The versatile Walter Huston has split rails for Griffith's "Lincoln" and harangued juries in courtroom scenes, and now, at the R. K. O. Boston Theatre, he goes down to the sea in ships. He earns his bread by bringing in salmon to a tiny fisher village somewhere in the north. Morose and violent, he strides away from the funeral of his first wife to drink barroom whiskey and brawl over a prostitute. Like another Captain Ahab, he rules his son, Kent Douglass, who has no heart for fishing.

But the story is not yet under way, A matrimonial agency, in a most improbable mix-up, sends to Mr. Huston's doorstep a young girl of nineteen to be his second wife and charwoman. She is not the solid matron that he wrote for, but a Gish girl, all pure and elfin and made for gauzed photography. She is frightened into marriage with Mr. Huston, whose name is Seth Something-or-other, anything but Parker; but it is plain to see that her destinies lie with Seth's more decorative son.

It is an absorbing triangle, and indeed an appealing one when the frail figure of the boy stands guard at the bedroom door to keep back the father. The outcome is not so much of a foregone conclusion as usual, and the audience is kept in some suspense till the final resolution of an effective storm scene.

Miss Helen Chandler is well cast as the mail-order bride from Kansas. Miss Chandler's extreme naivete, so often irritating has found its place here. Mr. Kent Douglass is not so much an actor as a boy with fine features, a sensitive mouth and engaging gaucheries. He has made uneven work of his part; at moments he achieves just the right mixture of weakness and fineness to play the son that Seth is ashamed of. Mr. Huston makes a going concern of a patchy plot by his forthright vitality.