Captain Saulsby was sitting smoking in the sun down by the hedge. They talked for a little while of various things, Billy somehow feeling reluctant to say that this visit must be the last.
“Got your shore hat, I see,” the Captain observed finally. “That means the end of the season for sure and that you’re leaving us. How early next spring will you be coming back?”
Billy was a little surprised, and for the second time that day. Early in the morning he had walked through the woods to say good-bye to Sally Shute. She too had asked when he would come back, taking it cheerfully for granted that he would never fail to return soon.
“I’m not coming back next year,” he said now; “we’re going out to the Rockies to camp, my father and mother and I, and the year after—well, I hardly know where we’ll be then. We don’t often go to the same place twice. No, maybe I won’t ever be coming back.”
Captain Saulsby knocked the ashes out of his pipe and smiled slowly.
“You’ll be coming back,” he said; “there’s nobody can keep away always. You’ll think that the prairies, and the big mountains, and all the wonderful things in the West can satisfy you, but a time will come, perhaps all in a minute, when you’ll remember the shining blue of the water out there, and the sound of the surf on the beach, and the smell of wet seaweed when the tide goes down. A boy who’s been on the sea, and in it and near it and of it as you have been this summer, Billy Wentworth, can never get away from it again.”
“I’m not so sure,” said Billy; “of course I’ve liked it and all that but—”
“You can’t know yet,” his friend replied. “There was my garden here; for five years I thought I hated it, and now, since you drew my notice, I find I’ve learned to love it. And you’ll find you love all this—” he swept his arm in a wide gesture to include the rocky shore, the high, green hill of Appledore and the wide stretch of sunny sea—“yes, that you love it too well to stop away. Well, good-bye; I hope you’ll have a good passage, but I fear it’s going to be a rough one.”
It was true that, although the sun was shining, there were banks of clouds in the west and signs of coming stormy weather.
“Do you hear the island singing?” Captain Saulsby said. “That means wind for sure.” It was a strange thing about the rocks of Appledore that, when rising winds blew across them in a certain way, there was a queer, hollow, humming sound that the fisherman said was “Appledore Island calling.” Billy had heard it before; it made him vaguely unhappy and homesick now.