"Bless your soul, Sonny, you'd be of use if you didn't do more than let us old shell-backs look at you," and Captain Eph seated himself in the chair, rocking the lad as if he had been a baby. "You never can know how much good it has done us to have you here. If it wasn't for the sore heart I know your father has this minute, I'd thank God you got lost in the fog, an' pray that you might never find your way off this 'ere ledge so long as I lived."
"You're mighty good to me," Sidney said, at a loss for words.
"It's me who's gettin' all the good out of it," Captain Eph replied with a vain attempt to speak in a careless tone. "Say, you don't mind if I rock you here on my knee while there's nobody by to see us, do you, Sonny? You put me in mind of a little shaver who spent a good many hours in my lap an' it kind'er makes me feel better to put my arms around you."
"Mind it, of course I don't, except that I'm glad to have you hold me," Sidney cried, guessing something of that which was in the old man's heart, and laying his head on the keeper's shoulder.
The clock which regulated the flashing of the light ticked loudly; the boom of the surf against the black reef sounded like distant thunder; but Captain Eph heard nothing save the soft breathing of the lad after he fell asleep, and saw nothing save the face of the "little shaver" against which he pressed his lips from time to time, while his eyelids glistened in the lamp-light as if they had been wet with dew.
CHAPTER VI.
THE VOYAGE.
Mr. Peters was not mistaken as to the time when he would finish the task of repairing the motor boat, and at the dinner-table on the day after Captain Eph and Sidney had had such a narrow escape from being run down in the fog, he announced that his work was at an end.
"She's in as good a condition as I can ever put her, an' outside of a reg'lar ship carpenter, I'd like to see the man who would do a neater job. When she's had a coat of paint, it would puzzle a Quaker lawyer to make out to tell that she'd ever been stove."
"There's one thing I like about our Sammy," Uncle Zenas said in a confidential tone to Sidney. "He'll never be hung because of not blowin' his own horn loud enough, an' that's really the fact."