r. All
the women were agreed that such pearls had bad luck somewhere on the
string, and no one had been found to buy.

"Why does he display them at this time of all times, in the face and
eyes of everybody?" thought the harbor master.

A laugh sounded behind him. It was Deep-water Peter, holding a gun in
one hand, and a dead sheldrake in the other. The red wall of the Customs
House bulged over him.

"Ah, there, Jethro!" he said. "Have you married the sea at last and
taken a mermaid home to live?"

"This is my daughter, if you please," said Jethro Rackby. An ugly glint
was in his usually gentle eye, but he did not refuse the outstretched
hand. "You have prospered seemingly."

"Oh, I have enough to carry me through," said Peter. "I picked up a
trifle here, and a trifle there, and a leetle pinch from nowhere, just
to salt it down. And so all this time you've been harbor master here?"

His tone was between contempt and tolerance, as befitted the character
formed in a harder school, and the harbor master was bitterly silent.

Day had turned from the jewels and was coming toward her father. When
she saw the strange man beside him she stopped short and averted her
face, not before observing that Rackby might have passed for Peter's
father.

"Not so shy--not so shy," murmured Deep-water Peter, as if she had been
a wild filly coming up to his hand.

"She cannot hear you," Rackby interposed. The gleam of triumph in his
eye was plain.

"Can't hear?"

"Neither speak nor hear."

Peter Loud turned toward the girl again--and this time her blue eye met
his, and a spark was struck, not dying out instantly, such a spark as
might linger on the surface of a flint struck by steel.

Was it a certain trick of movement, or only the quickened current of his
blood that made Deep-water Peter know the truth?

"This is strange," he said.

That wind-blown voice of his, with its deepwater melodiousness, had
dropped to a whisper.

"Even providential," the harbor master returned, and his eye glittered.

Peter would have said something to that, but Rackby, with a stern hand
at his daughter's elbow, passed out of hearing.

Peter Loud was promptly taken in the coils of that voiceless beauty
whose speaking eye had met his so squarely. The mother had played him
false, as she had Jethro--but with Peter these affairs were easier
forgotten.

Within the week, as he was striding over the bare flats of
Pull-an'-be-Damned, he saw the flas