“Beware! Beware! Beware! In the earth have ye found damnation!”
“There ’e is!” yelled Sipes, as he leaped across the floor for his scatter-gun. He ran out with it and was gone for some time. He returned with an expression of disgust on his weather-beaten face. “I’ll wing that cuss some night ’fore the snow falls,” he remarked, as he resumed his seat. “We’d better soak up all this booze tonight fer it won’t be safe in any o’ the ground ’round ’ere any more. Gosh! but this is a fine country to live in!”
The party broke up quite late. Happy Cal had imbibed rather freely. Catfish John had been more temperate, and thought he had “better go ’long with Cal,” and it seemed better that he should. As they went away I could hear Cal entertaining John with snatches of some old air about “wine, women, an’ song.” They stopped a while at the margin of the lake, where the wet sand made the walking better, and Cal affectionately assured John of his eternal devotion. They then disappeared.
I bade Sipes and his old shipmate good-night, and left them alone with the demon in the jug. There was very little chance of any of it ever falling into the hands of “the scourge,” who was evidently lurking in the vicinity.
The glory of the full moon over the lake caused Sipes to remark that “ev’rythin’s full tonight,” as he followed me out to bid me another good-by. After I left I could hear noisy vocalism in the shanty. The words, which were sung over and over, were:
“Comrades, comrades, ever since we was boys,—
Sharing each other’s sorrows, sharing each other’s joys.”
After each repetition there would be boisterous, rhythmic pounding of heavy boots on the wooden floor.
While the song was in many keys, and was technically open to much criticism, it was evidently sincere. The old shipmates were happy, and, after all, besides happiness, how much is there in the world really worth striving for?
I walked along the beach for a couple of miles to my temporary quarters in the dunes, and the stirring events of the evening furnished much food for reflection. I was interested in the advent of Bill Saunders, concerning whom I had heard so much from Sipes. Bill was a good deal of a mystery. He had “showed up” a few days before in response to a letter which Sipes told me he had “put in pustoffice fer ’im.” He may at some time have lived on the “unknown island in the South Pacific” that Sipes told me about, where he and Bill had been wrecked, and Bill had “married into the royal family several times,” but evidently he had deserted his black and tan household. For at least two years he had been living over on the river. Sipes explained that he stayed there “so as to be unbeknown.” For some reason which I did not learn, he and Sipes considered it advisable for him to “keep dark” for a while. The trouble, whatever it was, had evidently blown over, and Bill had returned to the sand-hills.
There was a rudely painted sign on the shanty a few days later, which read: