_GUESTS AT THE LIGHTHOUSE._
In a month Dave Fletcher was established at the light on Black Rocks as
assistant-keeper--a position that would bring him a far handsomer salary
than could any present clerkship at Shipton. This berth was not secured
without a struggle by Dave's friends, as several candidates were willing
to take the duties and profits of the place.
"You've got the place, though others wanted it," said the keeper,
returning from town one day and wiping his round, red face with his
handkerchief. "News came to-day. I don't know but you would have lost
it, but they say a friend of yours interceded and told them up and down
you must have it any way."
"Who was it?"
"Somebody that said he had seen you run a saw and knew you could run a
lighthouse. That's what folks tell me he said."
"Oh, Squire Sylvester!"
"Yes. Queer feller; but he isn't all growl, though he does look like
it, maybe."
Some time after this there were visitors at the light. One was expected,
the other was not. The first was Bart Trafton, brought by the
light-keeper one soft, sunny April day. Bart was very much interested
in the lantern.
[Illustration: "Bart was very much interested in the lantern of the
lighthouse." _Page 159_]
"Can I go up with you and see the lantern?" he asked.
"Oh yes," said Dave, leading Bart up the iron stairway that mounted from
room to room.
"There!" said Bart, looking round on the glass windows enclosing the
lantern and the lamp in its centre: "I think this is a dreadful
interestin' place."
"I think so too, Bart."
"And what I think is interestin' is that lamp in the centre. Why,
granny uses a lamp that, it seems to me, is no bigger than that, but it
can't throw anywhere near such a light as that. I saw your light last
night."
"You did? where?"
"From the hill behind our house. I went up there and saw it."
"I did not know that. Then we could signal to one another."
"Signal?"
"Yes, this way. Supposing, now, I should hang a lantern out on the side
of the lighthouse toward the land, toward your home, and you could see
it: you might take it as a sign that I wanted--well--we will say--a
doctor."
"I think I could see it with father's spy-glass; it is real powerful.
Say, will you try it to-morrow night? You hang it out, and I will take
father's spy-glass and see if I can make out anything. Then I will send
you word by the mail. You don't think it is too far from our house to
the light?"
"Too far to see? oh no. Now, I said a man might want a doctor here. I
have often thought if one of us was sick--and you know the keeper is
getting old--and if the other couldn't get off to bring a doctor, it
might be a very serious thing for the sick man."
"Well, if you are in trouble and will hang out a light, and I see it, I
will tell the people, and they will get to you."
Dave thought no more of this, but silently said, "I wonder if I haven't
something else interesting to show the boy! Yes, I have got it."
He went down from the lantern to the kitchen, and took from its shelf
the strange box of sandal-wood, whose story Dave already knew.
The light-keeper now repeated to Bart the tale of the drifting relic.
He held it to his ear. Did the boy think it was a shell--that it would
murmur a song of wave and cloud and the broad sunshine sweeping down on
lonely surf-washed ledges?
"It won't talk," said the light-keeper, beaming on him.
Bart shook his head.
"I wish it would talk," thought the keeper. "It might tell about that
man whom we picked up and brought into the light, and who seemed to know
something about it. I wonder if he will ever call for it!"
He spoke of it to Dave afterward. The two were up on the lantern-deck
at sunset looking off upon the sea. The water was still and glassy. It
was heaving gently, as if with the dying day it too was dying, but
feebly pulsating with life. One vast surface of shining gray, it
gradually darkened till it was a mass of shadows across which were drawn
the lines of white surf cresting the ledges.
"Several vessels in the harbour," said Dave.
"Yes: they have been coming down from Shipton this afternoon; but the
wind has all died away, and they seem to have made up their mind to
anchor there to-night. It is getting cool. Perhaps we had better go
down," said the keeper, shrugging his shoulders. While within the
lantern he glanced at the lamp, and then descended to the kitchen.
Without the twilight deepened. Out of the gloom towered the lighthouse,
bearing aloft its guiding, warning rays. The keeper was in the kitchen,
trimming an old lantern which had done him much faithful service. That
small visitor, Bart, had gone with Dave up into the lantern, anxious to
see the working of the lamp.
The keeper lighted his lantern, and then started for the fog-signal
tower. He was descending the stairs, when he heard a cry outside of the
lighthouse.
"Somebody at the foot of the ladder, I guess, wants me," concluded the
keeper, "and I will go to the door and see who it is."
He went to the door, lantern in hand, and looked down.
"Hollo, there!" sang out a man from the shadows below. "Shall I come
up?"
"Ay, ay!" responded the keeper. "Low water down there, isn't it, so you
can come up the ladder?"
"I guess so. I will make fast and try the ladder."
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.
"Nobody 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 Shipton man?" asked the keeper bluntly.
"Yes, I belong to Shipton; 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. Nobody 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 shipmate, Grant Williams, a warm
friend, and faithful too. He knew I had a weakness, and used to say he
was afraid his shipmate 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 Shipton 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 shipmate 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 Shipton 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 shipmate, 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 ship had
been wrecked, and only that, and when I saw the face of my old shipmate,
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, God 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 friendship 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-glass?"
"Behind the clock, Bartie," said granny. "What do you want it for?"
"Just to look off," he said, seizing the glass 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 glass.
"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 glass 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-glass.
"There, granny!" said the bearer of the glass. "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 glass, "I can't
see nothin'. This thing pokes out what there is there."
"Eh? can't you, granny?" replied Bart, levelling the glass 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."