Tobias o' the Light. James A. Cooper
CHAPTER XXIX
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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 pæan 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!