When the meal was over the captain filled his pipe and began to tell them stories. He had had a wide career on the sea, and had visited many lands on many ships, so they enjoyed his stories immensely. Stories of storms and staunch old sailing ships, of mutiny on the high seas and the people of the southern seas, of the great old shipping days in Boston, and many others. The boys listened attentively and with respect to their friend as he told it all in his own, vivid way.
It was Don who first interrupted. He had been looking off across the sea and now he said, “I beg your pardon, Captain Blow, but wasn’t your friend to burn a red light if he needed you for anything?”
“Eh?” said the captain, coming abruptly out of a story. “Yes, he was. Why?”
“Because,” answered Don, pointing across the tumbling black waters, “there is some kind of a red light burning from a window in the lighthouse right now!”
13. The Red Lamp
The captain jumped to his feet with a startled exclamation and looked in the direction of the lighthouse. Sure enough, a red light was burning high up in a window near the top.
“Well, I’ll be darned!” the captain exclaimed. “It’s the light, sure enough. Let’s get over there and find out what is wrong.”
Leaving everything just as it was on the sand the boys and the captain ran down the beach until they came to the shack and there they piled in the dory. The captain started the engine and headed out to sea toward the south shore and the lighthouse.
“This Timothy is a pretty queer sort of a fellow,” Captain Blow explained, as the dory cut her way into the bobbing waves. “I think so much solitude in that lighthouse has been too much for him. Like as not we’ll find that it is nothing at all. I told him more than once that he ought to get over being so sort of nervous, but he just keeps on his merry way. ’Taint very merry, though. Timothy is just the opposite of merry, but he is a good lighthouse keeper.”
It took them more than a half hour to arrive at the black spur of rock which ran abruptly out into the water and which was named Needle Point. When they got there the captain ran his boat alongside the dock and tied it up securely. The beacon itself stood about a hundred yards away from the dock.