-Damned?"

"No, I can't say that."

"No, it wasn't to be expected, you with your head and shoulders walking
around in a barrel of jam."

The harbor master smiled wistfully.

"More I don't require," he said.

"Ah, so you say now--Well, marry the sea, then. It's a slippery embrace,
take the word of a man who has gone foreign voyages."

"I mistrust the sea," said Jethro.

"So you do.--You mistrust the sea and the like o' that, and you mistrust
women and the like o' that. There's too much heaving and tossing in such
waters for a harbor master, hey?"

"I'm at home here, that's a fact," said Jethro. "I know the tides and
the buoys. I can find my way in the dark, where another man would be at
a total loss. I'm never suffering for landmarks."

"Landmarks!" roared Deep-water Peter. "What's a landmark good for but to
take a new departure?"

To the sea-goers, tilted on a bench in the shadow of the Customs House,
he added, "What life must be without a touch of lady fever is more than
I can tell."

A red-bearded viking at the end of the bench rose and took Peter's
shoulders in a fearful grip.

"What's all this talk of lady fever?"

"Let be, Cap'n Dreed!" cried Peter. His boisterousness failed him like
wind going out of a sail. He twisted out of the big seaman's grip and
from a distance shouted, "If you weren't so cussed bashful, you might
have had something more than a libel pinned to your mainmast by now,
with all this time in port."

There was a general shifting along the bench, to make room for possible
fray. It was a sore point with Sam Dreed that the ship chandler had that
day effected a lien for labor on his ship, and the libel was nailed to
the mast.

"Now they'll scandalize each other," murmured Zinie Shadd.

They were turned from that purpose only by the sudden passing at their
backs of the woman in question, Caddie Sills.

Quiet reigned. The older men crossed their legs, sat far down on their
spines, and narrowed their eyes. The brick wall of the Customs House,
held from collapsing by a row of rusty iron stars, seemed to bulge more
than its wont for the moment--its upper window, a ship's deadlight,
round and expressionless as the eye of a codfish.

Cad Sills ran her eye over them deftly, as if they were the separate
strings of an instrument which could afford gratification to her only
when swept lightly all at one time by her tingling finger tips, or,
more likely, by the intangible plectrum in her b