There was but little damage to the yacht’s bottom—­a small matter to find that out—­though the skipper he carried was no master of craft.  So many of them like that, too.  To face the sea like men is not what they’re after, not to take winter or summer as it comes, rough or smooth—­no—­but always the smooth water and soft winds.  But he did not sail for the West Indies that day, nor that week, nor winter—­something’d gone wrong with the machinery.  No concern of mine that.  There were those who said later—­but that was when my head begun to trouble me—­as it does now sometimes, as I said.  There was a time, when Sarah was alive, before we had even the old ship’s cabin on the end of the old dock by way of an office, when I carried my business in a wallet in my breast pocket—­that is, what we didn’t carry in our heads—­but the mother of those two lads, she was with me then.  That’s long ago.

A most interestin’ man he was.  As I say, he made no West India cruise that winter—­the machinery kept gettin’ out of order—­but he made a few trips with me—­wreckin’ trips—­for I still looked after the big jobs myself.  There were those who used to say that if I’d only learned to stand by and look on long enough to train a good man to take my place in the deep divin’, that I’d be goin’ yet.  Maybe so, but maybe, too, they didn’t know it all.  I’d yet to meet a man who would do my work half as well as I could myself—­never but one, and she was a woman and could do her part better—­Sarah, my first wife, and her kind aren’t livin’ now.

He was not so soft, this yacht man, as I used to think.  He stood the rough winter trips with me well.  I learned to like him—­rarely.  I could talk to him about the work, and he’d try to understand—­as so few of his kind would.  He understood better after he’d been some trips with me, and I came to love him—­almost.  When I was away on those trips, my wife would be at home—­until the time her aunt took sick.  I recollect her speakin’ of her aunt—­or did I?  No matter.  She lived out West somewhere, and didn’t want her to marry me—­or so I made out.  I didn’t go too deep into it.  When she hinted that she hadn’t told me of her aunt before for fear of hurtin’ my feelin’s, it was enough.  Women feel things more than men, and no use to rake ’em over.  I knew I was a rough man, not the kind many women folks might take to—­I never quite got over Her likin’ me—­nor did a whole lot of people—­and ’twas natural a woman of the kind her aunt must be, didn’t like her marryin’ a man like me.  But no matter; her aunt was bein’ reconciled, she used to write me, and when your wife is makin’ up to her only livin’ relative, and she dyin’, it’s no time to be exactin’.  So she stayed on in the West.  I’ve forgotten where—­Chicago maybe?—­too far, anyway, for me to go to her, because I had to stand ready in my business to leave at a minute’s notice.  A gale c’d rise in an hour, the coast be cluttered with wrecks in one day.  And there were so many big people, steamboat people and big shippin’ firms, who counted on me, would ‘a’ been disappointed, you see, if I wasn’t on deck when needed.  It’s something, after all, to be honest in your work all your life, not leave it to careless helpers.