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“Forty years I’ve been living here, Doctor,” he went on. “Forty years–and t’ last ten I’ve been all alone. Not a living soul have I had t’ chance to save all these long years, though God knows I’ve kept as good a lookout as one watch could. Then Neighbor Blake lost his helpmate like I had mine, and he let me share up with him, and have Nellie. He wanted his boys to help him get food and things for t’ rest, so a girl was what he gave me. And I couldn’t have had a boy, Doctor, anyhow. Willy’s place will never be filled for me, till he comes himself and fills it, and that won’t be long now either.” He looked at his pipe, which had gone out, and then continued: “No, I’m not one o’ them as can take a new wife almost as soon as t’ first one’s gone”–and then suddenly: “But it’s time to boil t’ kettle. You’se getting hungry, I ‘lows, and me chattering like a fool, and not thinking of anything beyond my own troubles. I’m forgetting you must be worriting over being kept so long in this bit of a tilt, but you’ll not get away till morning, so just make yourself as miserable as you can!”

As he bustled around filling the kettle with ice for water, and struggling to heat up a small molasses barrel in order to let out some “sweetness” for our tea, I had made a bird, a boat, and a couple of darts out of paper, as overtures to the lady of the house. Before the humble meal was spread she had the room ringing with her laughter, as she darted now here, now there, and at last succeeded in hitting the old man himself almost in the eye. Many times that meal has come back to my memory. The rough bare boards of the walls, naked but for one old picture of a horse cut from a magazine, carefully pasted upside down, and probably designed chiefly to cover some defective spot that was admitting too much coldness; the crazy table shaking with every gust and causing a tiny kerosene lamp to flare up and menace the dim religious darkness by depositing even more lamp-black than was its wont on its already negrine globe; the meagre board of dark bread, “oleo,” and molasses; the weird minstrelsy of the hurricane–the whole a harmony of poverty and war. Yet the memory brings deeper pleasure to my mind than that of many costly banquets–and even I have eaten from plates of silver with implements of gold. For in the flickering light of the crackling logs I can still see the joy of the old man’s kindly face over the boisterous happiness of his quaint ward, the dance in the eyes of the merry child as some colored candies placed in my nonny-bag by my wife fell somehow from the sky right on to the table before her. The telling of his story, never before mentioned to any one but his wife and foster child, but kept like some vendetta wrong waiting for revenge in his rebellious heart these many years, seemed to have renewed his youth. A merrier, happier party it has never been my lot to share in; and now that I know the pathos of the last chapter written in this strange life, I rejoice more than ever that for that night, anyhow, the enemy that haunted him overreached, and the very blizzard proved the key for one evening at least of freedom from his obsession.

We were away before daylight, and I never saw Uncle Rube again. Life, it seems, went along tranquilly with him the following winter. As usual he kept his watch and ward on the cliffs by the Red Island Shoals. Then the fatal 10th of April came round. Once again it broke upon the solitary figure of the old man straining his eyes from his coign of vantage on the dread shoals of the Red Islands. Unquestionably he saw again reenacted there the weird tragedy that nearly half a century before had broken his life, bringing home with a strange fascination the moving picture to his very heart. But with it this spring he witnessed also a scene that for many years every man on the coast had prayed for, but no man had been privileged to take part in. The wind had come out of the Straits and the Gulf ice was driving swiftly towards the great Atlantic, exactly as it had done on the memorable day now forty years before. Once again there was ice in huge sheets jammed against the great cliffs of Belle Isle, and clear water between. Suddenly the straining eyes of the old sailor shone with a totally new light. He jumped to his feet, and with hands shading his starting eyes, stood motionless like a statue on the pedestal of his lookout, now white as the purest marble in its winter mantle.