[By and by he caught an answering call]

[After a long look I saw that he did not resume his narrative. By that I knew that the stranger was troubling him]

[There she was, the Dancing Bess, holding a taut bowline to the eastward. And there were the two frigates, but they might as well have been chasing a star]

["Don't call me a mutineer, captain—I've disobeyed no order"]

[He said he hoped they'd meet again next day and bowed himself out]

[pg 1]

The Wrecker

Sometimes the notion comes to me while I'm talkin' to people that maybe I don't make myself clear, and it's been so for some time now—the things I see in my mind fadin' away from me at times, like ships in a fog. And that's strange enough, too, if what people tell me so often is true—that it used to be so one time that the office clerks would correct their account-books by what I told 'em out of my head. But sometimes—not often—things come back to me, like to-day—maybe because 'tis a winter day and a gale o' wind drivin' the sea afore it in the bay below there. Things come to me then—like pictures—wind and sea and fog and the wrecks on a lee shore.