and fierce as the summer lightning which played
below the dark horizon.

She was gone, planting that aerial foot willfully in the dust. Raindrops
ticked from one to another of the broad, green leaves over the harbor
master's head. Water might be heard frothing in a nearby cistern.

Suddenly the moon glittered on the parson's birch-wood pile, and slanted
a beam under the Preaching Tree. Sunk in the thick dust which the rain
had slightly stippled in slow droppings, he saw the tender prints of a
bare foot and the cruel tracks of the seaman's great, square-toed boots
pointing together toward the sea.

He raised his eyes only with a profound effort. They encountered a
blackboard affixed to the fat trunk of the Preaching Tree, on which from
day to day the parson wrote the text for its preachments in colored
chalk. The moon was full upon it, and Rackby saw in crimson lettering
the words, "Woman, hath no man damned thee?" The rest of the text he
had rubbed out with his own shoulders in turning to take the girl into
his arms.

"I damn ye!" he cried, raising his arms wildly. "Yes, by the Lord, I
damn ye up and down. May you burn as I burn, where the worm dieth not,
and the fires are not quenched."

So saying, he set his foot down deliberately on the first of the light
footprints she had made in springing from his side--as if he might as
easily as that blot out the memory of his enslavement.

Thereafter the Customs House twitted him, as if it knew the full extent
of his shame. Zinie Shadd called after him to know if he had heard that
voice from the sea yet, in his comings and goings.

"Peter Loud was not so easy hung by the heels," that aged loiterer
affirmed, "shipping as he did along with the lady herself, as bo's'n for
Cap'n Sam Dreed."

Jethro Rackby took to drink somewhat, to drown these utterances, or
perhaps to quench some stinging thirst within him which he knew not to
be of the soul.

When certain of the elders asked him why he did not cut the drink and
take a decent wife, he laughed like a demon, and cried out:

"What's that but to swap the devil for a witch?"

Others he met with a counter question:

"Do you think I will tie a knot with my tongue that I can't untie with
my teeth?"

So he sat by himself at the back windows of a water-front saloon, and
when he caught a glimpse of the water shining there low in its channels
he would shut his lips tight.--Who could have thought that it would be
the sea itse