The old storekeeper reached the sands below the Shell Road.  Scattered in groups along the strand were the people of all classes and degrees brought together by the word that a vessel was in peril.  Here a group of fishermen in guernseys and high boots, their sou’westers battened down upon their heads.  Yonder Bane and his fellow actors in natty summer suits stood around the camera discussing with the director the possibility of making a film of the scene.  Farther away huddled a party of women from the neighborhood, with shawls over their heads and children at their skirts.  Beyond them the people from the cottages on the bluff were hurrying to the spot—­women in silk attire and men in the lounge suits that fashion prescribed for afternoon wear.

The storekeeper saw and appreciated all this.  He stood squarely up to the wind, the ends of the red bandana over his ears snapping in the rifted airs, and shaded his eyes with his hand.  With his other hand he stroked the scar along his jaw.  He had a feeling that he had been cheated.  That story of the mutiny of the Galatea was destined to be one of his very best narratives.

He had come to take great pride in these tales, had Cap’n Abe.  He had heard enough men relate personal reminiscences to realize that his achievements in the story-telling line had a flavor all their own.  He could hold his course with any of them, was his way of expressing it.

And here something had intervened to shut him off in the middle of a narrative.  Cap’n Abe did not like it.

His keen vision swept the outlook once more.  How darkly the clouds lowered!  And the wind, spray-ridden down here on the open strand, cut shrewdly.  It would be a wild night.  Casually he thought of his cheerful living-room, with his chintz-cushioned rocker, Diddimus purring on the couch, and the lamplight streaming over all.

“Lucky chap, you, Abe Silt, after all,” he muttered.  “Lucky you ain’t at sea in a blow like this.”

It was just then that he saw the laboring schooner in the offing.  Her poles were completely bare and by the way she pitched and tossed Cap’n Abe knew she must have two anchors out and that they were dragging.

She was so far away that she looked like a toy on the huge waves that rolled in from the horizon line.  Now and then a curling wave-crest hid even her topmasts.  Again, the curtain of mist hanging above Gull Rocks shrouded her.

For the craft was being driven steadily upon the rocks.  Unless the wind shifted—­and that soon—­she must batter her hull to bits upon the reef.

The storekeeper, who knew this coast and the weather conditions so well, saw at once that the schooner had no chance for salvation.  When the wind backed around into the northeast, as it had on this occasion, it foreran a gale of more than usual power and of more than twenty-four hours’ duration.

“She’s doomed!” he whispered, and wagged his head sadly.