The old salt hung his head in the darkness of the boneyard. Under the dim illumination of the sodium lamps, sat Ruby. For decades she'd served up and down the coast but now her time was at an end. The old girl's boilers were quenched and she had been chained to tugs and hauled to this dismal place.

Tears ran down Ruby's face, stained with rust and soot, the fruits of years upon the water. But under the ravages of time, ${name} could still see the beauty of the steamer he'd first stepped aboard as a young man and grown weathered and battered himself alongside. But the world, and more importantly Ruby's owners, didn't see it that way. She wasn't worth refitting, and so was to be broken up. Men with torches would come at dawn's first light to do their evil deed, and Ruby would be no more.

${name} took a swig of the whiskey to still his nerves. It was killing him to see her like this. She'd saved his own life from the rage of the sea more times than he could count, and this was how those bastards repaid her. But someone had to keep a watch, a last vigil, on the formerly stately gallant workhorse brought so low. And ${name} was damned if it wasn't going to be him to do it. He would keep with her, holding her hand to the bitter end.

Ruby herself was resigned to her fate. When the notice came down and all through the decommissioning she had kept up the dauntless stoicism with which she'd faced down gales and swells able to swallow a meager trawler and the souls clinging to life aboard her whole. But now, in the final hours, she tearfully reminisced with ${name}, recalling people who were long gone and places she would never see again.

"Tell me, ${name}," she said with a quiver in her voice, "