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As he mounted the sand-dune he quickened his steps, hurried to the Station, opened the sitting-room door, found it empty, the men being in bed upstairs awaiting their turns, and then strode on to the captain's room, his sou'wester and tarpaulin drenched with spray and sand, his hip-boots leaving watery tracks along the clean floor. "Wreck ashore at No. 14, sir!"
"The yardage of 'The Pot of Gold' and claims 'Eureka' 1 and 2 totalled millions, while the leanest next to 'The Queen of Sheba, yielded a net profit of $700,000." Then the monotony of facts and figures was varied by another illustration showing a miner in hip-boots and a sou'wester blithely handling a giant which threw a ten-inch stream into a sand-bank.
"Stay where you are," he said as he laid his gun back in its rack. "I'll get into my hip-boots and get them before the water-rats steal what we've earned. They are skilled enough to get a decoy now and then. The marsh is alive with them at night." Morning paled. The village lay half hidden behind the rifts of mist.
He gloated on fly-rods and gorgeous rubber hip-boots, on tents with celluloid windows and folding chairs and ice-boxes. He simple-heartedly wanted to buy all of them. It was the Paul whom he was always vaguely protecting who kept him from his drunken desires. But even Paul lightened when Willis Ijams, a salesman with poetry and diplomacy, discussed flies.
But the words would not keep their places, and the page yielded forth no coherent thought. He could endure the tension no longer. He became a whirlwind slamming the book upon the table, kicking off the slippers, throwing the smoking-jacket at random, and rushing to the closet for his gear. At ten o'clock he was ready hip-boots, slouch-hat, rubber coat, and lantern, and went forth into the storm.
The sails of tacking sloops were a-blossom; sea-gulls swooped; a tall surf-fisherman in red flannel shirt and shiny black hip-boots strode out into the water and cast with a long curve of his line; cumulus clouds, whose pure white was shaded with a delicious golden tone, were baronial above; and out on the sky-line the steamers raced by.
"We'll just borrow that," said Jack, and then the four boys lifted the boat to that part of the road where the water ran. "All get in, and I'll push off," said Harry, who had hip-boots on. The other three climbed in, then Harry gave a good push and scrambled over the edge himself. "Think of rowing a boat in the middle of a street," said Bert.
We had thought that we were thoroughly leathered, but we had not passed the primary stage, apparently. My journal for the second day starts something like this: Cold and gray. Stood in the water fifteen minutes in hip-boots for a moving picture. River looks savage. Of that second day, one beautiful picture stands out with distinctness.
Then he threw off his hat as he always did when excited, and ran. And how he ran! With his fists clenched and his arms tight against his sides he ran as though the hip-boots were the seven-league boots of fable. In the stretch of deep sand he had to cross the weight was killing. The drag of the heavy boots seemed to pull his legs from their sockets but he did not slacken his pace.
The veins and arteries in his forehead and neck seemed bursting, as did his over-taxed lungs, when he started stumbling and sliding down the other side. It was not the distance he had covered which had so winded him, nor even the terrific pace, but the dragging weight of the hip-boots. They felt as though they were soled with lead.
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