“Would you rather be on shore?”
“Well, if I didn’t have to work so hard.”
“You like one, then, as well as the other?”
“Well, on shore the hours are longer, but you get your evenings and Sundays. Out here there ain’t any hour your own, but there’s plenty days when there’s nothin’ doin’. Some days there ain’t no wind. Sometimes we cruise right ahead without touchin’ the sails. Still, it’s hard, ’cause you can’t see nobody.”
“What would you do if you were on shore?”
“Oh, go to the show.”
It developed that his heart yearned for “nights off.” The little, bright-windowed main street in New Brighton was to his vision a kind of earthly heaven. To be there of an evening when people were passing, to loaf on the corner and see the bright-eyed girls go by, to be in the village hubbub, was to him the epitome of living. The great, silent, suggestive sea meant nothing to him.
After a while he went below and tumbled in and McLaughlin, the boatman, took the turn. In the cabin most of the pilots had gone to bed. Yet the two old salts were still at pinochle, browbeating each other, but in a subdued tone. All pipes were out. Snores were numerous and long.
At dawn the pilot whose turn it was to guide the next steamer into New York took the wheel. We sailed out into the east and the morning, looking for prey. It came soon, in the shape of a steamer.
“Steamer!” called the pilot, and all the other pilots turned out and came on deck. The sea to the eastward, whither they were looking, was utterly bare of craft. Not a sail, not a wisp of smoke! Yet they saw something and tacked ship so as to swing round and sail toward it. Not even the telescope revealed it to my untrained eyes until five minutes had gone by, when afar off a speck appeared above the waters. It came on larger and larger, until it assumed the proportions of a toy.