Part 51

“I volunteer, here and now.”

She rose and put out her hand to him. “I have not thanked you for saving my life--saving us all, Captain Mayo. It is too holy a matter to be profaned by any words. But here is my hand--like a friend--like a sister--no”--she held herself straight and looked him full in the face through the gloom and tightened her hold on his fingers--“like a man!”

He returned her earnest finger-clasp and released her hand when her pressure slackened. That sudden spirit, the suggestion that she desired to assume the attitude of man to man with him, seemed to vanish from her with the release of her fingers.

She quavered her “Good night!” There was even a hint of a sob. Then she ran into the house.

Mayo stared after her, wrinkling his forehead for a moment, as if he had discovered some new vagary in femininity to puzzle him. Then he resumed his patrol with the slow stride of the master mariner. Hue and Cry raised dim bulk in the harbor jaws, showing no glimmer of light. It was barren, treeless, a lump of land which towns had thrust from them and which county boundaries had not taken in. He admitted that the state had good reasons for desiring to change conditions on Hue and Cry, but this callous, brutal uprooting of helpless folks who had been attached to that soil through three generations was so senselessly radical that his resentment was stirred. It was swinging from the extreme of ill-considered indulgence to that of utter cruelty, and the poor devils could not in the least understand!

“There seem to be other things than a spiked martingale which can pick a man up and keep him away from his own business,” he mused. “What fool notion possesses me to go out there to-morrow I cannot understand. However, I can go and look on without butting into stuff that's no affair of mine.”

Two men were shuffling past in the road. In the utter silence of that summer night their conversation carried far.

“Yes, sir, as I was saying, there he lays dead! When I was with him on the Luther Briggs he fell from the main crosstrees, broke both legs and one arm, and made a dent in the deck, and he got well. And a week ago, come to-morrow, he got a sliver under his thumb, and there he lays dead.”

“It's the way it often is in life. Whilst a man is looking up into the sky so as to see the big things and dodge 'em, he goes to work and stubs his toe over a knitting-needle.”

“That's right,” Captain Mayo informed himself; “but I can't seem to help myself, somehow!”

XII ~ NO PLACE POR THE SOLES OP THEIR FEET

Don't you hear the old man roaring, Johnny, One more day? Don't you hear that pilot bawling, One more day? Only one more day, my Johnny, One more day! O come rock and roll me over, One more day. --Windlass Song.

When the subject of the proposed expedition to Hue and Cry was broached at the breakfast-table, Captain Epps Candage displayed prompt interest.

“It's going to be a good thing for the section round about here--roust 'em off! Heard 'em talking it over down to Rowley's store last evening. I'll go along with you and see it done.”

Mayo and Polly Candage exchanged looks and refrained from comment. It was evident that Captain Candage reflected the utilitarian view of Maquoit.

Mayo had put off that hateful uniform of Marston's yacht, and the girl gave him approving survey when he appeared that morning in his shore suit of quiet gray. With the widow's ready aid Polly Candage had made her own attire presentable once more. When they walked down to the shore she smiled archly at Mayo from under the brim of a very fetching straw poke.

“I ran down to the general store early and bought a boy's hat,” she explained. “I trimmed it myself. You know, I'm a milliner's apprentice. Does it do my training credit?”

He was somewhat warm in his assurances that it did.

“I ought to be pleased by your praise,” she said, demurely, “because women wear hats for men's approval, and if my customers go home and hear such nice words from their husbands my business career is sure to be a success.”

“Your business career?”

“Certainly, sir!” She bobbed a little courtesy. “I have money, sir! Money of my own. Five thousand dollars in the bank, if you please! Oh, you need not stare at me. I did not earn it. My dear mother's sister left it to me in her will. And some day when you are walking down the city street you'll see a little brass sign--very bright, very neat--and there'll be 'Polly' on it. Then you may come up and call on the great milliner--that will be this person, now so humble.”

“But that young man!” he protested, smiling at her gaiety.

“Oh, that young man?” She wrinkled her nose. Then she flushed, conscious that he was a bit surprised at her tone of disdain. “Why, he will wear a frock-coat and a flower in the buttonhole and will bow in my customers. You didn't think my young man was a farmer-boy, did you?”

She hurried ahead of him to the beach, where her father was waiting with his men. Captain Candage had borrowed a dory for the trip. He installed himself in the stern with the steer-oar, and the young man and the girl sat together on the midship seat. The skipper listened to their chat with bland content.

“There's a fellow that's one of our kind, and he ain't trying to court my girl,” he had confided to Mr. Speed. “He is spoke for and she knows it. And under them circumstances I believe in encouraging young folks to be sociable.”

It was still early morning when they arrived at the island, but the state agent was there ahead of them. They saw him walking briskly about among the scattered houses, puffing on his cigar.

He was making domiciliary visits and was transacting business in a loud tone of voice. That business was paying over the money which the state had allowed for “squatter improvements.” In the case of the settlers on Hue and Cry the sums were mere pittances; their improvements consisted of tottering shacks, erected from salvaged flotsam of the ocean and patched over and over with tarred paper.

There was only one building on the island which deserved