We listened on and on,—after the chilly night wind had come up from the sea, for we did not know of its coming until the music ceased and the light faded away from the parlour of the house behind us.
"Gee!" exclaimed Jake at last, spitting his mouthful of tobacco over into the water and wiping his eyes with his coat sleeve, "but that dope pulls a gink's socks off,—you bet.
"Guess, if a no-gooder like me had of heard that stuff oftener when he was a kid, he wouldn't be such a no-gooder;—eh! George."
I followed Jake to his boat and, somewhere out of the darkness, Mike the dog appeared and tailed off behind us.
I accompanied the old fellow to his shack, for this love of music in him was a new phase of his temperament to me and somehow my heart went out to him in his loneliness, in his apparent heart-hunger for something he could hardly hope to find.
We talked together for a long time, and as we talked I noticed that Jake made no effort to start his usual drinking bout, although Mike the dog reminded him of his neglect as plainly as dog could, by tugging at his trousers and going over to the whisky keg and whimpering.
This sudden temperance in Jake surprised me more than a little.
I noticed also that the brass-bound chest still lay under Jake's bunk. Several times I had been going to speak to him about that trunk and its contents, and the questionable security of a shack like his, but I had always evaded the subject at the last minute as being one in which I was not concerned.
But that night everything was different somehow.
"Look here, Jake," I said, in one of the quiet spells, "don't you think this old shack of yours isn't a very safe place to keep your money in?"