On still, cool days the smoke ascended softly from Cal’s shanty, and my sketching was often neglected for an hour or two with its interesting occupant.
He sometimes prowled around through the country back of the dunes at night, and the necessaries for his rude housekeeping were collected gradually. His age was difficult to guess; perhaps he looked older than he was. His lustreless eyes, weather-beaten face, grizzled unkempt beard, and rough hands, carried the story of a struggle on the raw edges of life.
While he said that he had “been up ag’inst it,” he seemed now comparatively contented. His interests were few, but they filled his days, and, as he expressed it, he “didn’t need nothin’ to think about nights.” Sipes claimed, however, that “Cal done all ’s thinkin’ at night, if ’e done any, fer ’e don’t never do none in the daytime.”
Sipes and Cal met occasionally. With the exception of a few serious misunderstandings, which were always eventually patched up, they got along very well with each other. Sipes’s attitude, while generally friendly, was not very charitable. He was disposed to comment caustically upon the many flaws he found in Cal, who, he believed, was destined for a hot hereafter. It is only fair to Cal to say that Sipes did not know of anybody in the dune country who would not have a hot hereafter, except his friend “Catfish John,” and his old shipmate, Bill Saunders, who lived with him, and with whom, in early life, he had sailed many stormy seas. He transacted his fish business with John, and was very fond of him. He once remarked that, “Old John don’t never wash, an’ ’e smells pretty fishy, but you bet ’e treats me all right, an’ wot’s the difference? I c’n always stay to wind’ard if I want to.”
Mrs. Elvirey Smetters lived over in the back country, on the road that led from the sleepy village to the marshy strip, and through it over into the dunes, where it was finally lost in the sand. It was a township line road and was seldom used for traffic. Travellers on it usually walked. The house, which had once been painted white, with green blinds, was rather shabby. Two tall evergreens stood in the front yard. In the carefully kept flower-beds along the fence the geraniums, cockscombs, marigolds, and verbenas bloomed gorgeously. They were constantly refreshed from the wooden pump near the back door. A smooth path led from the front gate, flanked with a luxurious growth of myrtle.
I pulled the brown bell handle one morning with a view of buying one of the young ducks which were waddling and quacking about the yard. I was going over to visit my old friend Sipes and intended it as a present for his Sunday dinner.
Mrs. Smetters, whom I had often met, opened the door. She wiped her face with her apron, and was profuse with her apologies for the appearance of everything. She explained at length the various causes that had brought about the disorderly conditions, which I must know would be different if so and so, and so and so, and so and so.
She was tall, muscular, of many angles, red-headed, and freckled. The pupils of the piercing eyes behind the brass-rimmed spectacles had a reddish tinge, and her square, protruding chin suggested anything but domestic docility. It was such a chin that took Napoleon over the Alps, and Cæsar into Gaul.
She had buried three husbands. They were resting, as Sipes said, “fer the fust time in their lives,” in the church-yard beyond the village, where flowers from the little garden were often laid upon the mounds.
A village gossip had said that Mrs. Smetters would sometimes return to the mounds, after she had left them, and transfer a bunch of geraniums from one to another, and once, she had cleaned off two of them and piled all of the offerings over the one near the tree. Sometimes the others would have all of the geraniums. The gossips could see these things, but they could not look into the secret chambers of Elvirey Smetters’s heart.