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He sighed, he yawned.

“I got her done,” says he, “confound her!” He yawned again.

“Too much labor, lad,” Skipper Tom complained.

“Pshaw!” says Terry, indignantly. “I didn’t labor on her.”

Skipper Tom stared aghast in the presence of this monstrously futile prevarication.

“Ecod!” he gasped.

“Why, father,” says Terry, airily, “I jus’–sketched her. Do she scare you?”

From Terry Lute’s picture Skipper Tom’s glance ran to Terry Lute’s anxious eyes.

“She do,” said he, gravely; “but I’m fair unable t’ fathom”–pulling his beard in bewilderment–“the use of it all.”

Terry Lute grinned.

* * * * *

It did not appear until the fall gales were blowing in earnest that “The Fang” had made a coward of Terry Lute. There was a gray sea that day, and day was on the wing. There was reeling, noisy water roundabout, turning black in the failing light, and a roaring lee shore; and a gale in the making and a saucy wind were already jumping down from the northeast with a trail of disquieting fog. Terry Lute’s spirit failed; he besought, he wept, to be taken ashore. “Oh, I’m woeful scared o’ the sea!” he complained. Skipper Tom brought him in from the sea, a whimpering coward, cowering degraded and shamefaced in the stern-sheets of the punt. There were no reproaches. Skipper Tom pulled grimly into harbor. His world had been shaken to ruins; he was grave without hope, as many a man before him has fallen upon the disclosure of inadequacy in his own son.

It was late that night when Skipper Tom and the discredited boy were left alone by the kitchen fire. The gale was down then, a wet wind blowing wildly in from the sea. Tom Lute’s cottage shook in its passing fingers, which seemed somehow not to linger long enough to clutch it well, but to grasp in driven haste and sweep on. The boy sat snuggled to the fire for its consolation; he was covered with shame, oppressed, sore, and hopeless. He was disgraced: he was outcast, and now forever, from a world of manly endeavor wherein good courage did the work of the day that every man must do. Skipper Tom, in his slow survey of this aching and pitiful degradation, had an overwhelming sense of fatherhood. He must be wise, he thought; he must be wise and very wary that fatherly helpfulness might work a cure.

The boy had failed, and his failure had not been a thing of unfortuitous chance, not an incident of catastrophe, but a significant expression of character. Terry Lute was a coward, deep down, through and through: he had not lapsed in a panic; he had disclosed an abiding fear of the sea. He was not a coward by any act; no mere wanton folly had disgraced him, but the fallen nature of his own heart. He had failed; but he was only a lad, after all, and he must be helped to overcome. And there he sat, snuggled close to the fire, sobbing now, his face in his hands. Terry Lute knew–that which Skipper Tom did not yet know–that he had nurtured fear of the sea for the scandalous delight of imposing it upon others in the exercise of a devilish impulse and facility.

And he was all the more ashamed. He had been overtaken in iniquity; he was foredone.

“Terry, lad,” said Skipper Tom, gently, “you’ve done ill the day.”

“Ay, sir.”

“I ‘low,” Skipper Tom apologized, “that you isn’t very well.”

“I’m not ailin’, sir,” Terry whimpered.

“An I was you,” Skipper Tom admonished, “I’d not spend time in weepin’.”

“I’m woebegone, sir.”

“You’re a coward, God help you!” Skipper Tom groaned.

“Ay, sir.”

Skipper Tom put a hand on the boy’s knee. His voice was very gentle.

“There’s no place in the world for a man that’s afeard o’ the sea,” he said. “There’s no work in the world for a coward t’ do. What’s fetched you to a pass like this, lad?”