Produced by Al Haines.
[Illustration: Cover]
[Illustration: The wallowing motor-boat was still right side up. There
seemed to be but one person in it. (_See Page 67_)]
TOBIAS O' THE LIGHT
_A STORY OF CAPE COD_
BY
JAMES A. COOPER
AUTHOR OF "CAP'N ABE, STOREKEEPER" AND
"CAP'N JONAH'S FORTUNE"
ILLUSTRATED BY
JOSEPH WYKOFF
NEW YORK
GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY
COPYRIGHT, 1920, BY
GEORGE SULLY & COMPANY
_All rights reserved_
PRINTED IN U. S. A.
BOOKS BY
JAMES A. COOPER
CAP'N ABE, STOREKEEPER
CAP'N JONAH'S FORTUNE
TOBIAS O' THE LIGHT
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
I. A Cry in the Night
II. Confidences
III. The Apex of the Storm
IV. Prophecies
V. The Unexpected
VI. Dead Men's Shoes
VII. A Newcomer
VIII. Philosophy and Other Things
IX. The Drop of Wormwood
X. Starting Something
XI. The Black Squall
XII. Troubled Waters
XIII. Cross Purposes
XIV. A Variety of Happenings
XV. Decisive Action
XVI. Poison
XVII. Real Trouble
XVIII. A Clue
XIX. Suspicions
XX. Put to the Question
XXI. The Rising Tide of Doubt
XXII. What Frets Lorna
XXIII. More than Weather Indications
XXIV. Understanding
XXV. Across the Years
XXVI. High Tide
XXVII. What the Night Brought
XXVIII. Desperation
XXIX. Daybreak
XXX. A Silver-Banded Pipe
ILLUSTRATIONS
The wallowing motor-boat was still right side up. There seemed to be
but one person in it. (See Page 67) . . . . . . _Frontispiece_
"I'll run up to the light to dress," she said
"Oh, sugar, Heppy! What's the matter o' ye?"
"We must do something!" she cried. "Tobias! We *must*!"
TOBIAS O' THE LIGHT
CHAPTER I
A CRY IN THE NIGHT
Old Winter wrapped in his grave clothes stalked the flats and sand dunes
about the Twin Rocks Light. Spring had smiled at the grim old fellow
only the day before. She would flutter back again anon to dry the
longshore wastes and warm to life the scant herbage that tries its best
to clothe the Cape Cod barrens.
But now the wind blew and the sleet charged against the staff of the
lighthouse, masking thickly the glass that defended the huge Argand
lamp. Its steady ray filtered through this curtain with difficulty.
Tobias Bassett pulled on his oilskins and buckled down the sou'wester
over his ears preparatory to venturing upon the high gallery to scrape
the clinging snow from the glass.
"You have a care what you're doing up there, slipping around outside the
light," advised his sister Hephzibah, who should have been named
"Martha," being cumbered by so many cares. "You ain't so young as you
used to be, Tobias."
"And you don't have to throw it up to me. I know my age well enough
without looking into the family Bible, Heppy," chuckled the lightkeeper.
"I'm sure you ain't changed _it_. I ain't cal'latin' to be like old
Miz' Toomey that when she went to vote for the first time told the poll
clerk she was thirty-six years old but had lived in this district
fifty-four years. I ain't goin' to let go all holts yet. Leastways, not
while I'm climbing about that gallery!"
"You'd ought to have an assistant, Tobias," sighed his sister, who was
preparing supper, always served at an early hour in winter on the Cape.
"A young fellow to do the hard work. The Government ought to give you
one."
"They think one man to a stationary lamp like this is enough. But I can
have a helper if I want one," her brother announced.
"Then, why don't ye?"
"'Cause I'd have to pay his wages out o' my own pay check, and feed him
in the bargain," chuckled the lightkeeper. "I figger we can't afford
that."
"Oh, dear!" croaked the lachrymose Heppy, "if Uncle Jethro Potts would
only leave us some of his money when he dies. The good Lord knows we
need it as much as ary rel'tive he's got."
"Wal," commented Tobias, picking up his lighted lantern, "Jethro Potts
has got to slip his cable pretty soon to do us much good, Heppy. We're
getting kind o' along in years to enjoy wealth."
"Speak for yourself, Tobias Bassett!" said his sister, more
energetically. "I ain't too old to know what to do with money--if I had
it."
"Ho, ho!" ejaculated her brother. "Slipper's on t'other foot, ain't it?
I wonder what age you give the poll clerk?" and he went out of the
kitchen chuckling.
He mounted the spiral stairway leading up through the lighthouse. After
passing the level of the second story, where were the family bedrooms,
at intervals there were narrow windows--mere slits in the masonry.
These were blocked with glass and only on the leeward side could Tobias
see through them.
"Winter's dying hard," was his comment, climbing steadily to the lamp
room. "This squall come as sudden and as savage as ary storm we've had
this winter. And the sleet sticks to the glass like all kildee!"
He stepped into the lamp room, closing the door at the top of the
stairway. It was warm in here, with a strong and sickish smell of
burning oil. He shaded his eyes with the sharp of his hand to look into
the lamp, the wick of which he had ignited half an hour before.
It was burning evenly and with a white clear light. But warm as the
lamp room was and strong as was the reflection of the light upon the
outer panes, the sleet had frozen to the glass, making a lacework
curtain which the warning ray of the lamp could pierce only with
difficulty.
Tobias took a steel scraper and an old broom, opened a door at the back,
and went out upon the leeward gallery of the light. The snow wraiths
swept past the staff on either hand, whipping away over the sand dunes
and disappearing in the pall of darkness that hovered over the land.
When he ventured around to the front gallery he found a pallid radiance
on the sea superinduced by the muffled ray of the lamp. The snow,
driven by the gale, plastered the light tower on this side from its cap
ten feet above the lamp to that point twenty feet above its base to
which the spray from the wavecaps was thrown. There was a drift of
snow, too, on the railed balcony, through which the lightkeeper waded.
"Whew!" he gasped, turned his back to the blast, and began using the
scraper vigorously. "I can see I've got an all night's job at this off
an' on if this sleet holds to it. Ain't going to be heat enough from
that old lamp to melt the ice as fast as it makes."
He muttered this into the throat-latch of his storm coat while using the
scraper. The frozen sleet rattled down in long ribbons. He dropped the
scraper finally and seized his broom. It was then that he first heard
that cry which was the tocsin of the unexpected series of events which
marched into Tobias Bassett's life out of this late winter storm.
He dropped the broom and strained his ears for a repetition of the cry.
Was it the voice of some lost seafowl swept landward on the breast of
the storm? A gale out of the northeast brought many such to be dashed
lifeless at the foot of the lamp tower.
There was a human quality to this sound he had heard that startled
Tobias. If from the sea, then the craft on which the owner of the voice
was borne, was doomed.
There had not been a wreck on the Twin Rocks within the present
lightkeeper's experience. He shuddered to think of the horror of such a
catastrophe.
A vessel driven upon the grim jaws of the reef that here were out-thrust
from the sands, would be wracked to mere culch within the hour. The
life savers from Lower Trillion could never put off a boat or shoot a
line into the teeth of such a gale as this.
Tobias stooped for the broom again. Then he heard the cry repeated. If
it came on the wings of the wind----
He scrambled around to the leeward side of the tower. Here the savage
paean of the storm was muffled. The drumming of the waves on the rocks,
the eerie shriek of the wind, the clash of the snow and sleet as they
swept by, left the lightkeeper in a sort of unquiet eddy.
Against the gale came a repetition of the cry--a faint "Ahoy!"
Tobias struggled with the latch of the lamp room door, and finally got
inside the tower. He hurried to the stairway and descended to the warm
and odorous kitchen where Heppy was heaping the brown and flaky
fishcakes upon the platter on the stove-shelf.
"What is the matter with you to-night, Tobias Bassett?" she demanded.
"You're as uneasy as a hen on a hot brick. Where are you going now?" as
he started for the outer door.
"There's somebody out in this storm," he told her. "I heard 'em
shouting."
"For love's sake! In a boat?"
"No. From the land side. Somebody on the road."
Tobias banged the door behind him. In clear weather there was not much
to be seen from the entrance of the lighthouse in this landward
direction, save sand. Now about all Tobias could see was snow.
"Ahoy! Aho-o-oy the light!"
The cry was shattered against the singing gale. But the lightkeeper made
out the direction from which it came and started down the road toward
Lower Trillion. In the other direction were the summer residences of
certain wealthy citizens on the Clay Head. While beyond lay Clinkerport
at the head of the bay, the entrance to which the lighthouse guarded.
Tobias announced his coming by a hearty hail. He saw a muffled glow in
the snow pall ahead. Then the outlines of a low-hung motor car that was
quite evidently stalled in a drift.
"Hey!" he demanded. "What you doing in that contraption out in this
storm? Ain't you got no sense?"
"Now don't _you_ begin!" rejoined a complaining voice, and a rather
stalky figure appeared in the half-shrouded radiance of the headlights.
"I've been told already what I am and where I get off. It isn't my
fault that blame thing got stalled."
"It is your fault that we came this way from Harbor Bar," interposed a
very sweet but at present very sharp voice. ("Jest like cranberry
sarse," Tobias secretly commented.) "We should not have taken the shore
road."
"You didn't say so when we started," declared the tall young man,
indignantly.
"I was not driving the car. You insisted on doing that," chimed the
tart voice instantly.
"One would think you expected me to be omniscient."
"Well, you appear to be omnipresent--you are always in the way," and a
much shorter figure, muffled in furs, and quite evidently that of a
young woman, appeared beside the taller individual from the stalled car.
"And I cal'late, Heppy," Tobias explained, relating the event later to
his sister, "that them two socdologers of words would have brought on a
fist fight if I hadn't stepped into the breach, so to say, _and_ the
smaller of them castaways hadn't been a gal! Some day when I get time
I'm going to look up 'omniscient' and 'omnipresent' in the dictionary.
They sound like mighty mean words."
It was the lightkeeper's interference that saved further and more bitter
words between the two stranded voyagers. Tobias got another look at the
taller figure's face, and in spite of the pulled-down peak of his cap
and the goggles he wore, recognized it.
"If 'tain't Ralph Endicott!" exclaimed the lightkeeper. "And who is
that with you? _Not_ Miss Lorna?"
"Oh, Mr. Bassett!" cried the young woman, stumbling toward him. "Take
me to the light. I shall be _so_ glad of its shelter. Is Miss
Hephzibah at home?"
"She was when I left," said Tobias. "An' I cal'late she won't go
gaddin' endurin' this gale. It don't show right good sense for anybody
to be out such a night."
"That's what I tell him," the girl cried. "Anybody with sense----"
"You wanted to come over here and see what shape the house was in, Lorna
Nicholet!" stormed Ralph Endicott. "I was only doing you a favor."
"Do you call this a favor?" demanded the girl.
"Anybody would think I brought this storm on purposely."
"You certainly tried to get through a road that you should have known
would be drifted when it _did_ begin to snow. Bah! Give me your arm,
Mr. Bassett. He's the most useless----"
"Ain't no good _you_ staying out here, Ralphie," advised the old
lightkeeper. "Nobody will run off with that little buzz-cart of yourn.
Heppy's got fish balls for supper--a whole raft of 'em."
The young man followed through the snow, grumbling. The prospect of a
good meal, as Tobias later acknowledged, did not seem to influence a
college man as it once might the long-legged harum-scarum boy who had
raced these beaches for so many summers.
Endicott and Lorna Nicholet were of the sandpiper class. So Tobias
usually referred to the summer visitors who fluttered about the sands
for several months of each year. These young folks had been coming to
Clay Head each season since they were in rompers. Lorna's aunt, Miss
Ida Nicholet of Harbor Bar, and head of the family, owned the rambling
old house overlooking the mouth of the bay. The Endicotts--"the
Endicotts of Amperly," to distinguish them from numerous other groups of
the same name whose habitat dot the sea-coast of Massachusetts--usually
occupied one of the bungalows on Clay Head during the summer.
"See what the gale blowed in, Heppy," was the lightkeeper's announcement
as he banged open the outer door.
His sister turned, frying-fork in hand, and peered through her
spectacles at the snow-covered figures of the visitors. She was a
comfortably built person, was Hephzibah Bassett, with rosy-brown,
unwrinkled face, despite her unacknowledged age of fifty-odd. Her
iron-gray hair was parted in the center and crinkled over her ears in
tiny plaits, being caught in a small "bob" low on her plump neck behind.
She never went to bed at night without braiding her hair on the side in
several "pigtails" (to use her brother's unsavory expression) to be
combed out into this wavy effect when she changed her house gown in the
afternoon. It was a style of hair-dressing which, if old-fashioned,
became her well.
There was something very wholesome and kindly appearing about Hephzibah
Bassett. She might not possess the shrewdness of her brother, the
lightkeeper, and she did nag a good bit. Yet spinsterhood had not
withered her smile nor squeezed dry her fount of human kindness.
"For love's sake!" she cried now, when she had identified the petite
figure shaking its furs free of the sticky snow. "If 'tain't Lorny
Nicholet! Do come and give me a kiss, Lorny. I can't leave these
fishballs or they'd scorch."
The girl wriggled out of her coat and let it drop to the braided mat.
She was just such a looking girl as one might expect from her name.
There was French blood in the Nicholets. Lorna was distinctly of the
brunette type, small limbed, as lithe as a feline. Perhaps that was why
she could scratch! There were little short curls framing her broad, low
forehead. The gloss of a crow's wing accentuated the blackness of her
hair.
Her face glowed now from facing the storm--or was it from indignation?
Her eyes sparkled so luminously that one could not be sure whether they
were black or brown. She was one of those girls who seem all alive, all
of the time. She had the alert appearance of a wild bird on the
twig--ready for instant flight.
"Oh, how good it smells in here, Miss Heppy!" She fluttered across the
big kitchen and imprinted upon the woman's cheek a warm kiss. She
hugged, too, the ample arm that Heppy did not use in turning the
fishballs in the deep frying kettle.
"You certain sure give us a surprise, Lorny," said the lightkeeper's
sister.
"Of course I intended giving you a call as we passed," the girl said.
"But I started for the special purpose of looking over the house for
Aunt Ida and listing such new things as we shall need for the summer.
_This_ doesn't look much like summer, does it?"
"Oh, it's the last quintal of winter, I cal'late," said the woman,
spearing a brown cake. "Lucky I made a mess of these. I didn't really
expect any visitors to-night."
"That's just it, Miss Heppy! How will I ever get back to Harbor Bar
to-night?"
"You won't. Why should you? Your aunt will know you are safe--with
him."
Miss Heppy glanced slyly around at Ralph Endicott, whom she had but
briefly greeted. The girl, seeing her glance, pouted.
"I wish you wouldn't!" she said in a low voice. "It fairly gets on my
nerves. Everybody does it."
"Does what, child?" asked Miss Heppy, with surprise.
"Takes it for granted that Ralph Endicott and I are engaged."
"Wal--you be sort o' young, I suppose----"
"If I was forty I wouldn't be engaged to him!" flared up Lorna.
"For love's sake!" exclaimed the woman. "Don't say that. Though at
forty you ought to've been married to him a good many years," and she
broke into an unctuous chuckle that shook her ample bosom like jelly.
"I'll never marry him!" cried the girl, but under her breath.
"Now, now!" urged Miss Heppy. "You always be quarreling with Ralphie.
But you know they're jest love spats. He's a good fellow----"
"You don't know what it means, Miss Heppy, to a girl to have a man just
forced on her. Everybody trying to make her take him, willy-nilly."
"Um-m. None warn't never forced on me," admitted the woman, dividing
her attention between the frying fishballs and Lorna's affair of the
heart. "But I reckon, Lorna, they couldn't force a better boy on you."
"That is one of the worst phases of it," declared the girl seriously.
"There is not one single, solitary thing to be said against Ralph's
character. Unless--well, there was a girl when he went to college. At
least, so they say. But I suppose all boys must have their foolish
puppy-love affairs," concluded Lorna, with an owllike appearance of
wisdom that revealed the quite unsophisticated girl who believes she
"knows it all."
Miss Heppy merely stared. In her secluded life love was _love_. There
were no gradations known either as "puppy-love" or by other terms of
rating.
"It isn't that Ralph isn't good enough, Miss Heppy," whispered the girl.
"But he's been thrown at me all my life long!" She was not yet
twenty-one. "I just _won't_ marry him."
She stamped her foot on the hearth. Tobias, who had been leisurely
taking off his storm coat and unbuckling the strap of his sou'wester as
he talked cheerfully to the rather glum looking Ralph, now turned to the
women.
"I feel some like stomping in my stall, too," was his comment upon
Lorna's emphatic punctuation of her whispered defiance. "Bear a hand
with the supper, Heppy. I've got to go up to the gallery again and
clear the snow off the lamp. It surely does stick to-night. I was just
getting the glass clear when I heard you young folks shouting for
rescue.
"Come, Miss Lorna! Come, Ralph! Pull up cheers for yourselves.
Supper's ready, I cal'late, ain't it, Heppy?"