Tobias o' the Light. James A. Cooper
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?"
CHAPTER II
CONFIDENCES
The blast struck the light tower so heavily that Ralph Endicott felt the whole structure vibrate as he followed Tobias up the spiral stairway after supper. In spite of the lightkeeper's jollity and Miss Heppy's kindness, the supper had seemed to hearten but little the spirits of the young man.
He had offered to attend Tobias in his duty at the top of the tower more for the purpose of getting away from the women than for any other reason. He seized the broom and followed Tobias with the scraper out upon the open gallery. If the storm had seemed furious before supper, it had risen to a top gale now. The two men could scarcely face it on the windward side.
The gale came in blasts that slapped their burden of snow against the lighthouse with great force. Ralph was barely able to keep his feet. But the sturdy lightkeeper went about the task with a certain phlegm.
They managed to free the glass of its curtain of snow. Then Ralph staggered around to the sheltered gallery, on the heels of Tobias. The younger man's was a gloomy face when they once more entered the lamp room.
"Cheer up," said Tobias, getting his breath and eyeing Ralph aslant. "They tell me the worst is yet to come. Though I tell you fair, Ralphie, if the last end o' my life is anywhere as hard as what happened me when I shipped cabin boy on the old Sarah Drinkwater, the good Lord help me to bear it!
"Why, Ralphie, from the time she was warped out o' the dock at Provincetown till we unloaded them box shocks at Santiago I didn't git to git my clothes off—no, sir!
"We did have bad weather, I cal'late, though I never got out on deck often enough the whole endurin' v'y'ge to observe the sea and sky. I was washing dishes, making up berths, cleaning pots and pans, peeling 'taters and turmits, and seeding raisins for the skipper's plum duff most o' the time.
"Seeding raisins! Oh, sugar, I got to thinkin' that if that was all going to sea meant, I might better have got a job in a scullery and kept on an even footing. And I purty nigh got my lips in such a pucker whistling while I seeded them raisins (cookie wouldn't trust me otherwise) that I never did get 'em straight since.
"Say, lemme tell you!" proceeded Tobias, his weather-stained face beaming in the glow of the great Argand light. "Cap'n Drinkwater demanded his plum duff for supper ev'ry endurin' day of the v'y'ge, no matter what the weather was. He had an old black cook, Sam Snowball, that had got so's he could make that pudding to the queen's taste.
"Lemme tell you! The skipper was that stingy that he fed the crew rusty pork and weevilly beans, and a grade of salt horse that would make a crew of Skowegians mutiny. But the Sarah Drinkwater never made long enough v'y'ges for her crew to mutiny—no, sir!
"But that plum duff—oh, sugar! Bein' the boy, I never got more'n the lickin's of the dish. If I got enough 'taters and salt horse to fill my belly so's to keep my pants up, I was lucky. The skipper and the mate divided the duff between 'em.
"Ahem!" he added critically, "you don't look as though there was any plums at all in your duff, Ralph."
"There isn't," returned the young man shortly.
"Oh, sugar!" ejaculated the lightkeeper, drawing forth a short clay pipe and a sack of cut tobacco. "I cal'late that you folks with money have more real troubles than what we poor folks do."
"Huh! Money!" scoffed Endicott.
"Yep. It's mighty poor bait for fish, I cal'late. You can't even chum with it."
"Money isn't everything," said the young man shrugging his shoulders.
"True. True as preaching," cried Tobias. "But 'twill buy most everything you're likely to need in this world. And you've got enough, Ralph, to keep you from getting gray-headed before your time worrying about where your three meals a day are coming from. I don't see what can be wrong with you. And that purty gal——"
"Now stop, Tobias Bassett!" exclaimed Endicott. "Don't keep reminding me of Lorna. I get enough of that at home."
"Wal!" gasped the lightkeeper. "For you to speak so of Lorna! Why, that's the main-skys'l-pole of the whole suit of spars—only needs the main-truck to cap it. What do you mean?"
"Now, mind you," Endicott said earnestly. "I haven't a thing to say against Lorna. She's a nice girl—for some other fellow. But I declare to you, Tobias, I won't marry her."
"Oh, sugar!"
"Just because my Uncle Henry and her Aunt Ida have planned for us to do so since we were little tads running about the beaches here, is no reason why I should be tied up to Lorna forever and ever, Amen!"
"That's a mighty hard sayin'——"
"You think, like everybody else, that Lorna and I were made for each other. We weren't! We'd fight all the time. We always do fight. Look at to-night. The first little thing that goes wrong she jumps at me. I'm sick of playing dog and rolling over every time Lorna orders me to.
"And look at the mess we're in to-night!"
"What's the matter with you, boy?" demanded the lighthouse keeper. "You're under shelter. There's grub enough in the light to stave off starvation for a spell. Nothing can't happen to your buzz-cart worse than its being drifted under with snow."
"Oh, you don't understand, Tobias!" said the exasperated Ralph. "Our going off in my car the way we did, and not getting back to-night—why! it'll be all over Harbor Bar that we've eloped."
"I see," said the lightkeeper between puffs of his short pipe. Then: "You don't cal'late to marry Lorna?"
"I won't have her thrown at me."
"I never had no gal throwed at me," Tobias reflected. "I dunno how