Page:Rideout--Beached keels.djvu/93

Rh the thought of the little boy braced his conscience at the same time that it made his heart sink.

In these thoughts by the fire, growing warm and sleepy, he was startled by a growling voice.

"Who the hell are you, buildin' fires on my beach?" The speaker was a man of middle height, prodigiously broad and bulky, with a wide red face in which the eyes were so staring and the big red nostrils so far apart that he had the aspect of a bull. As the question came rumbling again in a thick bass. Archer noticed that the hands, in the firelight, were fat, freckled, and immensely powerful, like the hand thrust in at the barroom door. This, then, was the Old Man, and, by the resemblance to the face at which Archer had swung his oar, it was Beaky Lehane's father.

"Oh, go to the devil," he answered, too cold, and tired, and bitter to let any man stare at him so. "This isn't your beach, anyway. It's Mr. Powell's. Go stare at somebody else."