At the Black Rocks Part 27

The keeper heard the steps of somebody on the ladder, and then a man's form wriggled up through the hole in the platform outside the door.

"I get up with less trouble to you than I did the last time I was here,"

said the man.

The keeper looked at him.

"Ho! this you?" he asked.

"n.o.body else."

It was the man who one day, when intoxicated, had been rescued from the bar, and the next morning had shown singular interest in the little box of sandalwood.

"Come up!" said the keeper, leading the man to the kitchen.

"I have been some time coming, haven't I?"

"Better late than never. Always glad to see people. Take that chair before the fire, and make yourself at home. I did not know as I should ever see you again. You are a s.h.i.+pton man?" asked the keeper bluntly.

"Yes, I belong to s.h.i.+pton; but then I am off about all the time. I think I have seen you on the street there."

"I was thinking myself I had seen you, but I couldn't say when, except that time you were at the lighthouse."

"Have you got that box now?"

"Oh yes. Here it is. n.o.body has come to claim it."

He took the box down from its shelf and placed it on the table.

The keeper's companion said, "Now I will tell you the story about that box, and this letter, too, will confirm it."

As he spoke he took a letter from his pocket and opened it.

"The man who wrote that was an old s.h.i.+pmate, Grant Williams, a warm friend, and faithful too. He knew I had a weakness, and used to say he was afraid his s.h.i.+pmate would get into the breakers. He sent me a letter from a foreign port; here it is. You look at it. You will see that he gave me some good advice. He laid it all down like a chart; but I was a poor hand to steer by it. 'I expect to sail for s.h.i.+pton in a Norwegian bark,' he wrote (I think he was born in Norway himself, but had been a long time in America), 'and I am going to get and bring my old s.h.i.+pmate a present of a box of sandal-wood, and I shall pack a few keepsakes into it. I will put my picture in, just to make it seem all the more like a present from me. I will put your initials and mine on the under side of the box. I will leave it at s.h.i.+pton with your father if you are not there. And now don't forget this: it is to be a reminder of my desire that you should let liquor alone. When you see it, think of an old s.h.i.+pmate, and look at my face you will find in the box.' The first time I saw the box was that morning after the night you found me in a state that was no credit to the one found. I knew the s.h.i.+p had been wrecked, and only that, and when I saw the face of my old s.h.i.+pmate, and knew that he had been lost on the bar where I came pretty near losing my own life through what he warned me against, I--I--felt it. I didn't see how I could take the box until I was in a condition to give some promise, you know, that I would be a better man; and now I hope I am, G.o.d being my helper."

"Well, I think it is plain proof that you are the one whom the man Williams meant, and the owner of this box, if those are your initials on the bottom--if--"

The keeper was about to ask the man for his name, but the sound of a light step tripping downstairs arrested their conversation, and both turned toward the stairway.

It was Bart Trafton. He looked up, stopped, started forward, and exclaimed, "Why, father!"

"This you, Bart?" said Thomas Trafton. "How came you here?--My boy, Mr.

Tolman. My vessel is off there in the stream, and while waiting for the wind I just rowed over."

There they stood, side by side, Bart and his father, while the keeper was rising to hand the box to Thomas Trafton. The lighthouse kitchen never presented a more interesting scene than that of the reformed sailor in the presence of his oft-abused child, taking into his hands this gift, that had survived a wrecking storm, to be not only a pledge of the friends.h.i.+p of the dead, but to the living a stimulus to right-doing and a warning against wrong.

Thomas Trafton rowed back to the vessel that night. Bart was carried to town the next day. Bart reached home at sundown, and first told granny about the affair of the box as far as he had been able to pick up the threads of the details and weave them into a story; then he asked, "Where is father's spy-gla.s.s?"

"Behind the clock, Bartie," said granny. "What do you want it for?"

"Just to look off," he said, seizing the gla.s.s and bearing it out-doors.

Granny followed him into the yard and there halted; for Bart was going farther, already bestriding the fence.

"Where is that boy going?" wondered granny.

"Bartie!" she called aloud, "it is a-gittin' too late to see things clear."

He was now mounting a hill beyond the yard.

"Back in a moment, granny!" he shouted.

She soon saw his figure standing out, clear and distinct, against the western sky, and he was elevating the gla.s.s.

"Too soon to see anything yet," he said, when he returned.

"Where you lookin', child?"

"Off to the lighthouse."

"They haven't more than lighted her up."

"I know it. I was too early."

"You want to see the light? You won't have to take a gla.s.s for that; you just wait."

"I want to see something else. You come with me, granny, when I go again."

"Sakes, child, what you up to?"

Later two figures crept up the hill, one carrying a spy-gla.s.s.

"There, granny!" said the bearer of the gla.s.s. "Now you look off to the light at Black Rocks, and right under it see if you can't see another light--a little one."

"La, child," declared granny, vainly looking through the gla.s.s, "I can't see nothin'. This thing pokes out what there is there."

"Eh? can't you, granny?" replied Bart, levelling the gla.s.s toward the harbour. "I see the light. And--and--I think--I see a--something else underneath. Seems like a little star under a moon."

The next day this was dropped in the post-office:--

"DEAR DAVE,--I saw your lantern, I know. Did you hang it out? Your friend, BART."

Dave answered this in person within a week.

"I'm having a holiday," he said to granny--"off for a day--and thought I would call. I want you, please, to say for me to Bart I got his note, and that I did hang out my lantern the night that he looked for it."

"Now, did you ever see sich a boy? He has been up every night to look for that lantern, and he says he feels easier if he don't see it."

"You tell him not to worry. We are very comfortable. A person might live there a century and nothing happen to them."