It was not a picture done in gigantic terms. It was not a climax. Greater winds have blown; greater seas have come tumbling in on the black rocks of Out-of-the-Way. The point is this, Cobden says, that the wind was rising, the sea working up, the ice running in, the fog spreading, thickening, obscuring the way to harbor. The imagination of the beholder was subtly stimulated to conceive the ultimate worst of that which might impend, which is the climax of fear.
Cobden turned to Skipper Tom.
"What does Terry Lute call it?" he asked.
"Nothin'."
"H-m-m!" Cobden deliberated. "It must bear a name. A great picture done by a great hand. It must bear a name."
"Terry calls it jus' 'My Picture.'"
"Let it be called 'The Fang,'" said Cobden.
"A very good name, ecod!" cried Skipper Tom. "'Tis a picture meant t' scare the beholder."
Terry Lute was not quite shamelessly given to the practice of "wieldin' a pencil" until he discovered that he could make folk laugh. After that he was an abandoned soul, with a naughty strut on the roads. For folk laughed with flattering amazement, and they clapped Terry Lute on his broad little back, and much to his delight they called him a limb o' the devil, and they spread his fame and his sketches from Out-of-the-Way and Twillingate Long Point to Cape Norman and the harbors of the Labrador. Caricatures, of course, engaged him—the parson, the schoolmaster, Bloody Bill Bull, and the crusty old shopkeeper. And had a man an enemy, Terry Lute, at the price of a clap on the back and an admiring wink, would provide him with a sketch which was like an arrow in his hand. The wink of admiration must be above suspicion, however, else Terry's cleverness might take another direction.
By these saucy sketches, Terry Lute was at one period involved in gravest trouble; the schoolmaster, good doctor of the wayward, thrashed him for a rogue; and from a prophetic pulpit the parson, anxious shepherd, came as near to promising him a part in perdition as honest conviction could bring him to speak. Terry Lute was startled. In the weakness of contrition he was moved to promise that he would draw their faces no more, and thereafter he confined his shafts of humor to their backs; but as most men are vulnerable to ridicule from behind, and as the schoolmaster had bandy legs and the parson meek feet and pious shoulders, Terry Lute's pencil was more diligently, and far more successfully, employed than ever. The illicit exercise, the slyer art, and the larger triumph, filled him with chuckles and winks.