"Had to be. The men were up and down the beach and the others was asleep in their bunks. Well, when I had 'em all together I run 'em up on the beach and in here to the Station, and when the light showed 'em up— Well, I tell ye, one of 'em—a nigger cook—was a sight! 'Bout seven feet high, and thick round as a flag-pole, and blacker'n that stove, and skeered so his teeth was a-chatterin'. They'd left their oyster schooner a-poundin' out on the bar and had tried to come ashore in their boat. Well, we got to work on 'em and got some dry clo'es on 'em, and——"
"Were you wet, too?" I again interrupted.
"Wet! Soppin'! I'd been under the boat feelin' 'round for 'em. Well, the King's Daughters had sent some clo'es down, and we looked over what we had, and I got a pair of high-up pants, and Jerry, who wears Number 12—Don't you, Jerry?" (Jerry nodded and puffed on)—"had an old pair of shoes, and we found a jacket, another high-up thing big 'nough to fit a boy, that come up to his shoulder-blades, and he put 'em on and then he set 'round here for a spell dryin' out, with his long black legs stickin' from out of his pants like handle-bars, and his hands, big as hams, pokin' out o' the sleeves o' his jacket. We got laughin' so we had to go out by ourselves in the kitchen and have it out; didn't want to hurt his feelin's, you know."
The Captain leaned back in his chair, laughed quietly to himself at the picture brought back to his mind, and continued, the men listening quietly, the smoke of their pipes drifting over the room.
"Next mornin' we got the four of 'em all ready to start off to the depot on their way back to Philadelphy—there warn't no use o' their stayin', their schooner was all up and down the beach, and there was oysters 'nough 'long the shore to last everybody a month. Well, when the feller got his rig on he looked himself all over, and then he said he would like to have a hat. 'Bout a week before Tom here [Tom nodded now, and smiled] had picked up on the beach one o' these high gray stovepipe hats with a black band on it, blowed overboard from some o' them yachts, maybe. Tom had it up on the mantel there dryin', and he said he didn't care, and I give it to the nigger and off he started, and we all went out on the back porch to see him move. Well, sir, when he went up 'long the dunes out here toward the village, steppin' like a crane in them high-up pants and jacket and them Number 12s of Jerry's and that hat of Tom's 'bout three sizes too small for him, I tell ye he was a show!"
Jerry and Saul chuckled, and Tom broke into a laugh—the first smile I had seen on Tom's face since he had finished telling me about the little baby at home.
I laughed too—outwardly to the men and inwardly to myself with a peculiar tightening of the throat, followed by a glow that radiated heat as it widened. My mind was not on the grotesque negro cook in the assorted clothes. All I saw was a man fighting the surf, groping around in the blackness of the night for four water-soaked, terrified men until he got them, as he said, "all together." That part of it had never appealed to the Captain, and never will. Pulling drowning men, single-handed, from a boiling surf, was about as easy as pulling gudgeons out of a babbling brook.
Saul now piped up: