“Never you mind; you put on yer trowsies an’ come on out ’ere an’ see wot our ol’ friend an’ feller-citizen ’as fetched in.”
Without following Sipes’s instructions implicitly, the disturbed occupant of the shanty came out to the wagon.
“This ’ere little book wot the feller gave me,” continued John, “has got it all in, with pitchers of all the little things in the machine, an’ how to grease it, an’ run it, an’ ev’rythin’ about it. Thar’s a lot o’ figgers in it wot tells wot ye pay fer all the things that gits busted.”
On the cover of the worn book, which the old man produced, was a highly colored picture of a slender youth, gay and debonair, with one of the machines in a canvas carrying bag. He swung it lightly and merrily in his hand as he tripped along toward his boat, which floated in the distance, where soft ripples laved its polished sides with pink water. His derby hat was tilted to a careless angle. On his face was a smile of joyful anticipation. There was no more suggestion of exertion than if the bag contained toy balloons instead of a motor. Nevertheless it required the united efforts of the three weather-buffeted old fishermen to get the machine out of the wagon on to the beach. Such is the contrast between exuberant youth and seasoned maturity.
“I bet that feller with the hard-boiled hat ain’t got the machine in that bag at all,” remarked Saunders, as he studied the scene on the cover. “They’s prob’ly some fellers follerin’ ’im with it that don’t show in the pitcher. I don’t like that cigarette moustache on ’im; I’ll bet ’e knows durned little ’bout navigation ’ceptin’ with crackers on soup. You leave this thing ’ere an’ me an’ Sipes’ll try ’er out, an’ if it works, we’ll keep ’er. Anyhow we’ll make up the fish yer out an’ you won’t lose nothin’.”
The fish for John’s peddling trip were carefully sorted out and recorded by Sipes, with a stubby pencil, on the inside of the shanty door where the accounts were kept. The nets had been lifted in the early morning and the supply was abundant. When John had sold the fish the proceeds were to be divided equally.
After John and his aged horse “Napoleon” had left with the slimy merchandise, the old shipmates sat down and considered the apparatus.
To this primitive coast, torn by the storms and yellowed by the suns of thousands of years, where elemental forces had ruled since the beginning, had come a strange and misfitting thing. It seemed an unhallowed and discordant intrusion into the Great Harmonies. Somehow we can, in a measure, be reconciled, poetically, to the use of steam, without great violence to our worship of the grandeur of nature’s forces, but there is no poetry in a gasoline engine. It is a fiend that wars upon things spiritual. Its dissonant soul-offending clatter on the rivers that flow gently through venerable woods, and out in the solitudes of wide and quiet waters is profanation.
Utilitarianism and ideality clashed when the motor touched the beach, but these things did not disturb Sipes and Saunders, engaged in the contemplation of the machine, as bewildered savages might gaze upon a fragment of a meteor that had dropped out of the sky from another world.
After a while they lugged it to the shanty. “I could ’a’ carried it alone if I’d ’a’ had one o’ them darby hats on!” declared Sipes.