By
that I knew that the stranger was troubling him
There she was, the _Dancing Bess_, holding a taut bowline to the
eastward. And there were the two frigates, but they might as well
have been chasing a star
"Don't call me a mutineer, captain--I've disobeyed no order"
He said he hoped they'd meet again next day and bowed himself out
The Wrecker
Sometimes the notion comes to me while I'm talkin' to people that maybe
I don't make myself clear, and it's been so for some time now--the
things I see in my mind fadin' away from me at times, like ships in a
fog. And that's strange enough, too, if what people tell me so often is
true--that it used to be so one time that the office clerks would
correct their account-books by what I told 'em out of my head. But
sometimes--not often--things come back to me, like to-day--maybe because
'tis a winter day and a gale o' wind drivin' the sea afore it in the bay
below there. Things come to me then--like pictures--wind and sea and fog
and the wrecks on a lee shore.
In my business--but of course you know--runnin' after wrecks, from
Newfoundland to Cuba, I had to be days and maybe weeks away from
home--which was no harm when I had no more home than a room in a
sailor's boardin'-house, and no harm later with Sarah. Even if anything
happened to me, I used to feel that Sarah--that's my first
wife--Sarah'd still have the two lads to hearten her and keep her busy;
but 'twas different with--but there, my mind's off again.
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