There was in the crew of the Lone Cove Coast Guard Station a man named Hosea Hand and called Ho Ha, partly because these were the first letters of his first and last names, partly because of the presence among the crew of another man called Ha Ha. Ha Ha’s name was Harvey Hawley and he was a silent, sorrowful, drooping figure. He resembled a gloomy question mark and not a joyful exclamation point. Ho Ha, however, was merry; Ho Ha was blithe and gay. Ha Ha, in the week of the six-year-old child’s existence at Lone Cove, had hardly done more than eye her with misgiving. But Ho Ha had picked her up a dozen times a day for little journeys down to the surf, back to the station, over to the bay, and up on the dunes. He had her now, pick-a-back, at the end of the little pier that stuck out into the bay shallows. The chugging of the keeper’s launch grew louder every minute.

“Wave to the Cap’n,” Ho Ha urged her. Mermaid answered his smile with a smile of her own. The afternoon sun struck her coppery hair and framed the smile in a halo.

Of a sudden the chug-chugging stopped, the launch came about neatly, and Ho Ha, hastily setting Mermaid down on the pier, caught the rope end Cap’n Smiley tossed him. Then he laid hold of the keeper’s bundles while John Smiley picked up the little girl and carried her to the station.

Spring had not conquered the chill of nightfall yet. The big stove in the long living room of the station gave forth a happy warmth, and the front lids were red. In the kitchen, through which arrivals passed into the living room, Warren Avery, Surfman No. 4, was working, apron-clad, at the task of dinner. It was his week to cook and he thanked God the agony would soon be over. Cake! He had never been able to make cake with confidence since the day when he had put in salt instead of saleratus. The cake had not risen but his fellows had.

“What you trying to do, Avery?” Ha Ha had demanded. “This might have been made by Lot’s wife.”

In the living room sat the other members of the crew, all except Tom Lupton who was forth on the east patrol. All smoked pipes except the youngest, Joe Sayre, Surfman No. 7. Joe was eighteen and Cap’n Smiley suffered great anxiety lest cigarettes impair the physique inherited from generations of bay-going ancestors.

All smoked; at the word that dinner was ready all would cease to smoke and begin to eat. At the conclusion of dinner they would light up again. All were hungry, all were hardy. Seven nights before, drenched to the skin, blinded by rain and hail and braced against a full gale, they had battled all night to save men from a ship smashing to pieces on the outer bar. Not one of them showed a sign of that prolonged and terrible struggle.

Cap’n Smiley drew up his chair at one end of the table, which thus became the head. Mermaid was seated beside him. For her there was mush and milk, the latter supplied by the only cow on the beach, which belonged to Mrs. Biggles. For the others huskier fare: corned beef and cabbage, hardtack and butter, bread pudding and coffee. Each waited on himself and on the others. There must be conversation; Cap’n Smiley valued certain amenities as evidence of man’s civilized state and table conversation was one of them. It devolved on him to start it. He said:

“Has the beach been gone over to-day for wreckage?”

It appeared it had. Jim Mapes and Joe Sayre, aided somewhat by Mrs. Biggles’s husband, had walked east and west almost to the stations on either side of Lone Cove. There was much driftwood from the lost ship. Some tinned provisions had come ashore but seemed hopelessly spoiled. And one body.

“Found it well up on the beach about two miles east,” Jim Mapes told the keeper. “That of the captain. Biggles took it over to Bellogue. I kept the papers he had on him. Put ’em on your desk, Cap’n.”

“Look ’em over later,” the keeper remarked. “Did Biggles take off that fo’c’s’le scum?”

“He did.”

“And a good riddance,” declared the keeper. “Evil-looking fellow, if I ever saw one. A squarehead, too. Some Dutch name or other—Dirk or Derrick or just plain Dirt. The owners said to let him go. But the curious thing is they couldn’t tell me what I wanted to know.”

He glanced at the small girl beside him. She had finished her supper and sat back in her chair, looking a little timidly and a little sleepily at the men. Cap’n Smiley interrupted his meal to carry her to his room whence, after an interval, he returned grinning happily.

“Eyes closed as soon as she was in bed,” he informed his crew. Then his forehead wrinkled again as he sat down.

“The owners,” he explained, “say that the captain was unmarried. The mate had a wife but no children. The second was a youngster and single. There was no passenger, not even one signed on as ‘medical officer’ or anything like that. The ship was direct from San Francisco, 130 days out. The child must have come aboard before she sailed, but there is no record to show who she is. Have any of you talked to her?”

“I have,” Ho Ha answered. “Easy-like, you know, Cap’n. She says she hasn’t any name. The captain looked after her and she lived in a spare cabin. The steward she remembers because he was kind to her and because he was lame. She had never seen any one aboard before she came on the ship. Doesn’t know how she got there. Woke up to find herself in the cabin and the ‘bed rocking.’ Before being on the boat she lived with ‘a tall lady’ whom she called Auntie. Just Auntie, nothing else. It was in the country, some place near Frisco, maybe. On shipboard the captain and the steward called her ‘little girl’ when they called her anything. None of the others spoke to her.”

Most of the men had finished eating. Cap’n Smiley got up and went to his desk. He picked up the papers that had been washed ashore with the body of the Mermaid’s skipper. There were certain of the ship’s papers, a little memorandum book with no entries, and a personal letter. The ink had run badly on the soaked documents and the letter was illegible except for a few words. These were far apart and decipherable after much pains.

“‘Only child ... return her ... precautions ... do not want my whereabouts ... so no message ... forgiveness’” puzzled out the keeper. From hand to hand the letter went to confirm these conjectural readings. The keeper scratched his head. His forehead showed little vertical lines. His blue eyes were thoughtful, and the wrinkles that converged at their corners, the result of much sea gazing, showed up like little furrows of light and shadow under the rays of the big oil lamp hanging overhead. The sense of so much as he had read was clear enough, but the story was woefully incomplete. What were a few words in a couple of sentences of a long letter? Four large sheets had been covered by that shaky and rather small handwriting; and for the fourteen words he could make out there were at least four hundred lost.

Footfalls sounded on the boardwalk outside the door, not the steady tramp of Tom Lupton returning from the easterly stretch of the beach but lighter steps of someone running. The door opened quickly and Mrs. Biggles appeared among them, white and breathless.

“Cap’n,” she panted. “There’s a stranger on the beach. My Henry hasn’t got back yet—he maybe’ll be staying over to Bellogue till morning. I heard a noise at a window and there was a man’s face. He disappeared quick. I was so frightened I couldn’t run and I couldn’t stay; so finally I run over here. ’Twasn’t any face I ever saw before. It’s—it’s a sailor like the one Henry took off. And—oh, have mercy on us!—they’re all drowned!”

Cap’n Smiley, young Joe Sayre, and Jim Mapes went back with Mrs. Biggles. It was a clear night with many stars but the moon had not yet risen. The fresh, damp southeast wind was playing great chords upon the organ of the surf. Eight minutes’ tramping over the dunes brought the four persons to the Biggles house—a fisherman’s shack of two rooms, but tight and dry. The lamp’s glow came through window panes. After circling the house Cap’n Smiley moved to one of the windows. He came back immediately and said to the others with a low chuckle:

“Whoever he is, he’s hungry. Mrs. Biggles, he’s eating your provender!”

All fear left the bayman’s wife. With an exclamation she advanced before the others could restrain her. They followed her through the door in time to hear her exclaim:

“You good-for-nothing, what are you doing eating my Henry’s cold samp porridge!”

The man choked on a mouthful. Swiftly he rose and tried to slip by her. She gave him a heavy box on the head and the men at the door caught and held him.

“Who are you? What are you doing here?” asked Cap’n Smiley, sharply, though amazed mirth at the transformation of Mrs. Biggles caused his eyes to twinkle. The sailor stood quietly enough. His English was poor. He was, he said, one of the crew of the wrecked ship. He had been washed ashore unconscious on the night of the disaster but had recovered his senses before dawn, creeping into the sandhills. There he had hidden in bushes and slept. He had slept all day and at night he had prowled about. Breaking into one of the few summer cottages on the beach he had found a little food and on that he had subsisted. He hadn’t approached the Coast Guard Station nor made himself known to any one because of a fight in San Francisco in which he had killed a man. A boarding-house keeper had sheltered him and put him on the Mermaid, but the captain knew who he was and he had expected to be arrested when the ship made New York. The wreck had seemed to offer him a miraculous chance of escape, and he had somehow escaped with his life. Was he to survive in the face of such odds only to lose his life ashore? But now, half-starved and plainly feverish, he could struggle no longer; he would confess and take his chances. His eye remained with a fixed fascination on the food that lay on the table. He wriggled feebly in Cap’n Smiley’s hard grasp to reach it; then sank down limply with delirious mutterings.

The keeper and Joe Sayre picked him up and carried him, as men on shipboard carry a lighter sail, to the station. Mrs. Biggles, entirely reassured, they left in her cabin. At the station a bed was made on the floor in the living room, not far from the stove. The keeper got out his medicine chest and prepared to spend a wakeful night.

The man was evidently in a very bad state. Sedatives seemed to have no effect on him. He tossed about on the floor as if he felt a heaving deck under him. He talked almost continuously. His exchanges with the boarding-house keeper and with the skipper of the Mermaid were on his lips; and interspersed with cringing entreaties were sentences that must have been uttered in a quarrel with the man he had killed. Cap’n Smiley listened patiently, but he could not make much of it.

The man killed in the fight had not been a sailor but a landsman, that was evident, and he had had something to do with a woman—no, a girl. Then came the words, “Six years old,” and the keeper suddenly realized that all this might relate to the child sleeping in his bed. He bent down and waited for her name, but it never came. Most likely the speaker did not know it. There was something about a “Captain King,” but the name of the Mermaid’s captain had been Jackson.... This Captain King had had something to do with the six-year-old girl.... She was not his child but another’s.... He had arranged to send her back ... keeping himself out of it.... Child ... Cap’n Smiley’s thoughts travelled to the letter found with the body of the Mermaid’s skipper. It must have been from this Captain King. But to whom was he returning this child who was not his? And who were her parents? All this sick man knew he had learned from an agent of Captain King who had brought the child to the master of the Mermaid, and who had been drinking with the money someone, presumably King, had paid him.... The keeper, with a beating heart, gave heed to the sailor’s talking. Much of it was irrelevant and not a little was unclean; once the man sang part of a chantey, and once he cursed a fellow working beside him aloft on a yard. It was a long and strained vigil that the Coast Guardsman kept, and when, toward morning, the poor wretch on the floor sank into a coma and died, he had an intolerable sense of being cheated, first by a dead man who should have kept his papers in oilskin packets, and then by a dying man whose tongue should either have wagged a few hours longer or never have wagged at all.