Tom then shifted his pipe and careened his head my way, and with a tone in his voice that left a ring behind it which vibrated in me for days, and does now, said:
"I've been here for a good many years, and I guess I'll stay here long as the Guv'ment'll let me. Some people think we've got a soft snap, and some people think we ain't. 'Tis kind o' lonely, sometimes—then somethin' comes along and we even up; but it ain't that that hurts me really—it's bein' so much away from home."
Tom paused, rapped the bowl of his pipe on his heel to clear it, twisted his body so that he could lay the precious comfort on the window-sill behind him safe out of harm's way, and continued:
"Yes, bein' so much away from home. I've been a surf man, you know, goin' on thirteen years, and out o' that time I ain't been home but two year and a half runnin' the days solid, which they ain't. I live up in Naukashon village, and you know how close that is. Cap'n could 'a' showed you my house as you druv 'long through—it's just across the way from his'n."
I looked at Tom in surprise. I knew that the men did not go home but once in two weeks, and then only for a day, but I had not summed up the vacation as a whole. Tom shifted his tilted leg, settled himself firmer in his chair, and went on:
"I ain't askin' no favors, and I don't expect to git none. We got to watch things down here, and we dasn't be away when the weather's rough, and there ain't no other kind 'long this coast; but now and then somethin' hits ye and hurts ye, and ye don't forgit it. I got a little baby at home—seven weeks old now—hearty little feller—goin' to call him after the Cap'n," and he nodded toward the man scratching away with his pen. "I ain't had a look at that baby but three times since he was born, and last Sunday it come my turn and I went up to see the wife and him. My brother Bill lives with me. He lost his wife two year ago, and the baby she left didn't live more'n a week after she died, and so Bill, not havin' no children of his own, takes to mine—I got three."
Again Tom stopped, this time for a perceptible moment. I noticed a little quiver in his voice now.
"Well, when I got home it was 'bout one o'clock in the day. I been on patrol that mornin'—it was snowin' and thick. Wife had the baby up to the winder waitin' for me, and they all come out—Bill and my wife and my little Susie, she's five year old—and then we all went in and sat down, and I took the baby in my arms, and it looked at me kind o' skeered-like and cried; and Bill held out his hands and took the baby, and he stopped cryin' and laid kind o' contented in his arms, and my little Susie said, 'Pop, I guess baby thinks Uncle Bill's his father.' ... I—tell—you—that—hurt!"
As the last words dropped from Tom's lips two of the surfmen—Jerry Potter and Robert Saul, who had been breasting the north-east gale—pushed open the door of the sitting-room and peered in, looking like two of Nansen's men just off an ice-floe. Their legs were clear of snow this time, the two having brushed each other off with a broom on the porch outside. Jerry had been exchanging brass checks with the patrol of No. 14, three miles down the beach, and Saul had been setting his clock by a key, locked in an iron box bolted to a post two miles and a half away and within sight of the inlet. Tramping the beach beside a roaring surf in a north-east gale blowing fifty miles an hour, and in the teeth of a snow-storm each flake cutting like grit from a whirling grindstone, was to these men what the round of a city park is to a summer policeman.
Jerry peeled off his waterproofs from head, body, and legs; raked a pair of felt slippers from under a chair; stuck his stocking-feet into their comforting depths; tore a sliver of paper from the end of a worn-out journal, twisted it into a wisp, worked the door of the cast-iron stove loose with his marlin-spike of a finger, held the wisp to the blaze, lighted his pipe carefully and methodically; tilted a chair back, and settling his great frame comfortably between its arms, started in to smoke. Saul duplicated his movements to the minutest detail, with the single omission of those connected with the pipe. Saul did not smoke.