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The inebriate weaved back and forth. His lips puckered several times for utterance. There was nothing comical about it. It was impotence trying too desperately hard to be deadly for that.

"Sshay," came the snarl, thickly, "name 's Yell, you? Name 's Yell? Got know. Name 's Yell?"

For the first time the gaunt, grizzled, competent old fellow actually took notice of the steward, actually looked at him.

"Yes," he said, "my name 's Yell. But you want to be careful. You'll pitch overboard among the little fishes in a minute."

"No, won't. Name 's Yell. All I want know. Got you. Got you at last. No f-f'gettin' name. Yell? Lute Yell? Huh! No, not in th-thirty years. Huh, some scream, you! Or is it short f' yellow? Eh, sshay, you-" But the abuse was foul, and may not be written.

Those seated within the curve of the stern rail, waiting for the baiting of a shark, numbered seven or eight, all men. Yell merely glanced our way, noting that there were no woman's ears to be offended, and let the fellow go on. We had not expected that, a competent man like him. He only put out a great hand now and then to keep the steward from collapsing on him when the swell dropped the ship. Then he asked:

puzzled; more than that, troubled, but not because of his danger.

"I don't guess I understand," he said. "If your name ain't Dillard, if you ain't Artie growed up, what business you got with me? But if you are Artie-"

The steward's clouded brain mistook that for temporizing, and he broke in:

"Don't make no diff'ence. I got you, 'n' I 'm goin' to do what Artie 'd do, f-f' what you did to old man Dillard 'n' Effie. No, won't mention Effie; jus' old man Dillard. What you did to old man Dillard."

The hand in his shirt had closed on the weapon, as we judged from the bulge of the fist over the breast; and he had backed against the rail, planting one naked heel against the lower rail, as if to raise and hurl himself down on the man in the deckchair.

Yell put down his book, and rose slowly out of his chair. My, but he was a towering, rugged stalwart! None of us saw any need of interfering. But we were enough interested to forget the sharks and the men below fixing the bait.

"What was it I did to old man Dillard?" Yell asked quietly. "That was 'most thirty years ago, bub."

"Jus' same, I remem'-I know what was," retorted the steward, still pawing his heel against the rail. "You broke

"Your name ain't Dillard, is it? Not him, tha' 's what. Stole his money, broke Dillard, by any chance?"

"No, 't ain't Dillard," said the other, hotly. "Mortimer; my name 's Mortimer."

"I mind me there was an Artie Dillard, about six or seven. Sour little cub. More like a viper than a human kid. I thought maybe you was him growed up.”

"My name's Mortimer, I tell you," cried the steward.

"Then I never heard of you, bub," said Yell. "And there 's no need getting put in irons. Better-"

He

However, the drunkard was past warning. He was amuck for a purpose. bent over the man, leering confidentially, and repeated: "Got you. Got you at last." First he glanced round the deck in furtive, stupid craft, as if to reckon on the chance of interference, and then he thrust a hand in his open shirt for a weapon.

Yell seemed not to see. He looked

him flat, 'n' he had go back to day wages, when he might 'ave gone on 'n' died rich, 'n' left money f-f'-" the drunkard's sullen scowl quickened in a spasm-"f-f Artie."

"And Effie," suggested Yell. "There was two children."

We were astounded. He had let pass a charge of theft like that!

"Effie 's out of it, tell you; out of it," cried the steward. "Effie 's married. Married twenty years 'go."

"Married?" The old man's steely eyes softened. "I'm glad, I 'm glad," he said. "Glad, you?" The other misunder

stood.

He thought it a sneer. And his foolish, blubbering rage, though rising insanely, was somehow worthier. "You hound!" he spluttered. "You hid behind what she was to you, or you 'd had your little term in the pen. Glad, you-"

We believed it, knew it, not of course from the drunken ravings, but from the

man Yell himself. The dumb look on his long, gaunt face admitted it. I believe that in the instant we hoped to see the maudlin avenger strike true.

He rose against the rail as if with the froth of his curses, jerking the hand from his shirt, clenching a sailor's knife, and straining backward for the drive of the blow. But the stern of the ship dropped as the swell slipped from beneath, and at the moment a charge of dynamite exploded in the water. Yell grabbed for the steward. Too late, however. He was overboard. A strong current carried him like a cork a hundred feet astern. Behind him he had left his knife, the sailor's long knife. It lay in the scuppers, under the rail, where he had dropped it. The knife here, and he out there-what a sudden gulf between them! A breath of time ago, he and the knife were one, an instrument. It gets me how strange and quick things happen sometime in this world.

Not that any of us noticed the knife just then. We were all eyes for the man overboard, where he lay as if on the side of a cliff a cliff of glass, say, of green glass. We hardly noted when he began swimming back to the ship. A horrible something, as yet subconscious, was holding us palsied. Abruptly we knew. Yes, the sharks!

Fortunately the charge of dynamite had scattered them, except the one that had swallowed it, which lay in fragments on the wave, and others that were either stunned or killed by the concussion. Some one-Yell-had shouted down the companionway to the shark-baiters there, and by the time they reached him, he was working at the ropes of the nearest lifeboat. The captain and other officers were there by that time, too, and Yell hastened back to us at the stern rail.

We had been cutting the lashing of life-preservers and throwing them over. The man out there, though, did not need them. He could swim, that doubly soused steward. The water, the peril, had sobered him, and he was coming in gallantly. Yell was not looking at him at all. His keen, blue eyes searched out the green bosom of the swell. Suddenly he uttered a low exclamation, and leaned far over the rail, and began coaching the swimmer.

"On your side-the overstroke, man!

Kick hard!" he called, and with a waving arm tried to set the pace for the stroke, as a cockswain would with his body. But why "Kick hard?"

Then we saw what Yell's capable eyes had seen first-a triangular fin. It was coming down the slope of the water, cutting the surface, leaving in its wake a faint hair-line of foam, a line of death, as straight for the swimmer as an arrow's flight. He of course could not see, and did not know; it was behind him, yards away as yet. I opened my mouth to shout, to urge, implore the man down there to swim faster; but Yell, next me, tramped my toe with his slippered foot, and he scowled forbiddingly, quickly round on all of us. We understood. He had gaged the imperiled man rightly. The swimmer must not know of the fin behind. He might lose a stroke trying to look back. He might go all to pieces.

"Correct-o!" Yell shouted down, still pacing the strokes with his arm. "We're betting on your time, bub. But kick! kick hard!"

"For God's sake! kick! kick!" we joined in. A tremendous splashing might keep off the shark, we knew now.

The swimmer had almost reached the overhang of the deck; but there was no rope to throw him-nothing. And the shark had halved the distance between them. If only we had not thrown over the life-preservers, they would have done for the moment to splatter around the monster and frighten him off, perhaps, until the boat could come. But the boat was only just going over the side. It would not come in time. It seemed that the shark had only to dart once. We did not know, or remember, that he must first turn over on his back before he could take his prey between those dense rows of serrated teeth. We made out the sinister shadow in the green water beneath the fin. Our faces were white, and our souls in our stomachs were turning us sick, when Yell picked up from the deck the sailor's knife with which the man down there in the water had meant to kill him.

"Any you men know how?" he addressed us with the sharpness of a command. He half proffered the knife. "Quick! Answer! I don't want him to owe his life to me. Any you know how?" I suppose we stared helplessly at the

knife. Who were we, inlanders, merchants, office men, to know even what he meant? He saw instantly that we did not, and eliminated us as so much wooden furniture. He sprang to the top rail, holding by a stanchion, the long knife in his right hand, and watched with tense calculation the culminating horror beneath him. The shark was twenty feet long, and not half his length behind the steward. Moreover, the steward knew now what was there. He knew it from our faces bent over him, and he had looked back and seen. His eyes were raised to us, and one arm. He was trying to ask us for a rope, but terror had taken his voice. He could not utter a sound. And the shark- We turned our heads. We could not bear to look.

There was a splash in the water directly under us. We shuddered, and the Paterson man melted to the deck in a faint like a clothed pillar of sawdust. The rest of us looked; the fascination was that compelling. Yell had vanished. He was not on the rail. He had gone overboard, feet first, the knife in his hand. The splash we had heard was of his body shooting downward. We peered over,

and there was the shark. Its immense tail was doubling and snapping back, churning the water into froth and bubbles. The froth and bubbles were reddish, and suddenly it was as if a whole jar of crimson fluid had been smashed under the surface and was welling up. At the same time the shark lay prone, then rolled over. We saw that the dead-white belly was ripped open for the length of a yard or more. What a sweep of knife that had been, after the first upward thrust!

Then Yell's virile old head bobbed up, the iron-gray hair wet over his eyes. He was straining, and finally he got the steward's head to the surface, too. The murderous inebriate had fainted. There was not a thing the matter with him, not a scratch.

Sympathy was all for Yell-our sympathy, I mean-as the two of them were taken into the small boat and brought back on board. Of course every one in the ship was crowding round, doing the awed-whispered thing for the blear-eyed, shuddering hulk that had so nearly been slashed up into fish-food, and wanting to do the acclamatory thing for his shaggy,

dripping rescuer, who left tracks of wet socks on the deck as he went direct to his cabin. But by sympathy I mean of those of us who had seen it all from first to last. No matter what he had done in the past, no matter if for a moment we had wanted to see retribution fall on him, there was no standing up against the brave, clean deed that had followed swiftly. While all the others were asking themselves, and meaning to ask him, how he did it, we who had heard the denunciation, the foul abuse, and witnessed the attempted assassination, were wondering why he did it. why he did it. Why? The question was bound to shape itself. Nay, more, we were almost angry with him to think that he had risked a life such as his, such as the deed had proved his life to be, to save a worthless, malignant cur who a moment before had tried to murder him.

When he reappeared in dry clothes, of course he was besieged to answer the first question. And he answered that easily, with whimsical and paternal indulgence for the curiosity. He had merely timed his jump to come up under the shark; it was a common-enough trick.

"But Mr. Yell," demanded the passenger who sat at the captain's table next the captain, "had you ever done it before?"

"No, 'm," said Yell; "but I 'd seen it done. Sharks was right common round the jetties where I 've been working."

He had only seen it done? And he had risked doing it! Had risked the slight, but ghastly, miscalculation of not getting his shark at the first thrust! Indeed, the question of the rest of us was bound for expression. It was not one that he would answer so easily. And of such a man it was going to be an awful hard one to ask, too. As things turned out, though, we did not have to ask. He came to us himself.

This was when he could get away, without being too brusk, from the general mob.

"I rec'lect you as one of them on the deck there at the time," he said quietly and gravely to me.

I replied that I was, but I was strangely embarrassed-embarrassed for him. It was passing in both our minds that I had heard him denounced as a thief and worse. "And you know who all else was there?" he asked.

I nodded, and then he wanted to know if it would be too much trouble for me to bring all of them to his state-room "for a bit o' sociable talk, like."

When the seven or eight of us were crowded into his state-room, he went direct to the heart of the thing in the downright way that was a part of the man himself.

"It's just as-what did he say his name was? Mortimer?-it 's just as Mortimer said," he began. "I did steal, dirty young scoundrel that I was-I did steal, and it ruined a man, and because of the man's daughter I was safe, and knew I was safe. There you are, gentlemen;

that 's to start with."

He said it bluntly and unsparingly, as if the "dirty young scoundrel" he had in mind was not himself, but some one else. We stirred uneasily. Why should he be repeating this to us, so many chance strangers?

"The man's name," he went on, "was Dillard, an iron-worker by trade, but for some time past in contracting for himself, and I boarded with him. I was just a carpenter's 'prentice, but with a mind a whole lot more on races and policy-shops than hammers and saws. Then there was old man Dillard's girl Effie. We was engaged, though what she saw in me beats me. Then there was the towhead little cub Artie; but he don't figure.

"Dillard had bitten off a pretty big bite for him, which was putting in the structural iron-girders and things-in a five-story bottling-works. He'd managed the bond, but he 'd bid right close, and what he could draw on accepted work barely kept him going. One Saturday I was passing the place, having left my own job at noon, and being on my way to put something on the Latonia races, when he quit the derrick he was at and called to

me.

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'Lute,' he says, 'my foreman has bu'sted his ankle, and I can't get away. I'm going to write you an order, and make it to bearer, and you hustle down to the office of these bottling people and get me the money on it, and hustle it back here. I ain't got cent to pay off with.'

Yell paused, looked at the floor, then faced us squarely. The man was weathered granite. "That, gentlemen," he said, "is what I stole."

"But—” one of us blurted out. He made a gesture for patience. "Seems," he said, "the money was an advance, and they grumbled when they paid it to me. Then I went and lost it before a smear of chalk-marks on a blackboard in a pool-room. I never went back to Dillard's. I guess Effie's the reason they did n't hunt me down. Whole neighborhood knew we was engaged, and—oh, well, figure it for yourselves. I knew I was safe."

We blinked incredulously at the manat the man he was now. He could not have been that utterly contemptible thief. Or else there was much yet to be explained. We could not believe in such magic of regeneration. We lacked the key.

"Then what?" one of us demanded involuntarily. Really it was a demand for the key.

"Well, I guess you do need more to understand," Yell admitted. "Some weeks later, then, I got a job on a skyscraper, and we was twelve stories up, and they was rigging up the boom for hoisting girders. It was a shallow building, and they had to project out a ten-byten beam to take the slant of the guy-rope on that side. One of the guy-ropes of the mast, you understand; I'm trying not to be technical. Almost the first thing I was sent out on the ten-by-ten, sticking out into plain empty air, to nail a cleat across the end to keep the guy-rope from slipping back. I was daring in those days, or fresh; maybe that 's better. Anyway, out I walked on that ten-inch timber, and straddled the end of it, and nailed on the cleat. Then I had to get on my feet again, turn around, and come back. But as I got my feet under me, Turk fashion, I happened to look down. Men, it was all off. My head simply was n't there on my shoulders. My hands shook from the wrists like they was tied on by strings. I could n't have budged. I'd have gone. I'd have gone for the twelve-story drop. Then somebody called behind me:

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'Hold on, kid. I'm coming out to get you.'

"I held on, thanking dear God in heaven. A heap of things got plain to me in the half-minute I was holding on. I guess human nature has got to be held up by eternity once to make it shell out the

stinking meanness that don't rightly belong to it. The man behind me came. I supposed it would be some veteran riveter who 'd think nothing of walking a greased brass rail over the fiery pit. I did n't see him till he 'd steadied me to my feet by the elbows, and got me faced round, he a-hold of my hand. Then I saw him-saw who it was. And he saw who I was. Yes, it was Dillard. The poor old man was back at his trade. That pay-day when he could n't pay off had finished him. He was back at day-wages, as I said.

"Well," said Yell, "there was no reason why he should take me off that tenby-ten. There was no one to see, either. He could have left me where I was, and the rest would have happened naturally, like I deserved. I'd have gone on down. I supposed he 'd leave me, of course. 'Go on,' I said, tugging to get my hand loose. I'd beat him to it, anyway. 'Come on,' he said, and he took me back. Just took me back. But," said Yell, with a certain grim satisfaction in the memory, "once my foot was safe beneath me, he dropped my hand like it was filth. I wish he had spit on me. I quit that job. I've never seen him since."

We had the key.

"But you paid him back the money," I said. This was not a question. Instinctively we knew he had, many times over. It was only a feeble shift at consolation.

Yell frowned impatiently.

"The money," he repeated. "The money, sent him in driblets as I earned it, how could that balance the lump-sum he had needed that Saturday afternoon? Could I bring that Saturday afternoon back with money, even with the lump-sum over again, or with ten times the lump-sum? Don't think it. Don't think it. Money was not restitution-not for a man once ruined and aging in his ruin."

So we perceived the thing that Luther Yell had faced through the years until this day, when he had faced it openly, as it was flung at him from the foul mouth of a drunken lout.

"I think now, gentlemen," said Yell in his quiet, grave way, "that after what you 've heard, I can ask you not to testify against-what 's his name?-yes, Mortimer. The captain has him locked up. So far it's only for drunkenness; but if any of you gentlemen spoke, at least before leaving the ship, it would be for attempted murder."

us.

We gave our word, and Yell thanked

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AT THE CH'EN GATE

BY CALE YOUNG RICE

T dusk, as wild geese winged their aery way Upon the sunset over proud Peking, To where, darker than jade, the mountains lay, Set in the misty gold of dying day,

I stood upon the mighty Tatar wall,

By the great-towered gate, the Ch'en, and felt The yellow myriads move to it and melt, As in some opiate sleep's imagining. And slowly through there came a caravan Of swinging camels out of far Tibet, Upon their tawny flanks the foam still wet, And in their eyes the desert's ancient span.

What dreams they bore to me I now forget, But through me rang the name of Kublai Khan.

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