“Damn it, no Captains and Misters!” he cried once. “There, I didn’t mean—your grandfather’ll ship me off for swearing! But call me Tony. Let’s be chums.”
Chums, therefore, they became, though not without capitulation. The lighthouses first showed them certain differences.
“Do you mean,” cried the wanderer, as they stood, one evening, in the glare of the lamp-room, “do you mean to say you leave a warm bed twice every night to watch these two tame lightning-bugs? Let ’em burn, boy! Get your sleep. What the devil, they’ll not go out; or if they did, who’d know? Must be as many as one schooner a fortnight pass that ledge after dark. Ho, ho! You stay in bed!”
“But it’s our agreement,” Miles protested.
The sailor’s gray eyes twinkled.
“Roman sentinel, eh? That’s nonsense, boy. Take your beauty sleep. Let ’em burn.”
“Why, ’twouldn’t be honest,” said the young keeper, somewhat shocked.
“Honest?” jeered Florio. Then his tone changed. “Oh, well, no harm done. Strict ideas—I s’pose somebody’s bound to have ’em. Tough on you, all the same.”
The upshot of their argument was that with high good-nature Tony insisted on making the last rounds himself. “I’m used to night work. This is my pidgin. You go to bed.”
The volunteer was faithful. Often thereafter, waking by force of habit at midnight or three in the morning, Miles rose from his pillow to watch, for a luxurious instant, the sailor’s lantern bobbing along through underbrush far below. He dropped asleep with drowsy gratitude. Yet in spite of kindness and the ascendency of experience, his new friend left something unfinished, dubious, unexplained. To grandfather, the man was another commercial contract like the light-keeping, a fender against evil days, a presence courteously tolerated; to Ella—and, through her, perhaps, to the outer world—a “visitin’ gentleman,” friend of the late Captain Christopher; to Miles, a frank companion and—what?