A long reach of coast country, white and smooth, broken by undulating fences smothered in snowdrifts, only their stakes and bush-tops showing; farther away, horizontal markings of black pines; still farther away, a line of ragged dunes bearded with yellow grass bordering a beach flecked with scurries of foam—mouthings of a surf twisting as if in pain; beyond this a wide sea, greenish gray, gray and gray-blue, slashed here and there with white-caps pricked by wind rapiers; beyond this again, out into space, a leaden sky flat as paint and as monotonous.

Nearer by, so close that I could see their movements from the car window, spatterings of crows, and higher up circling specks of gulls glinting or darkening as their breasts or backs caught the light. These crows and gulls were the only things alive in the wintry waste.

No, one thing more—two, in fact: as I came nearer the depot, a horse tethered to the section of the undulating fence, a rough-coated, wind-blown, shackly beast; the kind the great Schreyer always painted shivering with cold outside a stable door (and in the snow, too), and a man: Please remember, A MAN! And please continue to remember it to the end of this story.

Thirty-one years in the service he—this keeper of the Naukashon Life-Saving Station—twenty-five at this same post. Six feet and an inch, tough as a sapling and as straight; long-armed, long-legged, broad-shouldered and big-boned; face brown and tanned as skirt leather; eye like a hawk's; mouth but a healed scar, so firm is it; low-voiced, simple-minded and genuine.

If you ask him what he has done in all these thirty-one years of service he will tell you:

"Oh, I kind o' forget; the Superintendent gets reports. You see, some months we're not busy, and then ag'in we ain't had no wrecks for considerable time."

If you should happen to look in his locker, away back out of sight, you would perhaps find a small paper box, and in it a gold medal—the highest his government can give him—inscribed with his name and a record of some particular act of heroism. When he is confronted with the tell-tale evidence, he will say:

"Oh, yes—they did give me that! I'm keepin' it for my grandson."

If you, failing to corkscrew any of the details out of him, should examine the Department's reports, you will find out all he "forgets"—among them the fact that in his thirty-one years of service he and the crew under him have saved the lives of one hundred and thirty-one men and women out of a possible one hundred and thirty-two. He explains the loss of this unlucky man by saying apologetically that "the fellow got dizzy somehow and locked himself in the cabin, and we didn't know he was there until she broke up and he got washed ashore."

This was the man who, when I arrived at the railroad station, held out a hand in hearty welcome, his own closing over mine with the grip of a cant-hook.

"Well, by Jiminy! Superintendent said you was comin', but I kind o' thought you wouldn't 'til the weather cleared. Gimme yer bag—Yes, the boys are all well and will be glad to see ye. Colder than blue blazes, ain't it? Snow ain't over yet. Well, well, kind o' natural to see ye!"

The bag was passed up; the Captain caught the reins in his crab-like fingers, and the bunch of wind-blown fur, gathering its stiffened legs together, wheeled sharply to the left and started in to make pencil-markings in double lines over the white snow seaward toward the Naukashon Life-Saving Station.

Over the white snow seaward.

The perspective shortened: first the smooth, unbroken stretch; then the belt of pines; then a flat marsh diked by dunes; then a cluster of black dots, big and little—the big one being the Station house, and the smaller ones its outbuildings and fishermen's shanties; and then the hard, straight line of the pitiless sea.

I knew the "boys." I had known some of them for years: ever since I picked up one of their stations—its site endangered by the scour of the tide—ran it on skids a mile over the sand to the land side of the inlet without moving the crew or their comforts (even their wet socks were left drying on a string by the kitchen stove); shoved it aboard two scows timbered together, started out to sea under the guidance of a light-draught tug in search of its new location three miles away, and then, with the assistance of a suddenly developed north-east gale, backed up by my own colossal engineering skill, dropped the whole concern—skids, house, kitchen stove, socks and all—into the sea. When the surf dogs were through with its carcass the beach was strewn with its bones picked clean by their teeth. Only the weathercock, which had decorated its cupola, was left. This had floated off and was found perched on top of a sand-dune, whizzing away on its ornamental cap as merry as a jig-dancer. It was still whirling away, this time on the top of the cupola at Naukashon. I could see it plainly as I drove up, its arrow due east, looking for trouble as usual.

Hence my friendship for Captain Shortrode and his trusty surfmen. Hence, too, my welcome when I pushed in the door of the sitting-room and caught the smell of the cooking: Dave Austin's clam chowder—I could pick it out anywhere, even among the perfumes of a Stamboul kitchen; and hence, too, the hearty hand-grasp from the big, brawny men around the stove.

"Well! Kind o' summer weather you picked out! Here, take this chair—Gimme yer coat.—Git them legs o' yourn in, Johnny. He's a new man—John Partridge; guess you ain't met him afore. Where's Captain Shortrode gone? Oh, yes!—puttin' up old Moth-eaten. Ain't nothin' he thinks as much of as that old horse. Oughter pack her in camphor. Well, how's things in New York?—Nelse, put on another shovel of coal—Yes, colder'n Christmas!... Nothin' but nor'east wind since the moon changed.... Chowder!—Yes, yer dead right; Dave's cookin' this week, and he said this mornin' he'd have a mess for ye."

A stamping of feet outside and two bifurcated walruses (four hours out on patrol) pushed in the door. Muffled in oilskins these, rubber-booted to their hips, the snow-line marking their waists where they had plunged through the drifts; their sou'-westers tied under their chins, shading beards white with frost and faces raw with the slash of the beach wind.

More hand-shakes now; and a stripping of wet outer-alls; a wash-up and a hair-smooth; a shout of "Dinner!" from the capacious lungs of David the cook; a silent, reverential grace with every head bowed (these are the things that surprise you until you know these men), and with one accord an attack is made upon Dave's chowder and his corn-bread and his fried ham and his— Well, the air was keen and bracing, and the salt of the sea a permeating tonic, and the smell!—Ah, David! I wish you'd give up your job and live with me, and bring your saucepan and your griddle and your broiler and—my appetite!

The next night the Captain was seated at the table working over his monthly report, the kerosene lamp lighting up his bronzed face and falling upon his open book. There is nothing a keeper hates to do so much as making out monthly reports; his hard, horny hand is shaped to grasp an oar, not a pen. Four other men were asleep upstairs in their bunks, waiting their turns to be called for patrol. Two were breasting a north-east gale howling along the coast, their Coston signals tightly buttoned under their oilskins.

Tom Van Brunt and I—Tom knew all about the little kitchen stove and the socks—he had forgiven me my share in their loss—were tilted back against the wall in our chairs. The slop and rattle of Dave's dishes came in through the open door leading to the kitchen. Outside could be heard the roar and hammer of the surf and the shriek of the baffled wind trying to burglarize the house by way of the eaves and the shutters.

The talk had drifted to the daily life at the Station; the dreariness of waiting for something to come ashore (in a disappointed tone from Tom, as if he and his fellow surfmen had not had their share of wrecks this winter); of the luck of Number 16, in charge of Captain Elleck and his crew, who had got seven men and a woman out of an English bark last week without wetting the soles of their feet.

"Fust shot went for'd of her chain plates," Tom explained, "and then they made fast and come off in the breeches-buoy. Warn't an hour after she struck 'fore they had the hull of 'em up to the Station and supper ready. Heavy sea runnin' too."

Tom then shifted his pipe and careened his head my way, and with a tone in his voice that left a ring behind it which vibrated in me for days, and does now, said:

"I've been here for a good many years, and I guess I'll stay here long as the Guv'ment'll let me. Some people think we've got a soft snap, and some people think we ain't. 'Tis kind o' lonely, sometimes—then somethin' comes along and we even up; but it ain't that that hurts me really—it's bein' so much away from home."

Tom paused, rapped the bowl of his pipe on his heel to clear it, twisted his body so that he could lay the precious comfort on the window-sill behind him safe out of harm's way, and continued:

"Yes, bein' so much away from home. I've been a surf man, you know, goin' on thirteen years, and out o' that time I ain't been home but two year and a half runnin' the days solid, which they ain't. I live up in Naukashon village, and you know how close that is. Cap'n could 'a' showed you my house as you druv 'long through—it's just across the way from his'n."

I looked at Tom in surprise. I knew that the men did not go home but once in two weeks, and then only for a day, but I had not summed up the vacation as a whole. Tom shifted his tilted leg, settled himself firmer in his chair, and went on:

"I ain't askin' no favors, and I don't expect to git none. We got to watch things down here, and we dasn't be away when the weather's rough, and there ain't no other kind 'long this coast; but now and then somethin' hits ye and hurts ye, and ye don't forgit it. I got a little baby at home—seven weeks old now—hearty little feller—goin' to call him after the Cap'n," and he nodded toward the man scratching away with his pen. "I ain't had a look at that baby but three times since he was born, and last Sunday it come my turn and I went up to see the wife and him. My brother Bill lives with me. He lost his wife two year ago, and the baby she left didn't live more'n a week after she died, and so Bill, not havin' no children of his own, takes to mine—I got three."

Again Tom stopped, this time for a perceptible moment. I noticed a little quiver in his voice now.

"Well, when I got home it was 'bout one o'clock in the day. I been on patrol that mornin'—it was snowin' and thick. Wife had the baby up to the winder waitin' for me, and they all come out—Bill and my wife and my little Susie, she's five year old—and then we all went in and sat down, and I took the baby in my arms, and it looked at me kind o' skeered-like and cried; and Bill held out his hands and took the baby, and he stopped cryin' and laid kind o' contented in his arms, and my little Susie said, 'Pop, I guess baby thinks Uncle Bill's his father.' ... I—tell—you—that—hurt!"

As the last words dropped from Tom's lips two of the surfmen—Jerry Potter and Robert Saul, who had been breasting the north-east gale—pushed open the door of the sitting-room and peered in, looking like two of Nansen's men just off an ice-floe. Their legs were clear of snow this time, the two having brushed each other off with a broom on the porch outside. Jerry had been exchanging brass checks with the patrol of No. 14, three miles down the beach, and Saul had been setting his clock by a key, locked in an iron box bolted to a post two miles and a half away and within sight of the inlet. Tramping the beach beside a roaring surf in a north-east gale blowing fifty miles an hour, and in the teeth of a snow-storm each flake cutting like grit from a whirling grindstone, was to these men what the round of a city park is to a summer policeman.

Jerry peeled off his waterproofs from head, body, and legs; raked a pair of felt slippers from under a chair; stuck his stocking-feet into their comforting depths; tore a sliver of paper from the end of a worn-out journal, twisted it into a wisp, worked the door of the cast-iron stove loose with his marlin-spike of a finger, held the wisp to the blaze, lighted his pipe carefully and methodically; tilted a chair back, and settling his great frame comfortably between its arms, started in to smoke. Saul duplicated his movements to the minutest detail, with the single omission of those connected with the pipe. Saul did not smoke.

Up to this time not a word had been spoken by anybody since the two men entered. Men who live together so closely dispense with "How d'yes" and "Good-bys." I was not enough of a stranger to have the rule modified on my account after the first salutations.

Captain Shortrode looked up from his report and broke the silence.

"That sluice-way cuttin' in any, Jerry?"

Jerry nodded his head and replied between puffs of smoke:

"'Bout fifty feet, I guess."

The grizzled Captain took off his eye-glasses—he only used them in making up his report—laid them carefully beside his sheet of paper, stretched his long legs, lifting his body to the perpendicular, dragged a chair to my side of the room, and said with a dry chuckle:

"I've got to laugh every time I think of that sluice-way. Last month— Warn't it last month, Jerry?" Jerry nodded, and sent a curl of smoke through his ragged mustache, accompanied by the remark, "Yes—last month."

The Captain continued:

"Last month, I say, we were havin' some almighty high tides, and when they git to cuttin' round that sluice-way it makes it bad for our beach-cart, 'specially when we've got to keep abreast of a wreck that ain't grounded so we can git a line to her; so I went down after supper to see how the sluice-way was comin' on. It was foggy, and a heavy sea runnin'—the surf showin' white, but everythin' else black as pitch. Fust thing I knew I heared somethin' like the rattle of an oar-lock, or a tally-block, and then a cheer come just outside the breakers. I run down to the swash and listened, and then I seen her comin' bow on, big as a house; four men in her holdin' on to the gunnels, hollerin' for all they was worth. I got to her just as the surf struck her and rolled her over bottom-side up."

"Were you alone?" I interrupted.

"Had to be. The men were up and down the beach and the others was asleep in their bunks. Well, when I had 'em all together I run 'em up on the beach and in here to the Station, and when the light showed 'em up— Well, I tell ye, one of 'em—a nigger cook—was a sight! 'Bout seven feet high, and thick round as a flag-pole, and blacker'n that stove, and skeered so his teeth was a-chatterin'. They'd left their oyster schooner a-poundin' out on the bar and had tried to come ashore in their boat. Well, we got to work on 'em and got some dry clo'es on 'em, and——"

"Were you wet, too?" I again interrupted.

"Wet! Soppin'! I'd been under the boat feelin' 'round for 'em. Well, the King's Daughters had sent some clo'es down, and we looked over what we had, and I got a pair of high-up pants, and Jerry, who wears Number 12—Don't you, Jerry?" (Jerry nodded and puffed on)—"had an old pair of shoes, and we found a jacket, another high-up thing big 'nough to fit a boy, that come up to his shoulder-blades, and he put 'em on and then he set 'round here for a spell dryin' out, with his long black legs stickin' from out of his pants like handle-bars, and his hands, big as hams, pokin' out o' the sleeves o' his jacket. We got laughin' so we had to go out by ourselves in the kitchen and have it out; didn't want to hurt his feelin's, you know."

The Captain leaned back in his chair, laughed quietly to himself at the picture brought back to his mind, and continued, the men listening quietly, the smoke of their pipes drifting over the room.

"Next mornin' we got the four of 'em all ready to start off to the depot on their way back to Philadelphy—there warn't no use o' their stayin', their schooner was all up and down the beach, and there was oysters 'nough 'long the shore to last everybody a month. Well, when the feller got his rig on he looked himself all over, and then he said he would like to have a hat. 'Bout a week before Tom here [Tom nodded now, and smiled] had picked up on the beach one o' these high gray stovepipe hats with a black band on it, blowed overboard from some o' them yachts, maybe. Tom had it up on the mantel there dryin', and he said he didn't care, and I give it to the nigger and off he started, and we all went out on the back porch to see him move. Well, sir, when he went up 'long the dunes out here toward the village, steppin' like a crane in them high-up pants and jacket and them Number 12s of Jerry's and that hat of Tom's 'bout three sizes too small for him, I tell ye he was a show!"

Jerry and Saul chuckled, and Tom broke into a laugh—the first smile I had seen on Tom's face since he had finished telling me about the little baby at home.

I laughed too—outwardly to the men and inwardly to myself with a peculiar tightening of the throat, followed by a glow that radiated heat as it widened. My mind was not on the grotesque negro cook in the assorted clothes. All I saw was a man fighting the surf, groping around in the blackness of the night for four water-soaked, terrified men until he got them, as he said, "all together." That part of it had never appealed to the Captain, and never will. Pulling drowning men, single-handed, from a boiling surf, was about as easy as pulling gudgeons out of a babbling brook.

Saul now piped up:

"Oughter git the Cap'n to tell ye how he got that lady ashore last winter from off that Jamaica brig."

At the sound of Saul's voice Captain Shortrode rose quickly from his chair, picked up his report and spectacles, and with a deprecating wave of his hand, as if the story would have to come from some other lips than his own, left the room—to "get an envelope," he said.

"He won't come back for a spell," laughed Jerry. "The old man don't like that yarn." "Old man" was a title of authority, and had nothing to do with the Captain's fifty years.

I made no comment—not yet. My ears were open, of course, but I was not holding the tiller of conversation and preferred that someone else should steer.

Again Saul piped up, this time to me, reading my curiosity in my eyes:

"Well, there warn't nothin' much to it, 'cept the way the Cap'n got her ashore," and again Saul chuckled quietly, this time as if to himself. "The beach was full o' shipyard rats and loafers, and when they heared there was a lady comin' ashore in the breeches-buoy, more of 'em kept comin' in on the run. We'd fired the shot-line and had the anchor buried and the hawser fast to the brig's mast and the buoy rigged, and we were just goin' to haul in when Cap'n looked 'round on the crowd, and he see right away what they'd come for and what they was 'spectin' to see. Then he ordered the buoy hauled back and he got into the breeches himself, and we soused him through the surf and off he went to the brig. He showed her how to tuck her skirts in, and how to squat down in the breeches 'stead o' stickin' her feet through, and then she got skeered and said she couldn't and hollered, and so he got in with her and got his arms 'round her and landed her, both of 'em pretty wet." Saul stopped and leaned forward in his chair. I was evidently expected to say something.

"Well, that was just like the Captain," I said, mildly, "but where does the joke come in?"

"Well, there warn't no joke, really," remarked Saul with a wink around the room, "'cept when we untangled 'em. She was 'bout seventy years old, and black as tar. That's all!"

It seemed to be my turn now—"the laugh" being on me. Captain Shortrode was evidently of the same opinion, for, on reentering the room, he threw the envelope on the table, and settling himself again in his chair looked my way, as if expecting the next break in the conversation to be made by me. Two surfmen, who had been asleep upstairs, now joined the group, the laughter over Saul's story of the "lady" having awakened them half an hour ahead of their time. They came in rubbing their eyes, their tarpaulins and hip-boots over their arms. Jerry, Tom, and Saul still remained tilted back in their chairs. They should have been in bed resting for their next patrol (they went out again at four A.M.), but preferred to sit up in my honor.

Dozens of stories flashed into my mind—the kind I would tell at a club dinner, or with the coffee and cigarettes—and were as instantly dropped. Such open-air, breezy giants, full of muscle and ozone, would find no interest in the adventures of any of my characters; the cheap wit of the cafÉs, the homely humor of the farm, the chatter of the opera-box, or whisperings behind the palms of the conservatory—nothing of this could possibly interest these men. I would have been ashamed to offer it. Tom's simple, straightforward story of his baby and his brother Bill had made it impossible for me to attempt to match it with any cheap pathos of my own; just as the graphic treatment of the fitting out of the negro cook by the Captain, and of the rescue of the "lady" by Saul, had ended all hopes of my entertaining the men around me with any worm-eaten, hollow-shelled chestnuts of my own. What was wanted was some big, simple, genuine yarn: strong meat for strong men, not milk for babes: something they would know all about and believe in and were part of. The storming of a fort; the flagging of a train within three feet of an abyss; the rescue of a child along a burning ledge five stories above the sidewalk: all these themes bubbled up and sank again in my mind. Some of them I only knew parts of; some had but little point; all of them were hazy in my mind. I remembered, with regret, that I could only repeat the first verse of the "Charge of the Light Brigade," and but two lines of "Horatius," correctly.

Suddenly a great light broke in upon me. What they wanted was something about their own life: some account of the deeds of other life-savers up and down the coast, graphically put with proper dramatic effect, beginning slowly and culminating in the third act with a blaze of heroism. These big, brawny heroes about me would then get a clearer idea of the estimation in which they were held by their countrymen; a clearer idea, too, of true heroism—of the genuine article, examples of which were almost nightly shown in their own lives. This would encourage them to still greater efforts, and the world thereby be the better for my telling.

That gallant rescue of the man off Quogue was just the thing!

The papers of the week before had been full of the bravery of these brother surfmen on the Long Island coast. This, and some additional information given me by a reporter who visited the scene of the disaster after the rescue, could not fail to make an impression, I thought. Yes, the rescue was the very thing.

"Oh! men," I began, "did you hear about that four-master that came ashore off Shinnecock last week?" and I looked around into their faces.

"No," remarked Jerry, pulling his pipe from his mouth. "What about it?"

"Why, yes, ye did," grunted Tom; "Number 17 got two of 'em."

"Yes, and the others were drowned," interrupted Saul.

"Thick, warn't it?" suggested one of the sleepy surfmen, thrusting his wharf-post of a leg into one section of his hip-boots preparatory to patrolling the beach.

"Yes," I continued, "dense fog; couldn't see five feet from the shore. She grounded about a mile west of the Station, and all the men had to locate her position by was the cries of the crew. They couldn't use the boat, the sea was running so heavy, and they couldn't get a line over her because they couldn't see her. They stood by, however, all night, and at daylight she broke in two. All that day the men of two stations worked to get off to them, and every time they were beaten back by the sea and wreckage. Then the fog cleared a little and two of the crew of the schooner were seen clinging to a piece of timber and some floating freight. Shot after shot was fired at them, and by a lucky hit one fell across them, and they made fast and were hauled toward the shore."

At this moment the surfman who had been struggling with his hip-boots caught my eye, nodded, and silently left the room, fully equipped for his patrol. I went on:

"When the wreckage, with the two men clinging to it, got within a hundred yards of the surf, the inshore floatage struck them, and smash they went into the thick of it. One of the shipwrecked men grabbed the line and tried to come ashore, the other poor fellow held to the wreckage. Twice the sea broke his hold, and still he held on."

The other surfman now, without even a nod, disappeared into the night, slamming the outer door behind him, the cold air finding its way into our warm retreat. I ignored the slight discourtesy and proceeded:

"Now, boys, comes the part of the story I think will interest you." As I said this I swept my glance around the room. Jerry was yawning behind his hand and Tom was shaking the ashes from his pipe.

"On the beach" (my voice rose now) "stood Bill Halsey, one of the Quogue crew. He knew that the sailor in his weakened condition could not hold on through the inshore wreckage; and sure enough, while he was looking, a roller came along and tore the man from his hold. In went Bill straight at the combers, fighting his way. There was not one chance in a hundred that he could live through it, but he got the man and held on, and the crew rushed in and hauled them clear of the smother, both of them half-dead, Bill's arms still locked around the sailor. Bill came to soonest, and the first words he said were, 'Don't mind me, I'm all right: take care of the sailor!'"

I looked around again; Captain Shortrode was examining the stubs of his horny fingers with as much care as if they would require amputation at no distant day; Jerry and Saul had their gaze on the floor. Tom was still tilted back, his eyes tight shut. I braced up and continued:

"All this, of course, men, you no doubt heard about, but what the reporter told me may be new to you. That night the 'Shipping News' got Bill on the 'phone and asked him if he was William Halsey."

"'Yes.'"

"'Are you the man who pulled the sailor out of the wreckage this morning at daybreak?'"

"'Yes.'"

"'Well, we'd like you to write some little account of——'"

"'Well, I ain't got no time.'"

"'If we send a reporter down, will you talk to him and——'"

"'No, for there ain't nothin' to tell——'"

"'You're Halsey, aren't you?'"

"'Yes.'"

"'Well, we should like to get some of the details; it was a very heroic rescue, and——'"

"'Well, there ain't no details and there ain't no heroics. I git paid for what I do, and I done it,'" and he rang off the 'phone.

A dead silence followed—one of those uncomfortable silences that often follows a society break precipitating the well-known unpleasant quarter of an hour. This silence lasted only a minute. Then Captain Shortrode remarked calmly and coldly, and, I thought, with a tired feeling in his voice:

"Well, what else could he have said?"

The fur-coated beast was taken out of camphor, hooked up to the buggy, and the Captain and I ploughed our way back through the snow to the depot, the men standing in the door-way waving their hands Good-by.

The next day I wrote this to the Superintendent at headquarters:

"These men fear nothing but God!"

"OLD SUNSHINE"