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"Captains Courageous": A Story of the Grand Banks

by Rudyard Kipling · English · Gutenberg #2225 · 313,993 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: "Captains Courageous": A Story of the Grand Banks

Author: Rudyard Kipling

Illustrator: I. W. Taber


        
Release date: June 1, 2000 [eBook #2225]
                Most recently updated: September 30, 2026

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/2225

Credits: Produced by Bill Stoddard and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK "CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS": A STORY OF THE GRAND BANKS ***



"CAPTAINS COURAGEOUS"

A STORY OF THE GRAND BANKS

By Rudyard Kipling




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?"

"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.

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?"

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."

"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?"

The bloodletting 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',[1] outside Beaufort Harbor, with Fort Macon heavin' hot shot at
our stern, an' a livin' gale atop of all. Where was you then, Disko?"

"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.


[1] The Gemsbok, U. S. N.?


"'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.

"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."

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.



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."

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."

"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.

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!"

"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."

"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.

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.

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 

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