Page:Rideout--Beached keels.djvu/199

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WILD JUSTICE
185

visits to his private cache, somewhere under a rail fence behind the house, and visits to Jim Driscoll's secret barroom. This last, a secret which all the town knew, was in a tumbledown shanty, with windows shuttered and barred, on the most rickety wharf of all the crazy old piles. Here, where one dim kerosene lamp burned night and day from among the bottles behind the greasy bar, Lee spent much of his time, making friends over a glass of beer or rum and water. What little money he had brought home he spent quickly and generously on these friends, as he afterward spent what he could borrow from Marden on various pretenses, and what little he got by spasmodic efforts at clam-digging. His favorite trick was to borrow somebody's sailboat, take a party of summer people out, run them cleverly aground on the bar or elsewhere, and, after entertaining them with sea stories, overcharge them for the loss of his time in getting home so much later than they had agreed. The profits of these social afternoons he would spend freely at Driscoll's in still more social evenings. And the boozy