e with no other comment than a sigh, a sniff of disgust, and a
shuddering little whimper.

It was a windy night in the early fall of the year, blowing high and
wet, when Terry Lute dropped his crayon with the air of not wanting to
take it up again.

He sighed, he yawned.

"I got her done," says he, "confound her!" He yawned again.

"Too much labor, lad," Skipper Tom complained.

"Pshaw!" says Terry, indignantly. "I didn't _labor_ on her."

Skipper Tom stared aghast in the presence of this monstrously futile
prevarication.

"Ecod!" he gasped.

"Why, father," says Terry, airily, "I jus'--sketched her. Do she scare
you?"

From Terry Lute's picture Skipper Tom's glance ran to Terry Lute's
anxious eyes.

"She do," said he, gravely; "but I'm fair unable t' fathom"--pulling
his beard in bewilderment--"the use of it all."

Terry Lute grinned.

* * * * *

It did not appear until the fall gales were blowing in earnest that
"The Fang" had made a coward of Terry Lute. There was a gray sea that
day, and day was on the wing. There was reeling, noisy water
roundabout, turning black in the failing light, and a roaring lee
shore; and a gale in the making and a saucy wind were already jumping
down from the northeast with a trail of disquieting fog. Terry Lute's
spirit failed; he besought, he wept, to be taken ashore. "Oh, I'm
woeful scared o' the sea!" he complained. Skipper Tom brought him in
from the sea, a whimpering coward, cowering degraded and shamefaced in
the stern-sheets of the punt. There were no reproaches. Skipper Tom
pulled grimly into harbor. His world had been shaken to ruins; he was
grave without hope, as many a man before him has fallen upon the
disclosure of inadequacy in his own son.

It was late that night when Skipper Tom and the discredited boy were
left alone by the kitchen fire. The gale was down then, a wet wind
blowing wildly in from the sea. Tom Lute's cottage shook in its
passing fingers, which seemed somehow not to linger long enough to
clutch it well, but to grasp in driven haste and sweep on. The boy sat
snuggled to the fire for its consolation; he was covered with shame,
oppressed, sore, and hopeless. He was disgraced: he was outcast, and
now forever, from a world of manly endeavor wherein good courage did
the work of the day that every man must do. Skipper Tom, in his slow
survey of this aching and pitiful degradation, had an overwhelming
sense of fatherh