The world has gone on without them, and they are content to exist in solitudes where time is measured by years, rather than by achievement.
Sometimes the bitterness of a broken heart, or the story of thwarted hopes, will come to the surface out of the turbid memories which they carry. When their confidence is inspired by sympathetic association, they will often turn back some of the hidden pages in the stories of their lives, which are almost always of vivid interest.
Feeble flashes will then light up from among the dying embers. The story is not the one of success that the world loves to hear, but it is usually the melodies in the minor keys that touch our hearts. Many of the simple narratives, told under the roof of driftwood, before the rude scrap iron stove, are full of homely philosophy, subtle wit, and tragic interest.
“Old Sipes” was a grotesque character. He was apparently somewhere in the seventies. He had but one eye, his whiskers were scraggly, unequal in distribution, and uncertain as to direction. His old faded hat and short gray coat were quite the worse for wear, and a few patches on his trousers, put on with sail stitches, added a picturesque nautical quality to his attire.
He lived in a small driftwood hut, compactly built, about sixteen feet long, and perhaps ten feet wide. A rude bunk was built into one side of the single room, and another was placed about three feet above it.
He explained this arrangement of the bunks with quite a long story about a friend of his named Bill Saunders. It seems that he and Saunders had once been shipmates. They had been around the world together, and had cruised in many far-off waters. A howling gale and a lee shore had finally put an inglorious end to the old ship and most of the crew, and left Sipes and Bill on an unknown island in the South Pacific.
His stories of the man-eating sharks and other sea monsters which infested these waters, were hair-raising, and his descriptions of the wonderful natives whom they met, indicated that somewhere a race of people exists that the ethnologists have never found—and would be much astounded if they did. His accounts of man-apes and strange reptiles, olive-skinned beauties, and fierce war-like men nearly seven feet tall, would have made a modern marine novelist pale with envy.
No ship had ever sailed that was as stanch as the “Blue Porpoise,” and no winds had ever blown before like those that took away her proud sails and ripped the shrouds from her sides. No fish-poles had ever bent as her masts did when the ropes parted, and no waves had ever soared as high as those that broke in her faithful ribs, and cast the two shipmates high on the sands of that distant island.
After years of waiting for a friendly sail, Bill married into the royal family several times, and became a part of the kingdom. Sipes persistently resisted blandishment for nearly five years, when a small cloud of black smoke on the horizon gradually grew into a tramp steamer. A boat came ashore for fresh water, and our hero gladly became a member of the crew, leaving happy Bill in the land of luxury and promiscuous matrimony. After a long voyage he was put ashore at some gulf port and became a wanderer.
How he got into the sand hills he didn’t exactly know, but his idea was to keep as far as possible away from salt water. He had developed an antipathy for it, and felt that the lake would be quite sufficient for his future needs.