Captain Holt sat with his head on his chest looking at the floor in front of him.  The light of the banging lamp made dark shadows under his eyebrows and under his chin whiskers.  There was a firm set to his clean-shaven lips, but the eyes burned with a gentle light; a certain hope, positive now, seemed to be looming up in them.

Tod watched him for an instant, and said: 

“What do ye think of it, cap’n?”

“I ain’t made up my mind.”

“Is he lyin’?”

“I don’t know.  Seems too good to be true.  He’s got some things right; some things he ain’t.  Keep your mouth shut till I tell ye to open it—­to Cobden, mind ye, and everybody else.  Better help Green overhaul that line.  That’ll do, Fogarty.”

Tod dipped his head—­his sign of courteous assent —­and backed out of the room.  The captain continued motionless, his eyes fixed on space.  Once he turned, picked up the paper, scrutinized the handwriting word for word, and tossed it back on the desk.  Then he rose from his seat and began pacing the floor, stopping to gaze at a chart on the wall, at the top of the stove, at the pendulum of the clock, surveying them leisurely.  Once he looked out of the window at the flare of light from his swinging lamp, stencilled on the white sand and the gray line of the dunes beyond.  At each of these resting-places his face assumed a different expression; hope, fear, and anger again swept across it as his judgment struggled with his heart.  In one of his turns up and down the small room he laid his hand on a brick lying on the window-sill—­one that had been sent by the builders of the Station as a sample.  This he turned over carefully, examining the edges and color as if he had seen it for the first time and had to pass judgment upon its defects or merits.  Laying it back in its place, he threw himself into his chair again, exclaiming aloud, as if talking to someone: 

“It ain’t true.  He’d wrote before if he were alive.  He was wild and keerless, but he never was dirt-mean, and he wouldn’t a-treated me so all these years.  The Swede’s a liar, I tell ye!”

Wheeling the chair around to face the desk, he picked up a pen, dipped it into the ink, laid it back on the desk, picked it up again, opened a drawer on his right, took from it a sheet of official paper, and wrote a letter of five lines.  This he enclosed in the envelope, directed to the name on the slip of paper.  Then he opened the door.

“Fogarty.”

“Yes, cap’n.”

“Take this to the village and drop it in the post yourself.  The weather’s clearin’, and you won’t be wanted for a while,” and he strode out and joined his men.

CHAPTER XIX

THE BREAKING OF THE DAWN

September weather on Barnegat beach!  Fine gowns and fine hats on the wide piazzas of Beach Haven!  Too cool for bathing, but not too cool to sit on the sand and throw pebbles and loll under kindly umbrellas; air fresh and bracing, with a touch of June in it; skies full of mares’-tails—­slips of a painter’s brush dragged flat across the film of blue; sea gone to rest; not a ripple, no long break of the surf, only a gentle lift and fall like the breathing of a sleeping child.