"Come, Harbor Master," he said; "put your thumb mark in the corner along with the rest of us."
Rackby drew back. "Why should I dance?" he muttered.
He was town clerk as well as harbor master—a scholarly man with visionary, pale eyes, and a great solitary, as Peter knew.
"Why? I'll tell you why," said Peter. "To bring joy to Caddie Sill's heart, if nothing more. The girl would throw all the rest of us in a heap tomorrow for a firm hold of you, Rackby."
He winked at Zinie Shadd, who swayed on his heels soberly.
Rackby turned his eyes toward the black mound of Meteor, which lay like a shaggy stone Cerberus at the harbor's mouth.
The star-pointed harbor was quiet at his feet. Shadows in the water were deep and languid, betokening an early fall of rain through the still air. But from the rim of the sea, where the surf was seen only as a white glow waxing and waning, a constant drone was borne in to them—a thunder of the white horses' hoofs trampling on Pull-an'-be-Damned; the vindictive sound of seas falling down one after another on wasted rocks, on shifting sand bars—a powerful monotone seeming to increase in the ear with fuller attention. The contrast was marked between the heavy-lying peace of the inner harbor and that hungry reverberation from without of waters seeking fresh holds along a mutilated coast. On damp nights when the wind hauled to the southeast, men stood still in their tracks, and said, simply, "There's the Old Roke," as if it was the Old Man of the Sea himself. The sound was a living personality in their ears.—Women whom the sea had widowed shivered and rattled irons when the Old Roke came close to their windows; but the men listened, as if they had been called—each by his own name.
"What's the ringle jingle of feet by the side of that?" Rackby said, his mystified face turned toward the water. "I'm a man for slow tunes, Peter. No, no, no; put your paper up again."
"No? You're a denying sort of a crab, and no mistake. Always seeing how fast you can crawl backward out of pleasure."
"I mistrust women."