“You take it calmly enough. Do you realize what it means, man? You, who were such a magnificent man when you were whole and sound, do you know what it means?”
Martin regarded the doctor. “Do I know?” he gazed on his bandaged hands, and looked down on his poor stumps of feet. “God help me, ’tis well I know it. Ye’ll never fish again, Martin Carr; ye’ll never haul trawl or row dory again, nor stand to a wheel, nor reef a sail. The best part of your life’s gone. Ye’re such a creature, Martin Carr, as men throw pennies to in the street. But the last thing ye did in your full man’s life—maybe Jack Teevens will remember it when in another world he meets ye, that out of love of him ye stood by his boy—were a full dory-mate to him—and at the last gave him Christian burial.”
The Salving of the Bark Fuller
I
TO Captain Dixey, of the iron sea-going tug Ice King, lying tied up to her dock in Boston Harbor, came one winter’s morning a man in a fur coat and much bediamonded. “My name,” said the visitor, “is Wiley.”
“And wily is your nature,” thought Dixey, who, according to report, was not too unsophisticated himself.
“And I want to know what it will cost me for the services of your tug for one, two, three, or four days—a week, if necessary.”
“That will depend on the service.”