Day was breaking when the crew of the schooner, a full muster roll, were helped into the station. The weary surfmen gave their bunks to the rescued, and the black cook made strong coffee and corned-beef hash with incredible speed. Brainard fell on the floor like a dead man. But he could not sleep, for the night had been too crowded with racking events. His hurts and exhaustion were forgotten as the evening at the Coquina Beach Hotel came back to him, dimly at first, then focusing more sharply, as if he were recalling things far distant in time and place.
Amid this welter of impressions loomed the fact that magically the means had been provided for him to go back to his own, and more than this, to see her whose message had come as from the dead awakened. As if in a dream, he fumbled for his trousers pockets. Then it came to him that he had been forced to put on Jim Conklin's oilskin breeches while that comrade was half dragging him home from the wreck. He dully wondered why, until beneath the oil-skins he found a waistband and a few sodden rags, all that was left of his evening clothes. Pockets were gone, and with them——
"Five thousand dollars," he muttered in dazed, stupid fashion.
Just then a babbling chatter broke from the nearest cot. Brainard raised his head and saw a young man, no older than himself, sitting up and feebly swaying, his wits awry for the moment because of what he had suffered. The captain of the lost schooner wrung his hands and cried, while the tears were on his bruised face:
"No, no, I tell you, the Lucy B. was not insured.... I named her after you and she was a lucky vessel.... Cut away the rags o' that forestays'l, and we'll bend on somethin' that 'll hold.... We've got to heave her to, I tell you.... Five thousand dollars clean gone, all I've got and.... If we can fetch Tarpon Inlet before we founder, we can get inside.... The Lucy B. gone to pieces.... You're a liar.... Why, I just bought out old man Holter's share last voyage.... Five thousand dollars, all in the Lucy B.... All I've got and——"
Brainard was moved to pity, then amazement, that in this fashion he should be brought face to face with a tragedy so very like his own. But he glimpsed the fact, and was ashamed of it, that he would be stirred to deeper sympathy for the young skipper if there were no womanish wailing over his loss. And then, guilty and remorseful, Brainard realized that his own heart was full of sullen repining, bitter discontent with the fate that had robbed him of his treasure and his hopes, futile outcry against his forced return to the life of the station. He, then, was wholly lacking in that very fortitude which he wished to see displayed by this broken, fevered sailor in the cot, whose misfortune was, by far, the more crushing.
Brainard crawled stiffly outside to be alone. For some time he painfully overhauled his surging thoughts, and slowly there faded from his tired young face the clouding trouble that he had seen mirrored in the face of the boyish captain. Then he said aloud as if it were a verdict:
"A man who can't take his medicine is a pretty tough spectacle, isn't he? And it was all a dream, yes, all a dream—of money I didn't earn, and—and of a girl I can't marry."
He looked through the doorway, saw Jim Conklin slip over to the captain's cot and stroke the hot forehead, and heard him say:
"I know what it is, old man. I've been there myself."