"Just in, Captain?" I cried, springing to my feet, my fingers closing round his—no more welcome visitor than Captain Bob ever pushes open my office door.
"Yes—Teutonic."
"Where did you pick her up—Fire Island?"
"No; 'bout hundred miles off Montauk."
Captain Bob has been a Sandy Hook pilot for some years back.
"How was the weather?" I had a chair ready for him now and was lifting the lid of my desk in search of a box of cigars.
"Pretty dirty. Nasty swell on, and so thick you could hack holes in it. Come pretty nigh missin' her"—and the Captain opened his big storm-coat, hooked his cloth cap with its ear-tabs on one prong of the back of one office-chair, stretched his length in another, and, bending forward, reached out his long, brawny arm for the cigar I was extending toward him.
I have described this sea-dog before—as a younger sea-dog—twenty years younger, in fact, he was in my employ then—he and his sloop Screamer. Every big foundation stone that Caleb set in Shark Ledge Light—the one off Keyport harbor—can tell you about them both.
In those light-house days this Captain Bob was "a tall, straight, blue-eyed young fellow of twenty-two, with a face like an open book—one of those perfectly simple, absolutely fearless, alert men found so often on the New England coast, with legs and arms of steel, body of hickory, and hands of whalebone; cabin boy at twelve, common sailor at sixteen, first mate at twenty, and full captain the year he voted."
He is precisely the same kind of man to-day, plus twenty years of experience. The figure is still the figure of his youth, the hickory a little better seasoned, perhaps, and the steel and whalebone a little harder, but they have lost none of their spring and vitality. The ratio of promotion has also been kept up. That he should now rank as the most expert pilot on the station was quite to be expected. He could have filled as well a commander's place on the bridge, had he chosen to work along those lines.