y drew back. "Why should I dance?" he muttered.

He was town clerk as well as harbor master--a scholarly man with
visionary, pale eyes, and a great solitary, as Peter knew.

"Why? I'll tell you why," said Peter. "To bring joy to Caddie Sill's
heart, if nothing more. The girl would throw all the rest of us in a
heap tomorrow for a firm hold of you, Rackby."

He winked at Zinie Shadd, who swayed on his heels soberly.

Rackby turned his eyes toward the black mound of Meteor, which lay like
a shaggy stone Cerberus at the harbor's mouth.

The star-pointed harbor was quiet at his feet. Shadows in the water were
deep and languid, betokening an early fall of rain through the still
air. But from the rim of the sea, where the surf was seen only as a
white glow waxing and waning, a constant drone was borne in to them--a
thunder of the white horses' hoofs trampling on Pull-an'-be-Damned; the
vindictive sound of seas falling down one after another on wasted rocks,
on shifting sand bars--a powerful monotone seeming to increase in the
ear with fuller attention. The contrast was marked between the
heavy-lying peace of the inner harbor and that hungry reverberation from
without of waters seeking fresh holds along a mutilated coast. On damp
nights when the wind hauled to the southeast, men stood still in their
tracks, and said, simply, "There's the Old Roke," as if it was the Old
Man of the Sea himself. The sound was a living personality in their
ears.--Women whom the sea had widowed shivered and rattled irons when
the Old Roke came close to their windows; but the men listened, as if
they had been called--each by his own name.

"What's the ringle jingle of feet by the side of that?" Rackby said, his
mystified face turned toward the water. "I'm a man for slow tunes,
Peter. No, no, no; put your paper up again."

"No? You're a denying sort of a crab, and no mistake. Always seeing how
fast you can crawl backward out of pleasure."

"I mistrust women."

"You cleave to the spirit and turn from the flesh, that I know. But
here's a woman with a voice to waken the dead."

"That's the voice on the seaward side of Meteor," answered Rackby.

"Cad Sills is flesh and blood of the Old Roke, I'm agreed," said
Deep-water Peter. "She's a seafaring woman, that's certain. Next door to
ending in a fish's tail, too, sometimes I think, when I see her carrying
on--Maybe you've seen her sporting with the horse-shoe crabs and all o'
that at Pull-an'-be