"I'm at home here, that's a fact," said Jethro. "I know the tides and the buoys. I can find my way in the dark, where another man would be at a total loss. I'm never suffering for landmarks."
"Landmarks!" roared Deep-water Peter. "What's a landmark good for but to take a new departure?"
To the sea-goers, tilted on a bench in the shadow of the Customs House, he added, "What life must be without a touch of lady fever is more than I can tell."
A red-bearded viking at the end of the bench rose and took Peter's shoulders in a fearful grip.
"What's all this talk of lady fever?"
"Let be, Cap'n Dreed!" cried Peter. His boisterousness failed him like wind going out of a sail. He twisted out of the big seaman's grip and from a distance shouted, "If you weren't so cussed bashful, you might have had something more than a libel pinned to your mainmast by now, with all this time in port."
There was a general shifting along the bench, to make room for possible fray. It was a sore point with Sam Dreed that the ship chandler had that day effected a lien for labor on his ship, and the libel was nailed to the mast.
"Now they'll scandalize each other," murmured Zinie Shadd.
They were turned from that purpose only by the sudden passing at their backs of the woman in question, Caddie Sills.
Quiet reigned. The older men crossed their legs, sat far down on their spines, and narrowed their eyes. The brick wall of the Customs House, held from collapsing by a row of rusty iron stars, seemed to bulge more than its wont for the moment—its upper window, a ship's deadlight, round and expressionless as the eye of a codfish.