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"/captain" Daniel Bayliss stood ^^ on the narrow lantern platform of Cady 's Reef light — a granite shaft rearing itself, like a slender waterspout, one hundred feet above the sea — and polished the rings of glass in its magic lenses. This powerful eye of the coast, with its ten-foot lenses, had glared and winked, alternately, for many years, a full eighteen miles across the open waters. On the landward side, too, its short flash and eclipse, long flash and eclipse, had tirelessly warned of the dangerous reefs at the mouth of Shoretown harbor.
Now, under the keeper 's hand, and in the clear sunlight, the segments of its eyeball shone with all the prismatic colors of a titanic diamond.
Captain Daniel paused to comb his hand thru the thicket of white, bushy whiskers, that curled and crested about his chin. By his side, with the rising wind whipping her skirt, his daughter, Jane, pointed her binoculars fixedly at a tiny, black object, far out where sea and sky blended.
"It's a steamer, dad!" she exclaimed. "A big freighter, and she's heading for the harbor. ' '
"Give me the glass, child," said
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the weather-beaten keeper; "it's1 many a year since a big vessel has worked her nose atween the Reefs and the Point.
"It's a steamer, sure enough," he confirmed, thru the glass; "a big, ugly British tramp — looks like a Gold Coast trader. I wonder what she's doing — — "
"Dad" — Jane's deep blue eyes were sparkling with enthusiasm — "I'm going ashore in the dory and look her over when she docks. I shouldn't wonder if her decks were filled with cages of monkeys, anteaters, and black Zulus."
"Bosh and nonsense, girl — she's been working down the coast from St. John way; tho why she's turned her heel about and steams for Shoretown gets me."
"Good-by, dad," the girl's clear voice rang up the stairs of the lighthouse well.
Captain Daniel leaned his elbows on the platform railing, and brought the full force of his vision to bear on the incoming steamer.
"Gets me," said Captain Daniel, again; "there aint no furrin freight in Shoretown, and she's 'way off her course if she's bringin' anything in."