Dan Merrithew | Page 3

he discovered this before he was told. The
blood of the Merrithews was not to be denied; and turning to the salt
water, his request for a berth on one of the company's big sea-going
tugs was received with every manifestation of approval.
When he first presented himself to the Captain of the Hydrographer,
the bluff skipper set the young man down as a college boy in search of
sociological experience and therefore to be viewed with good-humored

tolerance--good-humored, because Dan was six feet tall and had
combative red-gold hair. His steel eyes were shaded by long
straw-colored lashes; he had a fighting look about him. He had a
magnificent temper, red, but not uncalculating, with a punch like a
mule's kick back of it.
As week after week passed, and the new hand revealed no
temperamental proclivities, no "kid-glove" inclinations, seemingly
content with washing down decks, lassooing pier bitts with the bight of
a hawser at a distance of ten feet, and hauling ash-buckets from the
fireroom when the blower was out of order--both of which last were
made possible by his mighty shoulders--the Captain began to take a
different sort of interest in him.
He allowed Dan to spend all his spare moments with him in the
pilot-house; and as the Captain could shoot the sun and figure latitude
and longitude and talk with fair understanding upon many other
elements of navigation, the young man's time was by no means wasted.
Later, Dan arranged with the director of a South Street night school of
navigation for the evenings when he was in port, and by the time they
made him mate of the Hydrographer, he was almost qualified to
undergo examination for his master's certificate.
Mental changes are not always attended by outward manifestations, but
all the crew of the Hydrographer, after that mad night off the Virginia
Capes, could see that something had hit the stalwart mate. The edge
seemed to be missing from his occasional moods of abandon;
sometimes he looked thoughtfully at a man without hearing what the
man was saying to him. But it did not impair his usefulness, and his
Captain could see indications of a better defined point in his ambitions.
So that was the way things were with him when, on a gray December
afternoon, the day before Christmas, the Hydrographer, just arrived
from Providence, slid against her pier in Jersey City, and the crew with
jocular shouts made the hawsers fast to the bitts. Some months before,
the Hydrographer had stumbled across a lumber-laden schooner,
abandoned in good condition off Fire Island, and had towed her into
port. The courts had awarded goodly salvage; and the tug's owners,

filled with the spirit of the season, had sent a man to the pier to
announce that at the office each of the crew would find his share of the
bounty, and a little extra, in recognition of work in the company's
interest.
"Dan," said the Captain, as the young man entered the pilot-house in
his well-fitting shore clothes, "you ought to get a pot of money out of
this; now don't go ashore and spend it all tonight. You bank most of it.
Take it from me--if I'd started to bank my money at your age, I would
be paying men to run tugboats for me now."
"Oh, I've money in the bank," laughed Dan. "I'll bank most of this; but
first I'm going to lay out just fifty dollars, which ought to buy about all
the Christmas joy I need. I was going to Boston to shock some sober
relations of mine, but I've changed my mind. About seven o'clock this
evening you'll find me in a restaurant not far from Broadway and
Forty-second Street; an hour later you'll locate me in the front row of a
Broadway theatre; and--better come with me, Captain Bunker."
"No, thanks, Dan," said the Captain. "If you come with me over to the
house in Staten Island about two hours from now, you'll see just three
little noses pressed against the window pane--waiting for daddy and
Santa Claus." The Captain's big red face grew tender and his eyes
softened. "When you get older, Dan," he added, "you'll know that
Christmas ain't so much what you get out of it as what you put into it."
Dan thought of the Captain's words as he crossed the ferry to New
York. All through the day he had been filled with the pleasurable
conviction that the morrow was a pretty decent sort of day to be ashore,
and he had intended to work up to the joys thereof to the utmost of his
capacity.
Now, with his knowledge as to the sort of enjoyment which Captain
Bunker was going to get out of the day, his well-laid plans seemed