id that I did not have time to come in, and started to make off.
Maurice asked me where I was bound. I told him that I thought of
taking a look in at Crow's Nest and getting the news.

"Yes, you'll get it there, sure enough. When they can't tell you
anything else up there they can tell you what everybody's doing." He
smiled at that, turned slowly toward the side-door, as if he would
rather go with me to Crow's Nest, and I went off.

Just outside the gate I saw Sam Hollis, a man I never did like. Tommie
Clancy, the man that could size up a person quicker than anybody I'd
ever met, used to say that deep down, if you could get at Hollis,
you'd find a quitter, but that nobody had ever got into him. I'd been
meeting Hollis after every trip in for two years in Withrow's store.
He was a successful fisherman, and a sharp, keen man ashore, but he
was a man I never quite took to. One of his ambitions, I felt
satisfied, was to be reckoned a devil of a fellow. He'd have given a
year's earnings, I knew, to have people point him out on the street
and say, "There's Sam Hollis--there's the boy to carry sail--nobody
ever made him take his mains'l in," the same as they used to say of a
half dozen or so that really would carry sail--that would drive a
vessel under before they would be the first to reef. But the people
didn't do that, although, let him tell it, he did wonderful things out
to sea, and he had such a way of telling it, too, that he'd almost
make you believe him. But as Clancy used to say, after he'd left you,
and you had time to think it over, you'd see where here and there his
story wasn't well-calked. My own idea was that he wanted a reputation
so that he could pose as a devil of a fellow with certain people
ashore. It is easy enough to see that even a more careful man than Sam
Hollis might take a chance for a smile from a woman like Minnie
Arkell.

Anyhow, I never felt at home with Hollis, and so was willing to take
Clancy's judgment straight. Hollis was a man about forty, and had been
one of Minnie Arkell's admirers ever since I could remember--ever
since she was old enough to have any, I mean, and she wasn't any late
bloomer, as Clancy used to say.

Hollis went into the Arkell house by the door that had only just
closed behind Maurice and Minnie Arkell. I didn't like that very much,
and was thinking of turning back and going in, too; but on second
thought it occurred to me that perhaps only Maurice would have a
welc