Isaac Polhemus came first:  Sixty years of age, silent, gray, thick-set; face scarred and seamed by many weathers, but fresh as a baby’s; two china-blue eyes—­peep-holes through which you looked into his open heart; shoulders hard and tough as cordwood hands a bunch of knots; legs like snubbing-posts, body quick-moving; brain quick-thinking; alert as a dog when on duty, calm as a sleepy cat beside a stove when his time was his own.  Sixty only in years, this man; forty in strength and in skill, twenty in suppleness, and a one-year-old toddling infant in all that made for guile.  “Uncle Ike” some of the younger men once called him, wondering behind their hands whether he was not too old and believing all the time that he was.  “Uncle Ike” they still called him, but it was a title of affection and pride; affection for the man underneath the blue woollen shirt, and pride because they were deemed worthy to pull an oar beside him.

The change took place the winter before when he was serving at Manasquan and when he pulled four men single-handed from out of a surf that would have staggered the bravest.  There was no life-boat within reach and no hand to help.  It was at night—­a snowstorm raging and the sea a corral of hungry beasts fighting the length of the beach.  The shipwrecked crew had left their schooner pounding on the outer bar, and finding their cries drowned by the roar of the waters, had taken to their boat.  She came bow on, the sea-drenched sailors clinging to her sides.  Uncle Isaac Polhemus caught sight of her just as a savage pursuing roller dived under her stern, lifted the frail shell on its broad back, and whirled it bottom side up and stern foremost on to the beach.  Dashing into the suds, he jerked two of the crew to their feet before they knew what had struck them; then sprang back for the others clinging to the seats and slowly drowning in the smother.  Twice he plunged headlong after them, bracing himself against the backsuck, then with the help of his steel-like grip all four were dragged clear of the souse.  Ever after it was “Uncle Isaac” or “that old hang-on,” but always with a lifting of the chin in pride.

Samuel Green came next:  Forty-five, long, Lincoln -bodied, and bony; coal-black hair, coal-black eyes, and charcoal-black mustache; neck like a loop in standing rigging; arms long as cant-hooks, with the steel grips for fingers; sluggish in movement and slow in action until the supreme moment of danger tautened his nerves to breaking point; then came an instantaneous spring, quick as the recoil of a parted hawser.  All his life a fisherman except the five years he spent in the Arctic and the year he served at Squan; later he had helped in the volunteer crew alongshore.  Loving the service, he had sent word over to Captain Holt that he’d like “to be put on,” to which the captain had sent back word by the same messenger “Tell him he is put on.”  And he was, as soon as the papers were returned from Washington.  Captain Nat had no record to look up or inquiries to make as to the character or fitness of Sam Green.  He was the man who the winter before had slipped a rope about his body, plunged into the surf and swam out to the brig Gorgus and brought back three out of the five men lashed to the rigging, all too benumbed to make fast the shot-line fired across her deck.