on the other side for a change, so he gave the order to gybe ship. Volger himself slacked the boom tackle, and the hands were hauling on the main sheet when Volger happened to look at me and saw the expression of my face.
“Well, Mr. Chauffeur,” says he, “maybe if this was your vessel, you wouldn't wish to gybe her with the wind near as fresh as what you are, hey?”
The hands stopped hauling to snicker. The mainsail was almost aback then.
“Oh, I don't know,” I answered; “I could name some others that ain't any too salt. Only, if this was my vessel, Captain Volger, I reckon I'd slack my weather backstay runner before I helped the wind to shift the boom across the deck. Otherwise she's apt to bust—the boom, I mean, and you might lose a mite of top-hamper, too.”
Jiminy, but you should have seen Volger jump for that runner! It was a fact; nobody had thought to slack it, and if Volger hadn't been mighty spry something would have carried away, for the wind was tolerable fresh.
But he got square the very next day when he set his fisherman's staysail, or the “ringtail,” as we call it downeast. The bight of the sheet rope was flying free, and managed to get under the projecting end of the body of the car just as the hands started to haul it home saw what had happened, and yelled for them to slack away. Volger saw it, too.
“Haul away!” he bellows. “Sheet her home, lads!”
About three jumps took me into that crowd of tailors, and I shifted them right and left in a way that left a few bruises, I reckon. But it was too late. The mischief was done. I heard a crack, and when I cleared away the tarpaulin and cover to look, here was a big, gaping seam in the enamel; nothing to hurt, so far as use went, but mighty unsightly to the eye.
Was I mad? For a few seconds I saw red, knowing as I did that Volger had done it on purpose. There was no mistaking the light in his eye when he heard me holler to the hands to slack away, and he looked and saw what had happened.
I worked some putty into the seam, and touched it up to match the enamel. It might have escaped notice, being a straight line, but I could just hear Volger telling Mr. Newell how sorry he was that when the bight of the slack staysail sheet bellied to leeward as they were setting the sail, it whipped under the car's body, and when the hands hauled down it split it—and how it was just as he had feared, but some people knew it all——
And sure enough he did, and there was nothing for me to say, for what could I prove? His crew would stand by Volger, after the way I'd hove them out of the way.
Off Atlantic City we got a hard easterly breeze with a lumpy sea, and along in the night I woke up and heard the pumps going. Thought I: “That's mighty funny; a stanch schooner like this oughtn't to make any water.” The next morning I asked the steward about it. He was a mean little whelp of a cockney, but civil enough.
“Skipper says it's narthing but a little bilge water,” he answered. “Once 'er plainks are wet, she'll tighten orp.”
But I thought of that sag in the lines of her sheer strake, and sort of wondered. It had struck me on coming aboard that it was more distinct than it had been during the summer. However, that was none of my business. I was full of my own trouble with that seam in the body of the car.

### CHAPTER X.

When we fetched up at Old Point, we found our party waiting for us and in a hurry to be off while the fine weather lasted, but two of Volger's sweeps had proved so slovenly that he was afraid of getting Mr. Newell down his back for having shipped them. So off he goes to Norfolk on the boat, hunting another brace, and we lost another twenty-four hours.
Mr. Edmond had shown up with the rest, although he was not to have gone, and my heart sort of sank at the idea of Grizel's being constantly with him for so long and in such narrow quarters. We were pretty cramped aboard, and I had to double up with the steward, which neither of us cared for any great amount.
Mr. Newell was politely pained to learn of the accident to the car, and it looked for a while as if I might have to make a return voyage with her on the steamer. The only thing that saved me was Volger's rather overdoing his “I told you so” talk, and Mr. Newell being a perverse sort of man, like many rich folks, finally threw it into him that, after all, if the proper care had been exercised, the accident wouldn't have happened, and that the car was to stop aboard, and would Captain Volger kindly detail somebody to see that the bight of the sheet rope was kept clear the next time the sail was set. Volger collapsed, and that was the end of it.
The day we arrived it struck me that the weather was much too hot for the middle of February, and that the glass was too high for any good to come, but when it got still hotter for the next two days and the glass still higher and unsteady, I made up my mind that there was something behind it all. When finally Volger came aboard with a brace of Norwegian lads he'd bought or stolen off a windmill bark and began to shout orders which might lead in time to our getting under way, thought to myself: “You'll have a chance to show how little you know about your business before you see Bermuda, my red-faced friend.”
Mr. Newell must have felt a mite the same way, I think, he being a yachtsman of considerable experience, who had seen more deep water than Volger ever knew there was. Just before Volger arrived on board, I came up on deck, and saw Mr. Newell, Mrs. Newell, Mr. Edmond, and Grizel sitting aft watching a fleet of oystermen running into Hampton. Mr. Newell caught sight of me, and called my name.
“You have been a seafaring man, Seagrave,” says he. “What do you think of the weather outlook?”
“Uncertain, sir,” I answered. “The glass is too high, and it's too hot.”
“Do you mean that you think there is danger of a storm, Seagrave?” asked Mrs. Newell, in a sort of surprised tone.
“Yes, ma'am,” I answered.
“H'm! said Mr. Newell, and looked thoughtful. “Then I am to understand that if you were to be—ah—consulted, Seagrave, you would not advise going to sea?”
“Since we've already lost three days of good weather,” I answered, “I think I'd wait until to-morrow morning to see what the signal station yonder had to report. But of course it might not be anything at all.”
“H'm!” said Mr. Newell again. “Thank you, Seagrave.”
Mr. Newell must have told Volger what I'd said when he came off aboard with his two towheads, for I heard Volger saying to Landois, the mate, as he meant I should:
“Say, we got not only a chauffeur and a Sunday-school teacher and a whalin' skipper and a sea lawyer aboard, but a weather prophet, too. Ain't it wonderful the talent you can stuff into one hide, what?”
“What's he prophesyin' now?” asked Landois, with a sort of uneasy look at me. The mate never tried to get fresh. He seemed to have an idea that some day something might happen to him if he did.
“Says we're in for a gale,” Volger answered, sneering like. “A gale—looks like it, don't it?” And he took a squint around.
So out we went with a fair tide and a nice little northwesterly breeze that lasted until midnight, when it dropped calm for an hour, then came fresh from due north. It was still warm, though, so I knew the slant must be local. Come daylight, back she went to westerly again, and the sea like a lake.
We were in a spur of the Gulf Stream now, but that wasn't enough to account for the heat at that time of year and in that latitude. The glass was still higher than the day before, and when toward the end of the afternoon watch we began to notice a long ground swell heaving in from the south, I was pretty sure we were going to catch something. About the same time the glass started down, slowly but steadily.
During the dogwatches, I saw Mr. Newell talking mighty earnestly to Volger, who seemed to be poohpoohing what he said, but toward nightfall, when the swell began to mount and shorten up and the air to get dead and heavy, Volger began to act uneasy. The sun had gone down looking like an egg whipped up with soot and spider webs, and left a bilious sky that got dark almost at once. The breeze was fitful and baffling, but pretty soon we got a fresh puff from northwest, which I knew was only a gasp, like, and wouldn't last.
All that night we flopped around, the breeze backing and hauling and the spars across the deck every hour or so. Daylight showed a dirty-looking prospect, if I ever saw one. There was no sunrise; only the sort of effect you get when you stir yellow paint with dark green. The sea was greasy, and the swell was big now, and uneven.
As I was leaning against the forerigging taking a look around, Volger came up behind me.
“Well,” he growls, “you guessed right, didn't you?”
“There was no guess about it, you swivel-eyed mutt,” I answered. “Anybody that had ever been to sea would have known, but I suppose the weather acts different on the canal.”
“Still feelin' sassy, ain't ye?” he answered, but in a sort of dispirited way. “Any more cheerful prophecies?”
I swung around and faced him. “Yes,” I answered, “want to hear 'em?”
“Pile it on,” he answered, with a nasty laugh.
“Well, then,” I answered, “I'll tell you something you already must know and something that maybe you suspect. What you know is that this schooner's got a soft spot, either in some of her amidships frames or lower down along the garboard strake. The sag of her sheer strake was bad enough last summer, but the knock you gave her in Narragansett Bay hasn't helped things any. Now what you may not know, you being a lubber like you are, is that we're in for all hell with the hatches off. Seen the glass? There's a West Injies hoorayboys twisting our way, and if you don't watch sharp, this joy packet won't live through it. Savvy-voo, mong share monseer?”
Volger turned green around the gills. Then the blood came back with a rush, and he dropped his voice, and handed me a line of talk that would have got him his head stove in at any other time and place.
The first of the real wind reached us about eight bells. It was fresh and damp and gaining weight; and bearing east, like it did, I put the storm center to the south of us, while the average fall of the glass made me think it must be about a hundred miles away. Volger had the schooner close-hauled on the starboard tack, which was all right if we were in the right semicircle, as I believed we were. Sure enough, the next shift of wind was southerly, when what does Volger do but go about and haul by the wind on the port tack.
Mr. Newell and Mr. Edmond were on deck at the time, and I saw them look at each other questioningly. Then they both looked at me, but I made no sign.
“Captain Volger!” called Mr. Newell.
Volger went over to where they were standing, and there seemed to be some sort of argument going on. I guessed that Mr. Newell and his brother knew something about the Law of Storms, and were asking Volger why he didn't try to get off the track as fast as the Almighty would let him. But Volger was one of those pig-headed brutes that wouldn't own up to being wrong, and he was trying to bluff the others out. He must have managed it, too, for they presently nodded and walked away aft, and a little later Miss Newell and Grizel came up, and the four of them stowed themselves away in the lee of a boat and watched the big seas rolling away to leeward.
I leaned against the rail feeling mighty uncomfortable. What I'd told Volger wasn't all exaggerated. I distrusted the soundness of the yacht, after the way she'd sopped up the Atlantic on the run from Boston to Old Point, and I knew that Volger wasn't doing the right thing. To make matters worse, about noon the carpenter came up and said something, and directly Volger gave the order to man the pumps. Thought I: “It's pretty early in the game to start that sort of business.”
Mr. Newell thought so, too, and there was another confab, Volger acting mighty sullen and emphatic. He won his point, and we held on as we were going. It was blowing hard now, and the old schooner was under forestaysail, foresail, and double-reefed mainsail.
But the climax came about three of the afternoon, when suddenly Volger gave the order to ease the sheets, then shoved up his helm and started in to run, the wind on his port quarter. What was in his head, I don't know, unless it was to ease the strain so as to stop her leaking, but the maneuver was calculated to lay us right across the storm track. All of the cabin party were on deck at the time, and Mr. Newell hopped up with his face like a death mask. He called to Volger, and for a minute they had it hot and heavy. Then suddenly Mr. Newell called: “Seagrave, come here——”
I hurried back to the quarter-deck, and as I passed to leeward of Volger, I caught the strong smell of spirits.
“Seagrave,” says Mr. Newell, and his voice had a nervous quaver to it, “where would you place the center of this storm that seems to be approaching?”
I told him.
Volger gave me an ugly stare, and seemed about to say something, but Mr. Newell interrupted him with a sort of snarling “Silence, sir!” and he held his gawp.
“What semicircle should you say we were in, Seagrave?” asked Mr. Newell.
“We're still in the right, sir,” I answered, “but we'll soon be plumb on the storm track if we hold this course.”
“Then, what would you do?” says Mr. Newell.
I started to tell him when Volger broke in. His face was a sickly purple now, and his pale eyes looked downright dangerous.
“Look-a-here,” says he to Mr. Newell; “you're the owner, all right, and, once we get in port, I'll tender my resignation. But we're off the three-mile limit now, and I want it understood that I'm the captain of this schooner and the responsible party. What I say goes, d'ye see?”
“Thats enough,” said Mr. Newell, and his voice sounded sort of thin and dry beside Volger's gruff bass, “I'm the owner, and, what is more, my wife and children are exposed to danger. I have long been of the opinion that you were incompetent, Captain Volger, and now I am convinced of it. You have exposed us to sufficient danger already in not informing me of the true condition of this vessel. You are relieved from command.”
Volger stepped forward, and shoved out his jaw. “Ho!” says he, “I am, hey? And who's going to relieve me?”
Mr. Newell turned to me.
“Seagrave,” says he, “my orders to you are to take command of the yacht, and do what you can to extricate us from this danger. I myself am the nominal captain of this schooner; Captain Volger is merely the sailing master and subject to my orders.”
What happened after that struck down as quick as a squall in the Straits of Magellan. Volger turned, and gave me a look, the hate streaming out of his eyes like poison from the tooth of a snake.
“Try it on, you——” says he, then turned on his heel. “Mr. Landois!” he called. “Bo'sun, there!”
I looked at Mr. Newell. “Those are your final orders, sir?” I asked. “You want me to take charge?”
“Can you?” asked Mr. Edmond. His face was white as chalk, but his jaw was set, and he looked wicked somehow.
“Sure I can,” I answered, and looked at Mr. Newell. He gave me a nod.
Volger, backed by Landois and the bo'sun, were coming toward me, and they looked like they meant business. “Get below, you——” growled Volger.
The next minute I was into them. Volger's fist cut me over the eye—an ugly gash from his initial seal ring, but I never felt it. I drove one into his solar plexus, and he went down like a sack of street sweepings. Landois and the bo'sun came together, but I ducked under the bo'sun's fist, and put one on the side of Landois' jaw that would have killed him in his tracks if he hadn't been so close.
The bo'sun had jumped to the fife rail, and jerked out a pin, and, though I was on him like a cat, he had time to strike, and I heard my left forearm crack like a dry stick. But the right was useful, and so was my head. I butted him up against the rail, then threw my weight on him, bent him back, and hammered his face into a pulp.
He might have gone overboard if Mr. Edmond hadn't jumped forward, caught him by the collar, and flung him onto the deck.
The crew had stood fast, scared and not knowing which way to jump. Halfway through the galley hatch hung the steward, his cockney face like plaster. Not a quiver came from Volger or Landois, but the bo'sun started to struggle up. I kicked him a good one, and he lay still.
“Steward!” I bawled. “Three pairs of handcuffs.”
He got them out of Volger's cabin, and Mr. Edmond snapped them on. I walked aft where one of the Norwegian lads was wrestling with the wheel. Nobody knew my arm was broken.
“Main sheet!” I hollered. “On the jump now, if you don't want me there amongst ye!”
They came running.
“Ready about——”t I sang, and a moment later: “Hard-a-lee——”
Around she came, swashing and plunging, and a few minutes later here we were beating it for better weather, close-hauled on the starboard tack.
Well, there was plenty to keep me busy for the next few hours, broken arm and all. Mr. Edmond fished the bone mighty shipshape, and it didn't bother me any. Just as I'd feared, though, the old box was none too sound, so instead of trying to run out, I hove her to under a storm gaff trysail, and kept the hands at the pumps. As the water seemed to be all coming from one spot along the garboard strake, I got a spare riding sail under her, and hove it taut, and this stopped the leak first rate.
We were three days hove to, for I wanted the sea to get down a mite before making sail. It was comfortable enough aboard, for the yacht was a big, beamy tub with a high freeboard, and made splendid weather of it, taking no water on deck to speak of. Most of the time the cabin party were able to come up, well swathed in oilers, and it was on the third day that I had the first chance to say a few words to Grizel that I'd had for a good many months.
The weather was lightening then. Grizel had come up to watch the sea, and was wedged in between two little skylights. I went over, and sat on one of them, and asked how she liked the real thing.
“I adore it,' she answered, “fights and all.”
I looked at her curiously. Certainly none of the others had seemed to care much for the old-fashioned way of doing things. But Grizel's face was all aglow through the salt rime, and her eyes were like violets in the rain. Some loose wisps of her hair, curly from the damp, were eddying around her forehead like smoke. It seemed to me as if I'd never before appreciated her downright loveliness, and it sort of took away my breath.
For the first time in all these months, I saw in her face what I'd seen that first day, and what I used to see in that dream face from the bridge. There was something else, too. The little candles had never burned so bright, and there was none of that standoffishness that I'd felt before, and that was like the feel of the air when there are bergs about.
“If you only knew,” says she, “how much better a ship fits you than a car, you'd never crank a motor again. Oh”—and her voice was impatient—“this is so much bigger; so much more splendid.”
“Look here, Miss McNair,” said I; “how many children did you have in your room in that Montreal public school?”
She shot me a quick look. “About fifty,” she answered sharply. “Why do you ask?”
“And were you paid half as much for your services as you are now?” I went on, looking her straight in the eyes.
“No,” she answered, sort of abrupt.
“But the work was two or three times as hard and monotonous, wasn't it? And you never had much of a chance to see how the rich, high-toned people lived, nor to get out in the big world and meet new and interesting folks, nor to live in big, bright, airy rooms with bathrooms and showers and towels that only needed to be rumpled a mite to be replaced, and the best things to eat and drink that money can buy. Yet up there in Montreal you were working to mold the future lives and thoughts and habits of fifty human beings, for that's what education does, and out of school hours you were your own mistress. To-day you teach two little girls whose future lives are more or less mapped out for them, and you are never your own mistress. Don't it strike you that our positions are pretty much alike, Miss McNair?”
She had got red and bit her lip when I began, but as I went on the rich color faded out, and she clasped her hands, staring out over the sulky-looking sea to windward. Seeing that she was disposed to listen, I went on:
“There is this difference, though, between us. Unless you make a rich marriage, or something of the sort, you are pretty well apt to stay right where you are. There's some future in school-teaching, but there's none in being a nursery governess. And when the children grow up, what then? You stay on as a sort of companion, maybe, and what is that? It comes pretty close to being an object of charity, Miss McNair. Now with me, it's different; I'm a chauffeur only for the time it takes me to get a start on my own hook, and that won't be very long. But taking things as they stand, it strikes me that you ought to be the very last person to taunt me with being a chauffeur when I might be master of a vessel.”
I'd spoken very quietly and with no wish to hurt her, and it gave me an awful feeling inside when she looked up pretty soon, and I saw that there were tears in her eyes.
“Why did you never say this before, Seagrave?” she asked. “Especially when I was so snippy at the very start?”
“Because I didn't want to hurt you,” I answered.
“And now you don't mind?” she asked quickly, but in so low a voice that I could scarcely hear it above the churning under the bows.
“I would rather lose an arm than hurt you,” I answered, and there was a tremble in my voice. “It's only that I can't stand having you think that I'm no more than a tight-fisted Yank that cares for nothing but getting on in a money way and has no soul above business matters. I could tell you things that I have felt at sea, thoughts I've had, lovely dreams when I've drifted through enchanted islands, and grim, terrible ones when I've seemed to be fighting with all the furies of hell. I've heard soft voices calling to me, and seen faces in the mist, and sometimes I think I've seen God walking on the waters. I've seen the decks littered with dead men and a ship's crew raving stark mad, howling as they raced up and down the beach of a small, sandy patch of hell where there was no shade, no food, and, worst of all, no water.
“I've seen a lot of strange things, Miss McNair—aye, and I've felt them, too. But I'll tell you one thing—I never saw a sight on land or sea that ever stirred me like the look in your face the first time I saw you on the train. Yours is the face that I'd always seen in my dreams, both waking and sleeping, and yours is the voice that I'd always been waiting to hear and wish to hear always. No doubt other men and better men have told you the same thing, for you're a girl that was made to be loved, God help you. But with me, you have been more of a religion since that first meeting, and it was really to be near you that I quit the sea. So please have the grace not to taunt me with it as though I'd done some shameful thing, Miss McNair——”
And I turned on my heel, and left her, and walked away forward where I stood, and let the spindrift cool my hot face. There—it was out, and I was glad of it. The wound might heal or stay open, as it liked. At any rate, she knew.
Standing by the windlass, I turned and looked back down the sweep of glistening deck. Grizel was still sitting there, huddled in a little heap, leaning forward with her chin in her hands and staring out over the heaving sea. As I watched her, she suddenly straightened up, then scrambled to her feet, and went below.
Our party stood the tossing about first rate. During the gale, I used to go down into the saloon a good deal and talk to the folks and try to sort of cheer them up by saying that we weren't leaking any to speak of, and that there wasn't the slightest danger in the world, and all that sort of thing. I never got another chance to speak to Grizel alone. She took care of that. But sometimes when I was talking or spinning some yarn, I would look up, and find her eyes on me and the little candles like two big, blazing beacons, and I wondered if the fires had been lighted to warn me off a dangerous coast.
When eventually the gale blew out, and we worked into Hamilton, still wearing our bellyband, we found that we'd been through the edge of a record hurricane, and that all sorts of wrecks and marine disasters had been reported. Everybody seemed to think we'd done mighty well to weather it, but as I explained to our people, we weren't directly in its track, and probably missed the worst of it.
Safe in port, Mr. Newell sent for me, and said some mighty nice things, ending up by asking me if I cared to change my billet and take command of a new auxiliary yacht he meant to have. I thanked him, and told him that I would rather keep my present job, as I hoped later on to work from that into something in the motor business that might let me swing to a little bigger scope.
Mr. Newell nodded, said he thought that I was right, and then got thoughtful all of a sudden.
The family went ashore to the hotel, but Mr. Edmond decided to stop aboard until the schooner went into the dock, which wouldn't be for a week. She had stopped leaking, once in still water with the strain off her. Mr. Newell had asked me to stop aboard for a couple of days, too.
That afternoon as I was standing by the rail watching the harbor sights, Mr. Edmond came on deck.
“Seagrave,” says he, “we all make mistakes sometimes. I want to apologize for what I said to you on the road that day.”
“Don't mention it, Mr. Edmond,” said I. “No doubt I did wrong myself. A man has to act according to his feelings sometimes.”
“Quite so,” says he. “Now, Seagrave, I've been talking things over with my brother, and we've a proposition to offer you. I don't wish to have it known, but the company which puts out my racing car is our concern. It's taking hold in very good shape, and we are prepared to offer you the managership of the new Boston office. The salary to begin with will be twenty-five hundred dollars, with a commission which we will fix later on all sales. I figure that you ought to clean up for yourself in the neighborhood of four thousand a year, at least.”
For a moment I couldn't speak—couldn't seem to get my breath. Before I got able to say anything, Mr. Edmond went on:
“You see, Seagrave, it's just as much for our advantage as for yours. We've learned your qualities, and we want to profit by them, so you needn't feel overwhelmed with obligation. And now there's another matter, a very delicate one, and another apology to come from me. I dislike the mere hint of eavesdropping, but one afternoon when we were hove to, I happened to be in the chartroom, and directly under the skylight that you were no doubt beside while talking to Miss McNair. I heard you say to her that it was your first sight of her face that had the most to do with your quitting the sea. Thereupon I went out, extremely thoughtful.
“Of course, this is none of my affair, Seagrave, but if you really care for Miss McNair, it strikes me that your chances are not bad. I don't say that, as a chauffeur, your stock would ever be quoted so much beyond par, but you have certainly got well to windward in her esteem as a sea captain. She's a very sweet, lovely girl, and the only thing that I have ever had against her was her refusal to be fascinated at any time by my unscrupulous self. Anyway, with your new job, there's no reason why you shouldn't stand as good a chance as the next man. Now, if you'll be so good as to call away the launch, I'll go ashore, and buy a ticket home. I always hated this silly place, anyway.”
And with that he turned sharply on his heel, and walked to the companionway, leaving me with everything flat aback and no steerageway.
Somehow, since our landing in Bermuda, my standing seemed to have changed a lot with the Newell fmily. Heretofore I'd always been treated kindly and with consideration, but there had been something in the very politeness which never let me forget that I was, after all, no more than the chauffeur. Mr. Edmond was the only one of the lot who had ever said a word to me which concerned myself and my views, and even he had often done it in a sort of sarcastic way.
Maybe it was during the gale that this ice got broken, and the fact that my chauffeur days were 'most over may have had something to do with it. Anyhow, I found that I was being treated almost like one of the family. But in spite of this, I wasn't happy. When there's just one thing a man wants, all creation ain't enough to satisfy him without it, and after what Mr. Edmond had told me it seemed as if my want of Grizel had changed from a low fever to a high, raging one. She was within my reach now, if I was man enough to win her. And the worst of it was she seemed harder to cut out from her convoy than ever before.
Then one evening, when I was taking a turn of the gardens, I came suddenly on Grizel, all alone. The family had gone to a dinner at Government House, and there was a big ball at the other hotel, so the place was deserted. Somehow, I knew that the white figure coming toward me was Grizel, even before I could really see her in the darkness.
“Good evening, Miss McNair,” said I, and Grizel stopped short, and looked to one side, as if she wanted to take a dive into the bays. But she answered me pleasantly enough.
“Do you mind if I walk with you a few minutes?” I asked. “Or perhaps I oughtn't ask.”
“Mrs. Newell wouldn't approve,” answered Grizel, in a doubtful sort of voice, and then added in a sort of flash of anger: “But I don't care. I'm tired of being told exactly what I may and may not do. You were right when you said that I'd given up my liberty for ease and luxury. I've had enough of it. I'm going back to my school, if they will have me.”
“What's wrong?” I asked.
“Nothing is really wrong,” says she, “but I'm beginning to long for freedom again. I wasn't made to trot along on a leash.”
She stamped her little foot, then laughed, and said in a softer voice:
“Never mind about me. I want to tell you how glad I was to hear of the splendid opening you've got. Mr. Edmond told me. Your ears must have burned these last few days——” And she tilted her head, and looked at me sideways as if to see if they were still smoldering.
“They've been awful kind to me,” I answered, “but I'll try to see that they don't lose anything by it.”
“Don't feel under obligation,” says Grizel quickly. “It's not only that you saved all of our lives in that gale——”
“Oh, nonsense,” I interrupted, sort of put out. “If I thought that they were making me manager of the new office on that account, I'd turn the job down.”
Grizel shook her head. “No,” she answered; “don't refuse the chance of getting on as long as you think that you can earn your hire. Now, in my case it's different. I don't begin to earn my hire, and, as you said the other day, my only chance of getting on is by making a good marriage; I mean, a rich marriage.”
“That wouldn't be very hard, if you chose to do it,” I answered.
Grizel pulled off a spicy verbena leaf, and began to tear it to pieces. Whenever I smell verbena now, that night comes back to me.
“Since I have been with Mrs. Newell,” she said, “I've had three such chances. But what's the use of exchanging one sort of captivity for another? And besides—the men weren't real men.”
“They weren't sailors, I suppose,” said I, “like Volger, for instance.”
Grizel turned her face to me, and it looked pale in the dim light.
“They weren't strong men,” she said, and something in her voice sent a hot wave through me.
“Strength isn't everything,” I answered. “Strong men are apt to be violent.”
“I love violence—in a good cause,” said Grizel, though her voice was so low I could scarce hear what she said.
“You wouldn't love the sort I mean,” I answered. “Maybe you'd call it brutality. Then you've got to remember that, unless a man is born with opportunities, the very violence of his nature, that might some day be the right kind of strength, is apt to drive him where he don't get much chance for a high finish.”
“What does finish count for, I'd like to know!” says Grizel. “Mr. Newell has finish, but how much good was it on the yacht? Mr. Edmond has it, too, and a certain amount of strength underneath. Yet he was about as effective as his clothes might have been with nobody inside them.”
The very heart of me warmed to hear her speak like this. But it was plain that what she'd been through in the gale had got away with her, and she was putting too much store on what really didn't value much, when all was said and done. Any sea-hardened sailorman that knew his business could do what I'd done, and I knew that it was the memory of this that was making Grizel's eyes shine and her bosom heave, and that was not the sort of credit that I wanted. I wished her to know that I had something better than that to offer.
“Listen,” said I, and my voice was husky as a bo'sun with a sore throat. “When it comes to a girl's caring for a man enough to marry him, almost the first thing that she should search his horizon for is how much he cares for her and what he's willing to go through for her sake. Never mind the size of his chest, or whether he's a lion chaser or can drive a crew of larrikins up and down the deck with a belaying pin. Any man that is a man will fight for a woman; the question is, Will he work for her? Will he work and wait and eat his heart out for weeks on end, hopeless and with the very soul of him burned out by jealousy and tenderness and longing? Will he do all that, asking only to be near her and serve her, no matter how? That's the thing for a woman to think of.”
I turned to look at her, and my face might have seemed wild in the starlight, for Grizel drew back a little.
“What—do you mean——” she said, and her voice quavered a mite. I reached out, and took her two soft wrists in my hands.
“Oh, Grizel,” I said, “don't you know that the heart inside me is nearly dead for the want of you? I've loved you from the moment my eyes fell on your face. It wasn't the first time I'd seen your face; it used to look at me out of the mist when standing my watch on the bridge, and I've dreamed of it, night after night, and seen it in the flames of a driftwood fire when near starvation. From the time I first saw you and knew that you were real, nothing else has mattered for me. I dropped everything, let my sea career slide, and followed. Girl, I love you——” I said, and I said it through my teeth, for she had started to draw away.
Only for a second she held back, not struggling, but breathing hard and staring into my face, as if she were trying to read the soul of me. Perhaps she did, for suddenly she yielded, and I found her in my arms and her face against mine, and I was saying things I never thought men really said.
Later we sat on the nearest bench, and Grizel told me things I could scarce believe. The wonder of it was that she had cared from the first, just as I had, and all of her harsh treatment of me was because she wished to drive me back to what she considered my proper calling, and the one for which I was made.
“After those hours on the train, I couldn't bear to think of you as a sort of menial, Jason,” she said. “When I first saw you in your livery, I wanted to cry. I wanted to swear and slam and say the meanest things that I could think of. I purposely treated Volger as your superior, and I tried to make you feel that you were 'way beneath me. Of course, I didn't know that you cared for me——”
“Come, now,” I interrupted; “honestly? How could you help but know?”
“Well,” says she, “there were times when——”
Grizel told me that she had hoped that I would get disgusted and go back to my old billet, when she meant to leave the Newells and take up her school-teaching again, when we could have seen each other every month, each of us free and independent, even if poor.
“But you were right,” she sighed. “Think of how long we would have had to wait!”
And as I took her in my arms, the only wonder is that I didn't go clean off my head for sheer happiness.
We have been married three years now, and, as I said at the beginning of this yarn, I've never had any reason to regret quitting the sea to turn chauffeur.
The sweetest of wives, the cutest of kids, a snug home, and a good growing business—what more could any man ask?
This work is in the public domain in the United States because it was published before January 1, 1929.
The longest-living author of this work died in 1933, so this work is in the public domain in countries and areas where the copyright term is the author's life plus 90 years or less. This work may be in the public domain in countries and areas with longer native copyright terms that apply the rule of the shorter term to foreign works.
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