Part 9

The keeper lighted his lantern, and then started for the fog-signal tower. He was descending the stairs, when he heard a cry outside of the lighthouse.

"Somebody at the foot of the ladder, I guess, wants me," concluded the keeper, "and I will go to the door and see who it is."

He went to the door, lantern in hand, and looked down.

"Hollo, there!" sang out a man from the shadows below. "Shall I come up?"

"Ay, ay!" responded the keeper. "Low water down there, isn't it, so you can come up the ladder?"

"I guess so. I will make fast and try the ladder."

The keeper heard the steps of somebody on the ladder, and then a man's form wriggled up through the hole in the platform outside the door.

"I get up with less trouble to you than I did the last time I was here," said the man.

The keeper looked at him.

"Ho! this you?" he asked.

"Nobody else."

It was the man who one day, when intoxicated, had been rescued from the bar, and the next morning had shown singular interest in the little box of sandalwood.

"Come up!" said the keeper, leading the man to the kitchen.

"I have been some time coming, haven't I?"

"Better late than never. Always glad to see people. Take that chair before the fire, and make yourself at home. I did not know as I should ever see you again. You are a Shipton man?" asked the keeper bluntly.

"Yes, I belong to Shipton; but then I am off about all the time. I think I have seen you on the street there."

"I was thinking myself I had seen you, but I couldn't say when, except that time you were at the lighthouse."

"Have you got that box now?"

"Oh yes. Here it is. Nobody has come to claim it."

He took the box down from its shelf and placed it on the table.

The keeper's companion said, "Now I will tell you the story about that box, and this letter, too, will confirm it."

As he spoke he took a letter from his pocket and opened it.

"The man who wrote that was an old shipmate, Grant Williams, a warm friend, and faithful too. He knew I had a weakness, and used to say he was afraid his shipmate would get into the breakers. He sent me a letter from a foreign port; here it is. You look at it. You will see that he gave me some good advice. He laid it all down like a chart; but I was a poor hand to steer by it. 'I expect to sail for Shipton in a Norwegian bark,' he wrote (I think he was born in Norway himself, but had been a long time in America), 'and I am going to get and bring my old shipmate a present of a box of sandal-wood, and I shall pack a few keepsakes into it. I will put my picture in, just to make it seem all the more like a present from me. I will put your initials and mine on the under side of the box. I will leave it at Shipton with your father if you are not there. And now don't forget this: it is to be a reminder of my desire that you should let liquor alone. When you see it, think of an old shipmate, and look at my face you will find in the box.' The first time I saw the box was that morning after the night you found me in a state that was no credit to the one found. I knew the ship had been wrecked, and only that, and when I saw the face of my old shipmate, and knew that he had been lost on the bar where I came pretty near losing my own life through what he warned me against, I--I--felt it. I didn't see how I could take the box until I was in a condition to give some promise, you know, that I would be a better man; and now I hope I am, God being my helper."

"Well, I think it is plain proof that you are the one whom the man Williams meant, and the owner of this box, if those are your initials on the bottom--if--"

The keeper was about to ask the man for his name, but the sound of a light step tripping downstairs arrested their conversation, and both turned toward the stairway.

It was Bart Trafton. He looked up, stopped, started forward, and exclaimed, "Why, father!"

"This you, Bart?" said Thomas Trafton. "How came you here?--My boy, Mr. Tolman. My vessel is off there in the stream, and while waiting for the wind I just rowed over."

There they stood, side by side, Bart and his father, while the keeper was rising to hand the box to Thomas Trafton. The lighthouse kitchen never presented a more interesting scene than that of the reformed sailor in the presence of his oft-abused child, taking into his hands this gift, that had survived a wrecking storm, to be not only a pledge of the friendship of the dead, but to the living a stimulus to right-doing and a warning against wrong.

Thomas Trafton rowed back to the vessel that night. Bart was carried to town the next day. Bart reached home at sundown, and first told granny about the affair of the box as far as he had been able to pick up the threads of the details and weave them into a story; then he asked, "Where is father's spy-glass?"

"Behind the clock, Bartie," said granny. "What do you want it for?"

"Just to look off," he said, seizing the glass and bearing it out-doors. Granny followed him into the yard and there halted; for Bart was going farther, already bestriding the fence.

"Where is that boy going?" wondered granny.

"Bartie!" she called aloud, "it is a-gittin' too late to see things clear."

He was now mounting a hill beyond the yard.

"Back in a moment, granny!" he shouted.

She soon saw his figure standing out, clear and distinct, against the western sky, and he was elevating the glass.

"Too soon to see anything yet," he said, when he returned.

"Where you lookin', child?"

"Off to the lighthouse."

"They haven't more than lighted her up."

"I know it. I was too early."

"You want to see the light? You won't have to take a glass for that; you just wait."

"I want to see something else. You come with me, granny, when I go again."

"Sakes, child, what you up to?"

Later two figures crept up the hill, one carrying a spy-glass.

"There, granny!" said the bearer of the glass. "Now you look off to the light at Black Rocks, and right under it see if you can't see another light--a little one."

"La, child," declared granny, vainly looking through the glass, "I can't see nothin'. This thing pokes out what there is there."

"Eh? can't you, granny?" replied Bart, levelling the glass toward the harbour. "I see the light. And--and--I think--I see a--something else underneath. Seems like a little star under a moon."

The next day this was dropped in the post-office:--

"DEAR DAVE,--I saw your lantern, I know. Did you hang it out? Your friend, BART."

Dave answered this in person within a week.

"I'm having a holiday," he said to granny--"off for a day--and thought I would call. I want you, please, to say for me to Bart I got his note, and that I did hang out my lantern the night that he looked for it."

"Now, did you ever see sich a boy? He has been up every night to look for that lantern, and he says he feels easier if he don't see it."

"You tell him not to worry. We are very comfortable. A person might live there a century and nothing happen to them."

Notwithstanding this assertion about the safety of century-serving keepers, Bart would sometimes steal out in the dark and climb the bare, lonely hill. Then he would search the black horizon.

"There's the reg'lar light," he would say, "but I don't see anything more. All right!"

XV.

_THE STORM GATHERING._

There was a tongue of land not far from the lighthouse known as "Pudding Point." How long the water-trip to it might be depended upon the state of the tide. In the immediate vicinity of the lighthouse there was, in the direction of this Pudding Point, such an accumulation of sandy ridges that at low-water the voyage was only a quarter of a mile. At high tide all the yellow flats were covered, and an oarsman must pull his boat across half-a-mile of water to go from the light to the point. Sometimes Dave had occasion to visit Pudding Point. A few houses were there, and they might be able to supply an article needed at the light, and that would save a trip to Shipton. One sunny morning Dave had rowed over from the light, and was drawing his boat up the sands, when he noticed a familiar figure striding along a ridge beyond the beach. It was a person of handsome carriage, and one well aware of it.

"I should know that form anywhere," said Dave. "Hollo, Dick!" he shouted.

Dick Pray came running down a sandy slope and gave Dave his hand.

"I am trying to hunt up Thomas Trafton," said Dave. "I believe he has a fish-house around here, hasn't he?"

"You'll find him on that ledge a little way back."

Dave hunted up the fish-house--a black, weather-beaten box. Thomas Trafton was spreading fish on the long fish-flakes in the rear of his humble quarters.

"That you, Dave?" asked the fisherman. "I thought I saw you down on the shore a half-hour ago."

"I was over at the light half-an-hour ago."

"Then it was Timothy Waters."

"How so?"

"Don't you know that if one takes a back view of you and Timothy, although he is really older than you by half-a-dozen years, it wouldn't be easy to tell you apart? Let me see. You are twenty-one?"

"So they say at home."

"Timothy is twenty-seven at least.'

"And I look like Timothy?"

"Rear view only, and I can only tell it is him if in walking he throws his arms out. You never do that."

"I am not anxious to resemble Timothy Waters. I thought he was at sea."

"Off and on. He is now, I suppose, in that craft off in the stream."

"The _Relentless_?"

"That's the one. I know I am glad to be out of her. My health improved steadily after quitting her. I am going to be at home, fishing, this season."

"How do they all do at home?"

"Oh, comfortable."

"Bart is getting to be a big boy, isn't he?"

"Yes, he is. He thinks a good deal of you. Now, you know that habit he got into once--"

"What was that?"

"Of taking my spy-glass and going out to look at the lighthouse at night--"

"To see if I had hung out a lantern because we were disabled--by sickness, you know, or something of the kind?"

"That is it. Well, his granny says he hasn't wholly dropped it now. She will see him go out, and when he comes back she will say, 'Anything?' 'Nothing,' he will say."

"Oh, I guess there never will be any need of his looking."

"No, I s'pose not; but it shows his interest."

"Yes; I am thankful for that.--Well, let us have a fish to broil; have come out for that."

Dave received his fish, paid for it, and very soon turned away, striding off energetically in the direction of his boat.

When Dave returned to the lighthouse, the tide, gradually dropping, had uncovered the rocky foundations, and the water was playing with the fringes of seaweed all about the rocks.

"How gracefully that seaweed rises and falls! Those curves of its motion are very delicate.--Hollo! what is that?" he asked.

Looking at the foundations, he saw in a crevice a little object that was not a lump of rock-weed or a rock, and what was it?

"A pocket-book!" said Dave, leaning out of his boat and picking up this relic tightly wedged between the stones. "I'll look at that when I get up into the kitchen."

Reaching the kitchen, he hastily opened the pocket-book, noticed that it was empty, and then placed it to dry on a shelf. It was very peaceful in the kitchen, and the stove purred and the clock ticked contentedly and quietly as ever. But where was the light-keeper? his assistant wondered.

"Upstairs probably," was the thought in reply; and yet this consideration, reasonable as it might seem at the moment, did not dispose of the question wholly. True, in a lighthouse, where one might say if a man were not downstairs he must be upstairs, that he could not be "out in the yard" or "in the cellar," Dave's conclusion seemed to be correct. He felt, however, a peculiar sense of loneliness. If Dave were a person given to moods, if he were likely to be sombre, he might have said it was only a fancy; but for one of his temperament that was unusual. Dave with reason had been somewhat worried about his principal. Toby Tolman was growing old. It had been in certain quarters openly said that he was too old for his position. He had been such an efficient keeper, and he had as his assistant a man so valuable, that no one cared to make an effort to remove him from his position. The person who would probably be benefited by any change, and would be invited to take charge of the light, was David Fletcher, and he would not move, for that reason, against his kind old friend. Dave had worked all the harder to fill up any deficiencies on the part of his principal, and the principal would doubtless have been invited to step out if his assistant had not worked so hard to keep him in. Often Dave noticed an indisposition in the light-keeper to attend to that fraction of the duties of the place falling to him, and Dave rightly attributed the indisposition to inability. During the watch-hours belonging to the keeper his assistant had sometimes found him asleep, and when the rest-hours belonging to the keeper arrived, he would unduly prolong his sleep in the morning, and neglect duties to which he had hitherto given prompt attention. Dave also noticed that Mr. Tolman lingered at an unusual length over his Bible. It would be an exceedingly good sign if it could be said of many people that they spent twice as much time as previously with their Bibles; but when a man usually giving to this habit an hour and a half may take three hours, neglecting other daily duties, there may be occasion for inquiry into the change. The light-keeper did not himself notice this peculiarity about to be mentioned, and yet any one seeing the passages read would have appreciated it. The keeper now found unusual comfort in the psalms that spoke of God as a hiding-place, a refuge, a high tower. Was he like the mariner who sees the storm pressing him closely and hastens to find the harbour where he can let fall each straining sail, like the tired bird that drops its wings because it has found its nest?

Dave had other reason for worry. There were in circulation mysterious stories that everything in the administration of the lighthouse at Black Rocks was not satisfactory. There were sly whisperings that goods belonging to Government were given out to others by the keepers, but when, where, and why, nobody said. There was only the repeated story of a mysterious disappearance of Government property. Several friends of Dave tried to catch and hold these rumours. Catch them they did, but hold them they could not. They were like birds that you may think are yours, but when you turn them into a room, lo, they fly out of an open window in the opposite direction.

Thomas Trafton was very indignant.

"Look here!" he said with a reddened face to a fisherman repeating some of these charges, "who told you that?"

"Almost everybody."

"Name one."

"Well, Timothy Waters was one."

"Timothy Waters, a man that had trouble at the light! You wait before you believe the story."

"But others have said the same thing."

"Well, wait; I am going to track these stories to their start."

Thomas Trafton imagined that he was a hunter, and like one following up the trail of an animal, he endeavoured to track these slanders back to their den. Sometimes he would follow the accusations back to Timothy Waters, and then somebody else would be found to assert them, and so the trail would start away again. Amid the multitude of tracks, but without evidence of their origin, this hunter from the Trafton family was bewildered. He mentioned the affair to Dave, feeling that here was an innocent person whom others were attacking, and yet he might be entirely ignorant of the assault.

"I--I--don't want to make you uneasy, but I feel friendly more than you can imagine," said Thomas, "and I thought you ought to know about the stories that are going round."

"Oh, I suppose people are always talking. Life would be dreadful dull if there wasn't something to talk about; and if I save the world from dulness I may flatter myself that I am doing some good."

"Oh, but it isn't just gossip."

"Isn't?" replied Dave, taking a hint from Thomas

Trafton's significant look more than from any language. "What is it then?"

"Now, I don't believe it, mind ye. I try to stop it, but it is like trying to stop a sand-piper on the beach without a gun. Running after it don't bring it."

"Well, what is it? I know you wouldn't believe anything unfair, but I am bothered to know what it is."

"Why--and I thought you had better know it--they say things belonging to Government are given out from the lighthouse: 'misappropriated'--I believe that is the word."

"Long word! Well, who says it?" asked Dave sternly.

"Oh, I'm sorry to say I've heard a good many tell it who ought to know better."

"It is all a lie! Misappropriation! That good man Toby Tolman--as if he would do such a thing! Why, any one with a head might know better. Toby never would do it!"

"Of course he wouldn't, nor you neither. That is not the p'int, but how to stop 'em?"

Dave was silent. Then he broke out,--

"Who has mentioned it?"

Thomas mentioned the fisherman he had recently confronted and rebuked. Then he added,--

"I have tried to run the story down to its hole. It don't seem to start with him, for he says somebody told him, and--"

"Who is that?"

"Timothy Waters."

"Indeed!"

"Now, I want to know how to stop the story."

"You let me think it over, Thomas. I am much obliged to you."

"I am real sorry to tell you," replied Thomas, "but I thought you ought to know of it, and I'll stand by you and Toby to--the last."

This conversation was only three days before Dave's visit to Pudding Point. Thomas had said if anything new turned up he would report to Dave. "Nothing," he had said to Dave during that call at the fish-house, looking significantly at him.

"I understand," replied Dave, "and I have nothing. All I can do is to grin and bear it."

To suit the act to the sentiment, he gave a smile with compressed lips. It was a rather grim smile.

Dave was thinking of the unpleasant subject continually. What added to his burden was the conviction that he did not think it would be wise to tell his principal, for he suspected--and he judged rightly--that it would do no good, that it would only grieve the light-keeper, and that this burden of grief he was not just then in a condition to easily carry.

"I am acting for two," he said to himself, "and that makes it all the harder. If it were just one, just myself, I could seem to tell what to do; but I think it would do an injury to the old man to tell him now; and what shall I do? I guess I must take the advice of that psalm to myself."

He had in mind the close of the twenty-seventh psalm, read the night before: "Wait on the Lord: be of good courage, and he shall strengthen thine heart: wait, I say, on the Lord." And this was Dave's comment on the verse: "I can rest on that promise. I was not aware when a man didn't know what to do, which way to turn, that this psalm could help and rest one like that."

So Dave, like many pilgrims perplexed and tired, came to the shadow of the mountain-promises of God. and there comforted his soul in the assurance that God thought of him, loved him, and would strengthen him. He needed this comfort when he returned to the lighthouse, after his visit to Thomas Trafton's fish-house, and missed the keeper.

"I will go upstairs to find him," he said.

How hard and heavy was the sound of his footsteps as he ascended the first flight of stairs leading from the kitchen! Dave went up as if he were carrying a burden. He pushed open the door at the head of the stairway and looked into the keeper's room, anxiously and yet timidly, as if desirous to find him and yet afraid.

"Ah, there he is," thought Dave.

He was lying on his bed, his eyes closed.

"Is he asleep?" wondered Dave. He stepped to the bed.

"Yes, he must be asleep. Shall I speak to him?"

He hesitated. He wanted to wake him and make sure that an ugly suspicion was without foundation.

He watched the old man's breast, and saw a movement there as of a pulsation of the heart. He held his hand before the keeper's mouth.

"Yes, I feel his warm breath. It must be sleep, and yet--"

He paused. He did not like to express in language what he could not help in thought.

"I will not disturb him," he finally said, "for it may be only just sleep. I will wait, any way, till after dinner."

Deferring and still suspecting, he went downstairs. The kitchen had not changed, and yet it seemed a different place. The clock and the fire now made discordant noises. The sunshine that fell through the window and rested on the floor seemed not so much to bring the light as to show how empty and comfortless the place was. He felt lonelier than ever, this man that people outside suspected of theft, who was cut off from the sympathy of the man suspected with him. He was like one of the ledges in the sea, so isolated, so much by itself, upon which the waves beat without mercy, without rest. In that hour what society, sympathy, strength, he found in the psalms!--a face to smile upon him, a voice to cheer, and a hand to uplift.

XVI.

_THE STORM STRIKING._

After dinner Dave mounted the stairway leading to the keeper's room.

"Still sleeping," thought Dave, lingering on the threshold and hesitating to go forward. He advanced, though, in a moment, for he was startled at the keeper's appearance. It was like an intermittent stupor rather than the continued unconsciousness of sleep. Dave touched the keeper, and he found the temperature to be that of a high fever. At times the old light-keeper would start and open his eyes, and when Dave left the room to search the pantry for some simple remedy on the medicine-shelf, he found on his return that his patient had left his bed and was standing by the narrow window in the thick stone walls. He murmured something about "storm," about the "light," and suffered Dave to lead him back to bed.

"I must look out how I leave him again," thought Dave; and yet how could he manage the case alone?

"I must have help," he said, "and soon as I have a chance I must hang a signal out at the door. Perhaps some one will call, and I'll wait before showing the signal."

Nobody came. Why should they come because suspecting any trouble? The afternoon was pleasant. The sea broke gently upon the stone walls of the lighthouse, and the sun shed its quiet glow like some benediction of peace upon the sea. It was the very afternoon when a spectator would be likely to conclude that the lighthouse was in no need of help.

"I'll go now," at last concluded Dave. "He is asleep; his fever is running lower. I will step to the door of the signal-tower, and throw out a white sheet there, and somebody may see it."

Nobody came, and yet here was a man who might be dangerously sick. At the hour of sunset he ran up to the lantern and lighted the lamp. He quickly descended, saying to himself, "How glad I am that it is not foggy! So much to be thankful for! How could I start that signal! But it won't do to try to get through the night in this fashion. What, what can I do?"

The twilight thickened; the shadows trailed longer, broader, and darker folds across the sea. Dave sat alone with the sick man, who moaned as if in pain.

"I have it!" he suddenly exclaimed, recalling what Thomas Trafton told him. "I can do one thing more. I'll hang the lantern out from the tower; maybe Bart will possibly see it."

Watching his chance when the keeper was less uneasy, he ran downstairs, lighted a lantern, and then suspended it outside a window on the landward side of the tower. The cool air of the sea blew refreshingly on his heated face as he leaned out.

"The air feels good; but I can't stop here," said Dave, hurrying away and returning to the keeper's room. "There! I have done all I could, and now--"