“Dollar an’ a half!  It’s too much for the father of eight children for one day!  But this—­see.  For baby.  And the Lord knows a baby who came through last night and never a yip out of him, he oughter get a million.  Here—­put in bank—­for baby.”

“Ah-h!  For baby.  Tenk you.”  She beamed and took the money.  “You brave man!  Him”—­pointing to Jan’s back—­“brave man too.”

“Him, brave—­yes.  But me?  No, no.  Me scared blue.  He’d ‘a’ shot me next only I beat him to it.”

“Kill baby too.”  She kissed the baby.

* * * * *

The sun was well up when they reached the top of the hill—­a pale, frightened-looking sun, but nevertheless a sun.  The bartender took off his cap and saluted it gravely.  Below them lay the town.

“We’ll go down there,” said Jan to Mrs. Goles, “and from there, when you’re well, we’ll go home—­to my mother.  But,” he added gravely, “we will go by train.”

She smiled weakly at him.  “I could go without a train—­on my hands and knees I could crawl to the mother of you!  You don’t know it, but when I was growing up it was a man like you I always used to dream about.  And I’m not sure I’m not dreaming now!”

“Don’t worry,” said the bartender.  “We’re all awake—­and alive.  And you bet it’s great to be alive again!  Ain’t it,”—­he turned to the Finn woman,—­“you mother of eight?”

The Finn woman made no answer.  She was nursing her baby.

Cogan Capeador

Eight bells had gone, the morning watch was done, it was almost time to eat, and so Kieran, the pump-man, laid aside the tools of his berth and came strolling aft; and swinging down the long gangway he sang: 

  “There was a girl,—­I knew her well,—­a girl in Zanzibar—­
  A bulgeous man of science said you bet her avatar
  Was Egypt’s Cleopatra—­and from off a man-o’-war
  I met her first—­and O, her eyes!  A blazing polar star! 
  From which you couldn’t head away no more than you could fly—­
  Gypsy one of Zanzy!  For you who wouldn’t die!”

It was one of those fine days in the Gulf of Mexico.  Abreast of the ship the Florida reefs, low-crested, ragged, and white, loomed above the smooth sea.

Kieran contemplated the line of reefs; presently he leaned over the taffrail and stared down at the whirling propeller; from the screws his gaze shifted to the whirling water above and about them, and thence to the tow in their wake.  He put his head to one side, studied the spectacle of the straining hawser and the wallowing barge on the end of it, as if it were a mysterious problem.

“Oh-h, shucks!” He sighed and came suddenly out of his reverie, looked up at the sky, turned wearily inboard, and sat himself on one of the towing bitts.

The passenger, from the other towing bitt, asked what it was.

“I was just thinking that some of us are tied to the end of a string, just like that barge, and we don’t know it any more than she does, and no more able to help ourselves than she can—­sometimes.”