The little fisherman had not known what elemental thing was in a kiss before. He bit his lip and fell back slowly. Then, after a second's vain reflection, he seized the butts of his oars, which had begun to knock together. Caddie Sills sank across a thwart and shivered a little to mark the crowding together of white horses at the very place where she had stood. Contrary currents caused the tide to horse in strongly over Pull-an'-be-Damned.
"What a ninny!" she whispered. "Was I sick with love, I wonder?"
The harbor master answered with the motion of his oars.
She glanced at him shrewdly, then struck her hands together at her breast, which she caused to rise and fall stormily. She was, in fact, a storm petrel in the guise of woman.
"You have saved my life," she cried out, "when not another man in all this world would have lifted so much as his little finger. Do what you will with me after this. Let me be your slave, your dog—. I am a lost woman if you will not take pity on me."
Rackby's heart came into his throat with the slow surge of a sculpin on a hook.
"Nothing—. Nothing at all. Nothing in the world. I happened along—. Just a happen so."
The girl stood up, looked at him long and long, cried, "Thank you for nothing, then, Mr. Happen-so," and from the humility of gratitude she went to the extreme of impudence, and laughed in his face—a ringing, brazen laugh, with the wild sweetness in it which he had noted in the song she sang on that November hillside.
"You're a caution, little man, you're a caution," she said, slanting her lashes. "You certainly are. I've heard of you. Yes, I have, only this morning. I'm a solitary like yourself. See here. You and I could set the world on fire if we joined hands. Do you know that?"
The little man was struck dumb at his oars for very fear of the boldness of her advance. He recognized this for an original and fearsome, not to say delectable, vein of talk. She came on like the sea itself, impetuous and all-embracing. Unfathomed, too. Could fancy itself construct a woman so, pat to his hand?