“Perhaps—some day,” she murmured.
THE END.
RUBY LIGHT.
By BURKE JENKINS.
CHAPTER I.
QUICK ACTION.
At a quarter to five in the afternoon, when the thing really began as far as I myself was concerned, I happened to be swinging my legs from the stringpiece of the town dock of Port Washington. How and why I had been sitting there some two hours, in a hot, summer sun, will develop in due course. Sufficient now to state that my frame of mind was one of general disgust at the world’s handling; this coupled to a dark-brown ennui.
Quite listlessly I had been running my eye over a trimlined launch of the “day-cruiser” type that was moored, bow and stern, to a float below me. For the most part, I love boats far more than people; so it must have been something out of the ordinary that made me shift my attention suddenly from the craft itself to the two men who manned it.
One, a clean-limbed, undersized man of about forty, much spattered with gilt braid and buttons, I sized up as the captain. He stood on the float alongside the diminutive wheelhouse, steadying the slight roll of the craft with his left hand, while his right constantly sought his watch in nervous consultation of the exact time.
“A precise and pompous bit of a fool!” I remember grunting to myself. But my gaze happened that instant to travel toward the other.