The adventures of Captain O'Shea

by Ralph Delahaye Paine

I

An elderly man of ample girth was plying a hoe in a very neat and tidy vegetable garden. His battered, good-natured visage reflected pleasure in the task and contentment with existence. Blue overalls were hitched to his shoulders by a pair of straps. A lock of gray hair poked itself through a hole in his ragged straw hat. His shirt-sleeves were rolled up to display a pair of ponderous, sunburnt arms upon which were tattooed an anchor and a pink-eyed mermaid. Ever and anon this bucolic person turned his attention to a boy who was weeding the onion bed on his hands and knees, and thundered admonitions at him in a voice that carried across the pasture and startled the grazing cows.

The youth thus bombarded showed no signs of terror. In fact, he grinned quite amiably as if hardened to threats of being skinned alive or triced up by the thumbs. Obviously, he considered his employer’s bark worse than his bite. At length the latter leaned on his hoe to remark with heated candor:

“Say, Bub, those weeds grow faster than you pull ’em up. Is there anything slower than you in this part of the country?”

The boy turned from watching a woodchuck meander toward its hole and promptly answered with a touch of pride:

“It runs in the family, Mr. Kent. My pa is the slowest man in the village, an’ my grand-dad was slower than he be, so ma says. Us Perkinses is all slower’n molasses in January.”

“Well, if I could find another boy, I’d lift you off this farm by the slack of your pants,” snorted Johnny Kent. “You make me peevish in spots, and I aim to be the happiest man on earth.”

“You can’t find another boy,” was the unruffled reply. “They’re all off hayin’. Say, Mr. Kent, it’s a great day to go fishin’. An’ this garden is jes’ full of fat, juicy angle-worms.”

“Doggone it, Bub, I’ll have to go you,” cried the elderly gardener with smiling animation. “You dig the bait and we’ll start right after dinner.”

He forsook the vegetables and moved at a leisurely gait in the direction of a small white cottage with green blinds, in front of which blazed a gorgeous profusion of hollyhocks. At the porch he halted to drop into a canvas hammock, the ropes of which were spliced sailorwise, and sought his ease for a few minutes while he fondly contemplated his landed possessions. The green fields, rolling and pleasantly diversified by patches of woodland, were framed by ancient stone-walls. In the foreground loomed the capacious barn, flanked by the hen-house and wood-shed. To the right of the cottage extended an apple orchard whose gnarled trees were laden with fruit.

It was here that Johnny Kent had cast anchor, in the haven of his dreams, and he roundly swore that the sea should know him no more. He was done with nursing crippled engines and hammering drunken stokers. The hazards of his calling were for younger men. A stroke of good fortune during his last voyage with Captain Michael O’Shea, in the liner Alsatian, had given him the cash in hand to pay for the longed-for “farm in the grand old State o’ Maine” and a surplus to stow in the bank.

“Here I am,” he said to himself as he swung his legs in the hammock, “and it’s too blamed good to be true, honest it is. Fightin’ potato-bugs is all the excitement I pine for, and when the red cow lets go her hind foot and capsizes me and the pail and the milkin’-stool, it’s positively thrilling. No watches to stand and nothing to pester me, barrin’ that lazy, tow-headed Perkins boy. And I’m going fishin’ with him this afternoon just to show myself how independent I am of skippers and owners and charters and such foolishness.”

With this the retired chief engineer entered the cottage and passed into the kitchen. The floors had been scrubbed white with sand and holy-stone. The brass door-knobs and andirons were polished like gold. The woodwork glistened with speckless white paint. What furniture there was consisted of solid, old-fashioned pieces, such as Windsor chairs, a highboy, a claw-footed table or two, and a desk of bird’s-eye maple. No bric-a-brac cluttered them. Habit had schooled this nautical housekeeper to dispense with loose stuff which might go adrift in a heavy sea-way.

Kicking himself out of his overalls, he tied a white apron about his waist and bent his attention to the kitchen stove. The green peas were boiling merrily, the potatoes were almost baked, and it was time to fry the bacon and eggs. He cooked his own dinner with as hearty good-will as he had hoed the garden. It was all part of the game which he enjoyed with such boyish zest.

Stepping to the back door, he blew a blast on a tin horn to summon the Perkins boy. That lazy urchin sped out of the onion bed as if he had wings, and Johnny Kent was moved to comment:

“Be careful, Bub, or your family’ll disown you. You came bowlin’ along to your vittles like you were actually alive! Right after dinner you wash the dishes and scour them tins, and if you leave a spot on ’em no bigger than a flea’s whisker, I’ll nail your hide to the barn door. Then we’ll hitch up the mare and jog along to East Pond with our fish-poles.”

“Folks in town think it kind o’ queer you don’t hire a woman to keep house,” said the Perkins offspring as he took the wash-basin down from its hook.

“You can tell ’em with my compliments that they’re a gabby lot of gossips and ought to have a stopper put on their jaw-tackle,” returned Johnny Kent with surprising heat and a perceptible blush. “I can look after myself without any advice from the village.”

Young Perkins snickered and thought it wise to change the subject. When they sat down to table, the host was in the best of humor as he declaimed with tremendous gusto:

“Did you ever taste such peas? Raised ’em myself. Cooked in cream from my own cow. Early Rose potatoes from my own garden. Eggs from my own hens. They lay ’em every day.”

“Hens have to lay or bust this time o’ year,” prosaically replied the youth. “An’ peas is peas.”

“Romance was plumb left out of your system,” sighed the mariner. “All the years I was wanderin’ over the high seas seem tame and monotonous alongside this.”

Before the meal was ended there came an interruption. Johnny Kent dropped knife and fork and suspiciously sniffed the breeze which drew through the open windows. “Bub” Perkins likewise showed uneasy symptoms and cocked his freckled snub nose to sniff the air. It was a tableau evidently of some importance. Presently they both arose without a word and hastened out of doors to scan the peaceful landscape far and near.

“I smelled wood smoke, sure as guns,” said Johnny Kent.

“So did I. I bet a cooky it’s another fire,” excitedly cried young Perkins. “I can’t see anything, can you?”

“Not yet. The woods have been afire seven times in the last week, and it ain’t accidental, Bub. The buildings will begin to go next. My farm has been spared so far.”

The boy was climbing into an apple-tree, from which perch he was able to gaze over the hill beyond the pasture. He could see a hazy cloud of smoke drifting among the pine growth of a neighboring farm and in the undergrowth glowed little spurts of flame like crimson ribbons. The fire had gained small headway, but unless speedily checked it might sweep destructively over a large area.

“No fishin’ trip to-day,” sorrowfully muttered Johnny Kent. “Pick up the shovels and hoes and some empty grain sacks, Bub, while I put the mare in the buggy. It’s a case of all hands turnin’ out again.”

The call of duty had never found the stout-hearted mariner indifferent, and a few minutes later he was driving down the country road under forced draught, the vehicle bounding over rocks and ruts, and the Perkins boy hanging on with both hands. Already the alarm had spread, and farmers were leaving their mowing machines and hay-racks in the fields to hurry in the direction of the burning woodland. Wagons loaded with men came rattling out from the village. Two or three of the recent fires, so mysteriously frequent, had done much damage, and the neighborhood was alert to respond.

Experience had taught the volunteer force how to operate. They dashed into the woodland and fought the fire at close range. Some wetted sacks in a near-by brook and beat out the flying embers and the blazing grass. Others shovelled sand and earth upon the creeping skirmish-line of the conflagration. The most agile climbed the trees, which were just beginning to catch, and chopped off the flaming, sizzling branches. They toiled like heroes, regardless of the wilting heat and blinding, choking smoke.

Johnny Kent was not a man to spare himself, and he raged in the fore-front of the embattled farmers, exerting himself prodigiously, shouting orders, taking command as a matter of habit. The others obeyed him, being afraid to do anything else, although they knew more about fighting forest fires than he. The elderly marine engineer had grown unaccustomed to such violent endeavor, and he puffed and grunted hugely and ran rivers of perspiration.

So promptly had the neighbors mustered that the flames were conquered before they could jump into the thickest part of the woodland and swirl through the tops of the pines. Leaving a patrol to search the undergrowth in search of stray sparks, the farmers withdrew from the blackened area and gathered together to listen to the excited story of a young man armed with a shot-gun.

“This ain’t the first fire that’s been set on my property,” said he. “My pasture was touched off in three places last Saturday night, but a heavy shower of rain come along and put it out. Next mornin’, just before day, my corn-crib was burnt to the ground. Since then I’ve been lookin’ around in the woods whenever I could spare the time——”

“It’s spite work or there’s a lunatic firebug roamin’ the country,” put in the first selectman of the village.

“The spite ain’t aimed at me in particular,” resumed the young man with the gun. “Mark Wilson’s wood lot has been set, and the Widow Morgan’s back field, and nobody knows where it will happen next. As I was about to say, when I fust seen the smoke this afternoon I was on the other side of the young growth, and I put for it as hard as I could. And I saw a man sneakin’ away from the fire. I threw up my gun to give him a dose of buckshot, but he dodged among the trees and was over the hill and down in the hollow before you could say Jack Robinson. I ain’t very speedy since I was throwed out of the dingle-cart and broke my leg, and the strange man got away from me.”

“He’s the crittur that’s been settin’ all the fires,” exclaimed the first selectman. “What in thunder did he look like, Harry? Give me a description, and I’ll call a special meeting of the board to-night, and we’ll offer a reward, mebbe as much as twenty dollars.”

“I can’t say exactly. He was six feet tall, or five, anyhow, and light-complected, though he might have been dark, and he had on brown clothes, but I ain’t quite sure about the color. Anyhow, he’s the man we’ve got to ketch before we can sleep easy in our beds.”

Johnny Kent was too weary to take much interest in a man-hunt, even with the magnificent largeness of twenty dollars in prospect. Summoning the Perkins boy, who was heaving rocks at a small turtle on the bank of the brook, he clambered heavily into the buggy and turned the mare toward the road. The afternoon had been spoiled and the worthy mariner was in a disgruntled mood. A serpent had entered his Eden. Likely enough the scoundrel who was starting conflagrations all over the landscape would soon give his attention to the beloved farm with the white cottage and the very neat and tidy vegetable garden.

The owner thereof ambled to the porch with the gait of one utterly exhausted and dumped himself into the nearest chair. His face was well blackened with smoke and soot. His raiment had been torn to rags by the thickets through which he had so gallantly plunged. He looked like an uncommonly large scarecrow in the last stages of disrepair. Moreover, his eyes were reddened and smarted acutely, he had a stitch in the side, and his stomach ached.

While he reposed in this state of ruin, there came briskly walking through his front gate a ruddy, well-knit figure of a man, young in years, whose suit of blue serge became him jauntily. Halting to survey the trimly ordered flower-beds and vine-covered portico, he ceased whistling a snatch of a sea chantey and nodded approvingly. Following the path to the side of the cottage, he beheld the disreputable person seated in a state of collapse upon the porch. Instead of expressing courteous sympathy, the visitor put his hands on his hips and laughed uproariously.

Stung by this rude levity, Johnny Kent heaved himself to his feet and hurled the chair at the head of the heartless young man, who dodged it nimbly, ducked the swing of a fist big enough to land him in the middle of next week, if not farther, and shoved the engineer into the canvas hammock where he floundered helplessly and sputtered:

“Howdy, Cap’n Mike! It’s a low-down Irish trick to laugh at a man that’s all wore out and tore up the way I am.”

Captain Michael O’Shea strove to check his unseemly mirth and thumped his old comrade affectionately as he explained:

“So this is the happy, simple life that ye cracked on about for years. You look it, Johnny. Was it an explosion that wrecked you or have ye been cleaning boilers? And is every day like this on the dear old homestead?”

“Not by a darn sight. I had to take a turn of extra duty. I’m the happiest man in the world, Cap’n Mike. And I’m tickled to death to clap eyes on you. Wait till I wash up and change my clothes.”

“Sure I’ll wait, Johnny. ’Tis a visit I have come to pay. You are sensitive about the terrible condition I find ye in, so I will say no more. But if I was surveyin’ you for Lloyds, I would mark you down as a total loss. And how are the pigs and chickens?”

The portly farmer brightened instantly and wheeled in the door to exclaim:

“You just ought to see ’em! Now how did I get along at sea all those years without ’em? Can you tell me that?”

“’Twas the lack of them that made ye so thin and melancholy,” said O’Shea with a grin. “Clean yourself up and fill the old pipe with the wicked brand of cut plug that ye misname tobacco, and we will sit down and talk it over.”

“Aye, aye, Cap’n Mike. And there’s some bottles of beer in the ice-box in the wood-shed. It’s just abaft the galley. Help yourself.”

The shipmaster enjoyed exploring the cottage while his host repaired damages and presently reappeared in a white-duck uniform, which he had worn as chief engineer of the English steamer Tarlington.

“There now, you look more like a man and less like a fat coal-heaver that has blown all his wages for rum,” said Captain O’Shea. “And will ye rummage in the lockers for a bite to eat? The train that fetched me had difficulty in finding this cute little town of yours. I mistrust ’twas not on the chart at all, and we wandered for hours and hours looking for it and stopping to take soundings at ten million way-stations. Where is the cook?”

“I’m the whole crew,” replied Johnny Kent as he convoyed his guest into the kitchen. “You see, Cap’n Mike, I found it wouldn’t do to have a woman workin’ for me. All the old maids and widows in the township seemed anxious to get the berth. But a solid man like me, with money in the bank, has to be careful. Confound it, they pestered me! I don’t want to talk about it.”

Until sunset the comrades yarned and laughed, sprawling in the shade of an apple-tree or rambling arm-in-arm over the farm. Then the mariner had his chores to do, which consisted mostly in bullying the Perkins boy, while O’Shea chuckled to think of the tempestuous scenes in which he had beheld Johnny Kent play a dominant part. The shipmaster had a purpose up his sleeve, but he had artfully delayed disclosing it until he could discover how firmly the engineer was anchored to his pastoral existence.

After supper, which O’Shea helped prepare with the handiness of a sailor, they walked slowly to and fro in the garden, falling into step by force of habit, for thus they had passed many an hour on bridge and deck beneath the stars. The tranquillity of the place, the sense of comfort and repose, soothed the restless temper of O’Shea and turned his mind to thoughts of a home and fireside of his own. But he was well aware that this mood would pass.

“’Tis sad I am that I cannot tarry long with you and your intelligent pigs and hens, Johnny,” said he, “but I have a bit of business in hand.”

“What is it? Does it look good to you, Cap’n Mike?” demanded the other. “We’ve been so busy livin’ our fights and frolics all over again that I haven’t had a chance to hurl questions at you. Why don’t you stay ashore and take it easy for a while? You’ve got money; plenty of it. Blow it like a gentleman.”

“And what would be the fun of that? I have a charter in mind. Would ye like to hear of it?”

The contented farmer cocked his head alertly and stood in his tracks. The light in his eye was not inspired by his neat rows of beets, carrots, and cabbages. O’Shea perceived that he was curious, and hastened to add, in the most winning accents:

“’Tis the kind of a game you used to like, Johnny. I have looked over the steamer, and she would please you. Politics are stewin’ in the Persian Gulf and intrigues are as thick as huckleberries. The British and the Russians have locked horns again, do ye mind, and the poor deluded Persians will be prodded into a revolution, and divil a bit of good it will do them. When the smoke clears the two benevolent Powers will try to beat each other to the plunder. Just now they are manœuvrin’ for position.”

“Pshaw! Cap’n Mike, haven’t you recovered from them delusions about the Persian Gulf?” growled the engineer.

“’Tis no dream, Johnny. I have met a man in New York. He came from Europe to find me. The proposition is copper-riveted. I take the steamer and load her with arms and munitions in a Mediterranean port and deliver them to certain parties somewheres the other side of Aden. The British gun-boats are patrollin’ the Gulf to put a crimp in this industry, so there will be a run for me money.”

Johnny Kent was silent while he meditated and listened to the whisper of temptation. Then a pig grunted in its straw litter, a chicken chirped drowsily on its perch, and the breeze rustled among the luxuriant pole-beans and tomatoes. And O’Shea had come to coax him away from this enchanted place. He would hear what the blarneying rascal had to say and convince him of his folly. The shipmaster liked not the stolid silence of his companion. He knew it of old for a stubbornness that nothing could budge. However, he went on with the argument:

“I need an engineer, Johnny. And will ye not take one more fling with me? You are an old rover, and this messing about a farm will not content you for long. ’Tis no place for a bold man that knows his trade. Wait a bit and come back here when ye have seen the green seas tumbling over the bows once more and felt the swing of a good ship under you, and heard the trade-winds singing in your ears, and watched the strange faces in ports that are new to ye.”

“I’ve heard you talk before, Cap’n Mike, and your tongue never gets hung on a dead-centre,” was the deliberate reply. “You’ll have to dish up something more attractive than the blisterin’ Persian Gulf to drag me from my moorings. Do I act restless?”

“About as much so as that old barn yonder,” admitted the other.

“See here, Cap’n Mike, the farm next to mine can be bought cheap. It cuts a hundred tons of hay and pastures forty head of stock. I meant to write you about it soon. Why don’t you buy it and settle down alongside of me?”

“You are the hopeless old barnacle,” laughed O’Shea. “’Tis plain that I waste me words. If my seductive persuasions have missed fire entirely I must bid ye farewell in the morning and lay a course back to New York.”

“I wish I could hold you longer,” sighed Johnny Kent. “The Grange picnic comes right after hayin’, and there’s other excitements to keep you busy.”

“And this is the talk I hear from a man that used to enjoy risking his neck between the divil and the deep sea. Maybe ye can offer me the mad intoxication of a husking-bee.”

“They’re out of season just now,” seriously returned the agriculturist.

“Well, we will not quarrel, Johnny. I have taken notice that it made you fretty to ask why ye were so mussed up and dirty when I strolled in this afternoon. Have you cooled off by now and do you mind explaining yourself? You were an awful sight and I was near moved to tears.”

“You laughed at me like a darned hyena,” grumbled Johnny. “It wa’n’t friendly, Cap’n Mike. I’d been fightin’ a fire till I was wrecked fore and aft. And for all I know we may have to turn out again to-night and fight another one.”

“Then I will stand watch and watch with you and keep lookout. And why have ye turned prophet? Can you predict them, same as you read the weather signs?”

“Pretty near,” dolefully answered Johnny Kent. “Some miserable scoundrel has been settin’ the woods afire to burn us all out. He was sighted to-day, but the lunk-head that caught him in the act wasn’t quick enough to shoot him. Settin’ fires in a dry season like this is as bad as murder.”

O’Shea had found something to interest him. There might be a spice of adventure in this drowsy region. And his friend seemed so genuinely worried that he was eager to help him. With a thrill of gratitude he recalled a certain night off a tropic coast when Johnny Kent had led the gang that descended into a blazing hold and saved a ship from being blown to atoms.

“Maybe my business in New York can wait a day or so longer,” said he. “’Tis unmannerly of me to leave you accumulating more white hairs in that frosty old thatch of yours.”

“You’d sooner hunt trouble than a square meal,” gratefully exclaimed Johnny. “I ain’t so spry on my feet as I was, and my wind is short, or I’d go after this firebug and scupper him by myself. I haven’t felt real worried over it till to-day, but he’s worked nearer and nearer my place, and I’m blamed if I can set up all night watchin’ for him.”

“’Tis a tired man I know you are to-night, so I will tuck ye in, and then I will wander a bit and keep an eye lifted. It would please me to run afoul of this unpleasant gentleman with the bonfire habit.”

“The fires have been coming in couples, Cap’n Mike. If there’s one in the daytime, it’s a good bet that another one will break loose the next night.”

The engineer yawned and confessed with an air of apology: “I’m tuckered and no mistake. Suppose I turn in now and you rouse me out at eight bells of the first watch.”

“Right enough. Where’s your old pair of night-glasses; and have ye a gun? If I find the disturber I may want to bend it over his head. I would sooner catch him than kill him.”

“It ain’t a mite hospitable to treat you this way, Cap’n Mike.”

“Pooh, man. Ye do me a favor. ’Twould reconcile me to buying the next farm if there was a chance of a ruction now and then.”

An hour later Captain Michael O’Shea was climbing the long, easy slope of the barn roof. One end of it supported a water-tank built upon a platform of stout timbers. Here the enterprising lookout found room to sit and scrutinize the surrounding woods and fields. The sky was starlit but the darkness had a duskier, more impenetrable quality than on a clear night at sea. O’Shea’s keen vision, accustomed to sweep large and lonely horizons, was rather baffled, but the powerful glasses enabled him to distinguish the vague outlines of the woodland and meadow and pasture boundaries.

In a blithe humor he smiled at the odd situation in which he found himself. Good old Johnny Kent had actually achieved a farm, and here was his commander perched on top of the barn like a weather-cock, and enjoying it, forsooth. His nimble wits had framed the most effective strategy possible. It would be futile to go blundering through the woods on a blind trail. From his elevated station he could see the first spark of fire to glow in any direction. The incendiary would linger to make sure that the fire had fairly caught, and O’Shea hoped to catch him unawares and overpower him.

The silent hours wore on and drew near to midnight when he had promised to arouse Johnny Kent. Nothing suspicious had been descried. A whippoorwill sounded its call with such breathless, unflagging persistence that the sentinel amused himself counting the sweet, monotonous notes and concluded that a vast deal of energy was going to waste.

“That bird is over-engined for its tonnage,” he reflected. “Well, I have stood me watch in worse places than this. ’Tis a shame to turn poor old Johnny out of his bunk. I will stay up here awhile and listen to the long-winded bird and enjoy the pleasure of me own company.”

His back against the water-tank, he could not walk to ward off the drowsiness that was borne on the wings of the soft night wind all laden with the smells of trees and earth and hay-fields. His vigilance relaxed and his thoughts drifted away to other climes and places.

He came out of his revery with a sudden start, convinced that he had been caught napping, for his eyes had failed to detect anything moving in the direction of the barn. But he could hear some one groping about close to the side of the building. A stick snapped, the bushes rustled, and there were other sounds very small yet significant. Captain Michael O’Shea gingerly forsook the little platform and began to slide down the roof, fairly digging his fingers and toes into the shingles with the tenacity of a cat.

The overhanging eaves made it difficult to observe what was going on below. In order to peep over the edge of the roof, the shipmaster was compelled to sprawl upon his stomach with his heels higher than his head and with no purchase by which to maintain his grip. It was a wide-angled roof or he would have tobogganed off into space before his laborious descent carried him as far as the eaves. However, in his trade a man who could not hang on by his eyelids was a lubber of a sailor, and the bold O’Shea wriggled into position an inch at a time.

The mysterious noises might have been made by Johnny Kent prowling in search of him, but O’Shea was afraid to call out lest he might frighten away the object of his vigil. His trousers catching on a nail and holding him fast for a moment, he ceased his precarious exertions long enough to listen. This time his ear caught the crackle of crumpling paper and a succession of sharper noises as if some one were breaking dry wood over his knee. He smelt the unmistakable odor of kerosene. Almost directly beneath him, and not more than a dozen feet distant, an attempt was well under way to set fire to Johnny Kent’s barn.

With more speed and less caution O’Shea managed to poke his head over the edge of the roof, intending to get his bearings before launching the attack. He found himself directly above a shadowy figure which flitted to the wood-pile and back again with quick, furtive movements. Captain O’Shea had never found himself in a more embarrassing situation. He disliked the idea of letting go and diving head first, which was the quickest method of coming to close quarters. And even if he should try to turn about and launch himself right end to, he was likely to hit the earth with the deuce and all of a thump and perhaps break his leg on a stick of cord-wood. The ladder by which he had climbed to the roof was on the other side of the building and he had no time to scramble in search of it.

While he hesitated the man beneath him scratched a match. Startled and flurried at sight of this imminent danger, O’Shea let his grip loosen for an instant and the law of gravity solved the problem for him. With a blood-curdling yell he slid over the brink, his fingers clawing wildly at the shingles and the wooden gutter. Head downward he plunged and by rights should have broken his neck. His own theory to explain his survival was that an Irishman always alights on his feet. The fact was that the incendiary stranger happened to be in a stooping posture and O’Shea’s head smote him squarely between the shoulders.

Both men rolled over and over like shot rabbits. There followed an interval during which the one took no thought of hostilities, and the other had no interest in flight. O’Shea sat up at length, grunted once or twice, and rubbed his head in a dazed manner. The pile of kindling had been scattered, but a fragment of newspaper was burning and he brought his heel down on it. His quarry now began to realize that his back was not broken and he showed signs of life. The pair sat glaring at each other, speechless, endeavoring to regain the wind that had been knocked out of them.

As tough as sole-leather was Captain O’Shea, and not to be put out of commission by so trifling a mishap as this. His head was spinning like a top and he felt sick and weak, but he had a job on hand and he meant to finish it. The revolver was missing from his pocket. It had been dislodged by his tumble and it was useless to grope for it in the darkness. By now the other man had found his feet and was moving unsteadily toward the end of the barn. O’Shea made for him and they clinched in a clump of burdocks.

Neither was in the best of condition to make a Homeric combat of it. To O’Shea’s dismay he discovered that he had caught a Tartar as collision-proof as himself. He tried to grip the fellow by the throat and to throw him with a heave and a twist, but a pair of arms as muscular as his own flailed him in the face and hammered his ribs. Then the brawny young shipmaster let fly with his fists and broke his knuckles against a jaw which seemed to be made of oak.

“If the both of us was ship-shape we would make a grand fight of it,” panted O’Shea with the shadow of a grin. “’Tis no time for etiquette and I will stretch him before he does the same for me.”

“Wait till I set my teeth in you,” growled his adversary, finding speech for the first time. “I’ll tear your windpipe out,” and he followed the horrid threat with a string of oaths that chilled O’Shea’s blood, although he had heard profanity over all the seven seas. The accents were so hoarse and savage as to be even more alarming than the words. The shipmaster ceased to regard the fight in the light of a diversion. He was convinced that he had a madman to deal with. Keeping clear, he turned and made for the wood-pile, a few yards distant. Groping for a moment, he was fortunate enough to catch up a four-foot length of hickory sapling, as handy a bludgeon as he could desire.

As if at bay, the other man made no effort to escape during this respite, but lunged after O’Shea, who wheeled in the nick of time and found room to swing his hickory club. It rose and fell only once. The madman toppled over and collapsed among the burdocks.

“He will stay there for a while,” said the weary O’Shea. “I caught him fair over the ear, and ’tis a safe bet that I put a dent in him.”

Thereupon he turned his lagging footsteps in the direction of the cottage. A lantern came bobbing out of the wood-shed door, and its light revealed the large presence of Johnny Kent simply clad in a flowing night-shirt and a pair of slippers. At discerning O’Shea advancing through the gloom, he shouted:

“Why didn’t you wake me up at eight bells? I just come to and turned out to look for you, Cap’n Mike. All quiet, I suppose?”

“Yes. I made it quiet, you sleepy old terrapin,” returned O’Shea with a laugh before they had come together. “Didn’t you hear me yell when I fell off the barn roof?”

“Nary a yell. I do sleep sounder than when I was at sea,” and Johnny Kent waddled nearer and held the lantern higher. “Gracious saints, what have you been doin’ to yourself? Your nose is all bloodied up and one eye is bunged. What do you mean by falling off my barn roof? You must have tapped that barrel of hard cider in the cellar.”

“I tapped a harder customer than that, Johnny. It was a gorgeous shindy while it lasted, but I had to wind it up. I caught your firebug and I laid him out in the barn-yard. Ye can hold a wake over him or send for the police.”

The engineer swung his lantern in excited circles as he pranced toward the barn, unmindful of the chilly breeze that played about his bare shanks.

“You’re not jokin’, are you, Cap’n Mike? The situation is too blamed serious for that. You landed him, honest? You’re the man to turn the trick. Where did you ketch him?”

“I got the drop on him, as ye might say, and it was a divil of a drop. My neck is an inch shorter than it was, but me collision bulkhead held fast. He is a broth of a boy, and he will be hard to hold when he comes out of the trance I put him in.”

“And I missed the fun,” mourned Johnny. “I’m surely getting old, Cap’n Mike. But I guess we can handle him without sending for the village constable to-night.”

“I have seen you tame some pretty tough tarriers. This is a bad one and no mistake. Fetch the lantern closer and we will look him over.”

They ploughed through the burdocks, the prickly burrs causing Johnny Kent to stride high and wide. The stranger lay as he had fallen. The light revealed him as a powerfully built man of middle age with reddish hair and a stubbled growth of beard. The dilapidated shirt and trousers were stained with earth and grass, and held together by a leather belt. His captors were about to scrutinize him more closely when he opened his eyes, groaned, and raised himself upon his elbow with an unexpected display of vitality. Bidding Johnny Kent stand by with the lantern, O’Shea caught up the hickory club and flourished it as a hint that unconditional surrender was advisable.

The prisoner blinked stupidly at the lantern and made no effort to rise. His aspect was not in the least ferocious. O’Shea could scarcely believe that this was the madman who had threatened to sink his teeth in him and discommode his windpipe. Rough-featured he was and unkempt beyond words, but he conveyed a most incongruous impression of kindly and harmless simplicity, and O’Shea was the more amazed to hear him mutter in his hoarse, curiously thickened accents:

“Can you spare a chew of tobacco, shipmate?”

“Well, I’ll be jiggered,” exclaimed Johnny Kent, absently feeling for his trousers’ pockets which were not there. “You certainly did tame him a whole lot, Cap’n Mike.”

“’Tis a riddle I cannot fathom at all,” was the reply.

Indignation got the upper hand of the engineer’s generous impulse and he explosively demanded of the stranger:

“What do you mean by tryin’ to set fire to my barn, you addle-headed, misbegotten, murderous son of a sculpin? I wish Cap’n Mike had knocked the block clean off you.”

The queer visitor showed no resentment, but smiled in an amiable sort of fashion and rubbed a large, red welt just above his right ear. Never a word did he say, although the twain plied him with questions. His demeanor was as friendly as if they had done him some signal service.

“If you can’t talk, maybe ye can walk,” gustily shouted O’Shea. “We will clap ye under hatches for to-night and investigate by daylight. We have caught an odd fish this time, Johnny.”

“Prod him into the wood-shed and lock him up,” grumbled the other. “He’s plumb twistified in his mental works, and I can’t make head or tail of him.”

At a beckoning gesture the prisoner meekly tried to get on his feet, but he had been shorn of his strength and he fell twice before O’Shea and Johnny Kent grasped him by the arms and steered him in the path that led to the cottage. He stumbled along like a drunken man and had to be half-dragged over the low step at the wood-shed door. Calling himself a soft-hearted old fool, the engineer bustled into the house and dragged forth a spare mattress. O’Shea obtained a lamp in the kitchen, also cold water and a towel to bathe the hurt that his hickory weapon had inflicted.

The red-haired man sat forlornly upon the mattress, leaning against the coal-bin, his hands clasped over his knees. He had the dumb, wistful look of a beaten dog, and his eyes, remarkably blue of color, followed Captain O’Shea with no ill-will, but like one who recognized his master. It was clear enough that he was to be dealt with as a man with a disordered mind, and it was unmanly to hold him accountable for his arson and violence. Attacked unawares in the darkness, there had been provocation for his bestial outbreak, and it was to be concluded that his usual mood was harmless, excepting a fatal fondness for playing with fire.

“I have a strong notion that he is a seafarin’ man,” said O’Shea, as he gave the captive a stiff drink of whiskey from the bottle kept in the hall cupboard. “Maybe this will buck him up and set his tongue going. That’s a sailor’s belt he has on, Johnny. And he has the look of it.”

The engineer had put his spectacles on his nose and was examining the litter of small objects he had fished out of the man’s pockets. One of them was like a leather thong thickened in the middle, and he cried excitedly:

“You’re right, Cap’n Mike. Here’s a sailor’s palm—a sea thimble, and the cuss has mended his clothes with it. See the patch on his shirt, and he has stitched the holes in his shoes with bits of tarred twine.”

“He called me shipmate when he asked for a chew, but many a landlubber uses the word and I did not lay much store by it.”

“It’s only twenty miles to the Maine coast,” said Johnny Kent, “and he may have wandered inland from one of the ports.”

“I have a hunch that he didn’t come out of a coasting schooner. The beggar has sailed deep water in his time. I wonder if he is hungry. Better introduce him to some grub. He is rounding to, but he has about as much conversation in him as an oyster.”

The engineer rummaged in the kitchen and brought out a plate of biscuits, cold bacon, potatoes, and pickles, which the red-haired man ate with an avidity that betokened starvation. The sight moved Johnny Kent almost to tears. The last spark of his animosity was quenched. There was no more awful fate than to be separated from three square meals per day.

“We’ll swab the dirt off him and shuck those ragged, rotten clothes before we batten him down for the night,” said Johnny. “I can’t leave a sailor in this fix, even if he is flighty in the main-top and has tried to smoke out the whole darn neighborhood.”

While he departed in search of a shift of raiment, Captain O’Shea removed the man’s shirt. At the first tug it tore and came away in his hands. The prisoner had remained sitting in the same posture, but now he moved and lazily stretched his length upon the mattress, lying on his stomach, his face pillowed against his arm. His hunger satisfied, the desire of sleep had overtaken him, and his heavy breathing told O’Shea that the extraordinary guest had carried his riddle to dreamland.

Johnny Kent had taken the lamp into the house, and the lantern which had been left standing on the floor cast a long, dusky shadow athwart the recumbent figure. The shipmaster stood looking down at the massive shoulders and knotted, hairy arms of the stranger when his attention was fixed by something which caused him to stare as though startled and fascinated and perplexed. The man’s broad back bore some kind of a design, an uncouth, sprawling pattern such as no artist in tattooing could ever have traced to please a sailor’s fancy.

It was a huge disfigurement composed of bold lines and angles which stood out in black projection against the white skin. Even in the dim light, Captain O’Shea could discern that these rude markings had been done with a purpose, that they composed themselves into a symbol of some sort. They looked as if they had been laid on with a brush, in broad, sweeping strokes which ran the width of the back, and all the way down to the waist. The man could not have made them himself. They were mysterious, sinister.

O’Shea was neither timid nor apt to be caught off his guard, but his pulse fluttered and his mouth felt dry. He was in the presence of something wholly beyond his ken, baffling his experience. This red-haired derelict, whose wits had forsaken him, brought a message hostile, alien, and remote. Presently O’Shea bethought himself of the lantern and made for it with nervous haste. Holding it close to the back of the sleeping man, he stared with horrified attention and pitying wrath that a human being should have been so maltreated.

The great symbol or design had been slashed in the flesh with strokes of a sword or knife. The edges of the scars stood out in rough ridges. Into the wounds had been rubbed India-ink or some like substance which the process of healing held indelibly fixed. The pattern thus made permanent and conspicuous was that of a character of the Chinese or Japanese language.

Johnny Kent came out of the kitchen and beckoned him. The engineer stood open-mouthed and gazed down at the tremendous ideograph that had been so brutally hacked in human flesh. O’Shea had nothing to say. What was there to say? The thing was there. It spoke for itself. What it meant was an enigma which neither man could in the smallest degree attempt to unravel. When Johnny Kent spoke it was only to voice the obvious fact or two that required no explanation.

“He was chopped and branded proper, wasn’t he, Cap’n Mike? And it was done for some devilish purpose. I’ve knocked about most of the ports in the Orient, but I never heard of anything like this.”

“They made a document of him, Johnny. ’Tis Chinese workmanship, I’m thinking. How could a man live through a thing like that? For the love of heaven, look at those scars! They are as wide as me thumb, and some of them are better than a foot long. And they stand out so black and wicked that it gives me the creeps.”

“It means something, Cap’n Mike. And it’s up to us to find the answer. One of them Chinese characters may tell a whole lot. Their heathen fashion of slingin’ a pen is more like drawin’ pictures. A few lines and a couple of wriggles all bunched up together and it tells the story.”

“And what is this story, Johnny? Answer me that.”

“You can search me. It’s almighty queer business to happen on my peaceful farm in the State o’ Maine.”

“Let the poor beggar rest here till morning and then we will consider him some more. I guess we don’t want to turn him over to the constable, Johnny.”

“Not till we try our hand at translatin’ him. I wish I had a Chinese dictionary. Say, Cap’n Mike, you’re as welcome as the flowers in spring, but as soon as you set foot on my farm things begin to happen. Trouble is a step-brother of yours. It’s like harborin’ a stormy petrel.”

“’Tis not fair to blackguard me,” laughed O’Shea. “You and your neighbors can sleep easy in your beds for I have caught the bogie-man.”

“I wish I knew what it is you’ve caught,” sighed the engineer.

O’Shea bent over the sleeping man in order to raise his head and slip underneath it a rolled blanket to serve as a pillow. His fingers chanced to detect on the top of the skull a curious depression or groove over which the red hair was rumpled in a sort of cow-lick. Examination convinced him that this was the result of some violent blow which had fairly dented the bony structure and pressed it down upon the brain.

“That is where he got it,” said O’Shea. “And ’tis what made a lunatic of him.”

“It looks like they tried to kill him with an axe but he was too tough for ’em, Cap’n Mike. No wonder that crack you gave him over the ear didn’t bother him much.”

“And whoever it was that put their mark on his back was the same party who caved in his lid or I’m a liar,” was the conclusion of Michael O’Shea.