Tobias o' the Light. James A. Cooper

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СКАЧАТЬ had not been a wreck on the Twin Rocks within the present lightkeeper's experience. He shuddered to think of the horror of such a catastrophe.

      A vessel driven upon the grim jaws of the reef that here were out-thrust from the sands, would be wracked to mere culch within the hour. The life savers from Lower Trillion could never put off a boat or shoot a line into the teeth of such a gale as this.

      Tobias stooped for the broom again. Then he heard the cry repeated. If it came on the wings of the wind——

      He scrambled around to the leeward side of the tower. Here the savage pæan of the storm was muffled. The drumming of the waves on the rocks, the eerie shriek of the wind, the clash of the snow and sleet as they swept by, left the lightkeeper in a sort of unquiet eddy.

      Against the gale came a repetition of the cry—a faint "Ahoy!"

      Tobias struggled with the latch of the lamp room door, and finally got inside the tower. He hurried to the stairway and descended to the warm and odorous kitchen where Heppy was heaping the brown and flaky fishcakes upon the platter on the stove-shelf.

      "What is the matter with you to-night, Tobias Bassett?" she demanded. "You're as uneasy as a hen on a hot brick. Where are you going now?" as he started for the outer door.

      "There's somebody out in this storm," he told her. "I heard 'em shouting."

      "For love's sake! In a boat?"

      "No. From the land side. Somebody on the road."

      Tobias banged the door behind him. In clear weather there was not much to be seen from the entrance of the lighthouse in this landward direction, save sand. Now about all Tobias could see was snow.

      "Ahoy! Aho-o-oy the light!"

      The cry was shattered against the singing gale. But the lightkeeper made out the direction from which it came and started down the road toward Lower Trillion. In the other direction were the summer residences of certain wealthy citizens on the Clay Head. While beyond lay Clinkerport at the head of the bay, the entrance to which the lighthouse guarded.

      Tobias announced his coming by a hearty hail. He saw a muffled glow in the snow pall ahead. Then the outlines of a low-hung motor car that was quite evidently stalled in a drift.

      "Hey!" he demanded. "What you doing in that contraption out in this storm? Ain't you got no sense?"

      "Now don't you begin!" rejoined a complaining voice, and a rather stalky figure appeared in the half-shrouded radiance of the headlights. "I've been told already what I am and where I get off. It isn't my fault that blame thing got stalled."

      "It is your fault that we came this way from Harbor Bar," interposed a very sweet but at present very sharp voice. ("Jest like cranberry sarse," Tobias secretly commented.) "We should not have taken the shore road."

      "You didn't say so when we started," declared the tall young man, indignantly.

      "I was not driving the car. You insisted on doing that," chimed the tart voice instantly.

      "One would think you expected me to be omniscient."

      "Well, you appear to be omnipresent—you are always in the way," and a much shorter figure, muffled in furs, and quite evidently that of a young woman, appeared beside the taller individual from the stalled car.

      "And I cal'late, Heppy," Tobias explained, relating the event later to his sister, "that them two socdologers of words would have brought on a fist fight if I hadn't stepped into the breach, so to say, and the smaller of them castaways hadn't been a gal! Some day when I get time I'm going to look up 'omniscient' and 'omnipresent' in the dictionary. They sound like mighty mean words."

      It was the lightkeeper's interference that saved further and more bitter words between the two stranded voyagers. Tobias got another look at the taller figure's face, and in spite of the pulled-down peak of his cap and the goggles he wore, recognized it.

      "If 'tain't Ralph Endicott!" exclaimed the lightkeeper. "And who is that with you? Not Miss Lorna?"

      "Oh, Mr. Bassett!" cried the young woman, stumbling toward him. "Take me to the light. I shall be so glad of its shelter. Is Miss Hephzibah at home?"

      "She was when I left," said Tobias. "An' I cal'late she won't go gaddin' endurin' this gale. It don't show right good sense for anybody to be out such a night."

      "That's what I tell him," the girl cried. "Anybody with sense——"

      "You wanted to come over here and see what shape the house was in, Lorna Nicholet!" stormed Ralph Endicott. "I was only doing you a favor."

      "Do you call this a favor?" demanded the girl.

      "Anybody would think I brought this storm on purposely."

      "You certainly tried to get through a road that you should have known would be drifted when it did begin to snow. Bah! Give me your arm, Mr. Bassett. He's the most useless——"

      "Ain't no good you staying out here, Ralphie," advised the old lightkeeper. "Nobody will run off with that little buzz-cart of yourn. Heppy's got fish balls for supper—a whole raft of 'em."

      The young man followed through the snow, grumbling. The prospect of a good meal, as Tobias later acknowledged, did not seem to influence a college man as it once might the long-legged harum-scarum boy who had raced these beaches for so many summers.

      Endicott and Lorna Nicholet were of the sandpiper class. So Tobias usually referred to the summer visitors who fluttered about the sands for several months of each year. These young folks had been coming to Clay Head each season since they were in rompers. Lorna's aunt, Miss Ida Nicholet of Harbor Bar, and head of the family, owned the rambling old house overlooking the mouth of the bay. The Endicotts—"the Endicotts of Amperly," to distinguish them from numerous other groups of the same name whose habitat dot the sea-coast of Massachusetts—usually occupied one of the bungalows on Clay Head during the summer.

      "See what the gale blowed in, Heppy," was the lightkeeper's announcement as he banged open the outer door.

      His sister turned, frying-fork in hand, and peered through her spectacles at the snow-covered figures of the visitors. She was a comfortably built person, was Hephzibah Bassett, with rosy-brown, unwrinkled face, despite her unacknowledged age of fifty-odd. Her iron-gray hair was parted in the center and crinkled over her ears in tiny plaits, being caught in a small "bob" low on her plump neck behind. She never went to bed at night without braiding her hair on the side in several "pigtails" (to use her brother's unsavory expression) to be combed out into this wavy effect when she changed her house gown in the afternoon. It was a style of hair-dressing which, if old-fashioned, became her well.

      There was something very wholesome and kindly appearing about Hephzibah Bassett. She might not possess the shrewdness of her brother, the lightkeeper, and she did nag a good bit. Yet spinsterhood had not withered her smile nor squeezed dry her fount of human kindness.

      "For love's sake!" she cried now, when she had identified the petite figure shaking its furs free of the sticky snow. "If 'tain't Lorny Nicholet! Do come and give me a kiss, Lorny. I can't leave these fishballs or they'd scorch."

      The girl wriggled СКАЧАТЬ