“‘A good line,’” he repeated to himself. “Pshaw! I wonder if that flock of girls will think so--those who are coming up the river this afternoon, from that distant beach, to see the launching? At least, Olive said so in her note. Will leading a blind horse which ‘tugged himself blind’ carrying the hook and ladder to city fires--straining harder than he was driven, as if he knew there were lives in danger--will that seem a good line to them? Oh, they’ll gush over him, of course!... Ha! Here comes another visitor! ‘Never rains but it pours!’” truculently.
Carefully--indeed, tenderly--guiding Tim, duty’s blind hero, he had reached that part of the lumber-littered shipyard where the ponderous beveled “frame,” or yellow ship’s rib which the horse was hauling, would be set up, hoisted by a rude derrick worked by man-power, until it was in line with sixty-odd of those square frames already branching outward and upward from the keel of a skeleton vessel propped high upon the building-stocks.
“Hum-m! ‘Some’ visitor he seems to be! They’re dropping auger, mallet, and saw to shake hands with him--the ship-carpenters!”
Curiously enough, young Atwood, leaning against his equine hero--a sturdy, boyish figure, light-haired, ruddy-skinned, as Captain Andy had described him, in smeared khaki trousers, a white duck shirt, a duck hat on the back of his head--wanted to do the same, while he waited for the rib to be set up.
But the visitor did not look at him. He exchanged a few greetings, hearty, but rather heavy-hearted. In his eye there was a brooding sense of loss, but a very slight birth-mark beneath it burned like fire--a flaming star that could not be extinguished.
It magnetized Atwood’s gaze, that star; he kept glancing curiously up at it--it looked so indomitable, burning upon the tall cheek-bone of a bronzed man who must have measured six feet one even from the red horizon-line across his tanned forehead to the highly polished toe of his tan shoe which burrowed speculatively into the matted shavings of the shipyard.
“I’ve come to see what vessels you’ve got on the stocks, that’ll be ready for launching pretty soon,” he said, addressing the foreman, within hearing of Atwood, Blind Tim--who pricked his ears at the lusty voice--and an interested circle of workmen.
“What! You’re not thinking of going out again--so soon, Captain Bob? Why! It’s only two weeks since--since that dandy schooner we built for you a year ago was sunk by a submarine.” The master shipwright gasped. “Named after your two little boys she was, wasn’t she? Sufferin’ catfish! that did make me feel bad; I’m the boy who--built--her.”
Captain Bob’s tall lip-line quivered, then tightened--flamed like the birth-star.
“Yes, they sank my savings with her,” he admitted. “All I had was in that vessel! An eight-thousand-dollar fare o’ fish, too, that we had faced dirty weather to get! ’Twill come heavier on the crew, though, mostly married men with families who’ll lose their share, four hundred dollars each, from the trip. Gosh!”