The Argosy, August 1914 — page 36: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

26 THE edge, and a half dozen flimsy docks reached out like grasping fingers. A stocky man in yellow oilskins and, a sou’wester stood at the end of one of these docks. Jack noted as the salient feature of his face, which was really all that his costume revealed, a grizzled beard seeming to sprout mostly from under his chin. The old man raised a shout. : “For the land’s sake, Jess, is that you?” he called. “I thought even a mack’rel gull’d know enough not to try coming across to-day.” “Hello, grandfather,” the girl called back. “I’ve brought company.” “ Sufferin’ porpoises, so you have,” the other returned as she made a skilful turn to the dock. He fished up her painter with a boat-hook. “ Well, he’s welcome, whoever he is, and [ swan I’m glad to see you again, girl.” A quarter of a minute later he had his arms around her, boathook in one hand and warp in the other. CHAPTER VII. BARRATRY ISLAND. To his great mortification, the young man was compelled to play the role of an invalid. So weak was he, in fact, that he was unable to make the high step from the Polly Ann’s bow to the dock unaided. He would have fallen after being lifted to the narrow plank- ing but for the support of his rescuer’s grandfather. Jessica’s orders were that he be put to bed at once. “Tm all right—just give me a bite to eat and let me sit down,” he pro- tested. Captain Zed, as he learned was the general way of addressing the eray-whiskered person who had. wel- comed Jessica at the dock, overruled his demurrer. “No, you ain't, neither,”’ he contra- dicted. “I’ve seen many a_ ship- wrecked man, but I dunno’s I ever see ary one that needed nursing more than you do. Anyway, my granddaughter ARGOSY. is skipper of this here craft, and if she says you've got to go to bed and be sick, to bed you go.” THlis sodden clothes removed, his battered body clothed in one of the captain’s coarse cotton night-shirts and laid between clean, dry sheets, and Jack was forced to admit that his symptoms had been accurately diag- nosed. It was wonderfully agreeable to play the tired, sick child again after what he had passed through. For a few minutes—a very few in- deed—after he had been permitted a bowl of warm, vivifying broth and a cup of coffee, he lay awake taking mental inventory of his state. His badly wrenched arm had been rubbed with carron oil, the coast dweller’s spe- cific for everything from frost bite to sprains and burns, and bandaged with clean linen. It throbbed dully from shoulder to finger-tips, echoing the grinding it had undergone between hungry fragments of wreckage. For the matter of that, his whole body felt like a mass of bruises. Captain Zed, looking him over, had discovered a great bump on his head, underlying a bad scalp wound. This had been fixed up with ointment and plaster. Jack allowed him to nurse the belief that it was inflicted by a wave-tossed timber, although he himself knew it for a memento of his costly - ac- quaintance with his casual barroom acquaintances. Then he fell into the deep sleep of exhaustion. When he awoke from one of those troubled dreams of insuper- able difficulties which often act as avant courriers of returning conscious- ness, he could not remember at first where he «was. He found himself in bed in a low, rude, poorly appointed but scrupu- lously neat room. Jt was furnished with a small rug of woven rags, a solt-pine dresser painted yellow, with brown striping, a couple of chairs, and on the wall some pictures cut from magazines tacked to the unpapercd EO 06) AMUG SS COm