n, he was
henceforth to be a sailor of the sea, a rover, and he saw the rest of
his existence passed with her, aboard their faithful little schooner.
They would have the whole round world as their playground; they held the
earth and the great seas in fief; there was no one to let or to hinder.
They two belonged to each other. Once outside the Heads again, and they
swept the land of cities and of little things behind them, and they two
were left alone once more; alone in the great world of romance.

About an hour after her arrival off the station, while Hoang and the
hands were furling the jib and foresail and getting the dory over the
side, Moran remarked to Wilbur:

"It's good we came in when we did, mate; the glass is going down fast,
and the wind's breezing up from the west; we're going to have a blow;
the tide will be going out in a little while, and we never could have
come in against wind and tide."

"Moran," said Wilbur, "I'm going ashore--into the station here; there's
a telephone line there; see the wires? I can't so much as turn my hand
over before I have some shore-going clothes. What do you suppose they
would do to me if I appeared on Kearney Street in this outfit? I'll ring
up Langley & Michaels--they are the wholesale chemists in town--and have
their agent come out here and talk business to us about our ambergris.
We've got to pay the men their prize-money; then as soon as we get
our own money in hand we can talk about overhauling and outfitting the
'Bertha.'"

Moran refused to accompany him ashore and into the Lifeboat Station.
Roofed houses were an object of suspicion to her. Already she had begun
to be uneasy at the distant sight of the city of San Francisco, Nob,
Telegraph, Russian, and Rincon hills, all swarming with buildings and
grooved with streets; even the land-locked harbor fretted her. Wilbur
could see she felt imprisoned, confined. When he had pointed out the
Palace Hotel to her--a vast gray cube in the distance, overtopping the
surrounding roofs--she had sworn under her breath.

"And people can live there, good heavens! Why not rabbit-burrows, and
be done with it? Mate, how soon can we be out to sea again? I hate this
place."

Wilbur found the captain of the Lifeboat Station in the act of sitting
down to a dinner of boiled beef and cabbage. He was a strongly built
well-looking man, with the air more of a soldier than a sailor. He had
already been studying the schooner through his front