time--I don't know--but he was dead in two
years. He was supposed to be very rich--three or four millions--but on
settling up there was less than half a million. Of course that wasn't
bad--enough for Minnie to buy a big house next her grandmother's for
a summer home, and enough to go off travelling whenever she pleased.

When she came back to Gloucester she was still a very handsome girl,
spoken of as the "Miner widow" among people who had known her only
since her marriage, but still called Minnie Arkell by most of those
who had known her when she was a child. In Gloucester she bought the
first house just around the corner from her grandmother's. A handy
passage between their two back yards allowed her to visit her
grandmother whenever she pleased. She wanted to be near her own
people, she said, and was more in her grandmother's house than her
own.

Maurice came down the steps of Mrs. Arkell's boarding-house as I came
along, and joined me on the sidewalk. He asked me the first thing if
I wouldn't have a drink, and I said no.

"Oh, I forgot," he said, "you don't drink. Have a cigar," and he
pulled one out of his pocket, and I took and lit it. Generally I
smoked a pipe, but I liked good cigars, though I couldn't afford them
myself. This was not a good one--more like the kind they hand out in
bar-rooms when men get tired of drinking and say they guess they'll
have a smoke.

"How does it happen, Joe, you're not at the store? I always thought
Withrow held his men pretty close to hours."

"Well, so he does, but I'm not working for him now." And then I told
him that I had had an argument with Withrow, been discharged, and was
thinking of going fishing. I didn't tell him at first how it all came
about, but I think he guessed it, for all at once, after a searching
look, he reached out and shook hands with me.

"If ever I get a vessel again, Joe, and you still want to go fishing
and care for a chance with me, you can have it--if you can't go with a
better man, I mean. I'll take you and be glad to have you."

That meant a good berth, of course, for Maurice was a killer.

I looked at Maurice when he wasn't watching me, and felt sorry for
him. He was a man that anybody would like the looks of. It wasn't
that he was a handsome man--I never could get to like pretty men
myself--but there was something about him that made you feel you could
trust him. The heavy tan of his face and the grip of his jaw would
spoil almost anybod