Polhemus gained his feet and the two men stepped to the sash and peered out. To them the sky was always an open book—each cloud a letter, each mass a paragraph, the whole a warning.
"But I'm kind o' glad, Isaac." Again the captain forgot the surfman in the friend. "As long as it's got to blow it might as well blow now and be over. I'd kind o' set my heart on Bart's comin', but I guess I've waited so long I kin wait a day or two more. I wrote him to come by train, but he wrote back he had a lot o' plunder and he'd better put it 'board the Polly; and, besides, he said he kind o' wanted to sail into the inlet like he used to when he was a boy. Then again, I couldn't meet him; not with this weather comin' on. No—take it all in all, I'm glad he ain't comin'."
"Well, I guess yer right, captain," answered uncle Isaac in an even tone, as he left the room to overhaul the cork jackets. The occasion was not one of absorbing interest to Isaac.
By the time the table was cleared and the kitchen once more in order not only were the windows on the sea side of the house roughly shaken by the rising gale, but the sand caught from the dunes was being whirled against their panes. The tide, too, egged on by the storm, had crept up the slope of the dunes, the spray drenching the grass-tufts.
At five o'clock the wind blew forty miles an hour at sundown it had increased to fifty; at eight o'clock it bowled along at sixty. Morgan, who had been to the village for supplies, reported that the tide was over the dock at Barnegat and that the roof of the big bathing-house at Beach Haven had been ripped off and landed on the piazza. He had had all he could do to keep his feet and his basket while crossing the marsh on his way back to the station. Then he added:
"There's a lot o' people there yit. That feller from Philadelphy who's mashed on Cobden's aunt was swellin' around in a potato-bug suit o' clothes as big as life." This last was given from behind his hand after he had glanced around the room and found that Archie was absent.
At eight o'clock, when Parks and Archie left the Station to begin their patrol, Parks was obliged to hold on to the rail of the porch to steady himself, and Archie, being less sure of his feet, was blown against the water-barrel before he could get his legs well under him. At the edge of the surf the two separated for their four hours' patrol, Archie breasting the gale on his way north, and Parks hurrying on, helped by the wind, to the south.
At ten o'clock Parks returned. He had made his first round, and had exchanged his brass check with the patrol at the next station. As he mounted the sand-dune he quickened his steps, hurried to the Station, opened the sitting-room door, found it empty, the men being in bed upstairs awaiting their turns, and then strode on to the captain's room, his sou'wester and tarpaulin drenched with spray and sand, his hip-boots leaving watery tracks along the clean floor.
"Wreck ashore at No. 14, sir!" Parks called out in a voice hoarse with fighting the wind.
The captain sprang from his cot—he was awake, his light still burning.