SIMPLE FOLK
SIMPLE FOLK
A long reach of coast country, white and smooth, broken by undulating fences smothered in snowdrifts, only their stakes and bush-tops showing; farther away, horizontal markings of black pines; still farther away, a line of ragged dunes bearded with yellow grass bordering a beach flecked with scurries of foam—mouthings of a surf twisting as if in pain; beyond this a wide sea, greenish gray, gray and gray-blue, slashed here and there with white-caps pricked by wind rapiers; beyond this again, out into space, a leaden sky flat as paint and as monotonous.
Nearer by, so close that I could see their movements from the car window, spatterings of crows, and higher up circling specks of gulls glinting or darkening as their breasts or backs caught the light. These crows and gulls were the only things alive in the wintry waste.
No, one thing more—two, in fact: as I came nearer the depot, a horse tethered to the section of the undulating fence, a rough-coated, wind-blown, shackly beast; the kind the great Schreyer always painted shivering with cold outside a stable door (and in the snow, too), and a man: Please remember, A MAN! And please continue to remember it to the end of this story.
Thirty-one years in the service he—this keeper of the Naukashon Life-Saving Station—twenty-five at this same post. Six feet and an inch, tough as a sapling and as straight; long-armed, long-legged, broad-shouldered and big-boned; face brown and tanned as skirt leather; eye like a hawk's; mouth but a healed scar, so firm is it; low-voiced, simple-minded and genuine.
If you ask him what he has done in all these thirty-one years of service he will tell you:
"Oh, I kind o' forget; the Superintendent gets reports. You see, some months we're not busy, and then ag'in we ain't had no wrecks for considerable time."