“You paid all it’s worth, but it does seem thick and warm, and I guess it will do you service. I will take a few stitches in it for you where a needle is wanted.”
“A pretty good looking set of surfmen when we get our new blouses on, neat and clean, you know, and then turn out for some drill at the station. The only trouble is that the coats look so much alike and are of about the same size.”
“Look alike!” thought Aunt Lydia. “Guess I will tuck a blue ‘W’ on somewhere.”
With her nimble needle, she “tucked” this blue initial inside one of the sleeves just above the wrist. The blouse lining was white. Without any reference to this, she handed Walter’s blouse back to him.
He wore this blouse, that night of the wind and snow.
“Glad I have got it,” he said, pushing out into the night. “It helps keep a fellow warm. Now for it!”
He crossed from the station lot to the beach, and was glad to find a strip of sand that the rising tide had not yet covered. “Boom—m—m—m!” went the waves in one unending roar. The wind was drowned in that chorus, and as it blew from the north–west and drove at his back, Walter cared little for its fury. When the tide forced him to walk upon the rocks, though their surface was so uneven and so slippery with the snow, he made steady progress and completed his beat in about the usual time, He turned to begin his homeward walk, and then the wind pounced upon him with all its fury.
“Now I have you!” it seemed to say. “I can drive into your face, blind your eyes with snow—there, take that!” A flurry of flakes came into his face, sharp, tingling, compelling him to turn and offer his back to the charge.
“I can go this way,” thought Walter. “Hard work though! What if I should see any trouble on the water and have to signal and start for the station?”
No sign of trouble did the young patrolman discover, no flash from any rocket. There was only one huge, roaring blackness! He stubbornly fought his way over the rocks, across any chance bit of sand, now splashing through the pools left in the ledges by the tide, struggling over an ice bank to high ground where a field skirted the shore and along whose edge he could walk and still have before him that ocean which he must continually watch and ever be prepared to fight. He was not far from the station, and was saying, “Well, I have whipped the wind this time,” when he remembered that he still had an ugly place to cross. It was an abrupt break in a shore ledge, and could be avoided by keeping to the right and taking the ground in the rear of the ledge. By making this detour, though, he lost sight of the sea, and in that interval, what if some vessel sent up from the water its plea for help—a vain appeal because no vigilant patrol detected the rocket’s flight?