would fall on the
few gray hairs about his temples. "That beggar Miggs said so yesterday
at the club. By gad, how pretty she was, and how her eyes snapped! I
didn't think it was in her!"

CHAPTER XVIII

THE SWEDE'S STORY

Captain Holt had selected his crew--picked surfmen, every one of
them--and the chief of the bureau had endorsed the list without comment
or inquiry. The captain's own appointment as keeper of the new
Life-Saving Station was due as much to his knowledge of men as to his
skill as a seaman, and so when his list was sent in--men he said he
could "vouch for"--it took but a moment for the chief to write
"Approved" across its face.

Isaac Polhemus came first: Sixty years of age, silent, gray, thick-set;
face scarred and seamed by many weathers, but fresh as a baby's; two
china-blue eyes--peep-holes through which you looked into his open
heart; shoulders hard and tough as cordwood hands a bunch of knots;
legs like snubbing-posts, body quick-moving; brain quick-thinking;
alert as a dog when on duty, calm as a sleepy cat beside a stove when
his time was his own. Sixty only in years, this man; forty in strength
and in skill, twenty in suppleness, and a one-year-old toddling infant
in all that made for guile. "Uncle Ike" some of the younger men once
called him, wondering behind their hands whether he was not too old and
believing all the time that he was. "Uncle Ike" they still called him,
but it was a title of affection and pride; affection for the man
underneath the blue woollen shirt, and pride because they were deemed
worthy to pull an oar beside him.

The change took place the winter before when he was serving at
Manasquan and when he pulled four men single-handed from out of a surf
that would have staggered the bravest. There was no life-boat within
reach and no hand to help. It was at night--a snowstorm raging and the
sea a corral of hungry beasts fighting the length of the beach. The
shipwrecked crew had left their schooner pounding on the outer bar, and
finding their cries drowned by the roar of the waters, had taken to
their boat. She came bow on, the sea-drenched sailors clinging to her
sides. Uncle Isaac Polhemus caught sight of her just as a savage
pursuing roller dived under her stern, lifted the frail shell on its
broad back, and whirled it bottom side up and stern foremost on to the
beach. Dashing into the suds, he jerked two of the crew to their feet
before they knew what had struc