f his picture, in the
last example of his work, "The Fang."

At any rate, it must be added that after his conversion Terry Lute was
a very good boy for a time.

* * * * *

Terry Lute was in his fourteenth year when he worked on "The Fang."
Skipper Tom did not observe the damnable disintegration that occurred,
nor was Terry Lute himself at all aware of it. But the process went
on, and the issue, a sudden disclosure when it came, was inevitable in
the case of Terry Lute. When the northeasterly gales came down with
fog, Terry Lute sat on the slimy, wave-lapped ledge overhanging the
swirl of water, and watched the spent breaker, streaked with current
and flecked with fragments; and he watched, too, the cowering ledge
beyond, and the great wave from the sea's restlessness as it thundered
into froth and swept on, and the cliff in the mist, and the approach
of the offshore ice, and the woeful departure of the last light of
day. But he took no pencil to the ledge; he memorized in his way. He
kept watch; he brooded.

In this way he came to know in deeper truth the menace of the sea; not
to perceive and grasp it fleetingly, not to hold it for the uses of
the moment, but surely to possess it in his understanding.

His purpose, avowed with a chuckle, was to convey fear to the beholder
of his work. It was an impish trick, and it brought him unwittingly
into peril of his soul.

"I 'low," says he between his teeth to Skipper Tom, "that she'll scare
the wits out o' _you_, father."

Skipper Tom laughed.

"She'll have trouble," he scoffed, "when the sea herself has failed."

"You jus' wait easy," Terry grimly promised him, "till I gets her off
the stocks."

At first Terry Lute tentatively sketched. Bits of the whole were
accomplished,--flecks of foam and the lines of a current,--and torn
up. This was laborious. Here was toil, indeed, and Terry Lute bitterly
complained of it. 'Twas bother; 'twas labor; there wasn't no _sense_
to it. Terry Lute's temper went overboard. He sighed and shifted,
pouted and whimpered while he worked; but he kept on, with courage
equal to his impulse, toiling every evening of that summer until his
impatient mother shooed him off to more laborious toil upon the task
in his nightmares. The whole arrangement was not attempted for the
first time until midsummer. It proceeded, it halted, it vanished.
Seventeen efforts were destroyed, ruthlessly thrust into the kitchen
stov