"CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS"

A STORY OF THE GRAND BANKS

By Rudyard Kipling

Original

Original

Contents

CHAPTER I

CHAPTER II

CHAPTER III

CHAPTER IV

CHAPTER V

CHAPTER VI

CHAPTER VII

CHAPTER VIII

CHAPTER IX

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER I

The weather door of the smoking-room had been left open to the North
Atlantic fog, as the big liner rolled and lifted, whistling to warn the
fishing-fleet.

"That Cheyne boy's the biggest nuisance aboard," said a man in a frieze
overcoat, shutting the door with a bang. "He isn't wanted here. He's too
fresh."

A white-haired German reached for a sandwich, and grunted between bites:
"I know der breed. Ameriga is full of dot kind. I dell you you should
imbort ropes' ends free under your dariff."

"Pshaw! There isn't any real harm to him. He's more to be pitied than
anything," a man from New York drawled, as he lay at full length along the
cushions under the wet skylight. "They've dragged him around from hotel to
hotel ever since he was a kid. I was talking to his mother this morning.
She's a lovely lady, but she don't pretend to manage him. He's going to
Europe to finish his education."

"Education isn't begun yet." This was a Philadelphian, curled up in a
corner. "That boy gets two hundred a month pocket-money, he told me. He
isn't sixteen either."

"Railroads, his father, aind't it?" said the German.

"Yep. That and mines and lumber and shipping. Built one place at San
Diego, the old man has; another at Los Angeles; owns half a dozen
railroads, half the lumber on the Pacific slope, and lets his wife spend
the money," the Philadelphian went on lazily. "The West don't suit her,
she says. She just tracks around with the boy and her nerves, trying to
find out what'll amuse him, I guess. Florida, Adirondacks, Lakewood, Hot
Springs, New York, and round again. He isn't much more than a second-hand
hotel clerk now. When he's finished in Europe he'll be a holy terror."

"What's the matter with the old man attending to him personally?" said a
voice from the frieze ulster.

"Old man's piling up the rocks. 'Don't want to be disturbed, I guess.
He'll find out his error a few years from now. 'Pity, because there's a
heap of good in the boy if you could get at it."

"Mit a rope's end; mit a rope's end!" growled the German.

Once more the door banged, and a slight, slim-built boy perhaps fifteen
years old, a half-smoked cigarette hanging from one corner of his mouth,
leaned in over the high footway. His pasty yellow complexion did not show
well on a person of his years, and his look was a mixture of irresolution,
bravado, and very cheap smartness. He was dressed in a cherry-coloured
blazer, knickerbockers, red stockings, and bicycle shoes, with a red
flannel cap at the back of the head. After whistling between his teeth, as
he eyed the company, he said in a loud, high voice: "Say, it's thick
outside. You can hear the fish-boats squawking all around us. Say,
wouldn't it be great if we ran down one?"

Original

"Shut the door, Harvey," said the New Yorker. "Shut the door and stay
outside. You're not wanted here."

"Who'll stop me?" he answered deliberately. "Did you pay for my passage,
Mister Martin? 'Guess I've as good right here as the next man."

He picked up some dice from a checker-board and began throwing, right hand
against left.

"Say, gen'elmen, this is deader'n mud. Can't we make a game of poker
between us?"

There was no answer, and he puffed his cigarette, swung his legs, and
drummed on the table with rather dirty fingers. Then he pulled out a roll
of bills as if to count them.

"How's your mamma this afternoon?" a man said. "I didn't see her at
lunch."

"In her state-room, I guess. She's 'most always sick on the ocean. I'm
going to give the stewardess fifteen dollars for looking after her. I
don't go down more 'n I can avoid. It makes me feel mysterious to pass
that butler's-pantry place. Say, this is the first time I've been on the
ocean."

"Oh, don't apologise, Harvey."

"Who's apologising? This is the first time I've crossed the ocean,
gen'elmen, and, except the first day, I haven't been sick one little bit.
No, sir!" He brought down his fist with a triumphant bang, wetted his
finger, and went on counting the bills.

"Oh, you're a high-grade machine, with the writing in plain sight," the
Philadelphian yawned. "You'll blossom into a credit to your country if you
don't take care."

"I know it. I'm an American—first, last, and all the time. I'll show
'em that when I strike Europe. Pif! My cig's out. I can't smoke the truck
the steward sells. Any gen'elman got a real Turkish cig on him?"

The chief engineer entered for a moment, red, smiling, and wet. "Say,
Mac," cried Harvey, cheerfully, "how are we hitting it?"

"Vara much in the ordinary way," was the grave reply. "The young are as
polite as ever to their elders, an' their elders are e'en tryin' to
appreciate it."

A low chuckle came from a corner. The German opened his cigar-case and
handed a skinny black cigar to Harvey.

"Dot is der broper apparatus to smoke, my young friendt," he said. "You
vill dry it? Yes? Den you vill be efer so happy."

Harvey lit the unlovely thing with a flourish: he felt that he was getting
on in grown-up society.

"It would take more 'n this to keel me over," he said, ignorant that he
was lighting that terrible article, a Wheeling 'stogie'.

"Dot we shall bresently see," said the German. "Where are we now, Mr.
Mactonal'?"

"Just there or thereabouts, Mr. Schaefer," said the engineer.
"We'll be on the Grand Bank to-night; but in a general way o' speakin',
we're all among the fishing-fleet now. We've shaved three dories an'
near skelped the boom off a Frenchman since noon, an' that's close
sailin', ye may say."

"You like my cigar, eh?" the German asked, for Harvey's eyes were full of
tears.

"Fine, full flavour," he answered through shut teeth. "Guess we've slowed
down a little, haven't we? I'll skip out and see what the log says."

"I might if I vhas you," said the German.

Harvey staggered over the wet decks to the nearest rail. He was very
unhappy; but he saw the deck-steward lashing chairs together, and, since
he had boasted before the man that he was never seasick, his pride made
him go aft to the second-saloon deck at the stern, which was finished in a
turtle-back. The deck was deserted, and he crawled to the extreme end of
it, near the flagpole. There he doubled up in limp agony, for the Wheeling
"stogie" joined with the surge and jar of the screw to sieve out his soul.
His head swelled; sparks of fire danced before his eyes; his body seemed
to lose weight, while his heels wavered in the breeze. He was fainting
from seasickness, and a roll of the ship tilted him over the rail on to
the smooth lip of the turtle-back. Then a low, grey mother-wave swung out
of the fog, tucked Harvey under one arm, so to speak, and pulled him off
and away to leeward; the great green closed over him, and he went quietly
to sleep.

Original

He was roused by the sound of a dinner-horn such as they used to blow at a
summer-school he had once attended in the Adirondacks. Slowly he
remembered that he was Harvey Cheyne, drowned and dead in mid-ocean, but
was too weak to fit things together. A new smell filled his nostrils; wet
and clammy chills ran down his back, and he was helplessly full of salt
water. When he opened his eyes, he perceived that he was still on the top
of the sea, for it was running round him in silver-coloured hills, and he
was lying on a pile of half-dead fish, looking at a broad human back
clothed in a blue jersey.

"It's no good," thought the boy. "I'm dead, sure enough, and this thing is
in charge."

He groaned, and the figure turned its head, showing a pair of little gold
rings half hidden in curly black hair.

"Aha! You feel some pretty well now'?" it said. "Lie still so: we trim
better."

With a swift jerk he sculled the flickering boat-head on to a foamless sea
that lifted her twenty full feet, only to slide her into a glassy pit
beyond. But this mountain-climbing did not interrupt blue-jersey's talk.
"Fine good job, I say, that I catch you. Eh, wha-at? Better good job, I
say, your boat not catch me. How you come to fall out?"

"I was sick," said Harvey; "sick, and couldn't help it."

"Just in time I blow my horn, and your boat she yaw a little. Then I see
you come all down. Eh, wha-at? I think you are cut into baits by the
screw, but you dreeft—dreeft to me, and I make a big fish of you. So
you shall not die this time."

"Where am I?" said Harvey, who could not see that life was particularly
safe where he lay.

"You are with me in the dory—Manuel my name, and I come from
schooner 'We're Here' of Gloucester. I live to Gloucester. By-and-by we
get supper. Eh, wha-at?"

Original

He seemed to have two pairs of hands and a head of cast-iron, for, not
content with blowing through a big conch-shell, he must needs stand up to
it, swaying with the sway of the flat-bottomed dory, and send a grinding,
thuttering shriek through the fog. How long this entertainment lasted,
Harvey could not remember, for he lay back terrified at the sight of the
smoking swells. He fancied he heard a gun and a horn and shouting.
Something bigger than the dory, but quite as lively, loomed alongside.
Several voices talked at once; he was dropped into a dark, heaving hole,
where men in oilskins gave him a hot drink and took off his clothes, and
he fell asleep.

When he waked he listened for the first breakfast-bell on the steamer,
wondering why his stateroom had grown so small. Turning, he looked into a
narrow, triangular cave, lit by a lamp hung against a huge square beam. A
three-cornered table within arm's reach ran from the angle of the bows to
the foremast. At the after end, behind a well-used Plymouth stove, sat a
boy about his own age, with a flat red face and a pair of twinkling grey
eyes. He was dressed in a blue jersey and high rubber boots. Several pairs
of the same sort of foot-wear, an old cap, and some worn-out woolen socks
lay on the floor, and black and yellow oilskins swayed to and fro beside
the bunks. The place was packed as full of smells as a bale is of cotton.
The oilskins had a peculiarly thick flavour of their own which made a sort
of background to the smells of fried fish, burnt grease, paint, pepper,
and stale tobacco; but these, again, were all hooped together by one
encircling smell of ship and salt water. Harvey saw with disgust that
there were no sheets on his bed-place. He was lying on a piece of dingy
ticking full of lumps and nubbles. Then, too, the boat's motion was not
that of a steamer. She was neither sliding nor rolling, but rather
wriggling herself about in a silly, aimless way, like a colt at the end of
a halter. Water-noises ran by close to his ear, and beams creaked and
whined about him. All these things made him grunt despairingly and think
of his mother.

"Feelin' better?" said the boy, with a grin. "Hev some coffee?" He brought
a tin cup full, and sweetened it with molasses.

"Is n't there milk?" said Harvey, looking round the dark double tier of
bunks as if he expected to find a cow there.

"Well, no," said the boy. "Ner there ain't likely to be till 'baout
mid-September. 'Tain't bad coffee. I made it."

Harvey drank in silence, and the boy handed him a plate full of pieces of
crisp fried pork, which he ate ravenously.

"I've dried your clothes. Guess they've shrunk some," said the boy. "They
ain't our style much—none of 'em. Twist round an' see ef you're hurt
any."

Harvey stretched himself in every direction, but could not report any
injuries.

"That's good," the boy said heartily. "Fix yerself an' go on deck. Dad
wants to see you. I'm his son,—Dan, they call me,—an' I'm
cook's helper an' everything else aboard that's too dirty for the men.
There ain't no boy here 'cep' me sence Otto went overboard—an' he
was only a Dutchy, an' twenty year old at that. How'd you come to fall off
in a dead flat ca'am?"

"'Twasn't a calm," said Harvey, sulkily. "It was a gale, and I was
seasick. Guess I must have rolled over the rail."

"There was a little common swell yes'day an' last night," said the boy.
"But ef thet's your notion of a gale——" He whistled. "You'll
know more 'fore you're through. Hurry! Dad's waitin'."

Like many other unfortunate young people, Harvey had never in all his life
received a direct order—never, at least, without long, and sometimes
tearful, explanations of the advantages of obedience and the reasons for
the request. Mrs. Cheyne lived in fear of breaking his spirit, which,
perhaps, was the reason that she herself walked on the edge of nervous
prostration. He could not see why he should be expected to hurry for any
man's pleasure, and said so. "Your dad can come down here if he's so
anxious to talk to me. I want him to take me to New York right away. It'll
pay him."

Dan opened his eyes, as the size and beauty of this joke dawned on him.
"Say, dad!" he shouted up the fo'c'sle hatch, "he says you kin slip down
an' see him ef you're anxious that way. 'Hear, dad?"

The answer came back in the deepest voice Harvey had ever heard from a
human chest: "Quit foolin', Dan, and send him to me."

Dan sniggered, and threw Harvey his warped bicycle shoes. There was
something in the tones on the deck that made the boy dissemble his extreme
rage and console himself with the thought of gradually unfolding the tale
of his own and his father's wealth on the voyage home. This rescue would
certainly make him a hero among his friends for life. He hoisted himself
on deck up a perpendicular ladder, and stumbled aft, over a score of
obstructions, to where a small, thick-set, clean-shaven man with grey
eyebrows sat on a step that led up to the quarter-deck. The swell had
passed in the night, leaving a long, oily sea, dotted round the horizon
with the sails of a dozen fishing-boats. Between them lay little black
specks, showing where the dories were out fishing. The schooner, with a
triangular riding-sail on the mainmast, played easily at anchor, and
except for the man by the cabin-roof—"house" they call it—she
was deserted.

"Mornin'—good afternoon, I should say. You've nigh slep' the clock
around, young feller," was the greeting.

"Mornin'," said Harvey. He did not like being called "young feller"; and,
as one rescued from drowning, expected sympathy. His mother suffered
agonies whenever he got his feet wet; but this mariner did not seem
excited.

"Naow let's hear all abaout it. It's quite providential, first an' last,
fer all concerned. What might be your name? Where from (we mistrust it's
Noo York), an' where baound (we mistrust it's Europe)?"

Harvey gave his name, the name of the steamer, and a short history of the
accident, winding up with a demand to be taken back immediately to New
York, where his father would pay anything any one chose to name.

"H'm," said the shaven man, quite unmoved by the end of Harvey's speech.
"I can't say we think special of any man, or boy even, that falls
overboard from that kind o' packet in a flat ca'am. Least of all when his
excuse is thet he's seasick."

Original

"Excuse!" cried Harvey. "D'you suppose I'd fall overboard into your dirty
little boat for fun?"

"Not knowin' what your notions o' fun may be, I can't rightly say, young
feller. But if I was you, I wouldn't call the boat which, under
Providence, was the means o' savin' ye, names. In the first place, it's
blame irreligious. In the second, it's annoyin' to my feelin's—an'
I'm Disko Troop o' the "We're Here" o' Gloucester, which you don't seem
rightly to know."

"I don't know and I don't care," said Harvey. "I'm grateful enough for
being saved and all that, of course; but I want you to understand that the
sooner you take me back to New York the better it'll pay you."

"Meanin'—haow?" Troop raised one shaggy eyebrow over a suspiciously
mild blue eye.

"Dollars and cents," said Harvey, delighted to think that he was making an
impression. "Cold dollars and cents." He thrust a hand into a pocket, and
threw out his stomach a little, which was his way of being grand. "You've
done the best day's work you ever did in your life when you pulled me in.
I'm all the son Harvey Cheyne has."

"He's bin favoured," said Disko, drily.

"And if you don't know who Harvey Cheyne is, you don't know much—that's
all. Now turn her around and let's hurry."

Harvey had a notion that the greater part of America was filled with
people discussing and envying his father's dollars.

"Mebbe I do, an' mebbe I don't. Take a reef in your stummick, young
feller. It's full o' my vittles."

Harvey heard a chuckle from Dan, who was pretending to be busy by the
stump-foremast, and the blood rushed to his face. "We'll pay for that
too," he said. "When do you suppose we shall get to New York?"

"I don't use Noo York any. Ner Boston. We may see Eastern Point about
September; an' your pa—I'm real sorry I hain't heerd tell of him—may
give me ten dollars efter all your talk. Then o' course he mayn't."

"Ten dollars! Why, see here, I—" Harvey dived into his pocket for
the wad of bills. All he brought up was a soggy packet of cigarettes.

"Not lawful currency, an' bad for the lungs. Heave 'em overboard, young
feller, and try ag'in."

"It's been stolen!" cried Harvey, hotly.

"You'll hev to wait till you see your pa to reward me, then?"

"A hundred and thirty-four dollars—all stolen," said Harvey, hunting
wildly through his pockets. "Give them back."

A curious change flitted across old Troop's hard face. "What might you
have been doin' at your time o' life with one hundred an' thirty-four
dollars, young feller?"

"It was part of my pocket-money—for a month." This Harvey thought
would be a knockdown blow, and it was—indirectly.

Oh! One hundred and thirty-four dollars is only part of his pocket-money—for
one month only! You don't remember hittin' anything when you fell over, do
you? Crack ag'in' a stanchion, le's say. Old man Hasken o' the "East Wind"—Troop
seemed to be talking to himself—"he tripped on a hatch an' butted
the mainmast with his head—hardish. 'Baout three weeks afterwards,
old man Hasken he would hev it that the "East Wind" was a
commerce-destroyin' man-o'-war, an' so he declared war on Sable Island
because it was Bridish, an' the shoals run aout too far. They sewed him up
in a bed-bag, his head an' feet appearin', fer the rest o' the trip, an'
now he's to home in Essex playin' with little rag dolls."

Harvey choked with rage, but Troop went on consolingly: "We're sorry fer
you. We're very sorry fer you—an' so young. We won't say no more
abaout the money, I guess."

"'Course you won't. You stole it."

"Suit yourself. We stole it ef it's any comfort to you. Naow, abaout goin'
back. Allowin' we could do it, which we can't, you ain't in no fit state
to go back to your home, an' we've jest come on to the Banks, workin' fer
our bread. We don't see the ha'af of a hundred dollars a month, let alone
pocket-money; an' with good luck we'll be ashore again somewheres abaout
the first weeks o' September."

"But—but it's May now, and I can't stay here doin' nothing just
because you want to fish. I can't, I tell you!"

"Right an' jest; jest an' right. No one asks you to do nothin'. There's a
heap as you can do, for Otto he went overboard on Le Have. I mistrust he
lost his grip in a gale we f'und there. Anyways, he never come back to
deny it. You've turned up, plain, plumb providential for all concerned. I
mistrust, though, there's ruther few things you kin do. Ain't thet so?"

"I can make it lively for you and your crowd when we get ashore," said
Harvey, with a vicious nod, murmuring vague threats about "piracy," at
which Troop almost—not quite—smiled.

"Excep' talk. I'd forgot that. You ain't asked to talk more'n you've a
mind to aboard the "We're Here". Keep your eyes open, an' help Dan to do
ez he's bid, an' sechlike, an' I'll give you—you ain't wuth it, but
I'll give—ten an' a ha'af a month; say thirty-five at the end o' the
trip. A little work will ease up your head, an' you kin tell us all abaout
your dad an' your ma n' your money efterwards."

"She's on the steamer," said Harvey, his eyes fill-with tears. "Take me to
New York at once."

"Poor woman—poor woman! When she has you back she'll forgit it all,
though. There's eight of us on the "We're Here", an' ef we went back naow—it's
more'n a thousand mile—we'd lose the season. The men they wouldn't
hev it, allowin' I was agreeable."

"But my father would make it all right."

"He'd try. I don't doubt he'd try," said Troop; "but a whole season's
catch is eight men's bread; an' you'll be better in your health when you
see him in the fall. Go forward an' help Dan. It's ten an' a ha'af a
month, ez I said, an', o' course, all f'und, same ez the rest o' us."

"Do you mean I'm to clean pots and pans and things?" said Harvey.

"An' other things. You've no call to shout, young feller."

"I won't! My father will give you enough to buy this dirty little
fish-kettle"—Harvey stamped on the deck—"ten times over, if
you take me to New York safe; and—and—you're in a hundred and
thirty by me, anyway."

"Ha-ow?" said Troop, the iron face darkening.

"How? You know how, well enough. On top of all that, you want me to do
menial work"—Harvey was very proud of that adjective—"till the
Fall. I tell you I will not. You hear?"

Troop regarded the top of the mainmast with deep interest for a while, as
Harvey harangued fiercely all around him.

"Hsh!" he said at last. "I'm figurin' out my responsibilities in my own
mind. It's a matter o' jedgment."

Dan Stole up and plucked Harvey by the elbow. "Don't go to tamperin' with
dad any more," he pleaded. "You've called him a thief two or three times
over, an' he don't take that from any livin' bein'."

"I won't!" Harvey almost shrieked, disregarding the advice; and still
Troop meditated.

"Seems kinder unneighbourly," he said at last, his eye travelling down to
Harvey. "I don't blame you, not a mite, young feller, nor you won't blame
me when the bile's out o' your systim. 'Be sure you sense what I say? Ten
an' a ha'af fer second boy on the schooner—an' all f'und—fer
to teach you an' fer the sake o' your health. Yes or no?"

"No!" said Harvey. "Take me back to New York or I'll see you—"

He did not exactly remember what followed. He was lying in the scuppers,
holding on to a nose that bled, while Troop looked down on him serenely.

"Dan," he said to his son, "I was sot ag'in' this young feller when I
first saw him, on account o' hasty jedgments. Never you be led astray by
hasty jedgments, Dan. Naow I'm sorry for him, because he's clear
distracted in his upper works. He ain't responsible fer the names he's
give me, nor fer his other statements nor fer jumpin' overboard, which I'm
abaout ha'af convinced he did. You be gentle with him, Dan, 'r I'll give
you twice what I've give him. Them hemmeridges clears the head. Let him
sluice it off!"

Troop went down solemnly into the cabin, where he and the older men
bunked, leaving Dan to comfort the luckless heir to thirty millions.

CHAPTER II

I warned ye," said Dan, as the drops fell thick and fast on the dark,
oiled planking. "Dad ain't noways hasty, but you fair earned it. Pshaw!
there's no sense takin' on so." Harvey's shoulders were rising and falling
in spasms of dry sobbing. "I know the feelin'. First time dad laid me out
was the last—and that was my first trip. Makes ye feel sickish an'
lonesome. I know."

"It does," moaned Harvey. "That man's either crazy or drunk, and—and
I can't do anything."

"Don't say that to dad," whispered Dan. "He's set ag'in' all liquor, an'—well,
he told me you was the madman. What in creation made you call him a thief?
He's my dad."

Harvey sat up, mopped his nose, and told the story of the missing wad of
bills. "I'm not crazy," he wound up. "Only—your father has never
seen more than a five-dollar bill at a time, and my father could buy up
this boat once a week and never miss it."

"You don't know what the "We're Here's" worth. Your dad must hey a pile o'
money. How did he git it? Dad sez loonies can't shake out a straight yarn.
Go ahead."

"In gold-mines and things, West."

"I've read o' that kind o' business. Out West, too? Does he go around with
a pistol on a trick-pony, same ez the circus? They call that the Wild
West, and I've heard that their spurs an' bridles was solid silver."

"You are a chump!" said Harvey, amused in spite of himself. "My father
hasn't any use for ponies. When he wants to ride he takes his car."

"Haow? Lobster-car?"

"No. His own private car, of course. You've seen a private car some time
in your life?"

"Slatin Beeman he hez one," said Dan, cautiously. "I saw her at the Union
Depot in Boston, with three niggers hoggin' her run." (Dan meant cleaning
the windows.) "But Slatin Beeman he owns 'baout every railroad on Long
Island, they say; an' they say he's bought 'baout ha'af Noo Hampshire an'
run a line-fence around her, an' filled her up with lions an' tigers an'
bears an' buffalo an' crocodiles an' such all. Slatin Beeman he's a
millionaire. I've seen his car. Yes?"

"Well, my father's what they call a multi-millionaire; and he has two
private cars. One's named for me, the 'Harvey,' and one for my mother, the
'Constance.'"

"Hold on," said Dan. "Dad don't ever let me swear, but I guess you can.
'Fore we go ahead, I want you to say hope you may die if you're lying."

"Of course," said Harvey.

"Thet ain't 'nuff. Say, 'Hope I may die if I ain't speakin' truth.'"

"Hope I may die right here," said Harvey, "if every word I've spoken isn't
the cold truth."

"Hundred an' thirty-four dollars an' all?" said Dan. "I heard ye talkin'
to dad, an' I ha'af looked you'd be swallered up, same's Jonah."

Harvey protested himself red in the face. Dan was a shrewd young person
along his own lines, and ten minutes' questioning convinced him that
Harvey was not lying—much. Besides, he had bound himself by the most
terrible oath known to boyhood, and yet he sat, alive, with a red-ended
nose, in the scuppers, recounting marvels upon marvels.

"Gosh!" said Dan at last, from the very bottom of his soul, when Harvey
had completed an inventory of the car named in his honour. Then a grin of
mischievous delight overspread his broad face. "I believe you, Harvey.
Dad's made a mistake fer once in his life."

"He has, sure," said Harvey, who was meditating an early revenge.

"He'll be mad clear through. Dad jest hates to be mistook in his
jedgments." Dan lay back and slapped his thigh. "Oh, Harvey, don't you
spile the catch by lettin' on."

"I don't want to be knocked down again. I'll get even with him, though."

"Never heard any man ever got even with dad. But he'd knock ye down again
sure. The more he was mistook the more he'd do it. But gold-mines and
pistols—"

"I never said a word about pistols," Harvey cut in, for he was on his
oath.

"Thet's so; no more you did. Two private cars, then, one named fer you an'
one fer her; an' two hundred dollars a month pocket-money, all knocked
into the scuppers fer not workin' fer ten an' a ha'af a month! It's the
top haul o' the season." He exploded with noiseless chuckles.

"Then I was right? "said Harvey, who thought he had found a sympathiser.

"You was wrong; the wrongest kind o' wrong! You take right hold an' pitch
in 'longside o' me, or you'll catch it, an' I'll catch it fer backin' you
up. Dad always gives me double helps 'cause I'm his son, an' he hates
favourin' folk. 'Guess you're kinder mad at dad. I've been that way time
an' again. But dad's a mighty jest man; all the fleet says so."

"Looks like justice, this, don't it?" Harvey pointed to his outraged nose.

"Thet's nothin'. Lets the shore blood outer you. Dad did it for yer
health. Say, though, I can't have dealin's with a man that thinks me or
dad or any one on the "We're Here's" a thief. We ain't any common
wharf-end crowd by any manner o' means. We're fishermen, an' we've shipped
together for six years an' more. Don't you make any mistake on that! I
told ye dad don't let me swear. He calls 'em vain oaths, and pounds me;
but ef I could say what you said 'baout your pap an' his fixin's, I'd say
that 'baout your dollars. I dunno what was in your pockets when I dried
your kit, fer I didn't look to see; but I'd say, using the very same words
ez you used jest now, neither me nor dad—an' we was the only two
that teched you after you was brought aboard—knows anythin' 'baout
the money. Thet's my say. Naow?"

Original

The blood-letting had certainly cleared Harvey's brain, and maybe the
loneliness of the sea had something to do with it. "That's all right," he
said. Then he looked down confusedly. "'Seems to me that for a fellow just
saved from drowning I haven't been over and above grateful, Dan."

"Well, you was shook up and silly," said Dan. "Anyway, there was only dad
an' me aboard to see it. The cook he don't count."

"I might have thought about losing the bills that way," Harvey said, half
to himself, "instead of calling everybody in sight a thief Where's your
father?"

"In the cabin What d' you want o' him again?"

"You'll see," said Harvey, and he stepped, rather groggily, for his head
was still singing, to the cabin steps, where the little ship's clock hung
in plain sight of the wheel. Troop, in the chocolate-and-yellow painted
cabin, was busy with a note-book and an enormous black pencil, which he
sucked hard from time to time.

"I haven't acted quite right," said Harvey, surprised at his own meekness.

"What's wrong naow?" said the skipper "Walked into Dan, hev ye?"

"No; it's about you."

"I'm here to listen."

"Well, I—I'm here to take things back," said Harvey, very quickly.
"When a man's saved from drowning—" he gulped.

"Ey? You'll make a man yet ef you go on this way."

"He oughtn't begin by calling people names."

"Jest an' right—right an' jest," said Troop, with the ghost of a dry
smile.

"So I'm here to say I'm sorry." Another big gulp.

Troop heaved himself slowly off the locker he was sitting on and held out
an eleven-inch hand. "I mistrusted 'twould do you sights o' good; an' this
shows I weren't mistook in my jedgments." A smothered chuckle on deck
caught his ear. "I am very seldom mistook in my jedgments." The
eleven-inch hand closed on Harvey's, numbing it to the elbow. "We'll put a
little more gristle to that 'fore we've done with you, young feller; an' I
don't think any worse of ye fer anythin' thet's gone by. You wasn't fairly
responsible. Go right abaout your business an' you won't take no hurt."

"You're white," said Dan, as Harvey regained the deck, flushed to the tips
of his ears.

"I don't feel it," said he.

"I didn't mean that way. I heard what dad said. When dad allows he don't
think the worse of any man, dad's give himself away. He hates to be
mistook in his jedgments, too. Ho! ho! Onct dad has a jedgment, he'd
sooner dip his colours to the British than change it. I'm glad it's
settled right eend up. Dad's right when he says he can't take you back.
It's all the livin' we make here—fishin'. The men'll be back like
sharks after a dead whale in ha'af an hour."

"What for?" said Harvey. "Supper, o' course. Don't your stummick tell you?
You've a heap to learn."

"'Guess I have," said Harvey, dolefully, looking at the tangle of ropes
and blocks overhead.

"She's a daisy," said Dan, enthusiastically, misunderstanding the look.
"Wait till our mainsail's bent, an' she walks home with all her salt wet.
There's some work first, though." He pointed down into the darkness of the
open main-hatch between the two masts.

"What's that for? It's all empty," said Harvey.

"You an' me an' a few more hev got to fill it," said Dan. "That's where
the fish goes."

"Alive?" said Harvey.

"Well, no. They're so's to be ruther dead—an' flat—an' salt.
There's a hundred hogshead o' salt in the bins; an' we hain't more'n
covered our dunnage to now."

"Where are the fish, though?"

"'In the sea, they say; in the boats, we pray,'" said Dan, quoting a
fisherman's proverb. "You come in last night with 'baout forty of 'em."

He pointed to a sort of wooden pen just in front of the quarter-deck.

"You an' me we'll sluice that out when they're through. 'Send we'll hev
full pens to-night! I've seen her down ha'af a foot with fish waitin' to
clean, an' we stood to the tables till we was splittin' ourselves instid
o' them, we was so sleepy. Yes, they're comin' in naow." Dan looked over
the low bulwarks at half a dozen dories rowing towards them over the
shining, silky sea.

"I've never seen the sea from so low down," said Harvey. "It's fine."

The low sun made the water all purple and pinkish, with golden lights on
the barrels of the long swells, and blue and green mackerel shades in the
hollows. Each schooner in sight seemed to be pulling her dories towards
her by invisible strings, and the little black figures in the tiny boats
pulled like clockwork toys.

"They've struck on good," said Dan, between his half-shut eyes. "Manuel
hain't room fer another fish. Low ez a lily-pad in still water, ain't he?"

"Which is Manuel? I don't see how you can tell 'em 'way off, as you do."

"Last boat to the south'ard. He f'und you last night," said Dan, pointing.
"Manuel rows Portugoosey; ye can't mistake him. East o' him—he's a
heap better'n he rows—is Pennsylvania. Loaded with saleratus, by the
looks of him. East o' him—see how pretty they string out all along
with the humpy shoulders, is Long Jack. He's a Galway man inhabitin' South
Boston, where they all live mostly, an' mostly them Galway men are good in
a boat. North, away yonder—you'll hear him tune up in a minute—is
Tom Platt. Man-o'-war's man he was on the old Ohio—first of our
navy, he says, to go araound the Horn. He never talks of much else, 'cept
when he sings, but he has fair fishin' luck. There! What did I tell you?"

A melodious bellow stole across the water from the northern dory. Harvey
heard something about somebody's hands and feet being cold, and then:

  "Bring forth the chart, the doleful chart;
  See where them mountings meet!
  The clouds are thick around their heads,
  The mists around their feet."

"Full boat," said Dan, with a chuckle. "If he gives us 'O Captain' it's
toppin' full."

The bellow continued:

  "And naow to thee, O Capting,
  Most earnestly I pray
  That they shall never bury me
  In church or cloister grey."

"Double game for Tom Platt. He'll tell you all about the old Ohio
to-morrow. 'See that blue dory behind him? He's my uncle,—dad's own
brother,—an' ef there's any bad luck loose on the Banks she'll fetch
up ag'in' Uncle Salters, sure. Look how tender he's rowin'. I'll lay my
wage and share he's the only man stung up to-day—an' he's stung up
good."

"What'll sting him?" said Harvey, getting interested.

"Strawberries, mostly. Punkins, sometimes, an' sometimes lemons an'
cucumbers. Yes, he's stung up from his elbows down. That man's luck's
perfectly paralysin'. Naow we'll take a-holt o' the tackles an' h'ist 'em
in. Is it true, what you told me jest now, that you never done a hand's
turn o' work in all your born life? Must feel kinder awful, don't it?"

"I'm going to try to work, anyway," Harvey replied stoutly. "Only it's all
dead new."

"Lay a-holt o' that tackle, then. Behind ye!"

Harvey grabbed at a rope and long iron hook dangling from one of the stays
of the mainmast, while Dan pulled down another that ran from something he
called a "topping-lift," as Manuel drew alongside in his loaded dory. The
Portuguese smiled a brilliant smile that Harvey learned to know well
later, and a short-handled fork began to throw fish into the pen on deck.
"Two hundred and thirty-one," he shouted.

"Give him the hook," said Dan, and Harvey ran it into Manuel's hands. He
slipped it through a loop of rope at the dory's bow, caught Dan's tackle,
hooked it to the stern-becket, and clambered into the schooner.

"Pull!" shouted Dan; and Harvey pulled, astonished to find how easily the
dory rose.

"Hold on; she don't nest in the crosstrees!" Dan laughed; and Harvey held
on, for the boat lay in the air above his head.

"Lower away," Dan shouted; and as Harvey lowered, Dan swayed the light
boat with one hand till it landed softly just behind the mainmast. "They
don't weigh nothin' empty. Thet was right smart fer a passenger. There's
more trick to it in a sea-way."

"Ah ha!" said Manuel, holding out a brown hand. "You are some pretty well
now? This time last night the fish they fish for you. Now you fish for
fish. Eh, wha-at?"

"I'm—I'm ever so grateful," Harvey stammered, and his unfortunate
hand stole to his pocket once more, but he remembered that he had no money
to offer. When he knew Manuel better the mere thought of the mistake he
might have made would cover him with hot, uneasy blushes in his bunk.

"There is no to be thankful for to me!" said Manuel. "How shall I leave
you dreeft, dreeft all around the Banks? Now you are a fisherman eh,
wha-at? Ouh! Auh!" He bent backward and forward stiffly from the hips to
get the kinks out of himself.

"I have not cleaned boat to-day. Too busy. They struck on queek. Danny, my
son, clean for me."

Harvey moved forward at once. Here was something he could do for the man
who had saved his life.

Dan threw him a swab, and he leaned over the dory, mopping up the slime
clumsily, but with great good-will. "Hike out the foot-boards; they slide
in them grooves," said Dan. "Swab 'em an' lay 'em down. Never let a
foot-board jam. Ye may want her bad some day. Here's Long Jack."

A stream of glittering fish flew into the pen from a dory alongside.

"Manuel, you take the tackle. I'll fix the tables. Harvey, clear Manuel's
boat. Long Jack's nestin' on the top of her."

Harvey looked up from his swabbing at the bottom of another dory just
above his head.

"Jest like the Injian puzzle-boxes, ain't they?" said Dan, as the one boat
dropped into the other.

"Takes to ut like a duck to water," said Long Jack, a grizzly-chinned,
long-lipped Galway man, bending to and fro exactly as Manuel had done.
Disko in the cabin growled up the hatchway, and they could hear him suck
his pencil.

"Wan hunder an' forty-nine an' a half—bad luck to ye, Discobolus!"
said Long Jack. "I'm murderin' meself to fill your pockuts. Slate ut for a
bad catch. The Portugee has bate me."

Whack came another dory alongside, and more fish shot into the pen.

"Two hundred and three. Let's look at the passenger!" The speaker was even
larger than the Galway man, and his face was made curious by a purple cut
running slantways from his left eye to the right corner of his mouth.

Not knowing what else to do, Harvey swabbed each dory as it came down,
pulled out the foot-boards, and laid them in the bottom of the boat.

"He's caught on good," said the scarred man, who was Tom Platt, watching
him critically. "There are two ways o' doin' everything. One's
fisher-fashion—any end first an' a slippery hitch over all—an'
the other's—"

"What we did on the old Ohio!" Dan interrupted, brushing into the knot of
men with a long board on legs. "Git out o' here, Tom Platt, an' leave me
fix the tables."

He jammed one end of the board into two nicks in the bulwarks, kicked out
the leg, and ducked just in time to avoid a swinging blow from the
man-o'-war's man.

"An' they did that on the Ohio, too, Danny. See?" said Tom Platt,
laughing.

"'Guess they was swivel-eyed, then, fer it didn't git home, and I know
who'll find his boots on the main-truck ef he don't leave us alone. Haul
ahead! I'm busy, can't ye see?"

"Danny, ye lie on the cable an' sleep all day," said Long Jack. "You're
the hoight av impidence, an' I'm persuaded ye'll corrupt our supercargo in
a week."

"His name's Harvey," said Dan, waving two strangely shaped knives, "an'
he'll be worth five of any Sou' Boston clam-digger 'fore long." He laid
the knives tastefully on the table, cocked his head on one side, and
admired the effect.

"I think it's forty-two," said a small voice over-side, and there was a
roar of laughter as another voice answered, "Then my luck's turned fer
onct, 'caze I'm forty-five, though I be stung outer all shape."

"Forty-two or forty-five. I've lost count," the small voice said.

"It's Penn an' Uncle Salters caountin' catch. This beats the circus any
day," said Dan. "Jest look at 'em!"

"Come in—come in!" roared Long Jack. "It's wet out yondher,
children."

"Forty-two, ye said." This was Uncle Salters.

"I'll count again, then," the voice replied meekly.

The two dories swung together and bunted into the schooner's side.

"Patience o' Jerusalem!" snapped Uncle Salters, backing water with a
splash. "What possest a farmer like you to set foot in a boat beats me.
You've nigh stove me all up."

"I am sorry, Mr. Salters. I came to sea on account of nervous dyspepsia.
You advised me, I think."

"You an' your nervis dyspepsy be drowned in the Whale-hole," roared Uncle
Salters, a fat and tubly little man. "You're comin' down on me ag'in. Did
ye say forty-two or forty-five?"

"I've forgotten, Mr. Salters. Let's count."

"Don't see as it could be forty-five. I'm forty-five," said Uncle Salters.
"You count keerful, Penn."

Disko Troop came out of the cabin. "Salters, you pitch your fish in naow
at once," he said in the tone of authority.

"Don't spile the catch, dad," Dan murmured. "Them two are on'y jest
beginnin'."

"Mother av delight! He's forkin' them wan by wan," howled Long Jack, as
Uncle Salters got to work laboriously; the little man in the other dory
counting a line of notches on the gunwale.

"That was last week's catch," he said, looking up plaintively, his
forefinger where he had left off.

Manuel nudged Dan, who darted to the after-tackle, and, leaning far
overside, slipped the hook into the stern-rope as Manuel made her fast
forward. The others pulled gallantly and swung the boat in—man,
fish, and all.

"One, two, four—nine," said Tom Platt, counting with a practised
eye. "Forty-seven. Penn, you're it!" Dan let the after-tackle run, and
slid him out of the stern on to the deck amid a torrent of his own fish.

"Hold on!" roared Uncle Salters, bobbing by the waist. "Hold on, I'm a bit
mixed in my caount."

He had no time to protest, but was hove inboard and treated like
"Pennsylvania."

"Forty-one," said Tom Platt. "Beat by a farmer, Salters. An' you sech a
sailor, too!"

"'Tweren't fair caount," said he, stumbling out of the pen; "an' I'm stung
up all to pieces."

His thick hands were puffy and mottled purply white.

"Some folks will find strawberry-bottom," said Dan, addressing the newly
risen moon, "ef they hev to dive fer it, seems to me."

"An' others," said Uncle Salters, "eats the fat o' the land in sloth, an'
mocks their own blood-kin."

"Seat ye! Seat ye!" a voice Harvey had not heard called from the fo'c'sle.
Disko Troop, Tom Platt, Long Jack, and Salters went forward on the word.
Little Penn bent above his square deep-sea reel and the tangled cod-lines;
Manuel lay down full length on the deck, and Dan dropped into the hold,
where Harvey heard him banging casks with a hammer.

"Salt," he said, returning. "Soon as we're through supper we git to
dressing-down. You'll pitch to dad. Tom Platt an' dad they stow together,
an' you'll hear 'em arguin'. We're second ha'af, you an' me an' Manuel an'
Penn—the youth an' beauty o' the boat."

"What's the good of that?" said Harvey. "I'm hungry."

"They'll be through in a minute. Sniff! She smells good to-night. Dad
ships a good cook ef he do suffer with his brother. It's a full catch
today, ain't it?" He pointed at the pens piled high with cod. "What water
did ye hev, Manuel?"

"Twenty-fife father," said the Portuguese, sleepily. "They strike on good
an' queek. Some day I show you, Harvey."

The moon was beginning to walk on the still sea before the elder men came
aft. The cook had no need to cry "second half." Dan and Manuel were down
the hatch and at table ere Tom Platt, last and most deliberate of the
elders, had finished wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. Harvey
followed Penn, and sat down before a tin pan of cod's tongues and sounds,
mixed with scraps of pork and fried potato, a loaf of hot bread, and some
black and powerful coffee. Hungry as they were, they waited while
"Pennsylvania" solemnly asked a blessing. Then they stoked in silence till
Dan drew breath over his tin cup and demanded of Harvey how he felt.

"'Most full, but there's just room for another piece."

The cook was a huge, jet-black negro, and, unlike all the negroes Harvey
had met, did not talk, contenting himself with smiles and dumb-show
invitations to eat more.

"See, Harvey," said Dan, rapping with his fork on the table, "it's jest as
I said. The young an' handsome men—like me an' Pennsy an' you an'
Manuel—we 're second ha'af, an' we eats when the first ha'af are
through. They're the old fish; and they're mean an' humpy, an' their
stummicks has to be humoured; so they come first, which they don't
deserve. Ain't that so, doctor?"

The cook nodded.

"Can't he talk?" said Harvey, in a whisper.

"'Nough to git along. Not much o' anything we know. His natural tongue's
kinder curious. Comes from the in'ards of Cape Breton, he does, where the
farmers speak home-made Scotch. Cape Breton's full o' niggers whose folk
run in there durin' aour war, an' they talk like the farmers—all
huffy-chuffy."

"That is not Scotch," said "Pennsylvania."

"That is Gaelic. So I read in a book."

"Penn reads a heap. Most of what he says is so—'cep' when it comes
to a caount o' fish—eh?"

"Does your father just let them say how many they've caught without
checking them?" said Harvey.

"Why, yes. Where's the sense of a man lyin' fer a few old cod?"

"Was a man once lied for his catch," Manuel put in. "Lied every day. Fife,
ten, twenty-fife more fish than come he say there was."

"Where was that?" said Dan. "None o' aour folk."

"Frenchman of Anguille."

"Ah! Them West Shore Frenchmen don't caount, anyway. Stands to reason they
can't caount. Ef you run acrost any of their soft hooks, Harvey, you'll
know why," said Dan, with an awful contempt.

  "Always more and never less,
  Every time we come to dress,"

Long Jack roared down the hatch, and the "second ha'af" scrambled up at
once.

The shadow of the masts and rigging, with the never-furled riding-sail,
rolled to and fro on the heaving deck in the moonlight; and the pile of
fish by the stern shone like a dump of fluid silver. In the hold there
were tramplings and rumblings where Disko Troop and Tom Platt moved among
the salt-bins. Dan passed Harvey a pitchfork, and led him to the inboard
end of the rough table, where Uncle Salters was drumming impatiently with
a knife-haft. A tub of salt water lay at his feet.

"You pitch to dad an' Tom Platt down the hatch, an' take keer Uncle
Salters don't cut yer eye out," said Dan, swinging himself into the hold.
"I'll pass salt below."

Penn and Manuel stood knee-deep among cod in the pen, flourishing drawn
knives. Long Jack, a basket at his feet and mittens on his hands, faced
Uncle Salters at the table, and Harvey stared at the pitchfork and the
tub.

"Hi!" shouted Manuel, stooping to the fish, and bringing one up with a
finger under its gill and a finger in its eye. He laid it on the edge of
the pen; the knife-blade glimmered with a sound of tearing, and the fish,
slit from throat to vent, with a nick on either side of the neck, dropped
at Long Jack's feet.

"Hi!" said Long Jack, with a scoop of his mittened hand. The cod's liver
dropped in the basket. Another wrench and scoop sent the head and offal
flying, and the empty fish slid across to Uncle Salters, who snorted
fiercely. There was another sound of tearing, the backbone flew over the
bulwarks, and the fish, headless, gutted, and open, splashed in the tub,
sending the salt water into Harvey's astonished mouth. After the first
yell, the men were silent. The cod moved along as though they were alive,
and long ere Harvey had ceased wondering at the miraculous dexterity of it
all, his tub was full.

"Pitch!" grunted Uncle Salters, without turning his head, and Harvey
pitched the fish by twos and threes down the hatch.

"Hi! Pitch 'em bunchy," shouted Dan. "Don't scatter! Uncle Salters is the
best splitter in the fleet. Watch him mind his book!"

Indeed, it looked a little as though the round uncle were cutting magazine
pages against time. Manuel's body, cramped over from the hips, stayed like
a statue; but his long arms grabbed the fish without ceasing. Little Penn
toiled valiantly, but it was easy to see he was weak. Once or twice Manuel
found time to help him without breaking the chain of supplies, and once
Manuel howled because he had caught his finger in a Frenchman's hook.
These hooks are made of soft metal, to be rebent after use; but the cod
very often get away with them and are hooked again elsewhere; and that is
one of the many reasons why the Gloucester boats despise the Frenchmen.

Down below, the rasping sound of rough salt rubbed on rough flesh sounded
like the whirring of a grindstone—a steady undertune to the
"click-nick" of the knives in the pen; the wrench and schloop of torn
heads, dropped liver, and flying offal; the "caraaah" of Uncle Salters's
knife scooping away backbones; and the flap of wet, opened bodies falling
into the tub.

At the end of an hour Harvey would have given the world to rest; for
fresh, wet cod weigh more than you would think, and his back ached with
the steady pitching. But he felt for the first time in his life that he
was one of a working gang of men, took pride in the thought, and held on
sullenly.

"Knife oh!" shouted Uncle Salters, at last. Penn doubled up, gasping among
the fish, Manuel bowed back and forth to supple himself, and Long Jack
leaned over the bulwarks. The cook appeared, noiseless as a black shadow,
collected a mass of backbones and heads, and retreated.

"Blood-ends for breakfast an' head-chowder," said Long Jack, smacking his
lips.

"Knife oh!" repeated Uncle Salters, waving the flat, curved splitter's
weapon.

"Look by your foot, Harve," cried Dan, below.

Harvey saw half a dozen knives stuck in a cleat in the hatch combing. He
dealt these around, taking over the dulled ones.

"Water!" said Disko Troop.

"Scuttle-butt's for'ard, an' the dipper's alongside. Hurry, Harve," said
Dan.

He was back in a minute with a big dipperful of stale brown water which
tasted like nectar, and loosed the jaws of Disko and Tom Platt.

"These are cod," said Disko. "They ain't Damarskus figs, Tom Platt, nor
yet silver bars. I've told you that every single time sence we've sailed
together."

"A matter o' seven seasons," returned Tom Platt, coolly. "Good stowin's
good stowin' all the same, an' there's a right an' a wrong way o' stowin'
ballast even. If you'd ever seen four hundred ton o' iron set into the—"

"Hi!" With a yell from Manuel the work began again, and never stopped till
the pen was empty. The instant the last fish was down, Disko Troop rolled
aft to the cabin with his brother; Manuel and Long Jack went forward; Tom
Platt only waited long enough to slide home the hatch ere he too
disappeared. In half a minute Harvey heard deep snores in the cabin, and
he was staring blankly at Dan and Penn.

"I did a little better that time, Danny," said Penn, whose eyelids were
heavy with sleep. "But I think it is my duty to help clean."

"'Wouldn't hev your conscience fer a thousand quintal," said Dan. "Turn
in, Penn. You've no call to do boy's work. Draw a bucket, Harvey. Oh,
Penn, dump these in the gurry-butt 'fore you sleep. Kin you keep awake
that long?"

Penn took up the heavy basket of fish-livers, emptied them into a cask
with a hinged top lashed by the fo'c'sle; then he too dropped out of sight
in the cabin.

"Boys clean up after dressin' down, an' first watch in ca'am weather is
boy's watch on the 'We're Here'." Dan sluiced the pen energetically,
unshipped the table, set it up to dry in the moonlight, ran the red
knife-blades through a wad of oakum, and began to sharpen them on a tiny
grindstone, as Harvey threw offal and backbones overboard under his
direction.

At the first splash a silvery-white ghost rose bolt upright from the oily
water and sighed a weird whistling sigh. Harvey started back with a shout,
but Dan only laughed. "Grampus," said he. "Beggin' fer fish-heads. They
up-eend thet way when they're hungry. Breath on him like the doleful
tombs, hain't he?" A horrible stench of decayed fish filled the air as the
pillar of white sank, and the water bubbled oilily. "Hain't ye never seen
a grampus up-eend before? You'll see 'em by hundreds 'fore ye're through.
Say, it's good to hev a boy aboard again. Otto was too old, an' a Dutchy
at that. Him an' me we fought consid'ble. 'Wouldn't ha' keered fer thet ef
he'd hed a Christian tongue in his head. Sleepy?"

"Dead sleepy," said Harvey, nodding forward.

"'Mustn't sleep on watch. Rouse up an' see ef our anchor-light's bright
an' shinin'. You're on watch now, Harve."

"Pshaw! What's to hurt us? Bright's day. Sn-orrr!

"Jest when things happen, dad says. Fine weather's good sleepin', an'
'fore you know, mebbe, you're cut in two by a liner, an' seventeen
brass-bound officers, all gen'elmen, lift their hand to it that your
lights was aout an' there was a thick fog. Harve, I've kinder took to you,
but ef you nod onct more I'll lay into you with a rope's end."

The moon, who sees many strange things on the Banks, looked down on a slim
youth in knickerbockers and a red jersey, staggering around the cluttered
decks of a seventy-ton schooner, while behind him, waving a knotted rope,
walked, after the manner of an executioner, a boy who yawned and nodded
between the blows he dealt.

The lashed wheel groaned and kicked softly, the riding-sail slatted a
little in the shifts of the light wind, the windlass creaked, and the
miserable procession continued. Harvey expostulated, threatened,
whimpered, and at last wept outright, while Dan, the words clotting on his
tongue, spoke of the beauty of watchfulness, and slashed away with the
rope's end, punishing the dories as often as he hit Harvey. At last the
clock in the cabin struck ten, and upon the tenth stroke little Penn crept
on deck. He found two boys in two tumbled heaps side by side on the
main-hatch, so deeply asleep that he actually rolled them to their berths.

CHAPTER III

It was the forty-fathom slumber that clears the soul and eye and heart,
and sends you to breakfast ravening. They emptied a big tin dish of juicy
fragments of fish—the blood-ends the cook had collected overnight.
They cleaned up the plates and pans of the elder mess, who were out
fishing, sliced pork for the midday meal, swabbed down the fo'c'sle,
filled the lamps, drew coal and water for the cook, and investigated the
fore-hold, where the boat's stores were stacked. It was another perfect
day—soft, mild, and clear; and Harvey breathed to the very bottom of
his lungs.

More schooners had crept up in the night, and the long blue seas were full
of sails and dories. Far away on the horizon, the smoke of some liner, her
hull invisible, smudged the blue, and to eastward a big ship's
topgallantsails, just lifting, made a square nick in it. Disko Troop was
smoking by the roof of the cabin—one eye on the craft around, and
the other on the little fly at the mainmast-head.

"When dad kerflummoxes that way," said Dan, in a whisper, "he's doin' some
high-line thinkin' fer all hands. I'll lay my wage an' share we'll make
berth soon. Dad he knows the cod, an' the fleet they know dad knows. 'See
'em comin' up one by one, lookin' fer nothin' in particular, o' course,
but scrowgin' on us all the time? There's the Prince Leboa; she's a
Chat-ham boat. She's crep' up sence last night. An' see that big one with
a patch in her foresail an' a new jib? She's the Carrie Pitman from West
Chatham. She won't keep her canvas long on less her luck's changed since
last season. She don't do much 'cep' drift. There ain't an anchor made'll
hold her. . . . When the smoke puffs up in little rings like that, dad's
studyin' the fish. Ef we speak to him now, he'll git mad. Las' time I did,
he jest took an' hove a boot at me."

Disko Troop stared forward, the pipe between his teeth, with eyes that saw
nothing. As his son said, he was studying the fish—pitting his
knowledge and experience on the Banks against the roving cod in his own
sea. He accepted the presence of the inquisitive schooners on the horizon
as a compliment to his powers. But now that it was paid, he wished to draw
away and make his berth alone, till it was time to go up to the Virgin and
fish in the streets of that roaring town upon the waters. So Disko Troop
thought of recent weather, and gales, currents, food-supplies, and other
domestic arrangements, from the point of view of a twenty-pound cod; was,
in fact, for an hour a cod himself, and looked remarkably like one. Then
he removed the pipe from his teeth.

"Dad," said Dan, "we've done our chores. Can't we go overside a piece?
It's good catch-in' weather."

"Not in that cherry-coloured rig ner them ha'afbaked brown shoes. Give him
suthin' fit to wear."

"Dad's pleased—that settles it," said Dan, delightedly, dragging
Harvey into the cabin, while Troop pitched a key down the steps. "Dad
keeps my spare rig where he kin overhaul it, 'cause ma sez I'm keerless."
He rummaged through a locker, and in less than three minutes Harvey was
adorned with fisherman's rubber boots that came half up his thigh, a heavy
blue jersey well darned at the elbows, a pair of flippers, and a
sou'wester.

"Naow ye look somethin' like," said Dan. "Hurry!"

"Keep nigh an' handy," said Troop, "an' don't go visitin' raound the
fleet. Ef any one asks you what I'm cal'latin' to do, speak the truth—fer
ye don't know."

A little red dory, labelled Hattie S., lay astern of the schooner. Dan
hauled in the painter, and dropped lightly on to the bottom boards, while
Harvey tumbled clumsily after.

"That's no way o' gettin' into a boat," said Dan. "Ef there was any sea
you'd go to the bottom, sure. You got to learn to meet her."

Dan fitted the thole-pins, took the forward thwart, and watched Harvey's
work. The boy had rowed, in a ladylike fashion, on the Adirondack ponds;
but there is a difference between squeaking pins and well-balanced
rowlocks—light sculls and stubby, eight-foot sea-oars. They stuck in
the gentle swell, and Harvey grunted.

"Short! Row short!" said Dan. "Ef you cramp your oar in any kind o' sea
you're liable to turn her over. Ain't she a daisy? Mine, too."

The little dory was specklessly clean. In her bows lay a tiny anchor, two
jugs of water, and some seventy fathoms of thin, brown dory-roding. A tin
dinner-horn rested in cleats just under Harvey's right hand, beside an
ugly-looking maul, a short gaff, and a shorter wooden stick. A couple of
lines, with very heavy leads and double cod-hooks, all neatly coiled on
square reels, were stuck in their place by the gunwale.

"Where's the sail and mast?" said Harvey, for his hands were beginning to
blister.

Dan chuckled. "Ye don't sail fishin'-dories much. Ye pull; but ye needn't
pull so hard. Don't you wish you owned her?"

"Well, I guess my father might give me one or two if I asked 'em," Harvey
replied. He had been too busy to think much of his family till then.

"That's so. I forgot your dad's a millionaire. You don't act millionary
any, naow. But a dory an' craft an' gear"—Dan spoke as though she
were a whale-boat "costs a heap. Think your dad 'u'd give you one fer—fer
a pet like?"

"Shouldn't wonder. It would be 'most the only thing I haven't stuck him
for yet."

"Must be an expensive kinder kid to home. Don't slitheroo thet way, Harve.
Short's the trick, because no sea's ever dead still, an' the swells'll—"

Crack! The loom of the oar kicked Harvey under the chin and knocked him
backward.

"That was what I was goin' to say. I hed to learn too, but I wasn't more
than eight years old when I got my schoolin'."

Harvey regained his seat with aching jaws and a frown.

"No good gettin' mad at things, dad says. It's our own fault ef we can't
handle 'em, he says. Le's try here. Manuel'll give us the water."

The "Portugee" was rocking fully a mile away, but when Dan up-ended an oar
he waved his left arm three times.

"Thirty fathom," said Dan, stringing a salt clam on to the hook. "Over
with the dough-boys. Bait same's I do, Harve, an' don't snarl your reel."

Dan's line was out long before Harvey had mastered the mystery of baiting
and heaving out the leads. The dory drifted along easily. It was not worth
while to anchor till they were sure of good ground.

"Here we come!" Dan shouted, and a shower of spray rattled on Harvey's
shoulders as a big cod flapped and kicked alongside. "Muckle, Harvey,
muckle! Under your hand! Quick!"

Evidently "muckle" could not be the dinner-horn, so Harvey passed over the
maul, and Dan scientifically stunned the fish before he pulled it inboard,
and wrenched out the hook with the short wooden stick he called a
"gob-stick." Then Harvey felt a tug, and pulled up zealously.

"Why, these are strawberries!" he shouted. "Look!"

The hook had fouled among a bunch of strawberries, red on one side and
white on the other—perfect reproductions of the land fruit, except
that there were no leaves, and the stem was all pipy and slimy.

"Don't tech 'em! Slat 'em off. Don't—"

The warning came too late. Harvey had picked them from the hook, and was
admiring them.

"Ouch!" he cried, for his fingers throbbed as though he had grasped many
nettles.

"Naow ye know what strawberry-bottom means. Nothin' 'cep' fish should be
teched with the naked fingers, dad says. Slat 'em off ag'in' the gunnel,
an' bait up, Harve. Lookin' won't help any. It's all in the wages."

Harvey smiled at the thought of his ten and a half dollars a month, and
wondered what his mother would say if she could see him hanging over the
edge of a fishing-dory in mid-ocean. She suffered agonies whenever he went
out on Saranac Lake; and, by the way, Harvey remembered distinctly that he
used to laugh at her anxieties. Suddenly the line flashed through his
hand, stinging even through the "flippers," the woolen circlets supposed
to protect it.

"He's a logy. Give him room accordin' to his strength," cried Dan. "I'll
help ye."

"No, you won't," Harvey snapped, as he hung on to the line. "It's my first
fish. Is—is it a whale?"

"Halibut, mebbe." Dan peered down into the water alongside, and flourished
the big "muckle," ready for all chances. Something white and oval
flickered and fluttered through the green. "I'll lay my wage an' share
he's over a hundred. Are you so everlastin' anxious to land him alone?"
Harvey's knuckles were raw and bleeding where they had been banged against
the gunwale; his face was purple-blue between excitement and exertion; he
dripped with sweat, and was half blinded from staring at the circling
sunlit ripples about the swiftly moving line. The boys were tired long ere
the halibut, who took charge of them and the dory for the next twenty
minutes. But the big flat fish was gaffed and hauled in at last.

"Beginner's luck," said Dan, wiping his forehead. "He's all of a hundred."

Harvey looked at the huge grey-and-mottled creature with unspeakable
pride. He had seen halibut many times on marble slabs ashore, but it had
never occurred to him to ask how they came inland. Now he knew; and every
inch of his body ached with fatigue.

"Ef dad was along," said Dan, hauling up, "he'd read the signs plain's
print. The fish are runnin' smaller an' smaller, an' you've took baout as
logy a halibut's we're apt to find this trip. Yesterday's catch—did
ye notice it?—was all big fish an' no halibut. Dad he'd read them
signs right off. Dad says everythin' on the Banks is signs, an' can be
read wrong er right. Dad's deeper'n the Whale-hole."

Even as he spoke some one fired a pistol on the "We're Here", and a
potato-basket was run up in the fore-rigging.

"What did I say, naow? That's the call fer the whole crowd. Dad's onter
something, er he'd never break fishin' this time o' day. Reel up, Harve,
an' we'll pull back."

They were to windward of the schooner, just ready to flirt the dory over
the still sea, when sounds of woe half a mile off led them to Penn, who
was careering around a fixed point, for all the world like a gigantic
water-bug. The little man backed away and came down again with enormous
energy, but at the end of each manoeuvre his dory swung round and snubbed
herself on her rope.

"We'll hey to help him, else he'll root an' seed here," said Dan.

"What's the matter?" said Harvey. This was a new world, where he could not
lay down the law to his elders, but had to ask questions humbly. And the
sea was horribly big and unexcited.

"Anchor's fouled. Penn's always losing 'em. Lost two this trip a'ready,—on
sandy bottom, too,—an' dad says next one he loses, sure's fish-in',
he'll give him the kelleg. That 'u'd break Penn's heart."

"What's a 'kelleg'?" said Harvey, who had a vague idea it might be some
kind of marine torture, like keel-hauling in the story-books.

"Big stone instid of an anchor. You kin see a kelleg ridin' in the bows
fur's you can see a dory, an' all the fleet knows what it means. They'd
guy him dreadful. Penn couldn't stand that no more'n a dog with a dipper
to his tail. He's so everlastin' sensitive. Hello, Penn! Stuck again?
Don't try any more o' your patents. Come up on her, and keep your rodin'
straight up an' down."

"It doesn't move," said the little man, panting. "It doesn't move at all,
and indeed I tried everything."

"What's all this hurrah's-nest for'ard?" said Dan, pointing to a wild
tangle of spare oars and dory-roding, all matted together by the hand of
inexperience.

"Oh, that," said Penn, proudly, "is a Spanish windlass. Mr. Salters showed
me how to make it; but even that doesn't move her."

Dan bent low over the gunwale to hide a smile, twitched once or twice on
the roding, and, behold, the anchor drew at once.

"Haul up, Penn," he said, laughing, "er she 'll git stuck again."

They left him regarding the weed-hung flukes of the little anchor with
big, pathetic blue eyes, and thanking them profusely.

"Oh, say, while I think of it, Harve," said Dan, when they were out of
ear-shot, "Penn ain't quite all caulked. He ain't nowise dangerous, but
his mind's give out. See?"

"Is that so, or is it one of your father's judgments?" Harvey asked, as he
bent to his oars. He felt he was learning to handle them more easily.

"Dad ain't mistook this time. Penn's a sure'nuff loony. No, he ain't thet,
exactly, so much ez a harmless ijjit. It was this way (you're rowin' quite
so, Harve), an' I tell you 'cause it's right you orter know. He was a
Moravian preacher once. Jacob Boller wuz his name, dad told me, an' he
lived with his wife an' four children somewheres out Pennsylvania way.
Well, Penn he took his folks along to a Moravian meetin',—camp-meetin',
most like,—an' they stayed over jest one night in Johnstown. You've
heered talk o' Johnstown?"

Harvey considered. "Yes, I have. But I don't know why. It sticks in my
head same as Ashtabula."

"Both was big accidents—thet's why, Harve. Well, that one single
night Penn and his folks was to the hotel Johnstown was wiped out. 'Dam
bu'st an' flooded her, an' the houses struck adrift an' bumped into each
other an' sunk. I've seen the pictures, an' they're dretful. Penn he saw
his folk drowned all 'n a heap 'fore he rightly knew what was comin'. His
mind give out from that on. He mistrusted somethin' hed happened up to
Johnstown, but for the poor life of him he couldn't remember what, an' he
jest drifted araound smilin' an' wonderin'. He didn't know what he was,
nor yit what he hed bin, an' thet way he run ag'in' Uncle Salters, who was
visitin' 'n Allegheny City. Ha'af my mother's folks they live scattered
inside o' Pennsylvania, an' Uncle Salters he visits araound winters. Uncle
Salters he kinder adopted Penn, well knowin' what his trouble wuz; an' he
brought him East, an' he give him work on his farm."

"Why, I heard him calling Penn a farmer last night when the boats bumped.
Is your Uncle Salters a farmer?"

"Farmer!" shouted Dan. "There ain't water enough 'tween here an' Hatt'rus
to wash the furrer-mould off'n his boots. He's Jest everlastin' farmer.
Why, Harve, I've seen thet man hitch up a bucket, long towards sundown,
an' set twiddlin' the spigot to the scuttle-butt same's ef 'twuz a cow's
bag. He's thet much farmer. Well, Penn an' he they ran the farm—up
Exeter way, 'twuz. Uncle Salters he sold it this spring to a jay from
Boston as wanted to build a summerhaouse, an' he got a heap for it. Well,
them two loonies scratched along till, one day, Penn's church he'd
belonged to—the Moravians—found out where he wuz drifted an'
layin', an' wrote to Uncle Salters. 'Never heerd what they said exactly;
but Uncle Salters was mad. He's a 'piscopalian mostly—but he jest
let 'em hev it both sides o' the bow, 'sif he was a Baptist, an' sez he
warn't goin' to give up Penn to any blame Moravian connection in
Pennsylvania or anywheres else. Then he come to dad, towin' Penn,—thet
was two trips back,—an' sez he an' Penn must fish a trip fer their
health. 'Guess he thought the Moravians wouldn't hunt the Banks fer Jacob
Boller. Dad was agreeable, fer Uncle Salters he'd been fishin' off an' on
fer thirty years, when he warn't inventin' patent manures, an' he took
quarter-share in the 'We're Here'; an' the trip done Penn so much good,
dad made a habit o' takin' him. Some day, dad sez, he'll remember his wife
an' kids an' Johnstown, an' then, like's not, he'll die, dad sez. Don't
yer talk about Johnstown ner such things to Penn, 'r Uncle Salters he'll
heave ye overboard."

"Poor Penn!" murmured Harvey. "I shouldn't ever have thought Uncle Salters
cared for him by the look of 'em together."

"I like Penn, though; we all do," said Dan. "We ought to ha' give him a
tow, but I wanted to tell ye first."

They were close to the schooner now, the other boats a little behind them.

"You needn't heave in the dories till after dinner," said Troop, from the
deck. "We'll dress-daown right off. Fix table, boys!"

"Deeper'n the Whale-deep," said Dan, with a wink, as he set the gear for
dressing-down. "Look at them boats that hev edged up sence mornin'.
They're all waitin' on dad. See 'em, Harve?"

"They are all alike to me." And, indeed, to a landsman the nodding
schooners around seemed run from the same mould.

"They ain't, though. That yaller, dirty packet with her bowsprit steeved
that way, she's the 'Hope of Prague'. Nick Brady's her skipper, the
meanest man on the Banks. We'll tell him so when we strike the Main Ledge.
'Way off yander's the 'Day's Eye'. The two Jeraulds own her. She's from
Harwich; fastish, too, an' hez good luck; but dad he'd find fish in a
graveyard. Them other three, side along, they're the 'Margie Smith',
'Rose', and 'Edith S. Walen', all frum home. 'Guess we'll see the 'Abbie
M. Deering' to-morrer, dad, won't we? They're all slippin' over from the
shoal o' 'Queereau."

"You won't see many boats to-morrow, Danny." When Troop called his son
Danny, it was a sign that the old man was pleased. "Boys, we're too
crowded," he went on, addressing the crew as they clambered inboard.
"We'll leave 'em to bait big an' catch small." He looked at the catch in
the pen, and it was curious to see how little and level the fish ran. Save
for Harvey's halibut, there was nothing over fifteen pounds on deck.

"I'm waitin' on the weather," he added.

"Ye'll have to make it yourself, Disko, for there's no sign I can see,"
said Long Jack, sweeping the clear horizon.

And yet, half an hour later, as they were dressing-down, the Bank fog
dropped on them, "between fish and fish," as they say. It drove steadily
and in wreaths, curling and smoking along the colourless water. The men
stopped dressing-down without a word. Long Jack and Uncle Salters slipped
the windlass-brakes into their sockets, and began to heave up the anchor,
the windlass jarring as the wet hempen cable strained on the barrel.
Manuel and Tom Platt gave a hand at the last. The anchor came up with a
sob, and the riding-sail bellied as Troop steadied her at the wheel. "Up
jib and foresail," said he.

"Slip 'em in the smother," shouted Long Jack, making fast the jib-sheet,
while the others raised the clacking, rattling rings of the foresail; and
the fore-boom creaked as the "We're Here" looked up into the wind and
dived off into blank, whirling white.

"There's wind behind this fog," said Troop.

It was all wonderful beyond words to Harvey; and the most wonderful part
was that he heard no orders except an occasional grunt from Troop, ending
with, "That's good, my son!"

"'Never seen anchor weighed before?" said Tom Platt, to Harvey gaping at
the damp canvas of the foresail.

"No. Where are we going?"

"Fish and make berth, as you'll find out 'fore you've bin a week aboard.
It's all new to you, but we never know what may come to us. Now, take me—Tom
Platt—I'd never ha' thought—"

"It's better than fourteen dollars a month an' a bullet in your belly,"
said Troop, from the wheel. "Ease your jumbo a grind."

"Dollars an' cents better," returned the man-o'-war's man, doing something
to a big jib with a wooden spar tied to it. "But we didn't think o' that
when we manned the windlass-brakes on the 'Miss Jim Buck', *
outside Beaufort Harbor, with Fort Macon heavin' hot shot at our stern,
an' a livin' gale atop of all. Where was you then, Disko?"

      * The Gemsbok, U. S. N.?
    

"Jest here, or hereabouts," Disko replied, "earnin' my bread on the deep
waters, and dodgin' Reb privateers. 'Sorry I can't accommodate you with
red-hot shot, Tom Platt; but I guess we'll come aout all right on wind
'fore we see Eastern Point."

There was an incessant slapping and chatter at the bows now, varied by a
solid thud and a little spout of spray that clattered down on the
fo'c'sle. The rigging dripped clammy drops, and the men lounged along the
lee of the house—all save Uncle Salters, who sat stiffly on the
main-hatch nursing his stung hands.

"'Guess she'd carry stays'l," said Disko, rolling one eye at his brother.

"Guess she wouldn't to any sorter profit. What's the sense o' wastin'
canvas?" the farmer-sailor replied.

The wheel twitched almost imperceptibly in Disko's hands. A few seconds
later a hissing wave-top slashed diagonally across the boat, smote Uncle
Salters between the shoulders, and drenched him from head to foot. He rose
sputtering, and went forward, only to catch another.

Original

"See dad chase him, all around the deck," said Dan. "Uncle Salters he
thinks his quarter-share's our canvas. Dad's put this duckin' act up on
him two trips runnin'. Hi! That found him where he feeds." Uncle Salters
had taken refuge by the foremast, but a wave slapped him over the knees.
Disko's face was as blank as the circle of the wheel.

"'Guess she'd lie easier under stays'l, Salters," said Disko, as though he
had seen nothing.

"Set your old kite, then," roared the victim, through a cloud of spray;
"only don't lay it to me if anything happens. Penn, you go below right off
an' git your coffee. You ought to hev more sense than to bum araound on
deck this weather."

"Now they'll swill coffee an' play checkers till the cows come home," said
Dan, as Uncle Salters hustled Penn into the fore-cabin. "'Looks to me
like's if we'd all be doin' so fer a spell. There's nothin' in creation
deader-limpsey-idler'n a Banker when she ain't on fish."

"I'm glad ye spoke, Danny," cried Long Jack, who had been casting round in
search of amusement. "I'd clean forgot we'd a passenger under that T-wharf
hat. There's no idleness for thim that don't know their ropes. Pass him
along, Tom Platt, an' we'll l'arn him."

"'Tain't my trick this time," grinned Dan. "You've got to go it alone. Dad
learned me with a rope's end."

Original

For an hour Long Jack walked his prey up and down, teaching, as he said,
"things at the sea that ivry man must know, blind, dhrunk, or asleep."
There is not much gear to a seventy-ton schooner with a stump-foremast,
but Long Jack had a gift of expression. When he wished to draw Harvey's
attention to the peak-halyards, he dug his knuckles into the back of the
boy's neck and kept him at gaze for half a minute. He emphasised the
difference between fore and aft generally by rubbing Harvey's nose along a
few feet of the boom, and the lead of each rope was fixed in Harvey's mind
by the end of the rope itself.

The lesson would have been easier had the deck been at all free; but there
appeared to be a place on it for everything and anything except a man.
Forward lay the windlass and its tackle, with the chain and hemp cables,
all very unpleasant to trip over; the fo'c'sle stovepipe, and the
gurry-butts by the fo'c'sle-hatch to hold the fish-livers. Aft of these
the fore-boom and booby of the main-hatch took all the space that was not
needed for the pumps and dressing-pens. Then came the nests of dories
lashed to ring-bolts by the quarter-deck; the house, with tubs and
oddments lashed all around it; and, last, the sixty-foot main-boom in its
crutch, splitting things lengthwise, to duck and dodge under every time.

Tom Platt, of course, could not keep his oar out of the business, but
ranged alongside with enormous and unnecessary descriptions of sails and
spars on the old Ohio.

"Niver mind fwhat he says; attind to me, Innocince. Tom Platt, this
bally-hoo's not the Ohio, an' you're mixing the bhoy bad."

"He'll be ruined for life, beginnin' on a fore-an'-after this way," Tom
Platt pleaded. "Give him a chance to know a few leadin' principles.
Sailin's an art, Harvey, as I'd show you if I had ye in the foretop o' the—"

"I know ut. Ye'd talk him dead an' cowld. Silince, Tom Platt! Now, after
all I've said, how'd you reef the foresail, Harve'? Take your time
answerin'."

"Haul that in," said Harvey, pointing to leeward.

"Fwhat? The North Atlantuc?"

"No, the boom. Then run that rope you showed me back there—"

"That's no way," Tom Platt burst in.

"Quiet! He's l'arnin', an' has not the names good yet. Go on, Harve."

"Oh, it's the reef-pennant. I'd hook the tackle on to the reef-pennant,
and then let down—"

"Lower the sail, child! Lower!" said Tom Platt, in a professional agony.

"Lower the throat-and peak-halyards," Harvey went on. Those names stuck in
his head.

"Lay your hand on thim," said Long Jack.

Harvey obeyed. "Lower till that rope-loop—on the after-leach—kris—no,
it's cringle—till the cringle was down on the boom. Then I'd tie her
up the way you said, and then I'd hoist up the peak-and throat-halyards
again."

"You've forgot to pass the tack-earing, but wid time and help ye'll l'arn.
There's good and just reason for ivry rope aboard, or else 'twould be
overboard. D'ye follow me? 'Tis dollars an' cents I'm puttin' into your
pocket, ye skinny little supercargo, so that fwhin ye've filled out ye can
ship from Boston to Cuba an' tell thim Long Jack l'arned you. Now I'll
chase ye around a piece, callin' the ropes, an' you'll lay your hand on
thim as I call."

He began, and Harvey, who was feeling rather tired, walked slowly to the
rope named. A rope's end licked round his ribs, and nearly knocked the
breath out of him.

"When you own a boat," said Tom Platt, with severe eyes, "you can walk.
Till then, take all orders at the run. Once more—to make sure!"

Harvey was in a glow with the exercise, and this last cut warmed him
thoroughly. Now, he was a singularly smart boy, the son of a very clever
man and a very sensitive woman, with a fine resolute temper that
systematic spoiling had nearly turned to mulish obstinacy. He looked at
the other men, and saw that even Dan did not smile. It was evidently all
in the day's work, though it hurt abominably; so he swallowed the hint
with a gulp and a gasp and a grin. The same smartness that led him to take
such advantage of his mother made him very sure that no one on the boat,
except, maybe, Penn, would stand the least nonsense. One learns a great
deal from a mere tone. Long Jack called over half a dozen more ropes, and
Harvey danced over the deck like an eel at ebb-tide, one eye on Tom Platt.

"Ver' good. Ver' good done," said Manuel. "After supper I show you a
little schooner I make, with all her ropes. So we shall learn."

"Fust-class fer—a passenger," said Dan. "Dad he's jest allowed
you'll be wuth your salt maybe 'fore you're draownded. Thet's a heap fer
dad. I'll learn you more our next watch together."

"Taller!" grunted Disko, peering through the fog as it smoked over the
bows. There was nothing to be seen ten feet beyond the surging jib-boom,
while alongside rolled the endless procession of solemn, pale waves
whispering and upping one to the other.

"Now I'll learn you something Long Jack can't," shouted Tom Platt, as from
a locker by the stern he produced a battered deep-sea lead hollowed at one
end, smeared the hollow from a saucer full of mutton tallow, and went
forward. "I'll learn you how to fly the Blue Pigeon. Shooo!"

Disko did something to the wheel that checked the schooner's way, while
Manuel, with Harvey to help (and a proud boy was Harvey), let down the jib
in a lump on the boom. The lead sung a deep droning song as Tom Platt
whirled it round and round.

"Go ahead, man," said Long Jack, impatiently. "We're not drawin'
twenty-five fut off Fire Island in a fog. There's no trick to ut."

"Don't be jealous, Galway." The released lead plopped into the sea far
ahead as the schooner surged slowly forward.

"Soundin' is a trick, though," said Dan, "when your dipsey lead's all the
eye you're like to hev for a week. What d'you make it, dad?"

Disko's face relaxed. His skill and honour were involved in the march he
had stolen on the rest of the fleet, and he had his reputation as a master
artist who knew the Banks blindfold. "Sixty, mebbe—ef I'm any
judge," he replied, with a glance at the tiny compass in the window of the
house.

"Sixty," sung out Tom Platt, hauling in great wet coils.

The schooner gathered way once more. "Heave!" said Disko, after a quarter
of an hour.

"What d'you make it?" Dan whispered, and he looked at Harvey proudly. But
Harvey was too proud of his own performances to be impressed just then.

"Fifty," said the father. "I mistrust we're right over the nick o' Green
Bank on old Sixty-Fifty."

"Fifty!" roared Tom Platt. They could scarcely see him through the fog.
"She's bu'st within a yard—like the shells at Fort Macon."

"Bait up, Harve," said Dan, diving for a line on the reel.

The schooner seemed to be straying promiscuously through the smother, her
head-sail banging wildly. The men waited and looked at the boys, who began
fishing.

"Heugh!" Dan's lines twitched on the scored and scarred rail. "Now haow in
thunder did dad know? Help us here, Harve. It's a big un. Poke-hooked,
too." They hauled together, and landed a goggle-eyed twenty-pound cod. He
had taken the bait right into his stomach.

"Why, he's all covered with little crabs," cried Harvey, turning him over.

"By the great hook-block, they're lousy already," said Long Jack. "Disko,
ye kape your spare eyes under the keel."

Splash went the anchor, and they all heaved over the lines, each man
taking his own place at the bulwarks.

"Are they good to eat?" Harvey panted, as he lugged in another
crab-covered cod.

"Sure. When they're lousy it's a sign they've all been herdin' together by
the thousand, and when they take the bait that way they're hungry. Never
mind how the bait sets. They'll bite on the bare hook."

"Say, this is great!" Harvey cried, as the fish came in gasping and
splashing—nearly all poke-hooked, as Dan had said. "Why can't we
always fish from the boat instead of from the dories?"

"Allus can, till we begin to dress-daown. Efter thet, the heads and offals
'u'd scare the fish to Fundy. Boat-fishin' ain't reckoned progressive,
though, unless ye know as much as dad knows. Guess we'll run aout aour
trawl to-night. Harder on the back, this, than frum the dory, ain't it?"

It was rather back-breaking work, for in a dory the weight of a cod is
water-borne till the last minute, and you are, so to speak, abreast of
him; but the few feet of a schooner's free-board make so much extra
dead-hauling, and stooping over the bulwarks cramps the stomach. But it
was wild and furious sport so long as it lasted; and a big pile lay aboard
when the fish ceased biting.

"Where's Penn and Uncle Salters?" Harvey asked, slapping the slime off his
oilskins, and reeling up the line in careful imitation of the others.

"Git's coffee and see."

Under the yellow glare of the lamp on the pawl-post, the fo'c'sle table
down and opened, utterly unconscious of fish or weather, sat the two men,
a checker-board between them, Uncle Salters snarling at Penn's every move.

"What's the matter naow?" said the former, as Harvey, one hand in the
leather loop at the head of the ladder, hung shouting to the cook.

"Big fish and lousy-heaps and heaps," Harvey replied, quoting Long Jack.
"How's the game?"

Little Penn's jaw dropped. "Tweren't none o' his fault," snapped Uncle
Salters. "Penn's deef."

"Checkers, weren't it?" said Dan, as Harvey staggered aft with the
steaming coffee in a tin pail. "That lets us out o' cleanin' up to-night.
Dad's a jest man. They'll have to do it."

"An' two young fellers I know'll bait up a tub or so o' trawl, while
they're cleanin'," said Disko, lashing the wheel to his taste.

"Urn! 'Guess I'd ruther clean up, dad."

"Don't doubt it. Ye wun't, though. Dress-daown! Dress-daown! Penn'll pitch
while you two bait up."

"Why in thunder didn't them blame boys tell us you'd struck on?" said
Uncle Salters, shuffling to his place at the table. "This knife's
gum-blunt, Dan."

"Ef stickin' out cable don't wake ye, guess you'd better hire a boy o'
your own," said Dan, muddling about in the dusk over the tubs full of
trawl-line lashed to windward of the house. "Oh, Harve, don't ye want to
slip down an' git's bait?"

"Bait ez we are," said Disko. "I mistrust shag-fishin' will pay better, ez
things go."

That meant the boys would bait with selected offal of the cod as the fish
were cleaned—an improvement on paddling barehanded in the little
bait-barrels below. The tubs were full of neatly coiled line carrying a
big hook each few feet; and the testing and baiting of every single hook,
with the stowage of the baited line so that it should run clear when shot
from the dory, was a scientific business. Dan managed it in the dark
without looking, while Harvey caught his fingers on the barbs and bewailed
his fate. But the hooks flew through Dan's fingers like tatting on an old
maid's lap. "I helped bait up trawl ashore 'fore I could well walk," he
said. "But it's a putterin' job all the same. Oh, dad!" This shouted
towards the hatch, where Disko and Tom Platt were salting. "How many
skates you reckon we'll need?"

"Baout three. Hurry!"

"There's three hundred fathom to each tub," Dan explained; "more'n enough
to lay out tonight. Ouch! 'Slipped up there, I did." He stuck his finger
in his mouth. "I tell you, Harve, there ain't money in Gloucester'u'd hire
me to ship on a reg'lar trawler. It may be progressive, but, barrin' that,
it's the putterin'est, slimjammest business top of earth."

"I don't know what this is, if 'tisn't regular trawling," said Harvey,
sulkily. "My fingers are all cut to frazzles."

"Pshaw! This is jest one o' dad's blame experiments. He don't trawl 'less
there's mighty good reason fer it. Dad knows. Thet's why he's baitin' ez
he is. We'll hev her saggin' full when we take her up er we won't see a
fin."

Penn and Uncle Salters cleaned up as Disko had ordained, but the boys
profited little. No sooner were the tubs furnished than Tom Platt and Long
Jack, who had been exploring the inside of a dory with a lantern, snatched
them away, loaded up the tubs and some small, painted trawl-buoys, and
hove the boat overboard into what Harvey regarded as an exceedingly rough
sea. "They'll be drowned. Why, the dory's loaded like a freight-car," he
cried.

"We'll be back," said Long Jack, "an' in case you'll not be lookin' for
us, we'll lay into you both if the trawl's snarled."

The dory surged up on the crest of a wave, and just when it seemed
impossible that she could avoid smashing against the schooner's side, slid
over the ridge, and was swallowed up in the damp dusk.

"Take a-hold here, an' keep ringin' steady," said Dan, passing Harvey the
lanyard of a bell that hung just behind the windlass.

Harvey rang lustily, for he felt two lives depended on him. But Disko in
the cabin, scrawling in the log-book, did not look like a murderer, and
when he went to supper he even smiled drily at the anxious Harvey.

"This ain't no weather," said Dan. "Why, you an' me could set thet trawl!
They've only gone out jest far 'nough so's not to foul our cable. They
don't need no bell reelly."

"Clang! cling! clang!" Harvey kept it up, varied with occasional
rub-a-dubs, for another half-hour. There was a bellow and a bump
alongside. Manuel and Dan raced to the hooks of the dory-tackle; Long Jack
and Tom Platt arrived on deck together, it seemed, one half the North
Atlantic at their backs, and the dory followed them in the air, landing
with a clatter.

"Nary snarl," said Tom Platt, as he dripped. "Danny, you'll do yet."

"The pleasure av your comp'ny to the banquit," said Long Jack, squelching
the water from his boots as he capered like an elephant and stuck an
oilskinned arm into Harvey's face. "We do be condescending to honour the
second half wid our presence." And off they all four rolled to supper,
where Harvey stuffed himself to the brim on fish-chowder and fried pies,
and fell fast asleep just as Manuel produced from a locker a lovely
two-foot model of the Lucy Holmes, his first boat, and was going to show
Harvey the ropes. Harvey never even twiddled his fingers as Penn pushed
him into his bunk.

"It must be a sad thing—a very sad thing," said Penn, watching the
boy's face, "for his mother and his father, who think he is dead. To lose
a child—to lose a man-child!"

"Git out o' this, Penn," said Dan. "Go aft and finish your game with Uncle
Salters. Tell dad I'll stand Harve's watch ef he don't keer. He's played
aout."

"Ver' good boy," said Manuel, slipping out of his boots and disappearing
into the black shadows of the lower bunk. "Expec' he make good man, Danny.
I no see he is any so mad as your parpa he says. Eh, wha-at?"

Dan chuckled, but the chuckle ended in a snore.

It was thick weather outside, with a rising wind, and the elder men
stretched their watches. The hours struck clear in the cabin; the nosing
bows slapped and scuffled with the seas; the fo'c'sle stovepipe hissed and
sputtered as the spray caught it; and the boys slept on, while Disko, Long
Jack, Tom Plait, and Uncle Salters, each in turn, stumped aft to look at
the wheel, forward to see that the anchor held, or to veer out a little
more cable against chafing, with a glance at the dim anchor-light between
each round.

Original

CHAPTER IV

Harvey waked to find the "first half" at 'breakfast, the fo'c'sle door
drawn to a crack, and every square inch of the schooner singing its own
tune. The black bulk of the cook balanced behind the tiny galley over the
glare of the stove, and the pots and pans in the pierced wooden board
before it jarred and racketed to each plunge. Up and up the fo'c'sle
climbed, yearning and surging and quivering, and then, with a clear,
sickle-like swoop, came down into the seas. He could hear the flaring bows
cut and squelch, and there was a pause ere the divided waters came down on
the deck above, like a volley of buck-shot. Followed the woolly sound of
the cable in the hawse-hole; a grunt and squeal of the windlass; a yaw, a
punt, and a kick, and the "We're Here" gathered herself together to repeat
the motions.

"Now, ashore," he heard Long Jack saying, "ye've chores, an' ye must do
thim in any weather. Here we're well clear of the fleet, an' we've no
chores—an' that's a blessin'. Good night, all." He passed like a big
snake from the table to his bunk, and began to smoke. Tom Platt followed
his example; Uncle Salters, with Penn, fought his way up the ladder to
stand his watch, and the cook set for the "second half."

It came out of its bunks as the others had entered theirs, with a shake
and a yawn. It ate till it could eat no more; and then Manuel filled his
pipe with some terrible tobacco, crotched himself between the pawl-post
and a forward bunk, cocked his feet up on the table, and smiled tender and
indolent smiles at the smoke. Dan lay at length in his bunk, wrestling
with a gaudy, gilt-stopped accordion, whose tunes went up and down with
the pitching of the "We're Here". The cook, his shoulders against the
locker where he kept the fried pies (Dan was fond of fried pies), peeled
potatoes, with one eye on the stove in event of too much water finding its
way down the pipe; and the general smell and smother were past all
description.

Harvey considered affairs, wondered that he was not deathly sick, and
crawled into his bunk again, as the softest and safest place, while Dan
struck up, "I don't want to play in your yard," as accurately as the wild
jerks allowed.

"How long is this for?" Harvey asked of Manuel.

"Till she get a little quiet, and we can row to trawl. Perhaps to-night.
Perhaps two days more. You do not like? Eh, wha-at?"

"I should have been crazy sick a week ago, but it doesn't seem to upset me
now—much."

"That is because we make you fisherman, these days. If I was you, when I
come to Gloucester I would give two, three big candles for my good luck."

"Give who?"

"To be sure—the Virgin of our Church on the Hill. She is very good
to fishermen all the time. That is why so few of us Portugee men ever are
drowned."

"You're a Roman Catholic, then?"

"I am a Madeira man. I am not a Porto Pico boy. Shall I be Baptist, then?
Eh, wha-at? I always give candles—two, three more when I come to
Gloucester. The good Virgin she never forgets me, Manuel."

"I don't sense it that way," Tom Platt put in from his bunk, his scarred
face lit up by the glare of a match as he sucked at his pipe. "It stands
to reason the sea's the sea; and you'll git jest about what's goin',
candles or kerosene, fer that matter."

"Tis a mighty good thing," said Long Jack, "to have a fri'nd at coort,
though. I'm o' Manuel's way o' thinkin'. About tin years back I was crew
to a Sou' Boston market-boat. We was off Minot's Ledge wid a northeaster,
butt first, atop of us, thicker'n burgoo. The ould man was dhrunk, his
chin waggin' on the tiller, an' I sez to myself, 'If iver I stick my
boat-huk into T-wharf again, I'll show the saints fwhat manner o' craft
they saved me out av.' Now, I'm here, as ye can well see, an' the model of
the dhirty ould Kathleen, that took me a month to make, I gave ut to the
priest, an' he hung Ut up forninst the altar. There's more sense in givin'
a model that's by way o' bein' a work av art than any candle. Ye can buy
candles at store, but a model shows the good saints ye've tuk trouble an'
are grateful."

"D'you believe that, Irish?" said Tom Platt, turning on his elbow.

"Would I do Ut if I did not, Ohio?"

"Wa-al, Enoch Fuller he made a model o' the old Ohio, and she's to Salem
museum now. Mighty pretty model, too, but I guess Enoch he never done it
fer no sacrifice; an' the way I take it is—"

There were the makings of an hour-long discussion of the kind that
fishermen love, where the talk runs in shouting circles and no one proves
anything at the end, had not Dan struck up this cheerful rhyme:

  "Up jumped the mackerel with his striped back.
  Reef in the mainsail, and haul on the tack;
  For it's windy weather—"

Here Long Jack joined in:

  "And it's blowy weather;
  When the winds begin to blow, pipe all hands together!"

Dan went on, with a cautious look at Tom Plait, holding the accordion low
in the bunk:

  "Up jumped the cod with his chuckle-head,
  Went to the main-chains to heave at the lead;
  For it's windy weather," etc.

Tom Platt seemed to be hunting for something. Dan crouched lower, but sang
louder:

  "Up jumped the flounder that swims to the ground.
  Chuckle-head! Chuckle-head!
  Mind where ye sound!"

Tom Platt's huge rubber boot whirled across the fo'c'sle and caught Dan's
uplifted arm. There was war between the man and the boy ever since Dan had
discovered that the mere whistling of that tune would make him angry as he
heaved the lead.

"Thought I'd fetch yer," said Dan, returning the gift with precision. "Ef
you don't like my music, git out your fiddle. I ain't goin' to lie here
all day an' listen to you an' Long Jack arguin' 'baout candles. Fiddle,
Tom Platt; or I'll learn Harve here the tune!"

Tom Platt leaned down to a locker and brought up an old white fiddle.
Manuel's eye glistened, and from somewhere behind the pawl-post he drew
out a tiny, guitar-like thing with wire strings, which he called a machette.

"'Tis a concert," said Long Jack, beaming through the smoke. "A reg'lar
Boston concert."

Original

There was a burst of spray as the hatch opened, and Disko, in yellow
oilskins, descended.

"Ye're just in time, Disko. Fwhat's she doin' outside?"

"Jest this!" He dropped on to the lockers with the push and heave of the
"We're Here".

"We're singin' to kape our breakfasts down. Ye'll lead, av course, Disko,"
said Long Jack.

"Guess there ain't more'n 'baout two old songs I know, an' ye've heerd
them both."

His excuses were cut short by Tom Platt launching into a most dolorous
tune, like unto the moaning of winds and the creaking of masts. With his
eyes fixed on the beams above, Disko began this ancient, ancient ditty,
Tom Platt flourishing all round him to make the tune and words fit a
little:

  "There is a crack packet—crack packet o' fame,
  She hails from Noo York, an' the Dreadnought's her name.
  You may talk o' your fliers—Swallow-tail and Black Ball—
  But the Dreadnought's the packet that can beat them all.

  "Now the Dreadnought she lies in the River Mersey,
  Because of the tugboat to take her to sea;
  But when she's off soundings you shortly will know
  (Chorus.)
  She's the Liverpool packet—O Lord, let her go!

  "Now the Dreadnought she's howlin' 'crost the Banks o' Newfoundland,
  Where the water's all shallow and the bottom's all sand.
  Sez all the little fishes that swim to an' fro:
  (Chorus.)
  'She's the Liverpool packet—O Lord, let her go!'"

There were scores of verses, for he worked the Dreadnought every mile of
the way between Liverpool and New York as conscientiously as though he
were on her deck, and the accordion pumped and the fiddle squeaked beside
him. Tom Platt followed with something about "the rough and tough McGinn,
who would pilot the vessel in." Then they called on Harvey, who felt very
flattered, to contribute to the entertainment; but all that he could
remember were some pieces of "Skipper Ireson's Ride" that he had been
taught at the camp-school in the Adirondacks. It seemed that they might be
appropriate to the time and place, but he had no more than mentioned the
title when Disko brought down one foot with a bang, and cried, "Don't go
on, young feller. That's a mistaken jedgment—one o' the worst kind,
too, becaze it's catchin' to the ear."

"I orter ha' warned you," said Dan. "Thet allus fetches dad."

"What's wrong?" said Harvey, surprised and a little angry.

"All you're goin' to say," said Disko. "All dead wrong from start to
finish, an' Whittier he's to blame. I have no special call to right any
Marblehead man, but 'tweren't no fault o' Ireson's. My father he told me
the tale time an' again, an' this is the way 'twuz."

"For the wan hundreth time," put in Long Jack, under his breath.

"Ben Ireson he was skipper o' the Betty, young feller, comin' home frum
the Banks—that was before the war of 1812, but jestice is jestice at
all times. They f'und the Active o' Portland, an' Gibbons o' that town he
was her skipper; they f'und her leakin' off Cape Cod Light. There was a
terr'ble gale on, an' they was gettin' the Betty home's fast as they could
craowd her. Well, Ireson he said there warn't any sense to reskin' a boat
in that sea; the men they wouldn't hev it; and he laid it before them to
stay by the Active till the sea run daown a piece. They wouldn't hev that
either, hangin' araound the Cape in any sech weather, leak or no leak.
They jest up stays'l an' quit, nat'rally takin' Ireson with 'em. Folks to
Marblehead was mad at him not runnin' the risk, and becaze nex' day, when
the sea was ca'am (they never stopped to think o' that), some of the
Active's folk was took off by a Truro man. They come into Marblehead with
their own tale to tell, sayin' how Ireson had shamed his town, an' so
forth an' so on; an' Ireson's men they was scared, seem' public feelin'
ag'in' 'em, an' they went back on Ireson, an' swore he was respons'ble for
the hull act. 'Tweren't the women neither that tarred and feathered him—Marblehead
women don't act that way—'twas a passel o' men an' boys, an' they
carted him araound town in an old dory till the bottom fell aout, an'
Ireson he told 'em they'd be sorry for it some day. Well, the facts came
aout later, same's they usually do, too late to be any ways useful to an
honest man; an' Whittier he come along an' picked up the slack eend of a
lyin' tale, an' tarred and feathered Ben Ireson all over onct more after
he was dead. 'Twas the only time Whittier ever slipped up, an' 'tweren't
fair. I whaled Dan good when he brought that piece back from school. You
don't know no better, o' course; but I've give you the facts, hereafter
an' evermore to be remembered. Ben Ireson weren't no sech kind o' man as
Whittier makes aout; my father he knew him well, before an' after that
business, an' you beware o' hasty jedgments, young feller. Next!"

Harvey had never heard Disko talk so long, and collapsed with burning
cheeks; but, as Dan said promptly, a boy could only learn what he was
taught at school, and life was too short to keep track of every lie along
the coast.

Then Manuel touched the jangling, jarring little machette to a
queer tune, and sang something in Portuguese about "Nina, innocente!"
ending with a full-handed sweep that brought the song up with a jerk. Then
Disko obliged with his second song, to an old-fashioned creaky tune, and
all joined in the chorus. This is one stanza:

  "Now Aprile is over and melted the snow,
  And outer Noo Bedford we shortly must tow;
  Yes, out o' Noo Bedford we shortly must clear,
  We're the whalers that never see wheat in the ear."

Here the fiddle went very softly for a while by itself, and then:

  "Wheat-in-the-ear, my true-love's posy blowin';
  Wheat-in-the-ear, we're goin' off to sea;
  Wheat-in-the-ear, I left you fit for sowin';
  When I come back a loaf o' bread you'll be!"

That made Harvey almost weep, though he could not tell why. But it was
much worse when the cook dropped the potatoes and held out his hands for
the fiddle. Still leaning against the locker door, he struck into a tune
that was like something very bad but sure to happen whatever you did.
After a little he sang in an unknown tongue, his big chin down on the
fiddle-tail, his white eyeballs glaring in the lamplight. Harvey swung out
of his bunk to hear better; and amid the straining of the timbers and the
wash of the waters the tune crooned and moaned on, like lee surf in a
blind fog, till it ended with a wail.

"Jimmy Christmas! Thet gives me the blue creevles," said Dan.

"What in thunder is it?"

"The song of Fin McCoul," said the cook, "when he wass going to Norway."
His English was not thick, but all clear-cut, as though it came from a
phonograph.

"Faith, I've been to Norway, but I didn't make that unwholesim noise. 'Tis
like some of the old songs, though," said Long Jack, sighing.

"Don't let's hev another 'thout somethin' between," said Dan; and the
accordion struck up a rattling, catchy tune that ended:

  "It's six an' twenty Sundays sence las' we saw the land,
  With fifteen hunder quintal,
  An' fifteen hunder quintal, 'Teen hunder toppin' quintal,
  'Twix' old 'Queereau an' Grand!"

"Hold on!" roared Tom Plait "D'ye want to nail the trip, Dan? That's Jonah
sure, 'less you sing it after all our salt's wet."

"No, 'tain't. Is it, dad? Not unless you sing the very las' verse. You
can't learn me anything on Jonahs!"

"What's that?" said Harvey. "What's a Jonah?"

"A Jonah's anything that spoils the luck. Sometimes it's a man—sometimes
it's a boy—or a bucket. I've known a splittin'-knife Jonah two trips
till we was on to her," said Tom Plait. "There's all sorts o' Jonahs. Jim
Bourke was one till he was drowned on Georges. I'd never ship with Jim
Bourke, not if I was starvin'. There wuz a green dory on the Ezra Flood.
Thet was a Jonah too, the worst sort o' Jonah. Drowned four men she did,
an' used to shine fiery o' nights in the nest."

"And you believe that?" said Harvey, remembering what Tom Platt had said
about candles and models. "Haven't we all got to take what's served?"

A mutter of dissent ran round the bunks. "Outboard, yes; inboard, things
can happen," said Disko. "Don't you go makin' a mock of Jonahs, young
feller."

"Well, Harve ain't no Jonah. Day after we catched him," Dan cut in, "we
had a toppin' good catch."

The cook threw up his head and laughed suddenly—a queer, thin laugh.
He was a most disconcerting nigger. "Murder!" said Long Jack. "Don't do
that again, doctor. We ain't used to Ut."

"What's wrong?" said Dan. "Ain't he our mascot, and didn't they strike on
good after we'd struck him?"

"Oh! yess," said the cook. "I know that, but the catch iss not finish
yet."

"He ain't goin' to do us any harm," said Dan, hotly. "Where are ye hintin'
an' edgin' to? He's all right."

"No harm. No. But one day he will be your master, Danny."

"That all?" said Dan, placidly. "He wun't—not by a jugful."

"Master!" said the cook, pointing to Harvey. "Man!" and he pointed to Dan.

"That's news. Haow soon?" said Dan, with a laugh.

"In some years, and I shall see it. Master and man—man and master."

"How in thunder d'ye work that out?" said Tom Platt.

"In my head, where I can see."

"Haow?" This from all the others at once.

"I do not know, but so it will be." He dropped his head, and went on
peeling the potatoes, and not another word could they get out of him.

"Well," said Dan, "a heap o' things'll hev to come abaout 'fore Harve's
any master o' mine; but I'm glad the doctor ain't choosen to mark him for
a Jonah. Now, I mistrust Uncle Salters fer the Jonerest Jonah in the fleet
regardin' his own special luck. Dunno ef it's spreadin' same's smallpox.
He ought to be on the Carrie Pitman. That boat's her own Jonah, sure—crews
an' gear make no differ to her driftin'. Jimmy Christmas! She'll etch
loose in a flat ca'am."

"We're well dear o' the fleet, anyway," said Disko, "Carrie Pitman an'
all." There was a rapping on the deck.

"Uncle Salters has catched his luck," said Dan, as his father departed.

"It's blown clear," Disko cried, and all the fo'c'sle tumbled up for a bit
of fresh air. The fog had gone, but a sullen sea ran in great rollers
behind it. The "We're Here" slid, as it were, into long, sunk avenues and
ditches which felt quite sheltered and homelike if they would only stay
still; but they changed without rest or mercy, and flung up the schooner
to crown one peak of a thousand grey hills, while the wind hooted through
her rigging as she zigzagged down the slopes. Far away a sea would burst
in a sheet of foam, and the others would follow suit as at a signal, till
Harvey's eyes swam with the vision of interlacing whites and greys. Four
or five Mother Carey's chickens stormed round in circles, shrieking as
they swept past the bows. A rain-squall or two strayed aimlessly over the
hopeless waste, ran down wind and back again, and melted away.

"'Seems to me I saw somethin' flicker jest naow over yonder," said Uncle
Salters, pointing to the northeast.

"Can't be any of the fleet," said Disko, peering under his eyebrows, a
hand on the fo'c'sle gangway as the solid bows hatcheted into the troughs.
"Sea's oilin' over dretful fast. Danny, don't you want to skip up a piece
an' see how aour trawl-buoy lays?"

Danny, in his big boots, trotted rather than climbed up the main rigging
(this consumed Harvey with envy), hitched himself around the reeling
crosstrees, and let his eye rove till it caught the tiny black buoy-flag
on the shoulder of a mile-away swell.

"She's all right," he hailed. "Sail O! Dead to the no'th'ard, comin' down
like smoke! Schooner she be, too."

They waited yet another half-hour, the sky clearing in patches, with a
flicker of sickly sun from time to time that made patches of olive-green
water. Then a stump-foremast lifted, ducked, and disappeared, to be
followed on the next wave by a high stern with old-fashioned wooden
snail's-horn davits. The sails were red-tanned.

"Frenchmen!" shouted Dan. "No, 'tain't, neither. Da-ad!"

"That's no French," said Disko. "Salters, your blame luck holds tighter'n
a screw in a keg-head."

"I've eyes. It's Uncle Abishai."

"You can't nowise tell fer sure."

"The head-king of all Jonahs," groaned Tom Platt. "Oh, Salters, Salters,
why wasn't you abed an' asleep?

"How could I tell?" said poor Salters, as the schooner swung up.

She might have been the very Flying Dutchman, so foul, draggled, and
unkempt was every rope and stick aboard. Her old-style quarter-deck was
some four or five feet high, and her rigging flew knotted and tangled like
weed at a wharf-end. She was running before the wind—yawing
frightfully—her staysail let down to act as a sort of extra
foresail,—"scandalised," they call it,—and her fore-boom guyed
out over the side. Her bowsprit cocked up like an old-fashioned frigate's;
her jib-boom had been fished and spliced and nailed and clamped beyond
further repair; and as she hove herself forward, and sat down on her broad
tail, she looked for all the world like a blowzy, frousy, bad old woman
sneering at a decent girl.

"That's Abishai," said Salters. "Full o' gin an' Judique men, an' the
judgments o' Providence layin' fer him an' never takin' good holt. He's
run in to bait, Miquelon way."

"He'll run her under," said Long Jack. "That's no rig fer this weather."

"Not he, 'r he'd 'a' done it long ago," Disko replied. "Looks's if he
cal'lated to run us under. Ain't she daown by the head more'n natural, Tom
Platt?"

"Ef it's his style o' loadin' her she ain't safe," said the sailor,
slowly. "Ef she's spewed her oakum he'd better git to his pumps mighty
quick."

The creature thrashed up, wore round with a clatter and rattle, and lay
head to wind within ear-shot.

A greybeard wagged over the bulwark, and a thick voice yelled something
Harvey could not understand. But Disko's face darkened. "He'd resk every
stick he hez to carry bad news. Says we're in fer a shift o' wind. He's in
fer worse. Abishai! Abishai!" He waved his arm up and down with the
gesture of a man at the pumps, and pointed forward. The crew mocked him
and laughed.

"Jounce ye, an' strip ye, an' trip ye!" yelled Uncle Abishai. "A livin'
gale—a livin' gale. Yah! Cast up fer your last trip, all you
Gloucester haddocks. You won't see Gloucester no more, no more!"

"Crazy full—as usual," said Tom Platt. "Wish he hadn't spied us,
though."

She drifted out of hearing while the greyhead yelled something about a
dance at the Bay of Bulls and a dead man in the fo'c'sle. Harvey
shuddered. He had seen the sloven tilled decks and the savage-eyed crew.

"An' that's a fine little floatin' hell fer her draught," said Long Jack.
"I wondher what mischief he's been at ashore."

"He's a trawler," Dan explained to Harvey, "an' he runs in fer bait all
along the coast. Oh, no, not home, he don't go. He deals along the south
an' east shore up yonder." He nodded in the direction of the pitiless
Newfoundland beaches. "Dad won't never take me ashore there. They're a
mighty tough crowd—an' Abishai's the toughest. You saw his boat?
Well, she's nigh seventy year old, they say; the last o' the old
Marblehead heel-tappers. They don't make them quarter-decks any more.
Abishai don't use Marblehead, though. He ain't wanted there. He jes'
drif's araound, in debt, trawlin' an' cussin' like you've heard. Bin a
Jonah fer years an' years, he hez. 'Gits liquor frum the Feecamp boats fer
makin' spells an' selling winds an' such truck. Crazy, I guess."

"Twon't be any use underrunnin' the trawl to-night," said Tom Platt, with
quiet despair. "He come alongside special to cuss us. I'd give my wage an'
share to see him at the gangway o' the old Ohio 'fore we quit floggin'.
Jest abaout six dozen, an' Sam Mocatta layin' 'em on crisscross!"

The dishevelled "heel-tapper" danced drunkenly down wind, and all eyes
followed her. Suddenly the cook cried in his phonograph voice: "It wass
his own death made him speak so! He iss fey—fey, I tell you! Look!"
She sailed into a patch of watery sunshine three or four miles distant.
The patch dulled and faded out, and even as the light passed so did the
schooner. She dropped into a hollow and—was not.

"Run under, by the great hook-block!" shouted Disko, jumping aft. "Drunk
or sober, we've got to help 'em. Heave short and break her out! Smart!"

Harvey was thrown on the deck by the shock that followed the setting of
the jib and foresail, for they hove short on the cable, and to save time,
jerked the anchor bodily from the bottom, heaving in as they moved away.
This is a bit of brute force seldom resorted to except in matters of life
and death, and the little "We're Here" complained like a human. They ran
down to where Abishai's craft had vanished; found two or three trawl-tubs,
a gin-bottle, and a stove-in dory, but nothing more. "Let 'em go," said
Disko, though no one had hinted at picking them up. "I wouldn't hev a
match that belonged to Abishai aboard. 'Guess she run clear under. 'Must
ha' been spewin' her oakum fer a week, an' they never thought to pump her.
That's one more boat gone along o' leavin' port all hands drunk."

Original

"Glory be!" said Long Jack. "We'd ha' been obliged to help 'em if they was
top o' water."

"'Thinkin' o' that myself," said Tom Platt.

"Fey! Fey!" said the cook, rolling his eyes. "He hass taken his own luck
with him."

"Ver' good thing, I think, to tell the fleet when we see. Eh, wha-at'?"
said Manuel. "If you runna that way before the wind, and she work open her
seams—" He threw out his hands with an indescribable gesture, while
Penn sat down on the house and sobbed at the sheer horror and pity of it
all. Harvey could not realise that he had seen death on the open waters,
but he felt very sick.

Then Dan went up the crosstrees, and Disko steered them back to within
sight of their own trawl-buoys just before the fog blanketed the sea once
again.

"We go mighty quick hereabouts when we do go," was all he said to Harvey.
"You think on that for a spell, young feller. That was liquor."

After dinner it was calm enough to fish from the decks,—Penn and
Uncle Salters were very zealous this time,—and the catch was large
and large fish.

"Abishai has shorely took his luck with him," said Salters. "The wind
hain't backed ner riz ner nothin'. How abaout the trawl? I despise
superstition, anyway."

Tom Platt insisted that they had much better haul the thing and make a new
berth. But the cook said: "The luck iss in two pieces. You will find it so
when you look. I know." This so tickled Long Jack that he overbore Tom
Platt, and the two went out together.

Underrunning a trawl means pulling it in on one side of the dory, picking
off the fish, rebaiting the hooks, and passing them back to the sea again
something like pinning and unpinning linen on a wash-line. It is a lengthy
business and rather dangerous, for the long, sagging line may twitch a
boat under in a flash. But when they heard, "And naow to thee, O Capting,"
booming out of the fog, the crew of the "We're Here" took heart. The dory
swirled alongside well loaded, Tom Platt yelling for Manuel to act as
relief-boat.

"The luck's cut square in two pieces," said Long Jack, forking in the
fish, while Harvey stood open-mouthed at the skill with which the plunging
dory was saved from destruction. "One half was jest punkins. Tom Platt
wanted to haul her an' ha' done wid ut; but I said, 'I'll back the doctor
that has the second sight,' an' the other half come up sagging full o' big
uns. Hurry, Man'nle, an' bring's a tub o' bait. There's luck afloat
tonight."

The fish bit at the newly baited hooks from which their brethren had just
been taken, and Tom Platt and Long Jack moved methodically up and down the
length of the trawl, the boat's nose surging under the wet line of hooks,
stripping the sea-cucumbers that they called pumpkins, slatting off the
fresh-caught cod against the gunwale, rebaiting, and loading Manuel's dory
till dusk.

"I'll take no risks," said Disko, then—"not with him floatin' around
so near. Abishai won't sink fer a week. Heave in the dories, an' we'll
dressdaown after supper."

That was a mighty dressing-down, attended by three or four blowing
grampuses. It lasted till nine o'clock, and Disko was thrice heard to
chuckle as Harvey pitched the split fish into the hold.

"Say, you're haulin' ahead dretful fast," said Dan, when they ground the
knives after the men had turned in. "There's somethin' of a sea tonight,
an' I hain't heard you make no remarks on it."

"Too busy," Harvey replied, testing a blade's edge. "Come to think of it,
she is a high-kicker."

The little schooner was gambolling all around her anchor among the
silver-tipped waves. Backing with a start of affected surprise at the
sight of the strained cable, she pounced on it like a kitten, while the
spray of her descent burst through the hawse-holes with the report of a
gun. Shaking her head, she would say: "Well, I'm sorry I can't stay any
longer with you. I'm going North," and would sidle off, halting suddenly
with a dramatic rattle of her rigging. "As I was just going to observe,"
she would begin, as gravely as a drunken man addressing a lamp-post. The
rest of the sentence (she acted her words in dumb-show, of course) was
lost in a fit of the fidgets, when she behaved like a puppy chewing a
string, a clumsy woman in a side-saddle, a hen with her head cut off, or a
cow stung by a hornet, exactly as the whims of the sea took her.

"See her sayin' her piece. She's Patrick Henry naow," said Dan.

She swung sideways on a roller, and gesticulated with her jib-boom from
port to starboard.

"But-ez—-fer-me, give me liberty—er give me-death!"

Wop! She sat down in the moon-path on the water, courtesying with a
flourish of pride impressive enough had not the wheel-gear sniggered
mockingly in its box.

Harvey laughed aloud. "Why, it's just as if she was alive," he said.

"She's as stiddy as a haouse an' as dry as a herrin'," said Dan,
enthusiastically, as he was stung across the deck in a batter of spray.
"Fends 'em off an 'fends 'em off, an' 'Don't ye come anigh me,' she sez.
Look at her—jest look at her! Sakes! You should see one o' them
toothpicks h'istin' up her anchor on her spike outer fifteen-fathom
water."

"What's a toothpick, Dan?"

"Them new haddockers an' herrin'-boats. Fine's a yacht forward, with yacht
sterns to 'em, an' spike bowsprits, an' a haouse that u'd take our hold.
I've heard that Burgess himself he made the models fer three or four of
'em, Dad's sot ag'in' 'em on account o' their pitchin' an' joltin', but
there's heaps o' money in 'em. Dad can find fish, but he ain't no ways
progressive—he don't go with the march o' the times. They're
chock-full o' labour-savin' jigs an' sech all. 'Ever seed the Elector o'
Gloucester? She's a daisy, ef she is a toothpick."

"What do they cost, Dan?"

"Hills o' dollars. Fifteen thousand, p'haps; more, mebbe. There's
gold-leaf an' everything you kin think of." Then to himself, half under
his breath "Guess I'd call her Hattie S., too."

CHAPTER V

That was the first of many talks with Dan, who told Harvey why he would
transfer his dory's name to the imaginary Burgess-modelled haddocker.
Harvey heard a good deal about the real Hattie at Gloucester; saw a lock
of her hair—which Dan, finding fair words of no avail, had "hooked"
as she sat in front of him at school that winter—and a photograph.
Hattie was about fourteen years old, with an awful contempt for boys, and
had been trampling on Dan's heart through the winter. All this was
revealed under oath of solemn secrecy on moonlit decks, in the dead dark,
or in choking fog; the whining wheel behind them, the climbing deck
before, and without, the unresting, clamorous sea. Once, of course, as the
boys came to know each other, there was a fight, which raged from bow to
stern till Penn came up and separated them, but promised not to tell
Disko, who thought fighting on watch rather worse than sleeping. Harvey
was no match for Dan physically, but it says a great deal for his new
training that he took his defeat and did not try to get even with his
conqueror by underhand methods.

That was after he had been cured of a string of boils between his elbows
and wrists, where the wet jersey and oilskins cut into the flesh. The salt
water stung them unpleasantly, but when they were ripe Dan treated them
with Disko's razor, and assured Harvey that now he was a "blooded Banker";
the affliction of gurry-sores being the mark of the caste that claimed
him.

Since he was a boy and very busy, he did not bother his head with too much
thinking. He was exceedingly sorry for his mother, and often longed to see
her and above all to tell her of his wonderful new life, and how
brilliantly he was acquitting himself in it. Otherwise he preferred not to
wonder too much how she was bearing the shock of his supposed death. But
one day, as he stood on the fo'c'sle ladder, guying the cook, who had
accused him and Dan of hooking fried pies, it occurred to him that this
was a vast improvement on being snubbed by strangers in the smoking-room
of a hired liner.

He was a recognised part of the scheme of things on the "We're Here"; had
his place at the table and among the bunks; and could hold his own in the
long talks on stormy days, when the others were always ready to listen to
what they called his "fairy-tales" of his life ashore. It did not take him
more than two days and a quarter to feel that if he spoke of his own life—it
seemed very far away—no one except Dan (and even Dan's belief was
sorely tried) credited him. So he invented a friend, a boy he had heard
of, who drove a miniature four-pony drag in Toledo, Ohio, and ordered five
suits of clothes at a time, and led things called "germans" at parties
where the oldest girl was not quite fifteen, but all the presents were
solid silver. Salters protested that this kind of yarn was desperately
wicked, if not indeed positively blasphemous, but he listened as greedily
as the others; and their criticisms at the end gave Harvey entirely new
notions on "germans," clothes, cigarettes with gold-leaf tips, rings,
watches, scent, small dinner-parties, champagne, card-playing, and hotel
accommodation. Little by little he changed his tone when speaking of his
"friend," whom Long Jack had christened "the Crazy Kid," "the Gilt-edged
Baby," "the Suckin' Vanderpoop," and other pet names; and with his
sea-booted feet cocked up on the table would even invent histories about
silk pajamas and specially imported neckwear, to the "friend's" discredit.
Harvey was a very adaptable person, with a keen eye and ear for every face
and tone about him.

Before long he knew where Disko kept the old green-crusted quadrant that
they called the "hog-yoke"—under the bed-bag in his bunk. When he
'took the sun, and with the help of "The Old Farmer's" almanac found the
latitude, Harvey would jump down into the cabin and scratch the reckoning
and date with a nail on the rust of the stove-pipe. Now, the chief
engineer of the liner could have done no more, and no engineer of thirty
years' service could have assumed one half of the ancient-mariner air with
which Harvey, first careful to spit over the side, made public the
schooner's position for that day, and then and not till then relieved
Disko of the quadrant. There is an etiquette in all these things.

The said "hog-yoke," an Eldridge chart, the farming almanac, Blunt's
"Coast Pilot," and Bowditch's "Navigator" were all the weapons Disko
needed to guide him, except the deep-sea lead that was his spare eye.
Harvey nearly slew Penn with it when Tom Platt taught him first how to
"fly the blue pigeon"; and, though his strength was not equal to
continuous sounding in any sort of a sea, for calm weather with a
seven-pound lead on shoal water Disko used him freely. As Dan said:
"'Tain't soundin's dad wants. It's samples. Grease her up good, Harve."
Harvey would tallow the cup at the end, and carefully bring the sand,
shell, sludge, or whatever it might be, to Disko, who fingered and smelt
it and gave judgment. As has been said, when Disko thought of cod he
thought as a cod; and by some long-tested mixture of instinct and
experience, moved the "We're Here" from berth to berth, always with the
fish, as a blindfolded chess-player moves on the unseen board.

But Disko's board was the Grand Bank—a triangle two hundred and
fifty miles on each side a waste of wallowing sea, cloaked with dank fog,
vexed with gales, harried with drifting ice, scored by the tracks of the
reckless liners, and dotted with the sails of the fishing-fleet.

For days they worked in fog—Harvey at the bell—till, grown
familiar with the thick airs, he went out with Tom Platt, his heart rather
in his mouth. But the fog would not lift, and the fish were biting, and no
one can stay helplessly afraid for six hours at a time. Harvey devoted
himself to his lines and the gaff or gob-stick as Tom Platt called for
them; and they rowed back to the schooner guided by the bell and Tom's
instinct; Manuel's conch sounding thin and faint beside them. But it was
an unearthly experience, and, for the first time in a month, Harvey
dreamed of the shifting, smoking floors of water round the dory, the lines
that strayed away into nothing, and the air above that melted on the sea
below ten feet from his straining eyes. A few days later he was out with
Manuel on what should have been forty-fathom bottom, but the whole length
of the roding ran out, and still the anchor found nothing, and Harvey grew
mortally afraid, for that his last touch with earth was lost.
"Whale-hole," said Manuel, hauling in. "That is good joke on Disko. Come!"
and he rowed to the schooner to find Tom Platt and the others jeering at
the skipper because, for once, he had led them to the edge of the barren
Whale-deep, the blank hole of the Grand Bank. They made another berth
through the fog, and that time the hair of Harvey's head stood up when he
went out in Manuel's dory. A whiteness moved in the whiteness of the fog
with a breath like the breath of the grave, and there was a roaring, a
plunging, and spouting. It was his first introduction to the dread summer
berg of the Banks, and he cowered in the bottom of the boat while Manuel
laughed. There were days, though, clear and soft and warm, when it seemed
a sin to do anything but loaf over the hand-lines and spank the drifting
"sun-scalds" with an oar; and there were days of light airs, when Harvey
was taught how to steer the schooner from one berth to another.

Original

It thrilled through him when he first felt the keel answer to his hand on
the spokes and slide over the long hollows as the foresail scythed back
and forth against the blue sky. That was magnificent, in spite of Disko
saying that it would break a snake's back to follow his wake. But, as
usual, pride ran before a fall. They were sailing on the wind with the
staysail—an old one, luckily—set, and Harvey jammed her right
into it to show Dan how completely he had mastered the art. The foresail
went over with a bang, and the foregaff stabbed and ripped through the
stay-sail, which, was of course, prevented from going over by the
mainstay. They lowered the wreck in awful silence, and Harvey spent his
leisure hours for the next few days under Tom Platt's lee, learning to use
a needle and palm. Dan hooted with joy, for, as he said, he had made the
very same blunder himself in his early days.

Boylike, Harvey imitated all the men by turns, till he had combined
Disko's peculiar stoop at the wheel, Long Jack's swinging overhand when
the lines were hauled, Manuel's round-shouldered but effective stroke in a
dory, and Tom Platt's generous Ohio stride along the deck.

"'Tis beautiful to see how he takes to ut," said Long Jack, when Harvey
was looking out by the windlass one thick noon. "I'll lay my wage an'
share 'tis more'n half play-actin' to him, an' he consates himself he's a
bowld mariner. 'Watch his little bit av a back now!"

Original

"That's the way we all begin," said Tom Platt. "The boys they make believe
all the time till they've cheated 'emselves into bein' men, an' so till
they die—pretendin' an' pretendin'. I done it on the old Ohio, I
know. Stood my first watch—harbor-watch—feelin' finer'n
Farragut. Dan's full o' the same kind o' notions. See 'em now, actin' to
be genewine moss-backs—every hair a rope-yarn an' blood Stockholm
tar." He spoke down the cabin stairs. "'Guess you're mistook in your
judgments fer once, Disko. What in Rome made ye tell us all here the kid
was crazy?"

"He wuz," Disko replied. "Crazy ez a loon when he come aboard; but I'll
say he's sobered up consid'ble sence. I cured him."

"He yarns good," said Tom Platt. "T'other night he told us abaout a kid of
his own size steerin' a cunnin' little rig an' four ponies up an' down
Toledo, Ohio, I think 'twas, an' givin' suppers to a crowd o' sim'lar
kids. Cur'us kind o' fairy-tale, but blame interestin'. He knows scores of
'em."

"'Guess he strikes 'em outen his own head," Disko called from the cabin,
where he was busy with the log-book. "'Stands to reason that sort is all
made up. It don't take in no one but Dan, an' he laughs at it. I've heard
him, behind my back."

"Y'ever hear what Sim'on Peter Ca'houn said when they whacked up a match
'twix' his sister Hitty an' Lorin' Jerauld, an' the boys put up that joke
on him daown to Georges?" drawled Uncle Salters, who was dripping
peaceably under the lee of the starboard dory-nest.

Tom Platt puffed at his pipe in scornful silence: he was a Cape Cod man,
and had not known that tale more than twenty years. Uncle Salters went on
with a rasping chuckle:

"Sim'on Peter Ca'houn he said, an' he was jest right, abaout Lorin',
'Ha'af on the taown,' he said, 'an' t'other ha'af blame fool; an' they
told me she's married a 'ich man.' Sim'on Peter Ca'houn he hedn't no roof
to his mouth, an' talked that way."

"He didn't talk any Pennsylvania Dutch," Tom Platt replied. "You'd better
leave a Cape man to tell that tale. The Ca'houns was gipsies frum 'way
back."

"Wal, I don't profess to be any elocutionist," Salters said. "I'm comin'
to the moral o' things. That's jest abaout what aour Harve be! Ha'af on
the taown, an' t'other ha'af blame fool; an' there's some'll believe he's
a rich man. Yah!"

"Did ye ever think how sweet 'twould be to sail wid a full crew o'
Salterses?" said Long Jack. "Ha'af in the furrer an' other ha'af in the
muck-heap, as Ca'houn did not say, an' makes out he's a fisherman!"

A little laugh went round at Salters's expense.

Disko held his tongue, and wrought over the log-book that he kept in a
hatchet-faced, square hand; this was the kind of thing that ran on, page
after soiled page:

"July 17. This day thick fog and few fish. Made berth to northward. So
ends this day.

"July 18. This day comes in with thick fog. Caught a few fish.

"July 19. This day comes in with light breeze from N. E. and fine weather.
Made a berth to eastward. Caught plenty fish.

"July 20. This, the Sabbath, comes in with fog and light winds. So ends
this day. Total fish caught this week, 3,478."

They never worked on Sundays, but shaved, and washed themselves if it were
fine, and Pennsylvania sang hymns. Once or twice he suggested that, if it
was not an impertinence, he thought he could preach a little. Uncle
Salters nearly jumped down his throat at the mere notion, reminding him
that he was not a preacher and mustn't think of such things. We'd hev him
rememberin' Johnstown next," Salters explained, "an' what would happen
then?" So they compromised on his reading aloud from a book called
"Josephus." It was an old leather-bound volume, smelling of a hundred
voyages, very solid and very like the Bible, but enlivened with accounts
of battles and sieges; and they read it nearly from cover to cover.
Otherwise Penn was a silent little body. He would not utter a word for
three days on end sometimes, though he played checkers, listened to the
songs, and laughed at the stories. When they tried to stir him up, he
would answer. "I don't wish to seem unneighbourly, but it is because I
have nothing to say. My head feels quite empty. I've almost forgotten my
name." He would turn to Uncle Salters with an expectant smile.

"Why, Pennsylvania Pratt," Salters would shout. "You'll fergit me next!"

"No—never," Penn would say, shutting his lips firmly. "Pennsylvania
Pratt, of course," he would repeat over and over. Sometimes it was Uncle
Salters who forgot, and told him he was Haskins or Rich or McVitty; but
Penn was equally content—till next time.

He was always very tender with Harvey, whom he pitied both as a lost child
and as a lunatic; and when Salters saw that Penn liked the boy, he
relaxed, too. Salters was not an amiable person (he esteemed it his
business to keep the boys in order); and the first time Harvey, in fear
and trembling, on a still day, managed to shin up to the main-truck (Dan
was behind him ready to help), he esteemed it his duty to hang Salters's
big sea-boots up there—a sight of shame and derision to the nearest
schooner. With Disko, Harvey took no liberties; not even when the old man
dropped direct orders, and treated him, like the rest of the crew, to
"Don't you want to do so and so?" and "Guess you'd better," and so forth.
There was something about the clean-shaven lips and the puckered corners
of the eyes that was mightily sobering to young blood.

Disko showed him the meaning of the thumbed and pricked chart, which, he
said, laid over any government publication whatsoever; led him, pencil in
hand, from berth to berth over the whole string of banks—Le Have,
Western, Banquereau, St. Pierre, Green, and Grand—talking "cod"
meantime. Taught him, too, the principle on which the "hog-yoke" was
worked.

In this Harvey excelled Dan, for he had inherited a head for figures, and
the notion of stealing information from one glimpse of the sullen Bank sun
appealed to all his keen wits. For other sea-matters his age handicapped
him. As Disko said, he should have begun when he was ten. Dan could bait
up trawl or lay his hand on any rope in the dark; and at a pinch, when
Uncle Salters had a gurry-sore on his palm, could dress down by sense of
touch. He could steer in anything short of half a gale from the feel of
the wind on his face, humouring the "We're Here" just when she needed it.
These things he did as automatically as he skipped about the rigging, or
made his dory a part of his own will and body. But he could not
communicate his knowledge to Harvey.

Still there was a good deal of general information flying about the
schooner on stormy days, when they lay up in the fo'c'sle or sat on the
cabin lockers, while spare eye-bolts, leads, and rings rolled and rattled
in the pauses of the talk. Disko spoke of whaling voyages in the Fifties;
of great she-whales slain beside their young; of death agonies on the
black, tossing seas, and blood that spurted forty feet in the air; of
boats smashed to splinters; of patent rockets that went off
wrong-end-first and bombarded the trembling crews; of cutting-in and
boiling-down, and that terrible "nip" of '71, when twelve hundred men were
made homeless on the ice in three days—wonderful tales, all true.
But more wonderful still were his stories of the cod, and how they argued
and reasoned on their private businesses deep down below the keel.

Long Jack's tastes ran more to the supernatural. He held them silent with
ghastly stories of the "Yo-hoes" on Monomoy Beach, that mock and terrify
lonely clam-diggers; of sand-walkers and dune-haunters who were never
properly buried; of hidden treasure on Fire Island guarded by the spirits
of Kidd's men; of ships that sailed in the fog straight over Truro
township; of that harbour in Maine where no one but a stranger will lie at
anchor twice in a certain place because of a dead crew who row alongside
at midnight with the anchor in the bow of their old-fashioned boat,
whistling—not calling, but whistling—for the soul of the man
who broke their rest.

Harvey had a notion that the east coast of his native land, from Mount
Desert south, was populated chiefly by people who took their horses there
in the summer and entertained in country-houses with hardwood floors and
Vantine portieres. He laughed at the ghost-tales,—not as much as he
would have done a month before,—but ended by sitting still and
shuddering.

Tom Platt dealt with his interminable trip round the Horn on the old Ohio
in the flogging days, with a navy more extinct than the dodo—the
navy that passed away in the great war. He told them how red-hot shot are
dropped into a cannon, a wad of wet clay between them and the cartridge;
how they sizzle and reek when they strike wood, and how the little
ship-boys of the Miss Jim Buck hove water over them and shouted to the
fort to try again. And he told tales of blockade—long weeks of
swaying at anchor, varied only by the departure and return of steamers
that had used up their coal (there was no change for the sailing-ships);
of gales and cold—cold that kept two hundred men, night and day,
pounding and chopping at the ice on cable, blocks, and rigging, when the
galley was as red-hot as the fort's shot, and men drank cocoa by the
bucket. Tom Platt had no use for steam. His service closed when that thing
was comparatively new. He admitted that it was a specious invention in
time of peace, but looked hopefully for the day when sails should come
back again on ten-thousand-ton frigates with hundred-and-ninety-foot
booms.

Manuel's talk was slow and gentle—all about pretty girls in Madeira
washing clothes in the dry beds of streams, by moonlight, under waving
bananas; legends of saints, and tales of queer dances or fights away in
the cold Newfoundland baiting-ports. Salters was mainly agricultural; for,
though he read "Josephus" and expounded it, his mission in life was to
prove the value of green manures, and specially of clover, against every
form of phosphate whatsoever. He grew libellous about phosphates; he
dragged greasy "Orange Judd" books from his bunk and intoned them, wagging
his finger at Harvey, to whom it was all Greek. Little Penn was so
genuinely pained when Harvey made fun of Salters's lectures that the boy
gave it up, and suffered in polite silence. That was very good for Harvey.

The cook naturally did not join in these conversations. As a rule, he
spoke only when it was absolutely necessary; but at times a queer gift of
speech descended on him, and he held forth, half in Gaelic, half in broken
English, an hour at a time. He was specially communicative with the boys,
and he never withdrew his prophecy that one day Harvey would be Dan's
master, and that he would see it. He told them of mail-carrying in the
winter up Cape Breton way, of the dog-train that goes to Coudray, and of
the ram-steamer Arctic, that breaks the ice between the mainland and
Prince Edward Island. Then he told them stories that his mother had told
him, of life far to the southward, where water never froze; and he said
that when he died his soul would go to lie down on a warm white beach of
sand with palm-trees waving above. That seemed to the boys a very odd idea
for a man who had never seen a palm in his life. Then, too, regularly at
each meal, he would ask Harvey, and Harvey alone, whether the cooking was
to his taste; and this always made the "second half" laugh. Yet they had a
great respect for the cook's judgment, and in their hearts considered
Harvey something of a mascot by consequence.

And while Harvey was taking in knowledge of new things at each pore and
hard health with every gulp of the good air, the "We're Here" went her
ways and did her business on the Bank, and the silvery-grey kenches of
well-pressed fish mounted higher and higher in the hold. No one day's work
was out of the common, but the average days were many and close together.

Naturally, a man of Disko's reputation was closely watched—"scrowged
upon," Dan called it—by his neighbours, but he had a very pretty
knack of giving them the slip through the curdling, glidy fog-banks. Disko
avoided company for two reasons. He wished to make his own experiments, in
the first place; and in the second, he objected to the mixed gatherings of
a fleet of all nations. The bulk of them were mainly Gloucester boats,
with a scattering from Provincetown, Harwich, Chatham, and some of the
Maine ports, but the crews drew from goodness knows where. Risk breeds
recklessness, and when greed is added there are fine chances for every
kind of accident in the crowded fleet, which, like a mob of sheep, is
huddled round some unrecognised leader. "Let the two Jeraulds lead 'em,"
said Disko. "We're baound to lay among 'em fer a spell on the Eastern
Shoals; though ef luck holds, we won't hev to lay long. Where we are naow,
Harve, ain't considered noways good graound."

"Ain't it?" said Harvey, who was drawing water (he had learned just how to
wiggle the bucket), after an unusually long dressing-down. "Shouldn't mind
striking some poor ground for a change, then."

"All the graound I want to see—don't want to strike her—is
Eastern Point," said Dan. "Say, dad, it looks 's if we wouldn't hev to lay
more'n two weeks on the Shoals. You'll meet all the comp'ny you want then,
Harve. That's the time we begin to work. No reg'lar meals fer no one then.
'Mug-up when ye're hungry, an' sleep when ye can't keep awake. Good job
you wasn't picked up a month later than you was, or we'd never ha' had you
dressed in shape fer the Old Virgin."

Harvey understood from the Eldridge chart that the Old Virgin and a nest
of curiously named shoals were the turning-point of the cruise, and that
with good luck they would wet the balance of their salt there. But seeing
the size of the Virgin (it was one tiny dot), he wondered how even Disko
with the hog-yoke and the lead could find her. He learned later that Disko
was entirely equal to that and any other business, and could even help
others. A big four-by-five blackboard hung in the cabin, and Harvey never
understood the need of it till, after some blinding thick days, they heard
the unmelodious tooting of a foot-power fog-horn—a machine whose
note is as that of a consumptive elephant.

They were making a short berth, towing the anchor under their foot to save
trouble. "Squarerigger bellowin' fer his latitude," said Long Jack. The
dripping red headsails of a bark glided out of the fog, and the "We're
Here" rang her bell thrice, using sea shorthand.

The larger boat backed her topsail with shrieks and shoutings.

"Frenchman," said Uncle Salters, scornfully. "Miquelon boat from St.
Malo." The farmer had a weatherly sea-eye. "I'm most outer 'baccy, too,
Disko."

"Same here," said Tom Platt. "Hi! Backez vouz—backez vouz! Standez
awayez, you butt-ended mucho-bono! Where you from—St. Malo, eh?"

Ah, ha! Mucho bono! Oui! oui! Clos Poulet—St. Malo! St. Pierre et
Miquelon," cried the other crowd, waving woollen caps and laughing. Then
all together, "Bord! Bord!"

"Bring up the board, Danny. Beats me how them Frenchmen fetch anywheres,
exceptin' America's fairish broadly. Forty-six forty-nine's good enough
fer them; an' I guess it's abaout right, too."

Dan chalked the figures on the board, and they hung it in the main-rigging
to a chorus of mercis from the bark.

"Seems kinder unneighbourly to let 'em swedge off like this," Salters
suggested, feeling in his pockets.

"Hev ye learned French then sence last trip'?" said Disko. "I don't want
no more stone-ballast hove at us 'long o' your calm' Miquelon boats 'footy
cochins,' same's you did off Le Have."

"Harmon Rush he said that was the way to rise 'em. Plain United States is
good enough fer me. We're all dretful short on terbakker. Young feller,
don't you speak French?"

"Oh, yes," said Harvey, valiantly; and he bawled: "Hi! Say! Arretez vous!
Attendez! Nous sommes venant pour tabac."

Original

"Ah, tabac, tabac!" they cried, and laughed again.

"That hit 'em. Let's heave a dory over, anyway," said Tom Platt. "I don't
exactly hold no certificates on French, but I know another lingo that
goes, I guess. Come on, Harve, an' interpret."

The raffle and confusion when he and Harvey were hauled up the bark's
black side was indescribable. Her cabin was all stuck round with glaring
coloured prints of the Virgin—the Virgin of Newfoundland, they
called her. Harvey found his French of no recognised Bank brand, and his
conversation was limited to nods and grins. But Tom Platt waved his arms
and got along swimmingly. The captain gave him a drink of unspeakable gin,
and the opera-comique crew, with their hairy throats, red caps, and long
knives, greeted him as a brother. Then the trade began. They had tobacco,
plenty of it—American, that had never paid duty to France. They
wanted chocolate and crackers. Harvey rowed back to arrange with the cook
and Disko, who owned the stores, and on his return the cocoa-tins and
cracker-bags were counted out by the Frenchman's wheel. It looked like a
piratical division of loot; but Tom Platt came out of it roped with black
pigtail and stuffed with cakes of chewing and smoking tobacco. Then those
jovial mariners swung off into the mist, and the last Harvey heard was a
gay chorus:

      "Par derriere chez ma tante,
       Il y a un bois joli,
       Et le rossignol y chante
       Et le jour et la nuit...
       Que donneriez vous, belle,
       Qui l'amènerait ici?
       Je donnerai Québec,
       Sorel et Saint Denis."
    

"How was it my French didn't go, and your sign-talk did?" Harvey demanded
when the barter had been distributed among the "We're Heres".

"Sign-talk!" Platt guffawed. "Well, yes, 'twas sign-talk, but a heap
older'n your French, Harve. Them French boats are chock-full o'
Freemasons, an' that's why."

"Are you a Freemason, then?"

"Looks that way, don't it?" said the man-o'war's man, stuffing his pipe;
and Harvey had another mystery of the deep sea to brood upon.

CHAPTER VI

The thing that struck him most was the exceedingly casual way in which
some craft loafed about the broad Atlantic. Fishing-boats, as Dan said,
were naturally dependent on the courtesy and wisdom of their neighbours;
but one expected better things of steamers. That was after another
interesting interview, when they had been chased for three miles by a big
lumbering old cattle-boat, all boarded over on the upper deck, that smelt
like a thousand cattle-pens. A very excited officer yelled at them through
a speaking-trumpet, and she lay and lollopped helplessly on the water
while Disko ran the "We're Here" under her lee and gave the skipper a
piece of his mind. "Where might ye be—eh? Ye don't deserve to be
anywheres. You barn-yard tramps go hoggin' the road on the high seas with
no blame consideration fer your neighbours, an' your eyes in your
coffee-cups instid o' in your silly heads."

At this the skipper danced on the bridge and said something about Disko's
own eyes. "We haven't had an observation for three days. D'you suppose we
can run her blind?" he shouted.

"Wa-al, I can," Disko retorted. "What's come to your lead'? Et it'? Can't
ye smell bottom, or are them cattle too rank?"

"What d'ye feed 'em?" said Uncle Salters with intense seriousness, for the
smell of the pens woke all the farmer in him. "They say they fall off
dretful on a v'yage. Dunno as it's any o' my business, but I've a kind o'
notion that oil-cake broke small an' sprinkled—"

"Thunder!" said a cattle-man in a red jersey as he looked over the side.
"What asylum did they let His Whiskers out of?"

"Young feller," Salters began, standing up in the fore-rigging, "let me
tell yeou 'fore we go any further that I've—"

The officer on the bridge took off his cap with immense politeness.
"Excuse me," he said, "but I've asked for my reckoning. If the
agricultural person with the hair will kindly shut his head, the sea-green
barnacle with the wall-eye may perhaps condescend to enlighten us."

"Naow you've made a show o' me, Salters," said Disko, angrily. He could
not stand up to that particular sort of talk, and snapped out the latitude
and longitude without more lectures.

"'Well, that's a boat-load of lunatics, sure," said the skipper, as he
rang up the engine-room and tossed a bundle of newspapers into the
schooner.

"Of all the blamed fools, next to you, Salters, him an' his crowd are
abaout the likeliest I've ever seen," said Disko as the "We're Here" slid
away. "I was jest givin' him my jedgment on lullsikin' round these waters
like a lost child, an' you must cut in with your fool farmin'. Can't ye
never keep things sep'rate?"

Harvey, Dan, and the others stood back, winking one to the other and full
of joy; but Disko and Salters wrangled seriously till evening, Salters
arguing that a cattle-boat was practically a barn on blue water, and Disko
insisting that, even if this were the case, decency and fisher-pride
demanded that he should have kept "things sep'rate." Long Jack stood it in
silence for a time,—an angry skipper makes an unhappy crew,—and
then he spoke across the table after supper:

"Fwhat's the good o' bodderin' fwhat they'll say?" said he.

"They'll tell that tale ag'in' us fer years—that's all," said Disko.
"Oil-cake sprinkled!"

"With salt, o' course," said Salters, impenitent, reading the farming
reports from a week-old New York paper.

"It's plumb mortifyin' to all my feelin's," the skipper went on.

"Can't see ut that way," said Long Jack, the peacemaker. "Look at here,
Disko! Is there another packet afloat this day in this weather c'u'd ha'
met a tramp an', over an' above givin' her her reckonin',—over an'
above that, I say,—c'u'd ha' discoorsed wid her quite intelligent on
the management av steers an' such at sea'? Forgit ut! Av coorse they will
not. 'Twas the most compenjus conversation that iver accrued. Double game
an' twice runnin'—all to us." Dan kicked Harvey under the table, and
Harvey choked in his cup.

"'Well," said Salters, who felt that his honour had been somewhat
plastered, "I said I didn't know as 'twuz any business o' mine, 'fore I
spoke."

"An' right there," said Tom Platt, experienced in discipline and etiquette—"right
there, I take it, Disko, you should ha' asked him to stop ef the
conversation wuz likely, in your jedgment, to be anyways—what it
shouldn't."

"Dunno but that's so," said Disko, who saw his way to an honourable
retreat from a fit of the dignities.

"'Why, o' course it was so," said Salters, "you bein' skipper here; an'
I'd cheerful hev stopped on a hint—not from any leadin' or
conviction, but fer the sake o' bearin' an example to these two blame boys
of aours."

"Didn't I tell you, Harve, 'twould come araound to us 'fore we'd done'?
Always those blame boys. But I wouldn't have missed the show fer a
half-share in a halibutter," Dan whispered.

"Still, things should ha' been kep' sep'rate," said Disko, and the light
of new argument lit in Salters's eye as he crumbled cut plug into his
pipe.

"There's a power av vartue in keepin' things sep'rate," said Long Jack,
intent on stilling the storm. "That's fwhat Steyning of Steyning and
Hare's f'und when he sent Counahan fer skipper on the Marilla D. Kuhn,
instid o' Cap. Newton that was took with inflam't'ry rheumatism an'
couldn't go. Counahan the Navigator we called him."

"Nick Counahan he never went aboard fer a night 'thout a pond o' rum
somewheres in the manifest," said Tom Platt, playing up to the lead. "He
used to bum araound the c'mission houses to Boston lookin' fer the Lord to
make him captain of a towboat on his merits. Sam Coy, up to Atlantic
Avenoo, give him his board free fer a year or more on account of his
stories. Counahan the Navigator! Tck! Tck! Dead these fifteen year, ain't
he?"

"Seventeen, I guess. He died the year the Caspar McVeagh was built; but he
could niver keep things sep'rate. Steyning tuk him fer the reason the
thief tuk the hot stove—bekaze there was nothin' else that season.
The men was all to the Banks, and Counahan he whacked up an iverlastin'
hard crowd fer crew. Rum! Ye c'u'd ha' floated the Marilla, insurance and
all, in fwhat they stowed aboard her. They lef' Boston Harbour for the
great Grand Bank wid a roarin' nor'wester behind 'em an' all hands full to
the bung. An' the hivens looked after thim, for divil a watch did they
set, an' divil a rope did they lay hand to, till they'd seen the bottom av
a fifteen-gallon cask o' bug-juice. That was about wan week, so far as
Counahan remembered. (If' I c'u'd only tell the tale as he told ut!) All
that whoile the wind blew like ould glory, an' the Marilla—'twas
summer, and they'd give her a foretopmast—struck her gait and kept
ut. Then Counahan tuk the hog-yoke an' thrembled over it for a whoile, an'
made out, betwix' that an' the chart an' the singin' in his head, that
they was to the south'ard o' Sable Island, gettin' along glorious, but
speakin' nothin'. Then they broached another keg, an' quit speculatin'
about anythin' fer another spell. The Marilla she lay down whin she
dropped Boston Light, and she never lufted her lee-rail up to that time—hustlin'
on one an' the same slant. But they saw no weed, nor gulls, nor schooners;
an' prisintly they obsarved they'd been out a matter o' fourteen days, and
they mistrusted the Bank had suspinded payment. So they sounded, an' got
sixty fathom. 'That's me,' sez Counahan. 'That's me iv'ry time! I've run
her slat on the Bank fer you, an' when we get thirty fathom we'll turn in
like little men. Counahan is the b'y,' sez he. 'Counahan the Navigator!'

"Nex' cast they got ninety. Sez Counahan: 'Either the lead-line's tuk too
stretchin' or else the Bank's sunk.'

"They hauled ut up, bein' just about in that state when ut seemed right
an' reasonable, and sat down on the deck countin' the knots, an' gettin'
her snarled up hijjus. The Marilla she'd struck her gait, and she hild ut,
an' prisintly along come a tramp, an' Counahan spoke her.

"'Hey ye seen any fishin'-boats now?' sez he, quite casual.

"'There's lashin's av them off the Irish coast,' sez the tramp.

"Aah! go shake yerself,' sez Counahan. 'Fwhat have I to do wid the Irish
coast?'

"'Then fwhat are ye doin' here?' sez the tramp.

"'Sufferin' Christianity!' sez Counahan (he always said that whin his
pumps sucked an' he was not feelin' good)—'Sufferin' Christianity!'
he sez, 'where am I at?' "'Thirty-five mile west-sou'west o' Cape Clear,'
sez the tramp, 'if that's any consolation to you.'

"Counahan fetched wan jump, four feet sivin inches, measured by the cook.

"'Consolation!' sez he, bould ez brass. 'D'ye take me fer a dialect?
Thirty-five mile from Cape Clear, an' fourteen days from Boston Light.
Sufferin' Christianity, 'tis a record, an' by the same token I've a mother
to Skibbereen!' Think av ut! The gall av um! But ye see he could niver
keep things sep'rate.

"The crew was mostly Cork an' Kerry men, barrin' one Marylander that
wanted to go back, but they called him a mutineer, an' they ran the ould
Marilla into Skibbereen, an' they had an illigant time visitin' around
with frinds on the ould sod fer a week. Thin they wint back, an' it cost
'em two an' thirty days to beat to the Banks again. 'Twas gettin' on
towards fall, and grub was low, so Counahan ran her back to Boston, wid no
more bones to ut."

"And what did the firm say?" Harvey demanded.

"Fwhat could they'? The fish was on the Banks, an' Counahan was at T-wharf
talkin' av his record trip east! They tuk their satisfaction out av that,
an' ut all came av not keepin' the crew and the rum sep'rate in the first
place; an' confusin' Skibbereen wid 'Queereau, in the second. Counahan the
Navigator, rest his sowl! He was an imprompju citizen!

"Once I was in the Lucy Holmes," said Manuel, in his gentle voice. "They
not want any of her feesh in Gloucester. Eh, wha-at? Give us no price. So
we go across the water, and think to sell to some Fayal man. Then it blow
fresh, and we cannot see well. Eh, wha-at? Then it blow some more fresh,
and we go down below and drive very fast—no one know where.
By-and-by we see a land, and it get some hot. Then come two, three nigger
in a brick. Eh, wha-at? We ask where we are, and they say—now, what
you all think?"

"Grand Canary," said Disko, after a moment. Manuel shook his head,
smiling.

"Blanco," said Tom Platt.

"No. Worse than that. We was below Bezagos, and the brick she was from
Liberia! So we sell our feesh there! Not bad, so? Eh, wha-at?"

"Can a schooner like this go right across to Africa?" said Harvey.

"Go araound the Horn ef there's anythin' worth goin' fer, and the grub
holds aout," said Disko. "My father he run his packet, an' she was a kind
o' pinkey, abaout fifty ton, I guess,—the Rupert,—he run her
over to Greenland's icy mountains the year ha'af our fleet was tryin'
after cod there. An' what's more, he took my mother along with him,—to
show her haow the money was earned, I presoom,—an' they was all iced
up, an' I was born at Disko. Don't remember nothin' abaout it, o' course.
We come back when the ice eased in the spring, but they named me fer the
place. Kinder mean trick to put up on a baby, but we're all baound to make
mistakes in aour lives."

"Sure! Sure!" said Salters, wagging his head. "All baound to make
mistakes, an' I tell you two boys here thet after you've made a mistake—ye
don't make fewer'n a hundred a day—the next best thing's to own up
to it like men."

Long Jack winked one tremendous wink that embraced all hands except Disko
and Salters, and the incident was closed.

Then they made berth after berth to the northward, the dories out almost
every day, running along the east edge of the Grand Bank in thirty-to
forty-fathom water, and fishing steadily.

It was here Harvey first met the squid, who is one of the best cod-baits,
but uncertain in his moods. They were waked out of their bunks one black
night by yells of "Squid O!" from Salters, and for an hour and a half
every soul aboard hung over his squid-jig—a piece of lead painted
red and armed at the lower end with a circle of pins bent backward like
half-opened umbrella ribs. The squid—for some unknown reason—likes,
and wraps himself round, this thing, and is hauled up ere he can escape
from the pins. But as he leaves his home he squirts first water and next
ink into his captor's face; and it was curious to see the men weaving
their heads from side to side to dodge the shot. They were as black as
sweeps when the flurry ended; but a pile of fresh squid lay on the deck,
and the large cod thinks very well of a little shiny piece of
squid-tentacle at the tip of a clam-baited hook. Next day they caught many
fish, and met the Carrie Pitman, to whom they shouted their luck, and she
wanted to trade—seven cod for one fair-sized squid; but Disko would
not agree at the price, and the Carrie dropped sullenly to leeward and
anchored half a mile away, in the hope of striking on to some for herself.

Disko said nothing till after supper, when he sent Dan and Manuel out to
buoy the "We're Here's" cable and announced his intention of turning in
with the broad-axe. Dan naturally repeated these remarks to a dory from
the Carrie, who wanted to know why they were buoying their cable, since
they were not on rocky bottom.

"Dad sez he wouldn't trust a ferryboat within five mile o' you," Dan
howled cheerfully.

"Why don't he git out, then'? Who's hinderin'?" said the other.

"Cause you've jest the same ez lee-bowed him, an' he don't take that from
any boat, not to speak o' sech a driftin' gurry-butt as you be."

"She ain't driftin' any this trip," said the man, angrily, for the Carrie
Pitman had an unsavoury reputation for breaking her ground-tackle.

"Then haow d'you make berths?" said Dan. "It's her best p'int o' sailin'.
An' ef she's quit driftin', what in thunder are you doin' with a new
jib-boom?" That shot went home.

"Hey, you Portugoosy organ-grinder, take your monkey back to Gloucester.
Go back to school, Dan Troop," was the answer.

"O-ver-alls! O-ver-alls!" yelled Dan, who knew that one of the Carrie's
crew had worked in an overall factory the winter before.

"Shrimp! Gloucester shrimp! Git aout, you Novy!"

To call a Gloucester man a Nova Scotian is not well received. Dan answered
in kind.

"Novy yourself, ye Scrabble-towners! ye Chatham wreckers' Git aout with
your brick in your stock in'!" And the forces separated, but Chatham had
the worst of it.

"I knew haow 'twould be," said Disko. "She's drawed the wind raound
already. Some one oughter put a deesist on thet packet. She'll snore till
midnight, an' jest when we're gittin' our sleep she'll strike adrift. Good
job we ain't crowded with craft hereaways. But I ain't goin' to up anchor
fer Chatham. She may hold."

The wind, which had hauled round, rose at sundown and blew steadily. There
was not enough sea, though, to disturb even a dory's tackle, but the
Carrie Pitman was a law unto herself. At the end of the boys' watch they
heard the crack-crack-crack of a huge muzzle-loading revolver aboard her.

"Glory, glory, hallelujah!" sung Dan. "Here she comes, dad; butt-end
first, walkin' in her sleep same's she done on 'Queereau."

Had she been any other boat Disko would have taken his chances, but now he
cut the cable as the Carrie Pitman, with all the North Atlantic to play
in, lurched down directly upon them. The "We're Here", under jib and
riding-sail, gave her no more room than was absolutely necessary,—Disko
did not wish to spend a week hunting for his cable,—but scuttled up
into the wind as the Carrie passed within easy hail, a silent and angry
boat, at the mercy of a raking broadside of Bank chaff.

"Good evenin'," said Disko, raising his headgear, "an' haow does your
garden grow?"

"Go to Ohio an' hire a mule," said Uncle Salters. "We don't want no
farmers here."

"Will I lend you my dory-anchor?" cried Long Jack.

"Unship your rudder an' stick it in the mud," said Tom Platt.

"Say!" Dan's voice rose shrill and high, as he stood on the wheel-box.
"Sa-ay! Is there a strike in the o-ver-all factory; or hev they hired
girls, ye Shackamaxons?"

"Veer out the tiller-lines," cried Harvey, "and nail 'em to the bottom."
That was a salt-flavoured jest he had been put up to by Tom Platt. Manuel
leaned over the stern and yelled; "Johnna Morgan play the organ! Ahaaaa!"
He flourished his broad thumb with a gesture of unspeakable contempt and
derision, while little Penn covered himself with glory by piping up: "Gee
a little! Hssh! Come here. Haw!"

They rode on their chain for the rest of the night, a short, snappy,
uneasy motion, as Harvey found, and wasted half the forenoon recovering
the cable. But the boys agreed the trouble was cheap at the price of
triumph and glory, and they thought with grief over all the beautiful
things that they might have said to the discomfited Carrie.

CHAPTER VII

Next day they fell in with more sails, all circling slowly from the east
northerly towards the west. But just when they expected to make the shoals
by the Virgin the fog shut down, and they anchored, surrounded by the
tinklings of invisible bells. There was not much fishing, but occasionally
dory met dory in the fog and exchanged news.

That night, a little before dawn, Dan and Harvey, who had been sleeping
most of the day, tumbled out to "hook" fried pies. There was no reason why
they should not have taken them openly; but they tasted better so, and it
made the cook angry. The heat and smell below drove them on deck with
their plunder, and they found Disko at the bell, which he handed over to
Harvey.

"Keep her goin'," said he. "I mistrust I hear somethin'. Ef it's anything,
I'm best where I am so's to get at things."

It was a forlorn little jingle; the thick air seemed to pinch it off; and
in the pauses Harvey heard the muffled shriek of a liner's siren, and he
knew enough of the Banks to know what that meant. It came to him, with
horrible distinctness, how a boy in a cherry-coloured jersey—he
despised fancy blazers now with all a fisherman's contempt—how an
ignorant, rowdy boy had once said it would be "great" if a steamer ran
down a fishing-boat. That boy had a state-room with a hot and cold bath,
and spent ten minutes each morning picking over a gilt-edged bill of fare.
And that same boy—no, his very much older brother—was up at
four of the dim dawn in streaming, crackling oilskins, hammering,
literally for the dear life, on a bell smaller than the steward's
breakfast-bell, while somewhere close at hand a thirty-foot steel stem was
storming along at twenty miles an hour! The bitterest thought of all was
that there were folks asleep in dry, upholstered cabins who would never
learn that they had massacred a boat before breakfast. So Harvey rang the
bell.

"Yes, they slow daown one turn o' their blame propeller," said Dan,
applying himself to Manuel's conch, "fer to keep inside the law, an'
that's consolin' when we're all at the bottom. Hark to her' She's a
humper!"

"Aoooo—whoooo—whupp!" went the siren. "Wingle—tingle—tink,"
went the bell. "Graaa—ouch!" went the conch, while sea and sky were
all milled up in milky fog. Then Harvey felt that he was near a moving
body, and found himself looking up and up at the wet edge of a cliff-like
bow, leaping, it seemed, directly over the schooner. A jaunty little
feather of water curled in front of it, and as it lifted it showed a long
ladder of Roman numerals—XV., XVI., XVII., XVIII., and so forth—on
a salmon-coloured, gleaming side. It tilted forward and downward with a
heart-stilling "Ssssooo"; the ladder disappeared; a line of brass-rimmed
port-holes flashed past; a jet of Steam puffed in Harvey's helplessly
uplifted hands; a spout of hot water roared along the rail of the "We're
Here", and the little schooner staggered and shook in a rush of screw-torn
water, as a liner's stern vanished in the fog. Harvey got ready to faint
or be sick, or both, when he heard a crack like a trunk thrown on a
sidewalk, and, all small in his ear, a far-away telephone voice drawling:
"Heave to! You've sunk us!"

"Is it us?" he gasped.

"No! Boat out yonder. Ring! We're goin' to look," said Dan, running out a
dory.

In half a minute all except Harvey, Penn, and the cook were overside and
away. Presently a schooner's stump-foremast, snapped clean across, drifted
past the bows. Then an empty green dory came by, knocking on the 'We're
Here's' side, as though she wished to be taken in. Then followed
something, face down, in a blue jersey, but it was not the whole of a man.
Penn changed colour and caught his breath with a click. Harvey pounded
despairingly at the bell, for he feared they might be sunk at any minute,
and he jumped at Dan's hail as the crew came back.

"The Jennie Cushman," said Dan, hysterically, "cut clean in half—graound
up an' trompled on at that! Not a quarter of a mile away. Dad's got the
old man. There ain't any one else, and—there was his son, too. Oh,
Harve, Harve, I can't stand it! I've seen—" He dropped his head on
his arms and sobbed while the others dragged a grey-headed man aboard.

"What did you pick me up for?" the stranger groaned. "Disko, what did you
pick me up for?"

Disko dropped a heavy hand on his shoulder, for the man's eyes were wild
and his lips trembled as he stared at the silent crew. Then up and spoke
Pennsylvania Pratt, who was also Haskins or Rich or McVitty when Uncle
Salters forgot; and his face was changed on him from the face of a fool to
the countenance of an old, wise man, and he said in a strong voice: "The
Lord gave, and the Lord hath taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!
I was—I am a minister of the Gospel. Leave him to me."

"Oh, you be, be you?" said the man. "Then pray my son back to me! Pray
back a nine-thousand-dollar boat an' a thousand quintal of fish. If you'd
left me alone my widow could ha' gone on to the Provident an' worked fer
her board, an' never known—an' never known. Now I'll hev to tell
her."

"There ain't nothin' to say," said Disko. "Better lie down a piece, Jason
Olley."

When a man has lost his only son, his summer's work, and his means of
livelihood, in thirty counted seconds, it is hard to give consolation.

"All Gloucester men, wasn't they," said Tom Platt, fiddling helplessly
with a dory-becket.

"Oh, that don't make no odds," said Jason, wringing the wet from his
beard. "I'll be rowin' summer boarders araound East Gloucester this fall."
He rolled heavily to the rail, singing.

"Happy birds that sing and fly Round thine altars, O Most High!"

"Come with me. Come below!" said Penn, as though he had a right to give
orders. Their eyes met and fought for a quarter of a minute.

"I dunno who you be, but I'll come," said Jason, submissively. "Mebbe I'll
get back some o' the—some o' the—nine thousand dollars." Penn
led him into the cabin and slid the door behind.

"That ain't Penn," cried Uncle Salters. "It's Jacob Boiler, an'—he's
remembered Johnstown! I never seed such eyes in any livin' man's head.
What's to do naow? What'll I do naow?"

They could hear Penn's voice and Jason's together. Then Penn's went on
alone, and Salters slipped off his hat, for Penn was praying. Presently
the little man came up the steps, huge drops of sweat on his face, and
looked at the crew. Dan was still sobbing by the wheel.

"He don't know us," Salters groaned. "It's all to do over again, checkers
and everything—an' what'll he say to me?"

Penn spoke; they could hear that it was to strangers. "I have prayed,"
said he. "Our people believe in prayer. I have prayed for the life of this
man's son. Mine were drowned before my eyes—she and my eldest and—the
others. Shall a man be more wise than his Maker? I prayed never for their
lives, but I have prayed for this man's son, and he will surely be sent
him."

Salters looked pleadingly at Penn to see if he remembered.

"How long have I been mad?" Penn asked suddenly. His mouth was twitching.

"Pshaw, Penn! You weren't never mad," Salters began. "Only a little
distracted like."

"I saw the houses strike the bridge before the fires broke out. I do not
remember any more. How long ago is that?"

"I can't stand it! I can't stand it!" cried Dan, and Harvey whimpered in
sympathy.

"Abaout five year," said Disko, in a shaking voice.

"Then I have been a charge on some one for every day of that time. Who was
the man?"

Disko pointed to Salters.

"Ye hain't—ye hain't!" cried the sea-farmer, twisting his hands
together. "Ye've more'n earned your keep twice-told; an' there's money
owin' you, Penn, besides ha'af o' my quarter-share in the boat, which is
yours fer value received."

"You are good men. I can see that in your faces. But—"

"Mother av Mercy," whispered Long Jack, "an' he's been wid us all these
trips! He's clean bewitched."

A schooner's bell struck up alongside, and a voice hailed through the fog:
"O Disko! 'Heard abaout the Jennie Cushman?"

"They have found his son," cried Penn. "Stand you still and see the
salvation of the Lord!"

"Got Jason aboard here," Disko answered, but his voice quavered. "There—warn't
any one else?"

"We've f'und one, though. 'Run acrost him snarled up in a mess o' lumber
thet might ha' bin a fo'c'sle. His head's cut some."

"Who is he?"

The "We're Heres'" heart-beats answered one another.

"Guess it's young Olley," the voice drawled.

Penn raised his hands and said something in German. Harvey could have
sworn that a bright sun was shining upon his lifted face; but the drawl
went on: "Sa-ay! You fellers guyed us consid'rable t'other night."

"We don't feel like guyin' any now," said Disko.

"I know it; but to tell the honest truth we was kinder—kinder
driftin' when we run ag'in' young Olley."

It was the irrepressible Carrie Pitman, and a roar of unsteady laughter
went up from the deck of the "We're Here".

"Hedn't you 'baout's well send the old man aboard? We're runnin' in fer
more bait an' graound-tackle. 'Guess you won't want him, anyway, an' this
blame windlass work makes us short-handed. We'll take care of him. He
married my woman's aunt."

"I'll give you anything in the boat," said Troop.

"Don't want nothin', 'less, mebbe, an anchor that'll hold. Say! Young
Olley's gittin' kinder baulky an' excited. Send the old man along."

Penn waked him from his stupor of despair, and Tom Platt rowed him over.
He went away without a word of thanks, not knowing what was to come; and
the fog closed over all.

"And now," said Penn, drawing a deep breath as though about to preach.
"And now"—the erect body sank like a sword driven home into the
scabbard; the light faded from the overbright eyes; the voice returned to
its usual pitiful little titter—"and now," said Pennsylvania Pratt,
"do you think it's too early for a little game of checkers, Mr. Salters?"

"The very thing—the very thing I was goin' to say myself," cried
Salters, promptly. "It beats all, Penn, how you git on to what's in a
man's mind."

The little fellow blushed and meekly followed Salters forward.

"Up anchor! Hurry! Let's quit these crazy waters," shouted Disko, and
never was he more swiftly obeyed.

"Now what in creation d'ye suppose is the meanin' o' that all?" said Long
Jack, when they were working through the fog once more, damp, dripping,
and bewildered.

"The way I sense it," said Disko, at the wheel, "is this: The Jennie
Cushman business comin' on an empty stummick—"

"He—we saw one of them go by," sobbed Harvey.

"An' that, o' course, kinder hove him outer water, Julluk runnin' a craft
ashore; hove him right aout, I take it, to rememberin' Johnstown an' Jacob
Boiler an' such-like reminiscences. Well, consolin' Jason there held him
up a piece, same's shorin' up a boat. Then, bein' weak, them props slipped
an' slipped, an' he slided down the ways, an' naow he's water-borne ag'in.
That's haow I sense it."

They decided that Disko was entirely correct.

"'Twould ha' bruk Salters all up," said Long Jack, "if Penn had stayed
Jacob Bollerin'. Did ye see his face when Penn asked who he'd been charged
on all these years'? How is ut, Salters?"

"Asleep—dead asleep. Turned in like a child," Salters replied,
tiptoeing aft. "There won't be no grub till he wakes, natural. Did ye ever
see sech a gift in prayer? He everlastin'ly hiked young Olley outer the
ocean. Thet's my belief. Jason was tur'ble praoud of his boy, an' I
mistrusted all along 'twas a jedgment on worshippin' vain idols."

"There's others jest as sot," said Disko.

"That's dif'runt," Salters retorted quickly. "Penn's not all caulked, an'
I ain't only but doin' my duty by him."

They waited, those hungry men, three hours, till Penn reappeared with a
smooth face and a blank mind. He said he believed that he had been
dreaming. Then he wanted to know why they were so silent, and they could
not tell him.

Disko worked all hands mercilessly for the next three or four days; and
when they could not go out, turned them into the hold to stack the ship's
stores into smaller compass, to make more room for the fish. The packed
mass ran from the cabin partition to the sliding door behind the fo'c'sle
stove; and Disko showed how there is great art in stowing cargo so as to
bring a schooner to her best draft. The crew were thus kept lively till
they recovered their spirits; and Harvey was tickled with a rope's end by
Long Jack for being, as the Galway man said, "sorrowful as a sick cat over
fwhat couldn't be helped." He did a great deal of thinking in those dreary
days; and told Dan what he thought, and Dan agreed with him—even to
the extent of asking for fried pies instead of hooking them.

But a week later the two nearly upset the Hattie S. in a wild attempt to
stab a shark with an old bayonet tied to a stick. The grim brute rubbed
alongside the dory begging for small fish, and between the three of them
it was a mercy they all got off alive.

At last, after playing blindman's-buff in the fog, there came a morning
when Disko shouted down the fo'c'sle: "Hurry, boys! We're in taown!"

CHAPTER VIII

To the end of his days, Harvey will never forget that sight. The sun was
just clear of the horizon they had not seen for nearly a week, and his low
red light struck into the riding-sails of three fleets of anchored
schooners—one to the north, one to the westward, and one to the
south. There must have been nearly a hundred of them, of every possible
make and build, with, far away, a square-rigged Frenchman, all bowing and
courtesying one to the other. From every boat dories were dropping away
like bees from a crowded hive; and the clamour of voices, the rattling of
ropes and blocks, and the splash of the oars carried for miles across the
heaving water. The sails turned all colours, black, pearly-grey, and
white, as the sun mounted; and more boats swung up through the mists to
the southward.

The dories gathered in clusters, separated, reformed, and broke again, all
heading one way; while men hailed and whistled and cat-called and sang,
and the water was speckled with rubbish thrown overboard.

"It's a town," said Harvey. "Disko was right. It is a town!"

"I've seen smaller," said Disko. "There's about a thousand men here; an'
yonder's the Virgin." He pointed to a vacant space of greenish sea, where
there were no dories.

The "We're Here" skirted round the northern squadron, Disko waving his
hand to friend after friend, and anchored as neatly as a racing yacht at
the end of the season. The Bank fleet pass good seamanship in silence; but
a bungler is jeered all along the line.

"Jest in time fer the caplin," cried the Mary Chilton.

"'Salt 'most wet?" asked the King Philip.

"Hey, Tom Platt! Come t' supper to-night?" said the Henry Clay; and so
questions and answers flew back and forth. Men had met one another before,
dory-fishing in the fog, and there is no place for gossip like the Bank
fleet. They all seemed to know about Harvey's rescue, and asked if he were
worth his salt yet. The young bloods jested with Dan, who had a lively
tongue of his own, and inquired after their health by the town—nicknames
they least liked. Manuel's countrymen jabbered at him in their own
language; and even the silent cook was seen riding the jib-boom and
shouting Gaelic to a friend as black as himself. After they had buoyed the
cable—all around the Virgin is rocky bottom, and carelessness means
chafed ground-tackle and danger from drifting—after they had buoyed
the cable, their dories went forth to join the mob of boats anchored about
a mile away. The schooners rocked and dipped at a safe distance, like
mother ducks watching their brood, while the dories behaved like
mannerless ducklings.

As they drove into the confusion, boat banging boat, Harvey's ears tingled
at the comments on his rowing. Every dialect from Labrador to Long Island,
with Portuguese, Neapolitan, Lingua Franca, French, and Gaelic, with songs
and shoutings and new oaths, rattled round him, and he seemed to be the
butt of it all. For the first time in his life he felt shy—perhaps
that came from living so long with only the "We're Heres"—among the
scores of wild faces that rose and fell with the reeling small craft. A
gentle, breathing swell, three furlongs from trough to barrel, would
quietly shoulder up a string of variously painted dories. They hung for an
instant, a wonderful frieze against the sky-line, and their men pointed
and hailed, Next moment the open mouths, waving arms, and bare chests
disappeared, while on another swell came up an entirely new line of
characters like paper figures in a toy theatre. So Harvey stared. "Watch
out!" said Dan, flourishing a dip-net. "When I tell you dip, you dip. The
caplin'll school any time from naow on. Where'll we lay, Tom Platt?"

Pushing, shoving, and hauling, greeting old friends here and warning old
enemies there, Commodore Tom Platt led his little fleet well to leeward of
the general crowd, and immediately three or four men began to haul on
their anchors with intent to lee-bow the "We're Heres". But a yell of
laughter went up as a dory shot from her station with exceeding speed, its
occupant pulling madly on the roding.

"Give her slack!" roared twenty voices. "Let him shake it out."

"What's the matter?" said Harvey, as the boat flashed away to the
southward. "He's anchored, isn't he?"

"Anchored, sure enough, but his graound-tackle's kinder shifty," said Dan,
laughing. "Whale's fouled it. . . . Dip, Harve! Here they come!"

The sea round them clouded and darkened, and then frizzed up in showers of
tiny silver fish, and over a space of five or six acres the cod began to
leap like trout in May; while behind the cod three or four broad
grey-black backs broke the water into boils.

Then everybody shouted and tried to haul up his anchor to get among the
school, and fouled his neighbour's line and said what was in his heart,
and dipped furiously with his dip-net, and shrieked cautions and advice to
his companions, while the deep fizzed like freshly opened soda-water, and
cod, men, and whales together flung in upon the luckless bait. Harvey was
nearly knocked overboard by the handle of Dan's net. But in all the wild
tumult he noticed, and never forgot, the wicked, set little eye—something
like a circus elephant's eye—of a whale that drove along almost
level with the water, and, so he said, winked at him. Three boats found
their rodings fouled by these reckless mid-sea hunters, and were towed
half a mile ere their horses shook the line free.

Then the caplin moved off and five minutes later there was no sound except
the splash of the sinkers overside, the flapping of the cod, and the whack
of the muckles as the men stunned them. It was wonderful fishing. Harvey
could see the glimmering cod below, swimming slowly in droves, biting as
steadily as they swam. Bank law strictly forbids more than one hook on one
line when the dories are on the Virgin or the Eastern Shoals; but so close
lay the boats that even single hooks snarled, and Harvey found himself in
hot argument with a gentle, hairy Newfoundlander on one side and a howling
Portuguese on the other.

Original

Worse than any tangle of fishing-lines was the confusion of the
dory-rodings below water. Each man had anchored where it seemed good to
him, drifting and rowing round his fixed point. As the fish struck on less
quickly, each man wanted to haul up and get to better ground; but every
third man found himself intimately connected with some four or five
neighbours. To cut another's roding is crime unspeakable on the Banks; yet
it was done, and done without detection, three or four times that day. Tom
Platt caught a Maine man in the black act and knocked him over the gunwale
with an oar, and Manuel served a fellow-countryman in the same way. But
Harvey's anchor-line was cut, and so was Penn's, and they were turned into
relief-boats to carry fish to the "We're Here" as the dories filled. The
caplin schooled once more at twilight, when the mad clamour was repeated;
and at dusk they rowed back to dress down by the light of kerosene-lamps
on the edge of the pen.

It was a huge pile, and they went to sleep while they were dressing. Next
day several boats fished right above the cap of the Virgin; and Harvey,
with them, looked down on the very weed of that lonely rock, which rises
to within twenty feet of the surface. The cod were there in legions,
marching solemnly over the leathery kelp. When they bit, they bit all
together; and so when they stopped. There was a slack time at noon, and
the dories began to search for amusement. It was Dan who sighted the Hope
of Prague just coming up, and as her boats joined the company they were
greeted with the question: "Who's the meanest man in the Fleet?"

Three hundred voices answered cheerily:

"Nick Bra-ady." It sounded an organ chant.

"Who stole the lamp-wicks?" That was Dan's contribution.

"Nick Bra-ady," sang the boats.

"Who biled the salt bait fer soup?" This was an unknown backbiter a
quarter of a mile away.

Again the joyful chorus. Now, Brady was not especially mean, but he had
that reputation, and the Fleet made the most of it. Then they discovered a
man from a Truro boat who, six years before, had been convicted of using a
tackle with five or six hooks—a "scrowger," they call it—on
the Shoals. Naturally, he had been christened "Scrowger Jim"; and though
he had hidden himself on the Georges ever since, he found his honours
waiting for him full blown. They took it up in a sort of fire-cracker
chorus: "Jim! O Jim! Jim! O Jim! Sssscrowger Jim!" That pleased everybody.
And when a poetical Beverly man—he had been making it up all day,
and talked about it for weeks—sang, "The Carrie Pitman's anchor
doesn't hold her for a cent!" the dories felt that they were indeed
fortunate. Then they had to ask that Beverly man how he was off for beans,
because even poets must not have things all their own way. Every schooner
and nearly every man got it in turn. Was there a careless or dirty cook
anywhere? The dories sang about him and his food. Was a schooner badly
found? The Fleet was told at full length. Had a man hooked tobacco from a
messmate? He was named in meeting; the name tossed from roller to roller.
Disko's infallible judgments, Long Jack's market-boat that he had sold
years ago, Dan's sweetheart (oh, but Dan was an angry boy!), Penn's bad
luck with dory-anchors, Salters's views on manure, Manuel's little slips
from virtue ashore, and Harvey's ladylike handling of the oar—all
were laid before the public; and as the fog fell around them in silvery
sheets beneath the sun, the voices sounded like a bench of invisible
judges pronouncing sentence.

The dories roved and fished and squabbled till a swell underran the sea.
Then they drew more apart to save their sides, and some one called that if
the swell continued the Virgin would break. A reckless Galway man with his
nephew denied this, hauled up anchor, and rowed over the very rock itself.
Many voices called them to come away, while others dared them to hold on.
As the smooth-backed rollers passed to the south-ward, they hove the dory
high and high into the mist, and dropped her in ugly, sucking, dimpled
water, where she spun round her anchor, within a foot or two of the hidden
rock. It was playing with death for mere bravado; and the boats looked on
in uneasy silence till Long Jack rowed up behind his countrymen and
quietly cut their roding.

"Can't ye hear ut knockin'?" he cried. "Pull for your miserable lives!
Pull!"

The men swore and tried to argue as the boat drifted; but the next swell
checked a little, like a man tripping on a carpet. There was a deep sob
and a gathering roar, and the Virgin flung up a couple of acres of foaming
water, white, furious, and ghastly over the shoal sea. Then all the boats
greatly applauded Long Jack, and the Galway men held their tongue.

"Ain't it elegant?" said Dan, bobbing like a young seal at home. "She'll
break about once every ha'af hour now, 'less the swell piles up good.
What's her reg'lar time when she's at work, Tom Platt?"

"Once ivry fifteen minutes, to the tick. Harve, you've seen the greatest
thing on the Banks; an' but for Long Jack you'd seen some dead men too."

There came a sound of merriment where the fog lay thicker and the
schooners were ringing their bells. A big bark nosed cautiously out of the
mist, and was received with shouts and cries of, "Come along, darlin',"
from the Irishry.

"Another Frenchman?" said Harvey.

"Hain't you eyes? She's a Baltimore boat; goin' in fear an' tremblin',"
said Dan. "We'll guy the very sticks out of her. 'Guess it's the fust time
her skipper ever met up with the Fleet this way."

She was a black, buxom, eight-hundred-ton craft. Her mainsail was looped
up, and her topsail flapped undecidedly in what little wind was moving.
Now a bark is feminine beyond all other daughters of the sea, and this
tall, hesitating creature, with her white and gilt figurehead, looked just
like a bewildered woman half lifting her skirts to cross a muddy street
under the jeers of bad little boys. That was very much her situation. She
knew she was somewhere in the neighbourhood of the Virgin, had caught the
roar of it, and was, therefore, asking her way. This is a small part of
what she heard from the dancing dories:

"The Virgin? Fwhat are you talk in' of'? This is Le Have on a Sunday
mornin'. Go home an' sober up."

"Go home, ye tarrapin! Go home an' tell 'em we're comin'."

Half a dozen voices together, in a most tuneful chorus, as her stern went
down with a roll and a bubble into the troughs: "Thay-aah—she—strikes!"

"Hard up! Hard up fer your life! You're on top of her now."

"Daown! Hard daown! Let go everything!"

"All hands to the pumps!"

"Daown jib an' pole her!"

Here the skipper lost his temper and said things. Instantly fishing was
suspended to answer him, and he heard many curious facts about his boat
and her next port of call. They asked him if he were insured; and whence
he had stolen his anchor, because, they said, it belonged to the Carrie
Pitman; they called his boat a mud-scow, and accused him of dumping
garbage to frighten the fish; they offered to tow him and charge it to his
wife; and one audacious youth slipped almost under the counter, smacked it
with his open palm, and yelled: "Gid up, Buck!"

The cook emptied a pan of ashes on him, and he replied with cod-heads. The
bark's crew fired small coal from the galley, and the dories threatened to
come aboard and "razee" her. They would have warned her at once had she
been in real peril; but, seeing her well clear of the Virgin, they made
the most of their chances. The fun was spoilt when the rock spoke again, a
half-mile to windward, and the tormented bark set everything that would
draw and went her ways; but the dories felt that the honours lay with
them.

All that night the Virgin roared hoarsely and next morning, over an angry,
white-headed sea, Harvey saw the Fleet with flickering masts waiting for a
lead. Not a dory was hove out till ten o'clock, when the two Jeraulds of
the 'Day's Eye', imagining a lull which did not exist, set the example. In a
minute half the boats were out and bobbing in the cockly swells, but Troop
kept the "We're Heres" at work dressing-down. He saw no sense in "dares";
and as the storm grew that evening they had the pleasure of receiving wet
strangers only too glad to make any refuge in the gale. The boys stood by
the dory-tackles with lanterns, the men ready to haul, one eye cocked for
the sweeping wave that would make them drop everything and hold on for the
dear life. Out of the dark would come a yell of "Dory, dory!" They would
hook up and haul in a drenched man and a half-sunk boat, till their decks
were littered down with nests of dories and the bunks were full. Five
times in their watch did Harvey, with Dan, jump at the foregaff where it
lay lashed on the boom, and cling with arms, legs, and teeth to rope and
spar and sodden canvas as a big wave filled the decks. One dory was
smashed to pieces, and the sea pitched the man head first on to the decks,
cutting his forehead open; and about dawn, when the racing seas glimmered
white all along their cold edges, another man, blue and ghastly, crawled
in with a broken hand, asking news of his brother. Seven extra mouths sat
down to breakfast: a Swede; a Chatham skipper; a boy from Hancock, Maine;
one Duxbury, and three Provincetown men.

Original

There was a general sorting out among the Fleet next day; and though no
one said anything, all ate with better appetites when boat after boat
reported full crews aboard. Only a couple of Portuguese and an old man
from Gloucester were drowned, but many were cut or bruised; and two
schooners had parted their tackle and been blown to the southward, three
days' sail. A man died on a Frenchman—it was the same bark that had
traded tobacco with the "We're Heres". She slipped away quite quietly one
wet, white morning, moved to a patch of deep water, her sails all hanging
anyhow, and Harvey saw the funeral through Disko's spy-glass. It was only
an oblong bundle slid overside. They did not seem to have any form of
service, but in the night, at anchor, Harvey heard them across the
star-powdered black water, singing something that sounded like a hymn. It
went to a very slow tune.

      La brigantine
      Qui va tourner,
      Roule et s'incline
      Pour m'entrainer.
      Oh, Vierge Marie,
      Pour moi priez Dieu!
      Adieu, patrie;
      Québec, adieu!
    

Tom Platt visited her, because, he said, the dead man was his brother as a
Freemason. It came out that a wave had doubled the poor fellow over the
heel of the bowsprit and broken his back. The news spread like a flash,
for, contrary to general custom, the Frenchman held an auction of the dead
man's kit,—he had no friends at St. Malo or Miquelon,—and
everything was spread out on the top of the house, from his red knitted
cap to the leather belt with the sheath-knife at the back. Dan and Harvey
were out on twenty-fathom water in the Hattie S., and naturally rowed over
to join the crowd. It was a long pull, and they stayed some little time
while Dan bought the knife, which had a curious brass handle. When they
dropped overside and pushed off into a drizzle of rain and a lop of sea,
it occurred to them that they might get into trouble for neglecting the
lines. "Guess 'twon't hurt us any to be warmed up," said Dan, shivering
under his oilskins, and they rowed on into the heart of a white fog,
which, as usual, dropped on them without warning.

"There's too much blame tide hereabouts to trust to your instinks," he
said. "Heave over the anchor, Harve, and we'll fish a piece till the thing
lifts. Bend on your biggest lead. Three pound ain't any too much in this
water. See how she's tightened on her rodin' already."

There was quite a little bubble at the bows, where some irresponsible Bank
current held the dory full stretch on her rope; but they could not see a
boat's length in any direction. Harvey turned up his collar and bunched
himself over his reel with the air of a wearied navigator. Fog had no
special terrors for him now. They fished awhile in silence, and found the
cod struck on well. Then Dan drew the sheath-knife and tested the edge of
it on the gunwale.

"That's a daisy," said Harvey. "How did you get it so cheap?"

"On account o' their blame Cath'lic superstitions," said Dan, jabbing with
the bright blade. "They don't fancy takin' iron frum off of a dead man, so
to speak. 'See them Arichat Frenchmen step back when I bid?"

"But an auction ain't taking anything off a dead man. It's business."

"We know it ain't, but there's no goin' in the teeth o' superstition.
That's one o' the advantages o' livin' in a progressive country." And Dan
began whistling:

"Oh, Double Thatcher, how are you? Now Eastern Point comes inter view. The
girls an' boys we soon shall see, At anchor off Cape Ann!"

"Why didn't that Eastport man bid, then? He bought his boots. Ain't Maine
progressive?"

"Maine? Pshaw! They don't know enough, or they hain't got money enough, to
paint their haouses in Maine. I've seen 'em. The Eastport man he told me
that the knife had been used—so the French captain told him—used
up on the French coast last year."

"Cut a man? Heave's the muckle." Harvey hauled in his fish, rebaited, and
threw over.

"Killed him! 'Course, when I heard that I was keener 'n ever to get it."

"Christmas! I didn't know it," said Harvey, turning round. "I'll give you
a dollar for it when I—get my wages. Say, I'll give you two
dollars."

"Honest? D'you like it as much as all that?" said Dan, flushing. "Well, to
tell the truth, I kinder got it for you—to give; but I didn't let on
till I saw how you'd take it. It's yours and welcome, Harve, because we're
dory-mates, and so on and so forth, an' so followin'. Catch a-holt!"

He held it out, belt and all.

"But look at here. Dan, I don't see—"

"Take it. 'Tain't no use to me. I wish you to hev it."

The temptation was irresistible. "Dan, you're a white man," said Harvey.
"I'll keep it as long as I live."

"That's good hearin'," said Dan, with a pleasant laugh; and then, anxious
to change the subject: "Look's if your line was fast to somethin'."

"Fouled, I guess," said Harve, tugging. Before he pulled up he fastened
the belt round him, and with deep delight heard the tip of the sheath
click on the thwart. "Concern the thing!" he cried. "She acts as though
she were on strawberry-bottom. It's all sand here, ain't it'?"

Dan reached over and gave a judgmatic tweak. "Holibut'll act that way 'f
he's sulky. Thet's no strawberry-bottom. Yank her once or twice. She
gives, sure. 'Guess we'd better haul up an' make certain."

They pulled together, making fast at each turn on the cleats, and the
hidden weight rose sluggishly.

"Prize, oh! Haul!" shouted Dan, but the shout ended in a shrill, double
shriek of horror, for out of the sea came—the body of the dead
Frenchman buried two days before! The hook had caught him under the right
armpit, and he swayed, erect and horrible, head and shoulders above water.
His arms were tied to his side, and—he had no face. The boys fell
over each other in a heap at the bottom of the dory, and there they lay
while the thing bobbed alongside, held on the shortened line.

"The tide—the tide brought him!" said Harvey, with quivering lips,
as he fumbled at the clasp of the belt.

"Oh, Lord! Oh, Harve!" groaned Dan, "be quick. He's come for it. Let him
have it. Take it off."

"I don't want it! I don't want it!" cried Harvey. "I can't find the
bu-buckle."

"Quick, Harve! He's on your line!"

Harvey sat up to unfasten the belt, facing the head that had no face under
its streaming hair. "He's fast still," he whispered to Dan, who slipped
out his knife and cut the line, as Harvey flung the belt far overside. The
body shot down with a plop, and Dan cautiously rose to his knees, whiter
than the fog.

"He come for it. He come for it. I've seen a stale one hauled up on a
trawl and I didn't much care, but he come to us special."

"I wish—I wish I hadn't taken the knife. Then he'd have come on your
line."

"Dunno as thet would ha' made any differ. We're both scared out o' ten
years' growth. Oh, Harve, did ye see his head?"

"Did I'? I'll never forget it. But look at here, Dan; it couldn't have
been meant. It was only the tide."

"Tide! He come for it, Harve. Why, they sunk him six mile to south'ard o'
the Fleet, an' we're two miles from where she's lyin' now. They told me he
was weighted with a fathom an' a half o' chain-cable."

"Wonder what he did with the knife—up on the French coast?"

"Something bad. 'Guess he's bound to take it with him to the Judgment, an'
so—What are you doin' with the fish?"

"Heaving 'em overboard," said Harvey.

"What for? We sha'n't eat 'em."

"I don't care. I had to look at his face while I was takin' the belt off.
You can keep your catch if you like. I've no use for mine."

Dan said nothing, but threw his fish over again.

"'Guess it's best to be on the safe side," he murmured at last. "I'd give
a month's pay if this fog 'u'd lift. Things go abaout in a fog that ye
don't see in clear weather—yo-hoes an' hollerers and such like. I'm
sorter relieved he come the way he did instid o' walkin'. He might ha'
walked."

"Do-on't, Dan! We're right on top of him now. 'Wish I was safe aboard,
bein' pounded by Uncle Salters."

"They'll be lookin' fer us in a little. Gimme the tooter." Dan took the
tin dinner-horn, but paused before he blew.

"Go on," said Harvey. "I don't want to stay here all night."

"Question is, haow he'd take it. There was a man frum down the coast told
me once he was in a schooner where they darsen't ever blow a horn to the
dories, becaze the skipper—not the man he was with, but a captain
that had run her five years before—he'd drownded a boy alongside in
a drunk fit; an' ever after, that boy he'd row alongside too and shout,
'Dory! dory!' with the rest."

"Dory! dory!" a muffled voice cried through the fog. They cowered again,
and the horn dropped from Dan's hand.

"Hold on!" cried Harvey; "it's the cook."

"Dunno what made me think o' thet fool tale, either," said Dan. "It's the
doctor, sure enough."

"Dan! Danny! Oooh, Dan! Harve! Harvey! Oooh, Haarveee!"

"We're here," sung both boys together. They heard oars, but could see
nothing till the cook, shining and dripping, rowed into them.

"What iss happened?" said he. "You will be beaten at home."

"Thet's what we want. Thet's what we're sufferin' for," said Dan.
"Anything homey's good enough fer us. We've had kinder depressin'
company." As the cook passed them a line, Dan told him the tale.

"Yess! He come for hiss knife," was all he said at the end.

Never had the little rocking "We're Here" looked so deliciously home—like
as when the cook, born and bred in fogs, rowed them back to her. There was
a warm glow of light from the cabin and a satisfying smell of food
forward, and it was heavenly to hear Disko and the others, all quite alive
and solid, leaning over the rail and promising them a first-class
pounding. But the cook was a black master of strategy. He did not get the
dories aboard till he had given the more striking points of the tale,
explaining as he backed and bumped round the counter how Harvey was the
mascot to destroy any possible bad luck. So the boys came overside as
rather uncanny heroes, and every one asked them questions instead of
pounding them for making trouble. Little Penn delivered quite a speech on
the folly of superstitions; but public opinion was against him and in
favour of Long Jack, who told the most excruciating ghost-stories to
nearly midnight. Under that influence no one except Salters and Penn said
anything about "idolatry" when the cook put a lighted candle, a cake of
flour and water, and a pinch of salt on a shingle, and floated them out
astern to keep the Frenchman quiet in case he was still restless. Dan lit
the candle because he had bought the belt, and the cook grunted and
muttered charms as long as he could see the ducking point of flame.

Said Harvey to Dan, as they turned in after watch: "How about progress and
Catholic superstitions?"

"Huh! I guess I'm as enlightened and progressive as the next man, but when
it comes to a dead St. Malo deck-hand scarin' a couple o' pore boys stiff
fer the sake of a thirty-cent knife, why, then, the cook can take hold fer
all o' me. I mistrust furriners, livin' or dead."

Next morning all, except the cook, were rather ashamed of the ceremonies,
and went to work double tides, speaking gruffly to one another.

The "We're Here" was racing neck and neck for her last few loads against
the "Parry Norman"; and so close was the struggle that the Fleet took
sides and betted tobacco. All hands worked at the lines or dressing-down
till they fell asleep where they stood—beginning before dawn and
ending when it was too dark to see. They even used the cook as pitcher,
and turned Harvey into the hold to pass salt, while Dan helped to dress
down. Luckily a "Parry Norman" man sprained his ankle falling down the
fo'c'sle, and the "We're Heres" gained. Harvey could not see how one more
fish could be crammed into her, but Disko and Tom Platt stowed and stowed,
and planked the mass down with big stones from the ballast, and there was
always "jest another day's work." Disko did not tell them when all the
salt was wetted. He rolled to the lazarette aft the cabin and began
hauling out the big mainsail. This was at ten in the morning. The
riding-sail was down and the main- and top-sail were up by noon, and
dories came alongside with letters for home, envying their good fortune.
At last she cleared decks, hoisted her flag,—as is the right of the
first boat off the Banks,—up-anchored, and began to move. Disko
pretended that he wished to accommodate folk who had not sent in their
mail, and so worked her gracefully in and out among the schooners. In
reality, that was his little triumphant procession, and for the fifth year
running it showed what kind of mariner he was. Dan's accordion and Tom
Platt's fiddle supplied the music of the magic verse you must not sing
till all the salt is wet:

Original

  "Hih! Yih! Yoho!
  Send your letters raound!
  All our salt is wetted, an' the anchor's off the graound!
  Bend, oh, bend your mains'l!, we're back to Yankeeland—
  With fifteen hunder' quintal,
  An' fifteen hunder' quintal,
  'Teen hunder' toppin' quintal,
  'Twix' old 'Queereau an' Grand."

The last letters pitched on deck wrapped round pieces of coal, and the
Gloucester men shouted messages to their wives and womenfolk and owners,
while the "We're Here" finished the musical ride through the Fleet, her
head-sails quivering like a man's hand when he raises it to say good-bye.

Harvey very soon discovered that the "We're Here", with her riding-sail,
strolling from berth to berth, and the "We're Here" headed west by south
under home canvas, were two very different boats. There was a bite and
kick to the wheel even in "boy's" weather; he could feel the dead weight
in the hold flung forward mightily across the surges, and the streaming
line of bubbles overside made his eyes dizzy.

Disko kept them busy fiddling with the sails; and when those were
flattened like a racing yacht's, Dan had to wait on the big topsail, which
was put over by hand every time she went about. In spare moments they
pumped, for the packed fish dripped brine, which does not improve a cargo.
But since there was no fishing, Harvey had time to look at the sea from
another point of view. The low-sided schooner was naturally on most
intimate terms with her surroundings. They saw little of the horizon save
when she topped a swell; and usually she was elbowing, fidgeting, and
coaxing her steadfast way through grey, grey-blue, or black hollows laced
across and across with streaks of shivering foam; or rubbing herself
caressingly along the flank of some bigger water-hill. It was as if she
said: "You wouldn't hurt me, surely? I'm only the little 'We're Here'."
Then she would slide away chuckling softly to herself till she was brought
up by some fresh obstacle. The dullest of folk cannot see this kind of
thing hour after hour through long days without noticing it; and Harvey,
being anything but dull, began to comprehend and enjoy the dry chorus of
wave-tops turning over with a sound of incessant tearing; the hurry of the
winds working across open spaces and herding the purple-blue
cloud-shadows; the splendid upheaval of the red sunrise; the folding and
packing away of the morning mists, wall after wall withdrawn across the
white floors; the salty glare and blaze of noon; the kiss of rain falling
over thousands of dead, flat square miles; the chilly blackening of
everything at the day's end; and the million wrinkles of the sea under the
moonlight, when the jib-boom solemnly poked at the low stars, and Harvey
went down to get a doughnut from the cook.

But the best fun was when the boys were put on the wheel together, Tom
Platt within hail, and she cuddled her lee-rail down to the crashing blue,
and kept a little home-made rainbow arching unbroken over her windlass.
Then the jaws of the booms whined against the masts, and the sheets
creaked, and the sails filled with roaring; and when she slid into a
hollow she trampled like a woman tripped in her own silk dress, and came
out, her jib wet half-way up, yearning and peering for the tall
twin-lights of Thatcher's Island.

They left the cold grey of the Bank sea, saw the lumber-ships making for
Quebec by the Straits of St. Lawrence, with the Jersey salt-brigs from
Spain and Sicily; found a friendly northeaster off Artimon Bank that drove
them within view of the East light of Sable Island,—a sight Disko
did not linger over,—and stayed with them past Western and Le Have,
to the northern fringe of George's. From there they picked up the deeper
water, and let her go merrily.

"Hattie's pulling on the string," Dan confided to Harvey. "Hattie an' ma.
Next Sunday you'll be hirin' a boy to throw water on the windows to make
ye go to sleep. 'Guess you'll keep with us till your folks come. Do you
know the best of gettin' ashore again?"

"Hot bath'?" said Harvey. His eyebrows were all white with dried spray.

"That's good, but a night-shirt's better. I've been dreamin' o'
night-shirts ever since we bent our mainsail. Ye can wiggle your toes
then. Ma'll hev a new one fer me, all washed soft. It's home, Harve. It's
home! Ye can sense it in the air. We're runnin' into the aidge of a hot
wave naow, an' I can smell the bayberries. Wonder if we'll get in fer
supper. Port a trifle."

The hesitating sails flapped and lurched in the close air as the deep
smoothed out, blue and oily, round them. When they whistled for a wind
only the rain came in spiky rods, bubbling and drumming, and behind the
rain the thunder and the lightning of mid-August. They lay on the deck
with bare feet and arms, telling one another what they would order at
their first meal ashore; for now the land was in plain sight. A Gloucester
swordfish-boat drifted alongside, a man in the little pulpit on the
bowsprit flourishing his harpoon, his bare head plastered down with the
wet. "And all's well!" he sang cheerily, as though he were watch on a big
liner. "Wouverman's waiting fer you, Disko. What's the news o' the Fleet?"

Disko shouted it and passed on, while the wild summer storm pounded
overhead and the lightning flickered along the capes from four different
quarters at once. It gave the low circle of hills round Gloucester
Harbour, Ten Pound Island, the fish-sheds, with the broken line of
house-roofs, and each spar and buoy on the water, in blinding photographs
that came and went a dozen times to the minute as the "We're Here" crawled
in on half-flood, and the whistling-buoy moaned and mourned behind her.
Then the storm died out in long, separated, vicious dags of blue-white
flame, followed by a single roar like the roar of a mortar-battery, and
the shaken air tingled under the stars as it got back to silence.

"The flag, the flag!" said Disko, suddenly, pointing upward.

"What is ut?" said Long Jack.

"Otto! Ha'af mast. They can see us frum shore now."

"I'd clean forgot. He's no folk to Gloucester, has he?"

"Girl he was goin' to be married to this fall."

"Mary pity her!" said Long Jack, and lowered the little flag half-mast for
the sake of Otto, swept overboard in a gale off Le Have three months
before.

Disko wiped the wet from his eyes and led the "We're Here" to Wouverman's
wharf, giving his orders in whispers, while she swung round moored tugs
and night-watchmen hailed her from the ends of inky-black piers. Over and
above the darkness and the mystery of the procession, Harvey could feel
the land close round him once more, with all its thousands of people
asleep, and the smell of earth after rain, and the familiar noise of a
switching-engine coughing to herself in a freight-yard; and all those
things made his heart beat and his throat dry up as he stood by the
foresheet. They heard the anchor-watch snoring on a lighthouse-tug, nosed
into a pocket of darkness where a lantern glimmered on either side;
somebody waked with a grunt, threw them a rope, and they made fast to a
silent wharf flanked with great iron-roofed sheds full of warm emptiness,
and lay there without a sound.

Then Harvey sat down by the wheel, and sobbed and sobbed as though his
heart would break, and a tall woman who had been sitting on a weigh-scale
dropped down into the schooner and kissed Dan once on the cheek; for she
was his mother, and she had seen the "We're Here" by the
lightning-flashes. She took no notice of Harvey till he had recovered
himself a little and Disko had told her his story. Then they went to
Disko's house together as the dawn was breaking; and until the telegraph
office was open and he could wire to his folk, Harvey Cheyne was perhaps
the loneliest boy in all America. But the curious thing was that Disko and
Dan seemed to think none the worse of him for crying.

Wouverman was not ready for Disko's prices till Disko, sure that the
"We're Here" was at least a week ahead of any other Gloucester boat, had
given him a few days to swallow them; so all hands played about the
streets, and Long Jack stopped the Rocky Neck trolley, on principle, as he
said, till the conductor let him ride free. But Dan went about with his
freckled nose in the air, bungful of mystery and most haughty to his
family.

"Dan, I'll hev to lay inter you ef you act this way," said Troop,
pensively. "Sence we've come ashore this time you've bin a heap too
fresh."

"I'd lay into him naow ef he was mine," said Uncle Salters, sourly. He and
Penn boarded with the Troops.

"Oho!" said Dan, shuffling with the accordion round the back-yard, ready
to leap the fence if the enemy advanced. "Dad, you're welcome to your own
jedgment, but remember I've warned ye. Your own flesh an' blood ha' warned
ye! 'Tain't any o' my fault ef you're mistook, but I'll be on deck to
watch ye. An' ez fer yeou, Uncle Salters, Pharaoh's chief butler ain't in
it 'longside o' you! You watch aout an' wait. You'll be ploughed under
like your own blamed clover; but me—Dan Troop—I'll flourish
like a green bay-tree because I warn't stuck on my own opinion."

Disko was smoking in all his shore dignity and a pair of beautiful
carpet-slippers. "You're gettin' ez crazy as poor Harve. You two go
araound gigglin' an' squinchin' an' kickin' each other under the table
till there's no peace in the haouse," said he.

"There's goin' to be a heap less—fer some folks," Dan replied. "You
wait an' see."

He and Harvey went out on the trolley to East Gloucester, where they
tramped through the bayberry-bushes to the lighthouse, and lay down on the
big red boulders and laughed themselves hungry. Harvey had shown Dan a
telegram, and the two swore to keep silence till the shell burst.

"Harve's folk?" said Dan, with an unruffled face after supper. "Well, I
guess they don't amount to much of anything, or we'd ha' heard frum 'em by
naow. His pop keeps a kind o' store out West. Maybe he'll give you's much
as five dollars, dad."

"What did I tell ye?" said Salters. "Don't sputter over your vittles,
Dan."

CHAPTER IX

Whatever his private sorrows may be, a multimillionaire, like any other
workingman, should keep abreast of his business. Harvey Cheyne, senior,
had gone East late in June to meet a woman broken down, half mad, who
dreamed day and night of her son drowning in the grey seas. He had
surrounded her with doctors, trained nurses, massage-women, and even
faith-cure companions, but they were useless. Mrs. Cheyne lay still and
moaned, or talked of her boy by the hour together to any one who would
listen. Hope she had none, and who could offer it? All she needed was
assurance that drowning did not hurt; and her husband watched to guard
lest she should make the experiment. Of his own sorrow he spoke little—hardly
realised the depth of it till he caught himself asking the calendar on his
writing-desk, "What's the use of going on?"

There had always lain a pleasant notion at the back of his head that, some
day, when he had rounded off everything and the boy had left college, he
would take his son to his heart and lead him into his possessions. Then
that boy, he argued, as busy fathers do, would instantly become his
companion, partner, and ally, and there would follow splendid years of
great works carried out together—the old head backing the young
fire. Now his boy was dead—lost at sea, as it might have been a
Swede sailor from one of Cheyne's big tea-ships; the wife was dying, or
worse; he himself was trodden down by platoons of women and doctors and
maids and attendants; worried almost beyond endurance by the shift and
change of her poor restless whims; hopeless, with no heart to meet his
many enemies.

He had taken the wife to his raw new palace in San Diego, where she and
her people occupied a wing of great price, and Cheyne, in a verandah-room,
between a secretary and a typewriter, who was also a telegraphist, toiled
along wearily from day to day. There was a war of rates among four Western
railroads in which he was supposed to be interested; a devastating strike
had developed in his lumber-camps in Oregon, and the legislature of the
State of California, which has no love for its makers, was preparing open
war against him.

Ordinarily he would have accepted battle ere it was offered, and have
waged a pleasant and unscrupulous campaign. But now he sat limply, his
soft black hat pushed forward on to his nose, his big body shrunk inside
his loose clothes, staring at his boots or the Chinese junks in the bay,
and assenting absently to the secretary's questions as he opened the
Saturday mail.

Cheyne was wondering how much it would cost to drop everything and pull
out. He carried huge insurances, could buy himself royal annuities, and
between one of his places in Colorado and a little society (that would do
the wife good), say in Washington and the South Carolina islands, a man
might forget plans that had come to nothing. On the other hand...

The click of the typewriter stopped; the girl was looking at the
secretary, who had turned white.

He passed Cheyne a telegram repeated from San Francisco:

Picked up by fishing schooner "We're Here" having fallen off boat great
times on Banks fishing all well waiting Gloucester Mass care Disko Troop
for money or orders wire what shall do and how is mama Harvey N. Cheyne.

The father let it fall, laid his head down on the roller-top of the shut
desk, and breathed heavily. The secretary ran for Mrs. Cheyne's doctor,
who found Cheyne pacing to and fro.

"What-what d'you think of it? Is it possible? Is there any meaning to it?
I can't quite make it out," he cried.

"I can," said the doctor. "I lose seven thousand a year—that's all."
He thought of the struggling New York practice he had dropped at Cheyne's
imperious bidding, and returned the telegram with a sigh.

"You mean you'd tell her? 'Maybe a fraud?"

"What's the motive?" said the doctor, coolly. "Detection's too certain.
It's the boy sure enough."

Enter a French maid, impudently, as an indispensable one who is kept on
only by large wages.

"Mrs. Cheyne she say you must come at once. She think you are seek."

The master of thirty millions bowed his head meekly and followed Suzanne;
and a thin, high voice on the upper landing of the great white-wood square
staircase cried: "What is it? what has happened?"

No doors could keep out the shriek that rang through the echoing house a
moment later, when her husband blurted out the news.

"And that's all right," said the doctor, serenely, to the typewriter.
"About the only medical statement in novels with any truth to it is that
joy don't kill, Miss Kinzey."

"I know it; but we've a heap to do first." Miss Kinzey was from Milwaukee,
somewhat direct of speech; and as her fancy leaned towards the secretary,
she divined there was work in hand. He was looking earnestly at the vast
roller-map of America on the wall.

"Milsom, we're going right across. Private car straight through—Boston.
Fix the connections," shouted Cheyne down the staircase.

"I thought so."

The secretary turned to the typewriter, and their eyes met (out of that
was born a story—nothing to do with this story). She looked
inquiringly, doubtful of his resources. He signed to her to move to the
Morse as a general brings brigades into action. Then he swept his hand.
musician-wise through his hair, regarded the ceiling, and set to work,
while Miss Kinzey's white fingers called up the Continent of America.

"K. H. Wade, Los Angeles—The 'Constance' is at Los Angeles, isn't
she, Miss Kinzey?"

"Yep." Miss Kinzey nodded between clicks as the secretary looked at his
watch.

"Ready? Send 'Constance,' private car, here, and arrange for special to
leave here Sunday in time to connect with New York Limited at Sixteenth
Street, Chicago, Tuesday next."

Click—click—click! "Couldn't you better that'?"

"Not on those grades. That gives 'em sixty hours from here to Chicago.
They won't gain anything by taking a special east of that. Ready? Also
arrange with Lake Shore and Michigan Southern to take 'Constance' on New
York Central and Hudson River Buffalo to Albany, and B. and A. the same
Albany to Boston. Indispensable I should reach Boston Wednesday evening.
Be sure nothing prevents. Have also wired Canniff, Toucey, and Barnes.—Sign,
Cheyne."

Miss Kinzey nodded, and the secretary went on.

"Now then. Canniff, Toucey, and Barnes, of course. Ready? Canniff Chicago.
Please take my private car 'Constance 'from Santa Fe at Sixteenth Street
next Tuesday p. m. on N. Y. Limited through to Buffalo and deliver N. Y.
C. for Albany.—Ever bin to N' York, Miss Kinzey? We'll go some day.
Ready? Take car Buffalo to Albany on Limited Tuesday p. m. That's for
Toucey."

"Haven't bin to Noo York, but I know that!" with a toss of the head.

"Beg pardon. Now, Boston and Albany, Barnes, same instructions from Albany
through to Boston. Leave three-five P. M. (you needn't wire that); arrive
nine-five P. M. Wednesday. That covers everything Wade will do, but it
pays to shake up the managers."

"It's great," said Miss Kinzey, with a look of admiration. This was the
kind of man she understood and appreciated.

"'Tisn't bad," said Milsom, modestly. "Now, any one but me would have lost
thirty hours and spent a week working out the run, instead of handing him
over to the Santa Fe straight through to Chicago."

"But see here, about that Noo York Limited. Chauncey Depew himself
couldn't hitch his car to her," Miss Kinzey suggested, recovering herself.

"Yes, but this isn't Chauncey. It's Cheyne—lightning. It goes."

"Even so. Guess we'd better wire the boy. You've forgotten that, anyhow."

"I'll ask."

When he returned with the father's message bidding Harvey meet them in
Boston at an appointed hour, he found Miss Kinzey laughing over the keys.
Then Milsom laughed too, for the frantic clicks from Los Angeles ran: "We
want to know why—why—why? General uneasiness developed and
spreading."

Ten minutes later Chicago appealed to Miss Kinzey in these words: "If
crime of century is maturing please warn friends in time. We are all
getting to cover here."

This was capped by a message from Topeka (and wherein Topeka was concerned
even Milsom could not guess): "Don't shoot, Colonel. We'll come down."

Cheyne smiled grimly at the consternation of his enemies when the
telegrams were laid before him. "They think we're on the war-path. Tell
'em we don't feel like fighting just now, Milsom. Tell 'em what we're
going for. I guess you and Miss Kinzey had better come along, though it
isn't likely I shall do any business on the road. Tell 'em the truth—for
once."

So the truth was told. Miss Kinzey clicked in the sentiment while the
secretary added the memorable quotation, "Let us have peace," and in
board-rooms two thousand miles away the representatives of sixty-three
million dollars' worth of variously manipulated railroad interests
breathed more freely. Cheyne was flying to meet the only son, so
miraculously restored to him. The bear was seeking his cub, not the bulls.
Hard men who had their knives drawn to fight for their financial lives put
away the weapons and wished him God-speed, while half a dozen
panic-smitten tin-pot roads perked up their heads and spoke of the
wonderful things they would have done had not Cheyne buried the hatchet.

It was a busy week-end among the wires; for, now that their anxiety was
removed, men and cities hastened to accommodate. Los Angeles called to San
Diego and Barstow that the Southern California engineers might know and be
ready in their lonely round-houses; Barstow passed the word to the
Atlantic and Pacific; the Albuquerque flung it the whole length of the
Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe management, even into Chicago. An engine,
combination-car with crew, and the great and gilded "Constance" private
car were to be "expedited" over those two thousand three hundred and fifty
miles. The train would take precedence of one hundred and seventy-seven
others meeting and passing; despatches and crews of every one of those
said trains must be notified. Sixteen locomotives, sixteen engineers, and
sixteen firemen would be needed—each and every one the best
available. Two and one half minutes would be allowed for changing engines,
three for watering, and two for coaling. "Warn the men, and arrange tanks
and chutes accordingly; for Harvey Cheyne is in a hurry, a hurry-a hurry,"
sang the wires. "Forty miles an hour will be expected, and division
superintendents will accompany this special over their respective
divisions. From San Diego to Sixteenth Street, Chicago, let the magic
carpet be laid down. Hurry! oh, hurry!"

"It will be hot," said Cheyne, as they rolled out of San Diego in the dawn
of Sunday. "We're going to hurry, mama, just as fast as ever we can; but I
really don't think there's any good of your putting on your bonnet and
gloves yet. You'd much better lie down and take your medicine. I'd play
you a game o' dominoes, but it's Sunday."

"I'll be good. Oh, I will be good. Only—taking off my bonnet makes
me feel as if we'd never get there."

"Try to sleep a little, mama, and we'll be in Chicago before you know."

"But it's Boston, father. Tell them to hurry."

The six-foot drivers were hammering their way to San Bernardino and the
Mohave wastes, but this was no grade for speed. That would come later. The
heat of the desert followed the heat of the hills as they turned east to
the Needles and the Colorado River. The car cracked in the utter drought
and glare, and they put crushed ice to Mrs. Cheyne's neck, and toiled up
the long, long grades, past Ash Fork, towards Flagstaff, where the forests
and quarries are, under the dry, remote skies. The needle of the
speed-indicator flicked and wagged to and fro; the cinders rattled on the
roof, and a whirl of dust sucked after the whirling wheels, The crew of
the combination sat on their bunks, panting in their shirt-sleeves, and
Cheyne found himself among them shouting old, old stories of the railroad
that every trainman knows, above the roar of the car. He told them about
his son, and how the sea had given up its dead, and they nodded and spat
and rejoiced with him; asked after "her, back there," and whether she
could stand it if the engineer "let her out a piece," and Cheyne thought
she could. Accordingly, the great fire-horse was "let out" from Flagstaff
to Winslow, till a division superintendent protested.

But Mrs. Cheyne, in the boudoir state-room, where the French maid,
sallow-white with fear, clung to the silver door-handle, only moaned a
little and begged her husband to bid them "hurry." And so they dropped the
dry sands and moon-struck rocks of Arizona behind them, and grilled on
till the crash of the couplings and the wheeze of the brake-hose told them
they were at Coolidge by the Continental Divide. Three bold and
experienced men—cool, confident, and dry when they began; white,
quivering, and wet when they finished their trick at those terrible wheels—swung
her over the great lift from Albuquerque to Glorietta and beyond Springer,
up and up to the Raton Tunnel on the State line, whence they dropped
rocking into La Junta, had sight of the Arkansaw, and tore down the long
slope to Dodge City, where Cheyne took comfort once again from setting his
watch an hour ahead.

Original

There was very little talk in the car. The secretary and typewriter sat
together on the stamped Spanish-leather cushions by the plate-glass
observation-window at the rear end, watching the surge and ripple of the
ties crowded back behind them, and, it is believed, making notes of the
scenery. Cheyne moved nervously between his own extravagant gorgeousness
and the naked necessity of the combination, an unlit cigar in his teeth,
till the pitying crews forgot that he was their tribal enemy, and did
their best to entertain him.

At night the bunched electrics lit up that distressful palace of all the
luxuries, and they fared sumptuously, swinging on through the emptiness of
abject desolation. Now they heard the swish of a water-tank, and the
guttural voice of a China-man, the clink-clink of hammers that tested the
Krupp steel wheels, and the oath of a tramp chased off the rear platform;
now the solid crash of coal shot into the tender; and now a beating back
of noises as they flew past a waiting train. Now they looked out into
great abysses, a trestle purring beneath their tread, or up to rocks that
barred out half the stars. Now scaur and ravine changed and rolled back to
jagged mountains on the horizon's edge, and now broke into hills lower and
lower, till at last came the true plains.

At Dodge City an unknown hand threw in a copy of a Kansas paper containing
some sort of an interview with Harvey, who had evidently fallen in with an
enterprising reporter, telegraphed on from Boston. The joyful journalese
revealed that it was beyond question their boy, and it soothed Mrs. Cheyne
for a while. Her one word "hurry" was conveyed by the crews to the
engineers at Nickerson, Topeka, and Marceline, where the grades are easy,
and they brushed the Continent behind them. Towns and villages were close
together now, and a man could feel here that he moved among people.

"I can't see the dial, and my eyes ache so. What are we doing?"

"The very best we can, mama. There's no sense in getting in before the
Limited. We'd only have to wait."

"I don't care. I want to feel we're moving. Sit down and tell me the
miles."

Cheyne sat down and read the dial for her (there were some miles which
stand for records to this day), but the seventy-foot car never changed its
long, steamer-like roll, moving through the heat with the hum of a giant
bee. Yet the speed was not enough for Mrs. Cheyne; and the heat, the
remorseless August heat, was making her giddy; the clock-hands would not
move, and when, oh, when would they be in Chicago?

It is not true that, as they changed engines at Fort Madison, Cheyne
passed over to the Amalgamated Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers an
endowment sufficient to enable them to fight him and his fellows on equal
terms for evermore. He paid his obligations to engineers and firemen as he
believed they deserved, and only his bank knows what he gave the crews who
had sympathised with him. It is on record that the last crew took entire
charge of switching operations at Sixteenth Street, because "she" was in a
doze at last, and Heaven was to help any one who bumped her.

Now the highly paid specialist who conveys the Lake Shore and Michigan
Southern Limited from Chicago to Elkhart is something of an autocrat, and
he does not approve of being told how to back up to a car. None the less
he handled the "Constance" as if she might have been a load of dynamite,
and when the crew rebuked him, they did it in whispers and dumb show.

"Pshaw!" said the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe men, discussing life
later, "we weren't runnin' for a record. Harvey Cheyne's wife, she were
sick back, an' we didn't want to jounce her. 'Come to think of it, our
runnin' time from San Diego to Chicago was 57.54. You can tell that to
them Eastern way-trains. When we're tryin' for a record, we'll let you
know."

To the Western man (though this would not please either city) Chicago and
Boston are cheek by jowl, and some railroads encourage the delusion. The
Limited whirled the "Constance" into Buffalo and the arms of the New York
Central and Hudson River (illustrious magnates with white whiskers and
gold charms on their watch-chains boarded her here to talk a little
business to Cheyne), who slid her gracefully into Albany, where the Boston
and Albany completed the run from tide-water to tide-water—total
time, eighty-seven hours and thirty-five minutes, or three days, fifteen
hours and one half. Harvey was waiting for them.

After violent emotion most people and all boys demand food. They feasted
the returned prodigal behind drawn curtains, cut off in their great
happiness, while the trains roared in and out around them. Harvey ate,
drank, and enlarged on his adventures all in one breath, and when he had a
hand free his mother fondled it. His voice was thickened with living in
the open, salt air; his palms were rough and hard, his wrists dotted with
the marks of gurry-sores; and a fine full flavour of cod-fish hung round
rubber boots and blue jersey.

The father, well used to judging men, looked at him keenly. He did not
know what enduring harm the boy might have taken. Indeed, he caught
himself thinking that he knew very little whatever of his son; but he
distinctly remembered an unsatisfied, dough-faced youth who took delight
in "calling down the old man" and reducing his mother to tears—such
a person as adds to the gaiety of public rooms and hotel piazzas, where
the ingenuous young of the wealthy play with or revile the bell-boys. But
this well set-up fisher-youth did not wriggle, looked at him with eyes
steady, clear, and unflinching, and spoke in a tone distinctly, even
startlingly, respectful. There was that in his voice, too, which seemed to
promise that the change might be permanent, and that the new Harvey had
come to stay.

"Some one's been coercing him," thought Cheyne. "Now Constance would never
have allowed that. Don't see as Europe could have done it any better."

"But why didn't you tell this man, Troop, who you were?" the mother
repeated, when Harvey had expanded his story at least twice.

"Disko Troop, dear. The best man that ever walked a deck. I don't care who
the next is."

"Why didn't you tell him to put you ashore? You know papa would have made
it up to him ten times over."

"I know it; but he thought I was crazy. I'm afraid I called him a thief
because I couldn't find the bills in my pocket."

"A sailor found them by the flagstaff that—that night," sobbed Mrs.
Cheyne.

"That explains it, then. I don't blame Troop any. I just said I wouldn't
work—on a Banker, too—and of course he hit me on the nose, and
oh! I bled like a stuck hog."

"My poor darling! They must have abused you horribly."

"Dunno quite. Well, after that, I saw a light."

Cheyne slapped his leg and chuckled. This was going to be a boy after his
own hungry heart. He had never seen precisely that twinkle in Harvey's eye
before.

"And the old man gave me ten and a half a month; he's paid me half now;
and I took hold with Dan and pitched right in. I can't do a man's work
yet. But I can handle a dory 'most as well as Dan, and I don't get rattled
in a fog—much; and I can take my trick in light winds—that's
steering, dear—and I can 'most bait up a trawl, and I know my ropes,
of course; and I can pitch fish till the cows come home, and I'm great on
old Josephus, and I'll show you how I can clear coffee with a piece of
fish-skin, and—I think I'll have another cup, please. Say, you've no
notion what a heap of work there is in ten and a half a month!"

"I began with eight and a half, my son," said Cheyne.

"'That so? You never told me, sir."

"You never asked, Harve. I'll tell you about it some day, if you care to
listen. Try a stuffed olive."

"Troop says the most interesting thing in the world is to find out how the
next man gets his vittles. It's great to have a trimmed-up meal again. We
were well fed, though. Best mug on the Banks. Disko fed us first-class.
He's a great man. And Dan—that's his son—Dan's my partner. And
there's Uncle Salters and his manures, an' he reads Josephus. He's sure
I'm crazy yet. And there's poor little Penn, and he is crazy. You mustn't
talk to him about Johnstown, because—And, oh, you must know Tom
Platt and Long Jack and Manuel. Manuel saved my life. I'm sorry he's a
Portugee. He can't talk much, but he's an everlasting musician. He found
me struck adrift and drifting, and hauled me in."

"I wonder your nervous system isn't completely wrecked," said Mrs. Cheyne.

"What for, mama? I worked like a horse and I ate like a hog and I slept
like a dead man."

That was too much for Mrs. Cheyne, who began to think of her visions of a
corpse rocking on the salty seas. She went to her state-room, and Harvey
curled up beside his father, explaining his indebtedness.

"You can depend upon me to do everything I can for the crowd, Harve. They
seem to be good men on your showing."

"Best in the Fleet, sir. Ask at Gloucester," said Harvey. "But Disko
believes still he's cured me of being crazy. Dan's the only one I've let
on to about you, and our private cars and all the rest of it, and I'm not
quite sure Dan believes. I want to paralyse 'em to-morrow. Say, can't they
run the 'Constance' over to Gloucester? Mama don't look fit to be moved,
anyway, and we're bound to finish cleaning out by to-morrow. Wouverman
takes our fish. You see, we're first off the Banks this season, and it's
four twenty-five a quintal. We held out till he paid it. They want it
quick."

"You mean you'll have to work to-morrow, then?"

"I told Troop I would. I'm on the scales. I've brought the tallies with
me." He looked at the greasy notebook with an air of importance that made
his father choke. "There isn't but three—no—two ninety-four or
five quintal more by my reckoning."

"Hire a substitute," suggested Cheyne, to see what Harvey would say.

"Can't, sir. I'm tally-man for the schooner. Troop says I've a better head
for figures than Dan. Troop's a mighty just man."

"Well, suppose I don't move the 'Constance' to-night, how'll you fix it?"

Harvey looked at the clock, which marked twenty past eleven.

"Then I'll sleep here till three and catch the four o'clock freight. They
let us men from the Fleet ride free, as a rule."

"That's a notion. But I think we can get the 'Constance' around about as
soon as your men's freight. Better go to bed now."

Harvey spread himself on the sofa, kicked off his boots, and was asleep
before his father could shade the electrics. Cheyne sat watching the young
face under the shadow of the arm thrown over the forehead, and among many
things that occurred to him was the notion that he might perhaps have been
neglectful as a father.

"One never knows when one's taking one's biggest risks," he said. "It
might have been worse than drowning; but I don't think it has—I
don't think it has. If it hasn't, I haven't enough to pay Troop, that's
all; and I don't think it has."

Morning brought a fresh sea breeze through the windows, the "Constance"
was side-tracked among freight-cars at Gloucester, and Harvey had gone to
his business.

"Then he'll fall overboard again and be drowned," the mother said
bitterly.

"We'll go and look, ready to throw him a rope in case. You've never seen
him working for his bread," said the father.

"What nonsense! As if any one expected—"

"Well, the man that hired him did. He's about right, too."

They went down between the stores full of fishermen's oilskins to
Wouverman's wharf, where the "We're Here" rode high, her Bank flag still
flying, all hands busy as beavers in the glorious morning light. Disko
stood by the main hatch superintending Manuel, Penn, and Uncle Salters at
the tackle. Dan was swinging the loaded baskets inboard as Long Jack and
Tom Platt filled them, and Harvey, with a notebook, represented the
skipper's interests before the clerk of the scales on the salt-sprinkled
wharf-edge.

"Ready!" cried the voices below. "Haul!" cried Disko. "Hi!" said Manuel.
"Here!" said Dan, swinging the basket. Then they heard Harvey's voice,
clear and fresh, checking the weights.

The last of the fish had been whipped out, and Harvey leaped from the
string-piece six feet to a ratline, as the shortest way to hand Disko the
tally, shouting, "Two ninety-seven, and an empty hold!"

"What's total, Harve?" said Disko.

"Eight sixty-five. Three thousand six hundred and seventy-six dollars and
a quarter. 'Wish I'd share as well as wage."

"Well, I won't go so far as to say you hevn't deserved it, Harve. Don't
you want to slip up to Wouverman's office and take him our tallies?"

"Who's that boy?" said Cheyne to Dan, well used to all manner of questions
from those idle imbeciles called summer boarders.

"Well, he's a kind o' supercargo," was the answer. "We picked him up
struck adrift on the Banks. Fell overboard from a liner, he sez. He was a
passenger. He's by way o' bein' a fisherman now."

"Is he worth his keep?"

"Ye-ep. Dad, this man wants to know ef Harve's worth his keep. Say, would
you like to go aboard? We'll fix a ladder for her."

"I should very much, indeed. 'Twon't hurt you, mama, and you'll be able to
see for yourself."

The woman who could not lift her head a week ago scrambled down the
ladder, and stood aghast amid the mess and tangle aft.

"Be you anyways interested in Harve?" said Disko.

"Well, ye-es."

"He's a good boy, an' ketches right hold jest as he's bid. You've heard
haow we found him? He was sufferin' from nervous prostration, I guess, 'r
else his head had hit somethin', when we hauled him aboard. He's all over
that naow. Yes, this is the cabin. 'Tain't anyways in order, but you're
quite welcome to look around. Those are his figures on the stove-pipe,
where we keep the reckonin' mostly."

"Did he sleep here?" said Mrs. Cheyne, sitting on a yellow locker and
surveying the disorderly bunks.

"No. He berthed forward, madam, an' only fer him an' my boy hookin' fried
pies an' muggin' up when they ought to ha' been asleep, I dunno as I've
any special fault to find with him."

"There weren't nothin' wrong with Harve," said Uncle Salters, descending
the steps. "He hung my boots on the main-truck, and he ain't over an'
above respectful to such as knows more'n he do, especially about farmin';
but he were mostly misled by Dan."

Dan, in the meantime, profiting by dark hints from Harvey early that
morning, was executing a war-dance on deck. "Tom, Tom!" he whispered down
the hatch. "His folks has come, an' dad hain't caught on yet, an' they're
pow-wowin' in the cabin. She's a daisy, an' he's all Harve claimed he was,
by the looks of him."

"Howly Smoke!" said Long Jack, climbing out covered with salt and
fish-skin. "D'ye belave his tale av the kid an' the little four-horse rig
was thrue?"

"I knew it all along," said Dan. "Come an' see dad mistook in his
judgments."

They came delightedly, just in time to hear Cheyne say: "I'm glad he has a
good character, because—he's my son."

Disko's jaw fell,—Long Jack always vowed that he heard the click of
it,—and he stared alternately at the man and the woman.

"I got his telegram in San Diego four days ago, and we came over."

"In a private car?" said Dan. "He said ye might."

"In a private car, of course."

Dan looked at his father with a hurricane of irreverent winks.

"There was a tale he tould us av drivin' four little ponies in a rig av
his own," said Long Jack. "Was that thrue now?"

"Very likely," said Cheyne. "Was it, mama?"

"He had a little drag when we were in Toledo, I think," said the mother.

Long Jack whistled. "Oh, Disko!" said he, and that was all.

"I wuz—I am mistook in my jedgments—worse'n the men o'
Marblehead," said Disko, as though the words were being windlassed out of
him. "I don't mind ownin' to you, Mister Cheyne, as I mistrusted the boy
to be crazy. He talked kinder odd about money."

"So he told me."

"Did he tell ye anything else? 'Cause I pounded him once." This with a
somewhat anxious glance at Mrs. Cheyne.

"Oh, yes," Cheyne replied. "I should say it probably did him more good
than anything else in the world."

"I jedged 'twuz necessary, er I wouldn't ha' done it. I don't want you to
think we abuse our boys any on this packet."

"I don't think you do, Mr. Troop."

Mrs. Cheyne had been looking at the faces—Disko's ivory-yellow,
hairless, iron countenance; Uncle Salters's, with its rim of agricultural
hair; Penn's bewildered simplicity; Manuel's quiet smile; Long Jack's grin
of delight; and Tom Platt's scar. Rough, by her standards, they certainly
were; but she had a mother's wits in her eyes, and she rose with
outstretched hands.

"Oh, tell me, which is who?" said she, half sobbing. "I want to thank you
and bless you—all of you."

"Faith, that pays me a hunder time," said Long Jack.

Original

Disko introduced them all in due form. The captain of an old-time Chinaman
could have done no better, and Mrs. Cheyne babbled incoherently. She
nearly threw herself into Manuel's arms when she understood that he had
first found Harvey.

"But how shall I leave him dreeft?" said poor Manuel. "What do you
yourself if you find him so? Eh, wha-at'? We are in one good boy, and I am
ever so pleased he come to be your son."

"And he told me Dan was his partner!" she cried. Dan was already
sufficiently pink, but he turned a rich crimson when Mrs. Cheyne kissed
him on both cheeks before the assembly. Then they led her forward to show
her the fo'c'sle, at which she wept again, and must needs go down to see
Harvey's identical bunk, and there she found the nigger cook cleaning up
the stove, and he nodded as though she were some one he had expected to
meet for years. They tried, two at a time, to explain the boat's daily
life to her, and she sat by the pawl-post, her gloved hands on the greasy
table, laughing with trembling lips and crying with dancing eyes.

"And who's ever to use the "We're Here" after this?" said Long Jack to Tom
Platt. "I feel it as if she'd made a cathedral av ut all."

"Cathedral!" sneered Tom Platt. "Oh, ef it had bin even the Fish
C'mmission boat instid o' this bally-hoo o' blazes. Ef we only hed some
decency an' order an' side-boys when she goes over! She'll have to climb
that ladder like a hen, an' we—we ought to be mannin' the yards!"

"Then Harvey was not mad," said Penn, slowly, to Cheyne.

"No, indeed—thank God," the big millionaire replied, stooping down
tenderly.

"It must be terrible to be mad. Except to lose your child, I do not know
anything more terrible. But your child has come back? Let us thank God for
that."

"Hello!" said Harvey, looking down upon them benignly from the wharf.

"I wuz mistook, Harve. I wuz mistook," said Disko, swiftly, holding up a
hand. "I wuz mistook in my jedgments. Ye needn't rub it in any more."

"'Guess I'll take care o' that," said Dan, under his breath.

"You'll be goin' off naow, won't ye?"

"Well, not without the balance of my wages, 'less you want to have the
"We're Here" attached."

"Thet's so; I'd clean forgot"; and he counted out the remaining dollars.
"You done all you contracted to do, Harve; and you done it 'baout's well
as ef you'd been brought up—" Here Disko brought himself up. He did
not quite see where the sentence was going to end.

"Outside of a private car?" suggested Dan, wickedly.

"Come on, and I'll show her to you," said Harvey.

Cheyne stayed to talk to Disko, but the others made a procession to the
depot, with Mrs. Cheyne at the head. The French maid shrieked at the
invasion; and Harvey laid the glories of the "Constance" before them
without a word. They took them in in equal silence—stamped leather,
silver door-handles and rails, cut velvet, plate-glass, nickel, bronze,
hammered iron, and the rare woods of the Continent inlaid.

"I told you," said Harvey; "I told you." This was his crowning revenge,
and a most ample one.

Mrs. Cheyne decreed a meal; and that nothing might be lacking to the tale
Long Jack told afterwards in his boarding-house, she waited on them
herself. Men who are accustomed to eat at tiny tables in howling gales
have curiously neat and finished table-manners; but Mrs. Cheyne, who did
not know this, was surprised. She longed to have Manuel for a butler; so
silently and easily did he comport himself among the frail glassware and
dainty silver. Tom Platt remembered great days on the Ohio and the manners
of foreign potentates who dined with the officers; and Long Jack, being
Irish, supplied the small talk till all were at their ease.

In the "We're Here's" cabin the fathers took stock of each other behind
their cigars. Cheyne knew well enough when he dealt with a man to whom he
could not offer money; equally well he knew that no money could pay for
what Disko had done. He kept his own counsel and waited for an opening.

"I hevn't done anything to your boy or fer your boy excep' make him work a
piece an' learn him how to handle the hog-yoke," said Disko. "He has twice
my boy's head for figgers."

"By the way," Cheyne answered casually, "what d'you calculate to make of
your boy?"

Disko removed his cigar and waved it comprehensively round the cabin.
"Dan's jest plain boy, an' he don't allow me to do any of his thinkin'.
He'll hev this able little packet when I'm laid by. He ain't noways
anxious to quit the business. I know that."

"Mmm! 'Ever been West, Mr. Troop?"

"Bin's fer ez Noo York once in a boat. I've no use for railroads. No more
hez Dan. Salt water's good enough fer the Troops. I've been 'most
everywhere—in the nat'ral way, o' course."

"I can give him all the salt water he's likely to need—till he's a
skipper."

"Haow's that? I thought you wuz a kinder railroad king. Harve told me so
when—I was mistook in my jedgments."

"We're all apt to be mistaken. I fancied perhaps you might know I own a
line of tea-clippers—San Francisco to Yokohama—six of 'em—iron-built,
about seventeen hundred and eighty tons apiece."

"Blame that boy! He never told. I'd ha' listened to that, instid o' his
truck abaout railroads an' pony-carriages."

"He didn't know."

"'Little thing like that slipped his mind, I guess."

"No, I only capt—took hold of the 'Blue M.' freighters—Morgan
and McQuade's old line—this summer."

Disko collapsed where he sat, beside the stove.

"Great Caesar Almighty! I mistrust I've bin fooled from one end to the
other. Why, Phil Airheart he went from this very town six year back—no,
seven—an' he's mate on the San José now—twenty-six days was
her time out. His sister she's livin' here yet, an' she reads his letters
to my woman. An' you own the 'Blue M.' freighters?"

Cheyne nodded.

"If I'd known that I'd ha' jerked the "We're Here" back to port all
standin', on the word."

"Perhaps that wouldn't have been so good for Harvey."

"Ef I'd only known! Ef he'd only said about the cussed Line, I'd ha'
understood! I'll never stand on my own jedgments again—never.
They're well-found packets, Phil Airheart he says so."

"I'm glad to have a recommend from that quarter. Airheart's skipper of the
San José now. What I was getting at is to know whether you'd lend me Dan
for a year or two, and we'll see if we can't make a mate of him. Would you
trust him to Airheart?"

"It's a resk taking a raw boy—"

"I know a man who did more for me."

"That's diff'runt. Look at here naow, I ain't recommendin' Dan special
because he's my own flesh an' blood. I know Bank ways ain't clipper ways,
but he hain't much to learn. Steer he can—no boy better, ef I say it—an'
the rest's in our blood an' get; but I could wish he warn't so cussed weak
on navigation."

"Airheart will attend to that. He'll ship as a boy for a voyage or two,
and then we can put him in the way of doing better. Suppose you take him
in hand this winter, and I'll send for him early in the spring. I know the
Pacific's a long ways off—"

"Pshaw! We Troops, livin' an' dead, are all around the earth an' the seas
thereof."

"But I want you to understand—and I mean this—any time you
think you'd like to see him, tell me, and I'll attend to the
transportation. 'Twon't cost you a cent."

"Ef you'll walk a piece with me, we'll go to my house an' talk this to my
woman. I've bin so crazy mistook in all my jedgments, it don't seem to me
this was like to be real."

They went over to Troop's eighteen-hundred-dollar, blue-trimmed white
house, with a retired dory full of nasturtiums in the front yard and a
shuttered parlor which was a museum of oversea plunder. There sat a large
woman, silent and grave, with the dim eyes of those who look long to sea
for the return of their beloved. Cheyne addressed himself to her, and she
gave consent wearily.

"We lose one hundred a year from Gloucester only, Mr. Cheyne," she said—"one
hundred boys an' men; and I've come so's to hate the sea as if 'twuz alive
an' listenin'. God never made it fer humans to anchor on. These packets o'
yours they go straight out, I take it, and straight home again?"

"As straight as the winds let 'em, and I give a bonus for record passages.
Tea don't improve by being at sea."

"When he wuz little he used to play at keeping store, an' I had hopes he
might follow that up. But soon's he could paddle a dory I knew that were
goin' to be denied me."

"They're square-riggers, mother; iron-built an' well found. Remember what
Phil's sister reads you when she gits his letters."

"I've never known as Phil told lies, but he's too venturesome (like most
of 'em that use the sea). Ef Dan sees fit, Mr. Cheyne, he can go—fer
all o' me."

"She jest despises the ocean," Disko explained, "an' I—I dunno haow
to act polite, I guess, er I'd thank you better."

"My father—my own eldest brother—two nephews—an' my
second sister's man," she said, dropping her head on her hand. "Would you
care fer any one that took all those?"

Cheyne was relieved when Dan turned up and accepted with more delight than
he was able to put into words. Indeed, the offer meant a plain and sure
road to all desirable things; but Dan thought most of commanding watch on
broad decks, and looking into far-away harbours.

Mrs. Cheyne had spoken privately to the unaccountable Manuel in the matter
of Harvey's rescue. He seemed to have no desire for money. Pressed hard,
he said that he would take five dollars, because he wanted to buy
something for a girl. Otherwise—"How shall I take money when I make
so easy my eats and smokes? You will giva some if I like or no? Eh,
wha-at? Then you shall giva me money, but not that way. You shall giva all
you can think." He introduced her to a snuffy Portuguese priest with a
list of semi-destitute widows as long as his cassock. As a strict
Unitarian, Mrs. Cheyne could not sympathise with the creed, but she ended
by respecting the brown, voluble little man.

Manuel, faithful son of the Church, appropriated all the blessings
showered on her for her charity. "That letta me out," said he. "I have now
ver' good absolutions for six months"; and he strolled forth to get a
handkerchief for the girl of the hour and to break the hearts of all the
others.

Salters went West for a season with Penn, and left no address behind. He
had a dread that these millionary people, with wasteful private cars,
might take undue interest in his companion. It was better to visit inland
relatives till the coast was clear. "Never you be adopted by rich folk,
Penn," he said in the cars, "or I'll take 'n' break this checker-board
over your head. Ef you forgit your name agin—which is Pratt—you
remember you belong with Salters Troop, an' set down right where you are
till I come fer you. Don't go taggin' araound after them whose eyes bung
out with fatness, accordin' to Scripcher."

CHAPTER X

But it was otherwise with the "We're Here's" silent cook, for he came up,
his kit in a handkerchief, and boarded the "Constance." Pay was no
particular object, and he did not in the least care where he slept. His
business, as revealed to him in dreams, was to follow Harvey for the rest
of his days. They tried argument and, at last, persuasion; but there is a
difference between one Cape Breton and two Alabama negroes, and the matter
was referred to Cheyne by the cook and porter. The millionaire only
laughed. He presumed Harvey might need a body-servant some day or other,
and was sure that one volunteer was worth five hirelings. Let the man
stay, therefore; even though he called himself MacDonald and swore in
Gaelic. The car could go back to Boston, where, if he were still of the
same mind, they would take him West.

With the "Constance," which in his heart of hearts he loathed, departed
the last remnant of Cheyne's millionairedom, and he gave himself up to an
energetic idleness. This Gloucester was a new town in a new land, and he
purposed to "take it in," as of old he had taken in all the cities from
Snohomish to San Diego of that world whence he hailed. They made money
along the crooked street which was half wharf and half ship's store: as a
leading professional he wished to learn how the noble game was played. Men
said that four out of every five fish-balls served at New England's Sunday
breakfast came from Gloucester, and overwhelmed him with figures in proof—statistics
of boats, gear, wharf-frontage, capital invested, salting, packing,
factories, insurance, wages, repairs, and profits. He talked with the
owners of the large fleets whose skippers were little more than hired men,
and whose crews were almost all Swedes or Portuguese. Then he conferred
with Disko, one of the few who owned their craft, and compared notes in
his vast head. He coiled himself away on chain-cables in marine
junk-shops, asking questions with cheerful, unslaked Western curiosity,
till all the water-front wanted to know "what in thunder that man was
after, anyhow." He prowled into the Mutual Insurance rooms, and demanded
explanations of the mysterious remarks chalked up on the blackboard day by
day; and that brought down upon him secretaries of every Fisherman's Widow
and Orphan Aid Society within the city limits. They begged shamelessly,
each man anxious to beat the other institution's record, and Cheyne tugged
at his beard and handed them all over to Mrs. Cheyne.

She was resting in a boarding-house near Eastern Point—a strange
establishment, managed, apparently, by the boarders, where the
table-cloths were red-and-white-checkered, and the population, who seemed
to have known one another intimately for years, rose up at midnight to
make Welsh rare-bits if it felt hungry. On the second morning of her stay
Mrs. Cheyne put away her diamond solitaires before she came down to
breakfast.