IGHTHOUSE TOM was sitting, this warm afternoon, in front of his dingy saloon. Really it is no saloon, but a sailor's tavern. He leaned back in his chair, gigantic, white haired. His face had that placidity which comes after a life of struggles. He looked down the Street of Foreign Parts and sighed.
“To think,” said he, “that all this will go for railroad tracks.”
I asked him what he meant, and he told me how the railroad company had bought up the whole neighborhood. “Things change,” said he, “but, arter all, they do not change more than a man does. I mind when I opened my place. I was young then; now I am old and ready to quit. It's been smooth sailing with me for a long time. But when the luck first come, I needed luck.”
I had often wondered how, in those days of distant youth, he had managed to break the shackles of poverty. With proper tact, I led the conversation until, anticipating my own words, he said:
“I never told ye how I got my start, did I? It was the strangest v'yge I ever had in all my years at sea. And, after all, it was not really a v'yge at all. When I come back from being shanghaied on a whaler, and found the Lass a-waiting for me with our first, a girl, I buckled down to hard work ashore. I cracked my back, swinging a number twelve scoop at the coal bunkers.
“The next year Michael come to us, as fine a bye as ever woman bore. We two was happy. Young we was! And, for all we had to fight agin head winds, we shut our teeth and stood up to it alongside of each other. Yes, we was happy.
“But there was that, that made us set up nights a-figuring on what laid ahead. The work was none too plenty. There was hard luck—a bit of sickness, and this and that. We used to cast about sometimes to see however we could buy proper meat and drink and clothes for the babies. This was not like the old days, when I was the bully of whatever port I happened to be in, a-blowing in my money and fighting any man that crossed me, and only myself to do for.
“It was like being in a hole and the hole a growing deeper. We could not get ahead. Something was always putting us back again. Then we got to wishing, the way man and wife will lay out a course where none is showing, that we could just get a start. Ye understand? A stake, to put us on our own feet, so that I would not have to be a-waiting for work when there was none; so that we would have some snug little business and know that the money was a-coming in.
“If only we had a thousand dollars!” Many's the evening, setting by the kitchen stove, that one of us would say them words to the other. Then this thing happened that I am a-telling ye about.
“One morning, went down to the bunkers, knowing there would be nothing there, for no collier was due in ort. I stood there a bit, a-yarning with one of the hatch bosses; and the hatch boss says to me, 'Here is a man has been looking fer ye.'
“The man come up alongside of us. 'Can ye tell me,' says he, 'where I can find a party they call Lighthouse Tom?'
“'That's my name,' says I.
“He was a little man, and he wore good clothes—a lean-faced little man; and from the way he dressed ye could tell the minute ye clapped eyes on him, that he was well fixed—and that he was used to having his own way. He give me a look from stem to starn, and then he asked me where we two could have a quiet talk together. I took him over this way to The Bells of Shandon. We set down at a table in the back of the room. All the way over he had not said a word. So now I asked him what it would be that he wanted with me.
“He pulled one of them cigarette cases out of his pocket; 'twas made of gold; and he fished out a cigarette. I looked him over, a-waiting for him to make answer, while he lighted it. There was that in his face—for all that he had everything he wanted and showed it—that said he had something on his mind. As I look back, I would say he was like a man when ye are a-yarning to him and he is not listening at all. Well, he took one or two puffs and then he says:
“'Do ye want a job?'
“I laughed at that. It was so easy. And I told him that I did.
“Says he, a-setting there all bent over in his chair, a-smoking on that cigarette and watching me, 'I have looked for a good man, and I have found out enough to make me know ye are the sort of man I want.'
“I asked him what kind of a job it would be.
“'That is the pint,' says he; 'ye are not to ask me. Ye are to do just what I tell ye. It may take six months; it may take a year. I will pay all your expenses, and when the thing is done, I will give ye one thousand dollars.'
“I told him no. I did not want sealed orders.