Page:Stringer - Lonely O'Malley.djvu/308

 green between Watterson's Creek and the river, gazing ruminatively down the sweep of shimmering yellow water toward the far-off freedom of the Great Lakes—the wider seas they had braved and known for so many years. Indeed, forty summers before, they had both had a hand in the planting of the very trees under which they sat dreaming autumnly of old times and old friends.

This had long been their favorite seat, under the useless old cannon, just at the point of the Common, from which no craft creeping up or down the river could escape their sharp old eyes. And they knew every craft that sailed those waters, from dug-out to excursion steamer, and had known some of them for half a century.

When, therefore, Cap'n Steiner's eye wandered up the glazed and mercury-like surface of Watterson's Creek that hot morning, and beheld an utterly unknown craft creeping down towards the river, he drew Cap'n Sands's startled attention to that fact, and together the two old cronies hobbled down to the dilapidated Common Wharf, and leaning on their sticks, looked anxiously out at this