f white satin. He
fondled the wonderful stones with his blunt finger-ends. So he stood for
a long time, breathing heavily, his black eyes glowing like the rubies
and glinting like the diamonds.

"A fortune," he murmured. "Aye, houses an' ships, liquor, food an'
sarvants. Holy saint! I bes richer nor any marchant in St. John's!"

At last he closed the box, put it back in the cavity overhead, and
returned the small square of wood to its place. He looked around the
room. The fading light of the winter day was gray at the window. The
curtained bed was a mass of gloom; a white Christ on a cross of ebony
gleamed above the narrow chimney-shelf, between two candlesticks of dull
brass; the floor, with its few rough mats, was as cold as the frozen
snow outside. The skipper felt the chill of the place in his sturdy
bones. He shot a glance at the crucifix. It, too, was an offering from
the sea. His father had told him how it had come ashore in the hand of a
dead woman, thirty years ago. Now the carven image of the Saviour seemed
to gleam out from the black of the cross and the shadowy wall as if with
an inner illumination. Black Dennis Nolan made the sign with an awkward
and unaccustomed finger, and then went swiftly from the room.

The skipper, Bill Brennen and Nick Leary left their cabins stealthily
about midnight, met on the snowy barren above the harbor, and tramped
southward to the vicinity of Nolan's Cove. They worked for a little
while in a clump of spruce-tuck, then moved off to another thicket about
half a mile away, and there worked again.

"There bes some men in this harbor I wouldn't trust as far as I could
t'row 'em over my back," said the skipper.

Bill and Nick agreed with him. The skipper glanced up at the starless
sky.

"There'll be snow by sun-up," he said.

"Aye, skipper, a desperate flurry out o' the nor'-west," replied
Brennen.

"D'ye mean wind, too?"

"Aye, skipper, mark that!"

All three felt a breath on their faces like the very essence of cold.
They turned northward and set out on the homeward way. All were snug in
their beds long before the first pale hint of dawn. The icy draft from
the northwest was a little stronger by that time, and it puffed a haze
of dry and powdery snow before it. The night was full of faint,
insistent voices. The roofs of the cabins snapped and creaked as if icy
fingers were prying them apart. A sharp crackling sound came up from the
harbor, where the tide fumbled at t