"No," he said with a bitter flippancy in his voice, "I don't amount to much. But, my God!" he laughed, and turning his head away, "when you think what I was! This doesn't seem much to you, and it doesn't seem much to me now that I have your point of view on it, but when I remember!" Clay stopped again and pressed his lips together and shook his head. His half-closed eyes, that seemed to be looking back into his past, lighted as they fell on King's white yacht, and he raised his arm and pointed to it with a wave of the hand. "When I was sixteen I was a sailor before the mast," he said, "the sort of sailor that King's crew out there wouldn't recognize in the same profession. I was of so little account that I've been knocked the length of the main deck at the end of the mate's fist, and left to lie bleeding in the scuppers for dead. I hadn't a thing to my name then but the clothes I wore, and I've had to go aloft in a hurricane and cling to a swinging rope with my bare toes and pull at a wet sheet until my finger-nails broke and started in their sockets; and I've been a cowboy, with no companions for six months of the year but eight thousand head of cattle and men as dumb and untamed as the steers themselves. I've sat in my saddle night after night, with nothing overhead but the stars, and no sound but the noise of the steers breathing in their sleep. The women I knew were Indian squaws, and the girls of the sailors' dance-houses and the gambling-hells of Sioux City and Abilene, and Callao and Port Said. That was what I was and those were my companions. Why!" he laughed, rising and striding across the boat-house with his hands locked behind him, "I've fought on the mud floor of a Mexican shack, with a naked knife in my hand, for my last dollar. I was as low and as desperate as that. And now—" Clay lifted his head and smiled. "Now," he said, in a lower voice and addressing Miss Langham with a return of his usual grave politeness, "I am able to sit beside you and talk to you. I have risen to that. I am quite content."
He paused and looked at Miss Langham uncertainly for a few moments as though in doubt as to whether she would understand him if he continued.
"And though it means nothing to you," he said, "and though as you say I am here as your father's employee, there are other places, perhaps, where I am better known. In Edinburgh or Berlin or Paris, if you were to ask the people of my own profession, they could tell you something of me. If I wished it, I could drop this active work tomorrow and continue as an adviser, as an expert, but I like the active part better. I like doing things myself. I don't say, 'I am a salaried servant of Mr. Langham's;' I put it differently. I say, 'There are five mountains of iron. You are to take them up and transport them from South America to North America, where they will be turned into railroads and ironclads.' That's my way of looking at it. It's better to bind a laurel to the plough than to call yourself hard names. It makes your work easier—almost noble. Cannot you see it that way, too?"
Before Miss Langham could answer, a deprecatory cough from one side of the open boat-house startled them, and turning they saw MacWilliams coming toward them. They had been so intent upon what Clay was saying that he had approached them over the soft sand of the beach without their knowing it. Miss Langham welcomed his arrival with evident pleasure.
"The launch is waiting for you at the end of the pier," MacWilliams said. Miss Langham rose and the three walked together down the length of the wharf, MacWilliams moving briskly in advance in order to enable them to continue the conversation he had interrupted, but they followed close behind him, as though neither of them were desirous of such an opportunity.
Hope and King had both come for Miss Langham, and while the latter was helping her to a place on the cushions, and repeating his regrets that the men were not coming also, Hope started the launch, with a brisk ringing of bells and a whirl of the wheel and a smile over her shoulder at the figures on the wharf.
"Why didn't you go?" said Clay; "you have no business at the Custom-House."
"Neither have you," said MacWilliams. "But I guess we both understand. There's no good pushing your luck too far."
"What do you mean by that—this time?"
"Why, what have we to do with all of this?" cried MacWilliams. "It's what I keep telling you every day. We're not in that class, and you're only making it harder for yourself when they've gone. I call it cruelty to animals myself, having women like that around. Up North, where everybody's white, you don't notice it so much, but down here—Lord!"