“Why! Miss Winter, I never expected to meet you here.” The massive stranger, standing bareheaded in the sunshine, was as cordially shaking that proffered hand.
“It’s Captain Andy, my dears!” Miss Anne Winter beckoned to the two Deering girls, her relatives and special charges. “Olive! this is Captain Andrew Davis who saved your Cousin Marvin’s life, with that of several other young men—college chums—when they were wrecked, while yachting a couple of years ago, off the Newfoundland Coast. You remember?” flutteringly.
“Oh! yes, indeed.” Olive extended a gracious, girlish hand; she was conscious of a little creepy thrill at meeting a real live hero, especially one who carried the heroism done up in such massive bulk, but she had heard her Cousin Marvin—before the rescue—speak of this Captain Andy Davis as being a sea-captain in no grand, mercantile way, as commanding no big barque, but only what Marvin—likewise before the rescue—dubbed a smelly fish-kettle, otherwise a New England fishing-schooner, little over a hundred feet in length from stem to taffrail.
Heroism had its noble uses, of course, especially when one had been stranded for hours as Marvin and those other college boys were upon sharp, naked rocks, seeing their yacht broken to pieces by the mountainous swell of an old sea after a storm, death staring them in the face, with no hope of rescue, until Captain Andy and his gallant “fish-kettle” hove in sight and bore down upon them—until Captain Andy, with a volunteer from his crew, launched a dory and succeeded in saving their lives at the extreme risk of his own.
Olive remembered hearing Marvin say that he did not believe there was another mariner upon the Massachusetts coast who could have “pulled off that rescue” with the sea as it was then. She thrilled again, looking up into the keen blue eye under the heavy lid, into the face which had made Jessica think of sheltering flame. At the same time, she could not help seeing a gulf—a broad gulf with floating shapes of fishy decks, horny hands, scaly oilskins—intervene between her and her sister, daughters of the bi-millionaire owner of big machine works for the manufacture of textile machinery, and this limping weather-beaten master mariner.
Sybil did not even take the trouble to be as friendly as she was.
Meanwhile Cousin Anne, Miss Anne Winter, was introducing Captain Andy Davis in proper form to Arline and Sally, mentioning the fact that the grateful Marvin had taken her to visit him when last she was in Gloucester.
“Oh, I must have felt it in my fingers—or in my tongue—that I knew you, or ought to know you, or that somebody here knew you, or I never would have talked to you so freely!” declared Sally in an orange flutter.
“And how do you come to be in Clevedon just now?” questioned Miss Anne, interrogating the weather-beaten face.
“My artist sent for me.” That florid visage bloomed all over with a boyish smile that gleamed somewhat shamefacedly through the thick, fair eyelashes, not yet turned grey. “She said she hadn’t got my ground colors right—gee! I didn’t know I had any, except when my vessel was grounded in the mud. ‘Carnation colors’ she called ’em—jiminy!”