DAN STAKES HIS LIFE, AND WINS

Before the Winter passed, Dan had taken his master’s examination with flying colors and was made Captain of the Fledgling, owned by the Phoenix Towboat Company.  She was a new boat, rugged, powerful, one hundred and twenty-five feet water line, designed and built to go anywhere and do anything.

The Phoenix Company was known as a venturesome organization, as willing to send its fleet ramping out through the fog to the assistance of a distressed liner as to transport arms to West Indian or Central American revolutionists.  Before Dan had commanded the Fledgling many months he had done both, and was beginning to be known up and down the coast as a captain to be called upon in emergencies verging upon the extraordinary, not to say extra-hazardous.

All of which he accepted joyously, as the portion of youth in search of experience that life has to offer.  He was sufficiently introspective to rate the temper of his spirit at something approaching its real value, and he knew it was to be cherished, guarded, lest the fine edge be lost.  As the world reckons things it was a humble calling upon which he had entered, a calling hardly qualified to enlist the pride of the family whose name he bore.

As a matter of fact, the pride of his few relations was not enlisted.  He had been made to feel that.  He did not complain.  He appreciated their attitude.  But that did not curb a high-hearted ambition to lift his vocation to the ideals he had formulated concerning it—­and the future lay before him.

But he was not thinking of these things now.  The face of the sea was gray in sullen fury.  From a blue horizon, dulled and almost obliterated by long, jagged layers of steely clouds, came the ceaseless rush of deep-chested waves, as even, as fascinating as the vermiculations of a serpent.  And the wind, tearing along the floor of the sea, whipped off the wave crests and sent them shivering, shimmering ahead, like the plumes of hard-riding cavalry.

The storm had passed.  The effects remained, and Dan Merrithew shifted his wheel several spokes east of north and took the brunt bow on.  She bore it well, did the stout Fledgling; she did that—­she split the waves or crashed through them, or laughed over them, as a stout tug should when coaxed by hands of skill, guided by an iron will.  The Long Island coast lay to port, a narrow band of ochre, and all about lay the heaving gray of mighty waters, in which the Fledgling was a black speck.

Dan’s hat was off and his red-gold hair was flying wild; his teeth were bared.  He was always thus in a fight.  This was one; a dandy—­a clinker!  He gave the wheel another spoke and the Fledgling slued across a sea and smashed down hard.  From below came a sliding rattle, a great crash of crockery, and then a series of imprecations.  The next instant Arthur M’Gill, the steward, dashed up the companionway and burst into the pilot-house.