“What’s the name of that queer light they carry around their necks?” asked Crullers. “It explodes, I think.”
“That’s the Coston light,” said the Captain. “I’ll show you some when we get inside the station. We don’t use them unless there’s a ship in danger at night. It’s to let the crew know they have been seen and help will be sent. There’s a spring you tap, and a percussion cap explodes that sets fire to the red light. Last spring, along the first of April, we got the tail end of a gale that had traveled all along the coast, and still had spunk enough to run a schooner on the reef yonder. We saw her beating her way down about sunset. Lumber boat she was, bound for Boston. I says then to Billy Clewen over at the Light that she’d never get by the Point. So we was looking out for her, but the crew were all Gloucester boys, and they wouldn’t give up till she’d struck fair and square.”
“Then what?” Polly’s dark, straight brows drew together anxiously. She looked out at the reef that showed its teeth about the incoming tide.
“We lost two of them,” said the Captain. “They was brothers, poor laddies. They came ashore two and a half miles below here. But we took off the rest.”
“Oh, I think it’s terrible, all the wrecks there are,” exclaimed Ruth, tensely. “Death seems so useless when it’s an accident.”
“Well, I’m thinking there ain’t anything that happens under the sun you can call useless,” rejoined the old sailor, placidly.
Polly began to sing, her voice rising clear and high on the breeze that blew up from the west, as the sun went down.
“Three fishers went sailing out into the west,
Out into the west as the sun went down,
Each thought on the woman who loved him the best,