g from any
other man either before or since. Yet, I had only known him for two
days. I could see that he, also, was similarly affected. It was as if
something above and beyond us were making our farewell singularly
solemn.

CHAPTER IX

The Booze Artist

I stood watching until the tiny launch rounded the point; then, as the
light was still fairly good,--it being the end of the month of
May,--and as I had no inclination for sleep as yet, I got into the
smallest of the rowing boats that were tied up alongside the wharf,
loosed it and pulled leisurely up the bay, with the intention of making
myself a little better acquainted with the only living soul with whom I
was within hail,--Jake Meaghan.

As I ran the boat into his cove, I could hear his dog bark warningly.

The door of his barn,--for it was nothing else,--was closed, and it was
some time before I heard Meaghan's deep voice in answer to my knock,
inviting me to come in and bidding his dog to lie down.

Meaghan was sitting, presumably reading a newspaper, which was the only
kind of "literature" I ever saw him read. His attitude appeared to me
to be assumed and I had a notion that, when the dog first barked at my
approach, he had been busy with the contents of a brass-bound, wooden
chest which now lay half under his bunk, in a recess in the far corner.

"Hello! Thought you might come over. Sit down," he greeted. "Saw the
boss pull out half an hour ago. I'm just sittin' down for my turn at
the newspaper. They leave me a bundle off the steamer once in a while.
This one's from the old country;--the _Liverpool Monitor_. It's two
months old, but what's the dif,--the news is just as good as if it was
yesterday's or to-morrow's."

I looked round Jake's shanty. Considering it was a single-roomed place
and used for cooking, washing, sleeping and everything else, it was
wonderfully tidy, although, to say truth, there was little in it after
all to occasion untidiness: a stove, a pot, a frying-pan, an enamelled
tin teapot, some crockery, a table, an oil lamp, three chairs, the
brass-bound trunk, two wheat-flake boxes and Jake's bed,--with one
other addition,--a fifteen-gallon keg with a stopcock in it and set on
a wooden stand close to his bunk.

An odour of shell-fish pervaded the atmosphere, coming from some kind
of soup made from clams and milk, on which Jake had evidently been
dining. The residue of it still sat in a pot on the stove. This, I
disc