Page:O'Higgins--From the life.djvu/248

 of the captain's voice. He continued gazing out at the sunset, his elbows on his knees, his chin supported on his cramped hands, smoking sadly.

The captain struck a match and sat—to relight his pipe—on the other end of the log. "Well," he said, "I come down to see if there was much wood here fer the whiter. Pick up more logs here in a day than you could cut down in a week. Cold weather's comin', Sam. You'll freeze stiff in that shack. I was tellin' my girl to get a room ready fer you—over the kitchen, where it 'll be warm. You can do her chores fer yer board if you want to."

Sam stopped puffing at his pipe, but he did not turn around.

"We're gettin' old," the captain went on. "Got to have a warm bed when you're old. I ust to be able to sleep on cargo an' never notice it. Well, well. I remember once—" And he rambled off into reminiscences of his rough youth when he had sailed the Great Lakes and been a "terrible feller."

They were reminiscences of the easy love-affairs of an able-bodied seaman, of sailors' fights in water-front "dives," of smuggling adventures in the days when he had run a schooner between the mouth of the Niagara River and the Canadian Port Credit—before the use of the telegraph put an end to that sort of "skylarkin'"—and of "bounty-jumping" in ports along the American shore dur-