what you said.'' He spoke the words as though she had delivered
a sentence. ``You don't think well of what I have done, of what
I am.''

He drew in his breath and shook his head with a hopeless laugh,
and leaned back against the railing of the boat-house with the
weariness in his attitude of a man who has given up after a long
struggle.

``No,'' he said with a bitter flippancy in his voice, ``I don't
amount to much. But, my God!'' he laughed, and turning his head
away, ``when you think what I was! This doesn't seem much to
you, and it doesn't seem much to me now that I have your point of
view on it, but when I remember!'' Clay stopped again and
pressed his lips together and shook his head. His half-closed
eyes, that seemed to be looking back into his past, lighted as
they fell on King's white yacht, and he raised his arm and
pointed to it with a wave of the hand. ``When I was sixteen
I was a sailor before the mast,'' he said, ``the sort of sailor
that King's crew out there wouldn't recognize in the same
profession. I was of so little account that I've been knocked
the length of the main deck at the end of the mate's fist, and
left to lie bleeding in the scuppers for dead. I hadn't a thing
to my name then but the clothes I wore, and I've had to go aloft
in a hurricane and cling to a swinging rope with my bare toes and
pull at a wet sheet until my finger-nails broke and started in
their sockets; and I've been a cowboy, with no companions for six
months of the year but eight thousand head of cattle and men as
dumb and untamed as the steers themselves. I've sat in my saddle
night after night, with nothing overhead but the stars, and no