Why should a man in the thirties, ebullient and a rover, suddenly choose to vegetate? Grandfather had called him “Mercury Resting.” For all his cheerful enthusiasm, the sailor could care little about their northern valley, the sad, rugged beauty of their border. When Miles proposed a favorite tramp, he had replied: “Kilmarnock Brook? What’s to see there? Nothing but scenery.” Nor could books dull the edge of his restlessness. “No, thank you. Not much on reading,” he replied, when grandfather gave him the freedom of the meagre “library.” And later, out of doors, he explained to Miles: “Print’s nearly all lies. Now them, why, every day, right in the open air, you can meet live men that’ll tell you them—fresh lies, not old ones,—and act ’em out to boot. So why rack eyesight over print?” Meantime, he taught Miles to box, and with his aid rebuilt the kitchen chimney, pruned the deserted orchard, shored up the Admiral’s quarter-deck. Yet these employments could not last.
Again, he had said, “I’m alone in the world.” And yet after a tranquil month, he was plainly fretting about letters. He and Miles often traversed the river road, up hill and down, to the half-deserted village of Kilmarnock; and always on the final crest, the red granite ledge where, sudden as a night-hawk’s downward wheel, the freed vision of the climbers fell wide over a landward prospect, following toward the sunset alternate wedges of bright water and black crenelated headlands,—there, always, the sailor paused and sat down.
“I’ll smoke here,” he said. “Great view, eh? Land and water, land and water—in layers, like Ella’s chocolate pie o’ Sundays.” Then, nodding toward the slate-gray houses clustered far below in a meadow cove: “You go on down and ask. May be a letter, this time.”
Once, when Miles clambered up again, empty-handed as ever, the sailor sat musing.
“Can you keep a secret?” he asked, with a glance at once introverted and shrewd. “We’re mates, aren’t we? Right, then. You’re the sort a man can trust. If a stranger comes asking for me, or any foreign-looking man, you know, you keep your tongue at home, and come straight to me, first. I’ll tell you why, some day. Long story—”
He watched a slim pillar of smoke rising from a cottage chimney, out of evening shadow, to vanish in the breeze on their glowing height. Then he sprang up, and started briskly homeward.
“Sometimes, you know,” he said, when they had scrambled down hill for a furlong, “sometimes, at sea, a man makes enemies.”
