The flurry of excitement was over.  But Ira Ball was a determined man.  It was in his mind that the trouble of taking care of the old mare was too great for Prudence, and he could not do the barn chores himself.  They really had no use for the gray mare, for nowadays the neighbors did all their errands in town for them, and the few remaining acres of the old farm lay fallow.

Nor, had he desired to sell the mare, would anybody be willing to pay much for the twenty-two-year-old Queenie.  In truth, Ira Ball was too tender-hearted to think of giving the Queen of Sheba over to a new owner and so sentence her to painful toil.

“She’d be a sight better off in the horse heaven, wherever that is,” he decided.  But he was careful to say nothing like this in his wife’s hearing.  “Women are funny that way,” he considered.  “She’d rather let the decrepit old critter hang around eatin’ her head off, like I say, than mercifully put her out of her misery.”

Stern times call for stern methods.  Cap’n Ira Ball had seen the tragic moment when he was forced to separate a bridegroom from his bride with a sinking deck all but awash under his feet.  What had to be done had to be done!  Prudence could no longer be endangered by the stable tasks connected with the old mare.  He could not relieve her.  They could scarcely afford a hired hand merely to take care of Queenie.

He remained rather silent that evening, and even forgot to praise Prue’s hot biscuit, of which he ate a good many with his creamed pollack.  The sweet-tempered old woman chatted as she knitted on his blue-wool hose, but she scarcely expected more than his occasional grunted acknowledgment that he was listening.  She always said it was “a joy to have somebody besides the cat around to talk to.”  The loneliness of shipmasters who sail the seven seas is often mentioned in song and in story; the loneliness of their wives at home is not usually marked.

They went to bed.  Old men do not usually sleep much after second cock-crow, and it was not far from three in the morning when Cap’n Ira awoke.  Like most mariners, he was wide awake when he opened his eyes.  He lay quietly for several moments in the broad bed he occupied alone.  The half-sobbing breathing of the old woman sounded from her room, through the open door.

“It’s got to be done,” Cap’n Ira almost audibly repeated.

He got out of the bed with care.  It was both a difficult and a painful task to dress.  When he had on all but his boots and hat he tiptoed to a green sea chest in the corner, unlocked it, and from beneath certain tarpaulins and other sea rubbish drew out something which he examined carefully in the semidarkness of the chamber.  He finally tucked this into an inner pocket of the double-breasted pilot coat he wore.  It sagged the coat a good deal on that side.

He crept out of the chamber, crossed the sitting room, and went into the ell-kitchen with his shoes in his hand.  When he opened the back door he faced the west, but even the sky at that point of the compass showed the glow of the false dawn.  Down in the cove the night mist wrapped the shipping about in an almost opaque veil.  Only the lofty tops of craft like the Seamew were visible, black streaks against the mother-of-pearl sky line.