Sheila of Big Wreck Cove | Page 9

she scarcely expected more than his occasional grunted
acknowledgment that he was listening. She always said it was "a joy to
have somebody besides the cat around to talk to." The loneliness of
shipmasters who sail the seven seas is often mentioned in song and in
story; the loneliness of their wives at home is not usually marked.
They went to bed. Old men do not usually sleep much after second
cock-crow, and it was not far from three in the morning when Cap'n Ira
awoke. Like most mariners, he was wide awake when he opened his
eyes. He lay quietly for several moments in the broad bed he occupied
alone. The half-sobbing breathing of the old woman sounded from her
room, through the open door.

"It's got to be done," Cap'n Ira almost audibly repeated.
He got out of the bed with care. It was both a difficult and a painful
task to dress. When he had on all but his boots and hat he tiptoed to a
green sea chest in the corner, unlocked it, and from beneath certain
tarpaulins and other sea rubbish drew out something which he
examined carefully in the semidarkness of the chamber. He finally
tucked this into an inner pocket of the double-breasted pilot coat he
wore. It sagged the coat a good deal on that side.
He crept out of the chamber, crossed the sitting room, and went into the
ell-kitchen with his shoes in his hand. When he opened the back door
he faced the west, but even the sky at that point of the compass showed
the glow of the false dawn. Down in the cove the night mist wrapped
the shipping about in an almost opaque veil. Only the lofty tops of craft
like the Seamew were visible, black streaks against the mother-of-pearl
sky line.
The captain closed the kitchen door softly behind him. He sat down on
a bench and painfully pulled on his shoes and laced them. When he
tried to straighten up it was by a method which he termed, "easy, by
jerks." He sat and recovered his breath after the effort.
Then, taking his cane, he hobbled off to the barn. The big doors were
open, for it had been a warm night. The pungent odor from Queenie's
stall made his nostrils wrinkle. He stumbled in, and the pale face of the
old mare appeared at the opening above her manger. She snorted her
surprise.
"You'll snort more'n that afore I'm done with you," Cap'n Ira said,
trying to seem embittered.
But when he unknotted the halter and backed her out of the stable, quite
involuntarily he ran a tender hand down her sleek neck. He sighed as he
led her out of the rear door.
The old mare hung back, stretching first one hind leg and then the other
as old horses do when first they come from the stall in the morning.

"Come on, you old nuisance!" exploded Cap'n Ira under his breath,
giving an impatient tug at the rope.
He did not look around at her, but set his face sternly toward the distant
lot which had once been known as the east meadow. It was no longer in
grass. Wild carrots sprang from its acidulous soil. The herbage would
scarcely have nourished sheep. There were patches of that gray moss
which blossoms with a tiny red flower, and there was mullein and sour
grass. Altogether the run-down condition of the soil could not be
mistaken by even the casual eye.
The hobbling old man and the hobbling old mare, making their way
across the bare lot, made as drab a picture in the early morning as a
Millet. At a distance their moving shapes would have seemed like
shadows only. There was no other sign of life upon Wreckers' Head.
A light but keen and salty breath blew in from the sea. Cap'n Ira faced
this breeze with twitching nostrils. The old mare's lower lip hung down
in depression. She groaned. She did not care to be led out of her
comfortable stall at this unconscionably early hour.
"Grunt, you old nuisance!" muttered Cap'n Ira bitterly. "You don't even
know what a dratted, useless thing you be, I swan!"
There was a depression in the field. When the heavy spring and fall
rains came the water ran down into this sink and stood, sometimes a
foot or two deep over several acres. In some past time of heavy flood
the water had washed out to the edge of the highland overlooking the
ocean beach. There it had crumbled the brink of the Head away, the
water gullying year after year a deeper and broader channel, until now
the slanting gutter began a hundred yards back from the brink.
The recurrent downpours, aided by