He flung a word to Heppy, and she ran out and helped him launch the dory.
"You have a care, Tobias," she cried after him as he settled the oars between the thole-pins. "Remember you ain't so young as you used to be."
"Oh, sugar!" he returned, "I ain't likely to forget it as long as your tongue can wag, Heppy."
The heaving gray waves roared over the rocks in great bursts of foam. The tiny, sheltered bight between the reefs had offered a more or less quiet launching for the dory, but the lightkeeper was soon in the midst of flying spume, his craft tossed and buffeted by the broken water that eddied off the points of the reef.
He drove clear of this in a few moments and pushed out to sea. Rising on a "seventh wave"—a particularly big one—Tobias glanced over his shoulder. The wallowing motor-boat was still right side up. There seemed to be but one person in it. The pennant whipped from the short staff in the stern where the figure of the man was likewise to be distinguished.
"She's broken down complete," muttered the old lightkeeper, "and he's keeping her head to it with an oar."
He settled himself for the long and arduous pull before him. In his youth he had many times managed a dory—sometimes laden with fish from the trawl-lines—in a worse sea than this. Tough in fibre as the ash oar he drove, was Tobias Bassett. He did not overlook the possible peril in this trip to the unmanageable motor-boat, but he had taken just such chances often and again.
Spoondrift, dashed from the caps of the waves, drenched him. When he turned his head now and again to make sure of his course, this spray spat viciously in his face. Little whirlwinds swooped down upon the sea and turned certain areas of it into boiling cauldrons of yellow foam.
"Looks like a caliker cat in a fit," was Tobias's comment on one occasion.
But these squalls were for the most part ignored by the lightkeeper. They were unpleasant visitations, but he knew the dory could weather them.