Tobias o' the Light. James A. Cooper

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СКАЧАТЬ let it drop to the braided mat. She was just such a looking girl as one might expect from her name. There was French blood in the Nicholets. Lorna was distinctly of the brunette type, small limbed, as lithe as a feline. Perhaps that was why she could scratch! There were little short curls framing her broad, low forehead. The gloss of a crow's wing accentuated the blackness of her hair.

      Her face glowed now from facing the storm—or was it from indignation? Her eyes sparkled so luminously that one could not be sure whether they were black or brown. She was one of those girls who seem all alive, all of the time. She had the alert appearance of a wild bird on the twig—ready for instant flight.

      "Oh, how good it smells in here, Miss Heppy!" She fluttered across the big kitchen and imprinted upon the woman's cheek a warm kiss. She hugged, too, the ample arm that Heppy did not use in turning the fishballs in the deep frying kettle.

      "You certain sure give us a surprise, Lorny," said the lightkeeper's sister.

      "Of course I intended giving you a call as we passed," the girl said. "But I started for the special purpose of looking over the house for Aunt Ida and listing such new things as we shall need for the summer. This doesn't look much like summer, does it?"

      "Oh, it's the last quintal of winter, I cal'late," said the woman, spearing a brown cake. "Lucky I made a mess of these. I didn't really expect any visitors to-night."

      "That's just it, Miss Heppy! How will I ever get back to Harbor Bar to-night?"

      "You won't. Why should you? Your aunt will know you are safe—with him."

      Miss Heppy glanced slyly around at Ralph Endicott, whom she had but briefly greeted. The girl, seeing her glance, pouted.

      "I wish you wouldn't!" she said in a low voice. "It fairly gets on my nerves. Everybody does it."

      "Does what, child?" asked Miss Heppy, with surprise.

      "Takes it for granted that Ralph Endicott and I are engaged."

      "Wal—you be sort o' young, I suppose——"

      "If I was forty I wouldn't be engaged to him!" flared up Lorna.

      "For love's sake!" exclaimed the woman. "Don't say that. Though at forty you ought to've been married to him a good many years," and she broke into an unctuous chuckle that shook her ample bosom like jelly.

      "I'll never marry him!" cried the girl, but under her breath.

      "Now, now!" urged Miss Heppy. "You always be quarreling with Ralphie. But you know they're jest love spats. He's a good fellow——"

      "You don't know what it means, Miss Heppy, to a girl to have a man just forced on her. Everybody trying to make her take him, willy-nilly."

      "Um-m. None warn't never forced on me," admitted the woman, dividing her attention between the frying fishballs and Lorna's affair of the heart. "But I reckon, Lorna, they couldn't force a better boy on you."

      "That is one of the worst phases of it," declared the girl seriously. "There is not one single, solitary thing to be said against Ralph's character. Unless—well, there was a girl when he went to college. At least, so they say. But I suppose all boys must have their foolish puppy-love affairs," concluded Lorna, with an owllike appearance of wisdom that revealed the quite unsophisticated girl who believes she "knows it all."

      Miss Heppy merely stared. In her secluded life love was love. There were no gradations known either as "puppy-love" or by other terms of rating.

      "It isn't that Ralph isn't good enough, Miss Heppy," whispered the girl. "But he's been thrown at me all my life long!" She was not yet twenty-one. "I just won't marry him."

      She stamped her foot on the hearth. Tobias, who had been leisurely taking off his storm coat and unbuckling the strap of his sou'wester as he talked cheerfully to the rather glum looking Ralph, now turned to the women.

      "I feel some like stomping in my stall, too," was his comment upon Lorna's emphatic punctuation of her whispered defiance. "Bear a hand with the supper, Heppy. I've got to go up to the gallery again and clear the snow off the lamp. It surely does stick to-night. I was just getting the glass clear when I heard you young folks shouting for rescue.

      "Come, Miss Lorna! Come, Ralph! Pull up cheers for yourselves. Supper's ready, I cal'late, ain't it, Heppy?"

CHAPTER II

       Table of Contents

CONFIDENCES

       Table of Contents

      The blast struck the light tower so heavily that Ralph Endicott felt the whole structure vibrate as he followed Tobias up the spiral stairway after supper. In spite of the lightkeeper's jollity and Miss Heppy's kindness, the supper had seemed to hearten but little the spirits of the young man.

      He had offered to attend Tobias in his duty at the top of the tower more for the purpose of getting away from the women than for any other reason. He seized the broom and followed Tobias with the scraper out upon the open gallery. If the storm had seemed furious before supper, it had risen to a top gale now. The two men could scarcely face it on the windward side.

      The gale came in blasts that slapped their burden of snow against the lighthouse with great force. Ralph was barely able to keep his feet. But the sturdy lightkeeper went about the task with a certain phlegm.

      They managed to free the glass of its curtain of snow. Then Ralph staggered around to the sheltered gallery, on the heels of Tobias. The younger man's was a gloomy face when they once more entered the lamp room.

      "Cheer up," said Tobias, getting his breath and eyeing Ralph aslant. "They tell me the worst is yet to come. Though I tell you fair, Ralphie, if the last end o' my life is anywhere as hard as what happened me when I shipped cabin boy on the old Sarah Drinkwater, the good Lord help me to bear it!

      "Why, Ralphie, from the time she was warped out o' the dock at Provincetown till we unloaded them box shocks at Santiago I didn't git to git my clothes off—no, sir!

      "We did have bad weather, I cal'late, though I never got out on deck often enough the whole endurin' v'y'ge to observe the sea and sky. I was washing dishes, making up berths, cleaning pots and pans, peeling 'taters and turmits, and seeding raisins for the skipper's plum duff most o' the time.

      "Seeding raisins! Oh, sugar, I got to thinkin' that if that was all going to sea meant, I might better have got a job in a scullery and kept on an even footing. And I purty nigh got my lips in such a pucker whistling while I seeded them raisins (cookie wouldn't trust me otherwise) that I never did get 'em straight since.

      "Say, lemme tell you!" proceeded Tobias, his weather-stained face beaming in the glow of the great Argand light. "Cap'n Drinkwater demanded his plum duff for supper ev'ry endurin' day of the v'y'ge, no matter what the weather was. He had an old black cook, Sam Snowball, that had got so's he could make that pudding to the queen's taste.

      "Lemme tell you! The skipper was that stingy that he fed the crew rusty pork СКАЧАТЬ