“Well, what do you think of the hoodoo ship, Horrors?” he hoarsely whispered.

Newbegin stared at him unwaveringly, and the red-haired one repeated the question.  The old salt finally batted one eye, slowly and impressively.

“D’you know what answer the little boy got that asked the quahog the time o’ day?” he drawled.  “Not a word.  Not a derned word, ’Rion.”

Landing at the fish wharf, Tunis Latham walked up the straggling street of the district inhabited for the most part by smiling brown men and women.  Fayal and Cape Cod are strangely analogous, especially upon a summer’s day.  The houses he passed had one room; they were little more than shacks.  But there were gay colors everywhere in the dress of both men and women.  It was believed that these Portygee fishermen would have their seines dyed red and yellow if the fish would swim into them.

A young woman sitting upon a doorstep, nursing a little, bald, brown-headed baby, dropped a gay handkerchief over her bared bosom but nodded and smiled at the captain of the Seamew with right good fellowship.  He knew all these people, and most of them, the young women at least, admired Tunis; but he was too self-centered and busied with his own thoughts and affairs to comprehend this.

At the corner of one of the houses a girl stood—­a tall, lean-flanked, but deep-bosomed creature, as graceful as a well-grown sapling.  Her calico frock clung to the lines of her matured figure as though she had just stepped up out of the sea itself.  Around her head she had banded a crimson bandanna, but it allowed the escape of glossy black hair that waved prettily.  Her lips were as red as poppies, full, voluptuous; her eyes were sloe-black and as soft as a cow’s.  Fortunately for the languishing girl’s peace of mind—­she had placed herself there at the corner of the house to wait for Tunis since the moment the Seamew had dropped anchor—­she did not know that the young captain had noticed her only as “that cow” as he swung by on his way to the road that wound up the slope of Wreckers’ Head.

Neither Eunez Pareta—­nor any other girl of the port, Portygee or Yankee—­had ever made Tunis Latham’s heart flutter.  He was not impervious to the blandishments of all feminine beauty.  As Cap’n Ira Ball would have said, Tunis was “a general admirer of the sect.”  And as the young man passed the languishing Eunez with a cheerful nod and smile there flashed into his memory an entirely different picture, but one of a girl nevertheless.  Somehow the memory of that girl in Scollay Square kept coming back to his mind.

He had gone up by train for the Seamew and her crew, and naturally he had spent one night in Boston.  Coming up out of the North End after a late supper, he had stopped upon one side of the square to watch the passing throng, some hurrying home from work, some hurrying to theaters and other places of amusement, but all hurrying.  Nowhere did he see the slow, but carrying, stride of a man used to open spaces.  And the narrow-skirted girls could scarcely hobble.