She gave him her hand, and he took it within his own, enveloping its pale slenderness in his rope-roughened palm. He held it just long enough to make her raise her eyes and meet his; then he released her, and, avoiding the anti-climax of a further talk with the missioner, passed out of the hall to the dark and sparsely peopled street.
At a small saloon whose lights spilled themselves across his path, he got himself a glass of beer; he was feeling just such a thirst as a man knows after nervous and exacting labor. The blond, white-jacketed barman glanced at him curiously, marking perhaps something distraught and rapt in his demeanor. Goodwin, ignoring him, took his beer and leaned an elbow on the bar, looking round the place.
A couple of Germans were playing a game at a table near the door. A man in the dumb-solemn stage of drunkenness stood regarding his empty glass with owlish fixity. It was all consistent with a certain manner and degree of life; it was commonplace, established in the order of things. In the same order were the dreary street without, and the Etna, loading at her wharf for the return voyage to San Francisco. Their boundaries were the limits of lives; one had but to cross them, to adventure beyond them, and all the world was different. A dozen steps had taken him from the sidewalk into the mission hall and the soft-glowing wonder of the girl; another dozen steps had replaced him on the sidewalk. It almost seemed as if a man might choose what world he would live in.
"Feelin' bad?" queried the barman softly; he could no longer contain his curiosity.
"Me!" exclaimed Goodwin. "No!"
"Well," said the barman apologetically Goodwin was a big and dangerous-looking young man "you're lookin' mighty queer, anyway." And he proceeded to wipe the bar industriously.
The Etna had left San Francisco with a crew of fourteen men before the mast, of whom twelve had been "Dutchmen." On her arrival in New York, these twelve had deserted forthwith, forfeiting the pay due to them rather than face the return voyage under the Etna's officers. There remained in her forecastle now only Goodwin and one other, an old seaman named Noble, a veteran who had followed the sea and shared the uncertain fate of ships since the days of single topsails.
Noble was seated on his battered chest when Goodwin unhooked the fo'c'sle door and entered. A globe-lamp that hung above him shed its light upon his silver head as he bent over his work of patching a pair of dungaree overalls, and he looked up in mild welcome of the other's return. His placidity, his venerable and friendly aspect, gave somehow to the bare forecastle, with its vacant bunks like empty coffin-shelves in a vault, an air of domesticity, the comfortable quality of a home. Save for brief intervals between voyages, in sailors' boarding-houses, such places had been "home" to Noble for fifty years.
Goodwin rehooked the door, and stood outside the globe-lamp's circle of dull light while he took off his coat. Old Noble, sail needle between his fingers, looked up from his work amiably.
"Well?" he queried. "Been havin' a hell of a good time uptown, eh?"