The sound of the mare’s feet on the oyster-shell path outside his cabin brought Fogarty, a tall, thin, weather-beaten fisherman, to the door.  He was still wearing his hip-boots and sou’wester—­he was just in from the surf—­and stood outside the low doorway with a lantern.  Its light streamed over the sand and made wavering patterns about the mare’s feet.

“Thought ye’d never come, Doc,” he whispered, as he threw the blanket over the mare.  “Wife’s nigh crazy.  Tod’s fightin’ for all he’s worth, but there ain’t much breath left in him.  I was off the inlet when it come on.”

The wife, a thick-set woman in a close-fitting cap, her arms bared to the elbow, her petticoats above the tops of her shoes, met him inside the door.  She had been crying and her eyelids were still wet and her cheeks swollen.  The light of the ship’s lantern fastened to the wall fell upon a crib in the corner, on which lay the child, his short curls, tangled with much tossing, smoothed back from his face.  The doctor’s ears had caught the sound of the child’s breathing before he entered the room.

“When did this come on?” Doctor John asked, settling down beside the crib upon a stool that the wife had brushed off with her apron.

“’Bout sundown, sir,” she answered, her tear-soaked eyes fixed on little Tod’s face.  Her teeth chattered as she spoke and her arms were tight pressed against her sides, her fingers opening and shutting in her agony.  Now and then in her nervousness she would wipe her forehead with the back of her wrist as if it were wet, or press her two fingers deep into her swollen cheek.

Fogarty had followed close behind the doctor and now stood looking down at the crib with fixed eyes, his thin lips close shut, his square jaw sunk in the collar of his shirt.  There were no dangers that the sea could unfold which this silent surfman had not met and conquered, and would again.  Every fisherman on the coast knew Fogarty’s pluck and skill, and many of them owed their lives to him.  To-night, before this invisible power slowly closing about his child he was as powerless as a skiff without oars caught in the swirl of a Barnegat tide.

“Why didn’t you let me know sooner, Fogarty?  You understood my directions?” Doctor John asked in a surprised tone.  “You shouldn’t have left him without letting me know.”  It was only when his orders were disobeyed and life endangered that he spoke thus.

The fisherman turned his head and was about to reply when the wife stepped in front of him.

“My husband got ketched in the inlet, sir,” she said in an apologetic tone, as if to excuse his absence.  “The tide set ag’in him and he had hard pullin’ makin’ the p’int.  It cuts in turrible there, you know, doctor.  Tod seemed to be all right when he left him this mornin’.  I had husband’s mate take the note I wrote ye.  Mate said nobody was at home and he laid it under your pipe.  He thought ye’d sure find it there when ye come in.”