AT BIG WRECK COVE
The girl had never been to sea before, not even on a pleasure boat down the harbor. The delights of a sail to Nantasket were quite unknown to her. Naturally this voyage out through the bay and into the illimitable ocean was sure to be either a delight or a most unpleasant experience.
Happily it was the former. She proved to be a good sailor.
"You was born for a sailor's bride, miss," Horry told her.
But he said it when nobody else was by to see the blush which stained her cheek. And yet she did not look happy after the old salt's observation. He hastened to interest her in another theme.
It was the tail of the afternoon watch. Because of the light and shifting airs the Seamew, in spite of her wonderful sailing qualities, had only then raised the northern extremity of the Cape and, turning on her heel, was now running out to sea again on the long leg of a tack into the southeast.
Horry hung to the spokes of the wheel while the skipper was helping Orion make up the manifest. The steersman had jettisoned his usual quid of tobacco when the girl approached him, and without that aid to complacency Horry just had to talk.
"Did you see the wheel jerk then, miss? That tug to sta'bo'd is the only fault I find with this here schooner. She's a right tidy craft, and Cap'n Tunis is a good judge of sailing ships, as his father was afore him.
"But although this Seamew looks like a new craft, she isn't. Sure, he knowed she wasn't new, Cap'n Tunis did, when he bought her up there to Marblehead. Only trouble is, he didn't seem to go quite deep enough into her antecedents, as the feller said. He bought her on the strength of her condition and the way she sailed on a trial trip."
"Well, isn't that all right?" asked his listener. "How would one go about buying a ship?"
"Huh—ship? Well, a schooner ain't a ship, Miss Bostwick. Howsomever, buying a schooner is like buying a race horse. You want to know his pedigree. They said the Seamew had been brought up from the Gulf to sell. And maybe she was. But she is Yankee built, every timber and rope of her. She warn't built down South none."
"Shouldn't that make the bargain all the more satisfactory?" queried the girl, smiling.
"Ordinarily, yes, ma'am. But it looks like they was hidin' something. It looks like, too, she was built for sailing and fishing, not to be a cargo boat."
"I think she is beautiful."
"She is sightly, I grant ye," said Horace. "But there's something to be considered 'sides looks when a man is putting his money into a craft. As I say, her pedigree oughter be looked up. What was the schooner before they changed the slant of them masts, painted her over, and put a new name under her stern?"
"I don't understand you at all, Mr. Newbegin," said the girl, staring at him with a strange look dawning in her own countenance.
He bent toward her, after casting a knowing glance aloft. His weather-bitten face was preternaturally solemn.
"Ye can't help havin' your suspicions 'bout ships or folks that are sailin' under cover. There's got to be some reason for a man changing his name and trying to get by on one that ain't his'n. Same with a schooner like this."
"Oh!"
"There is such things as hoodooed ships, Miss Bostwick, just like there is hoodooed folks," he said hoarsely, without seeming to notice her shrinking from him and her changed countenance.
"Oh! Is there?" she inquired faintly.
"Surest thing you know," acclaimed the old seaman with his most impressive manner. "There was a hoodooed schooner sailed out o' Salem some years back, the Marlin B. She had the same tug to sta'bo'd that I feel when I'm steerin' of this here schooner."
The girl was recovering from her momentary excitement. She saw that Newbegin had no ulterior meaning in his speech. He shook his head and cast a wary glance toward the companionway to see that the skipper was not appearing from below.
"Listen here, Miss Bostwick," he said hoarsely. "It's a mighty curious thing. I had just come back from a v'y'ge to New Guinea, and I thinks I'd like a trip to the Banks, not having been fishin' since I was a boy. I went to Sutro Brothers in Salem and got me a berth on the Marlin B. I marked that every man aboard her, skipper and all, warn't Salem men, nor yet from Gloucester nor Marblehead. But I didn't suspicion nothing.
"Tell you, Miss Bostwick, them that goes down to the sea in ships runs against more than natur's wonders. There's mysteries that ain't to be explained, scurce to be spoke of. I dunno why we shouldn't believe in spirits and ghosts and dead men come alive. The Bible's full of such, ain't it?
"Well, then! And what I tell you is as sure, as sure. I took the Marlin B. out of that harbor, being at the wheel. It was February, and a nasty snow squall come up and smothered us complete and proper. That schooner was a hummer; she sailed just so pretty as this one. She did for a fact. But I felt that tug to sta'bo'd. Do you know, Miss Bostwick, as I was tellin' Cap'n Tunis, there ain't never two craft just alike, no more than there is two men."
"Is that so?" she said.
"Ships is almost human. I never did see two so much alike as this Seamew and the Marlin B. Well, to continue, as the feller said, we was smothered in that snow squall for 'bout ten minutes. At the wheel there I heard off to windward the rushing sound of another craft. She was a tall ship, too, and she had as much canvas spread as we had. She came down on us like a shot.
"I shouted to the mate, but he had heard it too. He yelled for all hands on deck. We both knowed the Marlin B. was due to be run under unless a miracle intervened. It was a moment I ain't likely to forget, for we stood there, the whole ship's company, hanging on by backstay and rail, peering out into the smother of the snow, while the amazing rush of that unknown craft deafened us.
"Then out of her upper works—I swear I could see the tangle of ropes and slatting canvas—came a voice that rang in my ears for many a day, no matter how the others heard it. It shouted:
"We're the spirits of them ye run under! We're the spirits of them ye run under!"
"My soul and body, Miss Bostwick, but I was scairt!" confessed the old salt. "That rushing sound and the voices crashed on through our rigging and went down wind in a most amazing style. It was a ghost warning like nothing I'd ever heard before or since. And it struck the whole crew the same way. We begun to question what the Marlin B. was. She was a new schooner and had made but one trip to the Banks previous to this one we was on. We began to ask why her original crew had not stayed with her.
"You can't fool sailormen, Miss Bostwick," continued the old man, shaking his head with great solemnity. "They sees too much and they knows too much. Sutro Brothers had got rid of the Marlin B.'s first crew and picked up strangers, but murder will out. The story come to us through the night and in the snow squall. We couldn't stand for no murder ship. We made the skipper put back."
"Why, wasn't that mutiny?" gasped the girl.
"He was glad enough to turn back hisself. Even if he lost his ticket he would have turned back. Then we learned what it meant. On her first trip for fish, returning to Salem, the Marlin B. run under a smaller fishing craft and every soul aboard of her was lost. And it stands to reason that every time that murder schooner went out of the harbor and came to the spot where she'd run the other craft down, those uneasy souls would rise up and denounce the Marlin B."
"Oh!" gasped the girl, startled, for Tunis Latham and Orion stood behind her.
"Your tongue's hung in the middle and wags both ends, Horry," growled the young skipper. "You trying to scare Miss Bostwick out of her wits? What you poor, weak-minded, misguided fellows heard that time in the snow squall was a flock of black gulls coming down with the wind. And somebody aboard of the Marlin B. was a ventriloquist. Your whole crew weren't ignorant of the accident that happened on her first trip. Somebody had it in for Sutro Brothers, and made much of little, same as usual."
"Oh, they did?" muttered Horry.
"Anyway," said Captain Latham, "that's neither here nor there. We aren't sailing the Marlin B., for she's in Chilean waters, owned by a South American millionaire. You can stow that kind of talk, Horry—anyway, while Miss Bostwick is aboard."
They were until late in the evening beating into Paulmouth Harbor, but the heavens were starlit and the air as soft as spring. The tolling of the bell buoy over Bitter Reef was mellow and soothing; they heard it for a long time before the Seamew made the short leg of the final tack and went rushing in past the danger mark under the urge of a sudden puff of the fitful breeze.
"The old bell is welcoming us, Ida May," Captain Latham said to the girl who reclined in a canvas chair which the cook had raked out of the lazaret for her use. "I've beat my way in here when it hasn't sounded so cheerful."
"I am wondering what sort of welcome I shall receive when we get to—Wreckers' Head, do you call it?" she asked softly.
"That'll be all right, too," he told her with confidence. "Just wait and see."
They dropped anchor near the Main Street dock in order that they should be able to warp the schooner in to unload her cargo in the morning. Tunis allowed shore leave, late as the hour was. But he sat beside the passenger on the Seamew's deck, and they talked. It was surprising how much those two found to talk about! Perhaps a good deal of their inconsequential chatter was to hide the anxiety each felt in secret as to the future.
However, that talk was a memorable one for both Tunis Latham and the girl posing as Ida May Bostwick. Two young people can tell a great deal to each other under certain circumstances in the mid-watch of a starlit night. The lap, lap of the wavelets whispering against the schooner's hull, the drone of the surf on a distant bar, and the sounds of insect life from the shore were accompaniments to their long talk.
Orion Latham, tumbling over the forward rail from a waterside dinghy, whispered hoarsely in Johnny Lark's ear:
"What do you know about that? There they are, billin' and cooin', just where we left 'em when we went ashore. Wouldn't it sicken you?"
But Johnny only grinned and chuckled, shaking the tiny gold rings in his ears till they sparkled in the faint light. He had a girl himself in Portygee Town, at Big Wreck Cove.
The creaking of the hawsers and the "heave hos" of the crew as they warped the Seamew in to the wharf awoke the girl passenger in the cabin. There was little fancy about the schooner's after house, but it was comfortable.
There was a tarry smell about the place that rather pleased the girl. The lamp over the round table vibrated in its gimbals, but did not swing. There were several prints upon the walls of the cabin, prints which showed the rather exceptional taste of the Seamew's master, for they had been tacked up since she had come into Tunis Latham's possession.
There was, too, a somewhat faded photograph on a background of purple velvet, boxed in with glass, screwed to the forward stanchion. It was the photograph of an overhealthy-looking young woman, with scallops of hair pasted to her forehead undoubtedly with quince-seed pomatum, her basque wrinkled across her bust because of the high-shouldered cut of it. But it had been in the extreme mode when it was made and worn, in the eighties.
The brooch which fastened the lace collar had been painted yellow by the "artist photographer" of that day, and even the earrings she wore had been touched up, or perhaps painted on with the air brush.
This was Tunis Latham's mother, the girl who had seemed so promising an addition to the family in the opinion of Medway Latham, the builder of "Latham's Folly." The rather blowzy prettiness of Captain Randall Latham's young wife had been translated into real beauty in her son; for Tunis had got his physique and open, bold physiognomy from his mother.
The girl lying in an upper berth, a close cap tied over her neatly braided hair, parted the cretonne curtains to look at these ornaments hung about the cabin. She realized that the photograph, so strangely contrasting with the prints of some of the world's masterpieces, was a sort of shrine to Tunis Latham. He revered the mother whom he had told the girl he could not remember of ever having seen. His love and admiration for that unknown mother had helped make the captain of the Seamew what he was.
He was a good man, a safe man for any girl to trust. And yet he was lending himself to a species of masquerade which, if ever it became known, would bring upon his head both derision and scorn. He risked this contumely cheerfully and with a reckless disregard for what might arise through the plans they had made while sitting beside each other on that bench on Boston Common.
He would not admit the point of his own risk. He would not consider it when they had talked, only the night before, on the deck of the schooner. He scouted every possibility of any harm coming to him through their attempt to replace the girl in a firm niche in society and give the Cap'n Ira Balls what they needed of companionship and care.
The girl sat up in the berth and let her bare legs dangle a moment before dropping to the rug. In her bare feet she padded to the photograph of Captain Randall Latham's young wife.
The girl stood before the old photograph, her hands clasped, her gaze raised to the pictured face, as a votary might stand before the Madonna. There were tears in the girl's violet eyes. At that moment she was uplifted, carried out of herself by the wealth of feeling in her heart. Her lips moved.
"I promise," she said softly, "I promise you that I will never do anything that will hurt him. I promise you that I will never let him do anything that may harm him. He has given me my chance. I promise before you and God that he shall not be sorry, ever, that he has raised me out of the dust."
She stood on tiptoe and pressed her lips to the glass which covered the photograph.
The wind held fair, a quartering offshore blow, and the schooner, having discharged her cargo, just past noon spread her upper sails, caught a gentle breeze of old Boreas, and shot out of the harbor and so to the southward with a following wind which brought her to the mouth of Big Wreck Cove long before nightfall.
Upon the bluff of Wreckers' Head was to be dimly seen the sprawling Ball homestead. Tunis pointed it out to the passenger.
"That is where you are going to be happy, Ida May," he said to her softly.
"I wonder," murmured the girl.
He looked down into her rapt face. The violet eyes were fixed upon the old house and the brown-and-green fields immediately surrounding it. Perhaps Cap'n Ira and Prudence were out there now, watching from the front yard the white-winged Seamew threading so saucily the crooked passage into the cove, the sand bars on one hand and the serried teeth of the Lighthouse Point Reef on the other.
Inside the cove the schooner's canvas was reduced smartly to merely a topsail and jib, the wind in which carried her close enough to Luiz Wharf for a line to be cast ashore. Tier upon tier of barrels of clams were stored under the open sheds, ready to be packed away in the Seamew's hold. Orion loudly acclaimed against a malign fate.
"Hi golly! Ain't we goin' to have no spare time at all? This running in a coasting packet is plain slavery; that's what it is! A man don't have a chance even to go home and change his socks 'tween trips."
"Have a clean pair in your duffel bag; then you won't have to go home for 'em, 'Rion," advised Tunis. "We've got to make hay while the sun shines. There'll be loafing enough to cut into the profits by and by when bad weather breaks."
Orion grunted pessimistically. Little in this world ever just suited Orion.
"She's a hoodooed packet. I said it from the first," he muttered to Horry. "You know well enough what she was before they gave her a lick of paint and a new name. We'll all pay high yet for sailin' in her."
"I wouldn't let Cap'n Tunis hear me say that 'nless I was seekin' a new berth," rejoined the old mariner.
Tunis left the mate and Horry to carry on while he took the passenger ashore, meaning to spend the night himself at home with Aunt Lucretia. He stopped to get Eunez Pareta's father to harness up his old horse and transfer Miss Bostwick's trunk and bag to the Ball homestead. Eunez was in evidence—as she always was when Tunis came by—a bird of paradise indeed. Her languishing glances at Tunis flashed in their change to suspicious glares at the girl waiting in the roadway.
"You have a guest, Tunis Latham?" she asked with a composure which scarcely hid her jealousy and doubt.
"I'm taking her up to the Balls'. She's Mrs. Ball's niece, Eunez," Tunis said good-naturedly. He was always friendly with these Portygees. That was why he got along so well with them and they liked to work for him. Many of the Big Wreck Cove folk looked upon them even now as "furriners" who had to be shouted at if one would make them understood.
"What does she come for?" asked Eunez sharply.
"They need her up there. Mrs. Ball is feeble and so is the captain. She is going to live with them right along."
"Ah-ha!" whispered Eunez, as he passed her to step outside the house again. She seized his arm and swung him around to face her, for she was strong. "You think she is pretty, Tunis?" she demanded.
"Eh? What's eating on you, Eunez? I never stopped to think whether she was or not?"
But he flushed, and she saw it. Eunez smiled in a way which might have puzzled Tunis Latham had he stopped to consider it. But he joined the girl who was waiting for him, and they went on up the road and out of the town without his giving a backward glance or thought to the fiery Portygee girl.
When they mounted to the windswept headland the visitor looked about with glowing eyes, breathing deeply. The flush of excitement rose in her cheek. He knew that as far as the physical aspect of the place went, she was more rejoiced than ever she had expected to be.
"Beautiful—and free," she whispered.
"You've said it, now, Ida May," he agreed. "From up here it looks like the whole world was freer and a whole lot brighter. It is a great outlook."
"And is that the house?" the girl asked, for in approaching the Ball homestead from this angle it looked different from its appearance as viewed standing on the deck of the inbound Seamew.
"That is the Ball house, and Aunt Prue taking in her wash," Tunis replied. "I suppose she had John-Ed Williams' wife over to wash for her, but Myra will have gone home before this to get the supper. Tush! Aunt Prue ought not to try to do that."
The fresh wind blowing over the headland filled every garment on the lines like ballooning sails. The frail, little old woman had to stand on tiptoe to get each article unpinned from the line. The wind wickedly sought to drag the linen from her grasp.
Cap'n Ira, hobbling around from the front of the house, hailed his wife in some rancor:
"I don't see why you have to do that. Don't we pay that woman for washing them clothes? And ain't she supposed to take 'em down off'n the halyards? I swan! You'll be inter that basket headfirst, yet, like ye was inter the grain chist. Look out!"
"They wasn't all dry when Myra Williams went home, Ira. And I don't dare leave 'em out all night. Half of 'em would blow over the edge of the bluff. The wind is terrible strong."
It was much too strong for her frail arms, that was sure. The captain turned in anger to look for help about the open common. He saw the two figures briskly moving up the road toward the house.
"I swan! Who's this here?" he exclaimed. "Tunis Latham, and—and Ida May!"
His face broadened into a delighted smile. He had seen the Seamew come in, and had prayerfully hoped her master had brought the girl that he believed would be their salvation. This person with the captain of the Seamew could only be Ida May Bostwick!
At the moment Prudence was taking down her own starched, blue house dress from the line. It was hung like a pirate in chains by its sleeves, was blown out as round as a barrel, and was as stiff as a board. Just as the pins came out an extra heavy puff of wind shrieked around the corner of the house, as though it had been lying in wait for just this opportunity.
The dress was whipped out of Aunt Prue's hands. She herself, as Cap'n Ira had warned her, was cast, face downward, into the half-filled clothes basket. The blue dress was whirled high in the air, skirt downward. Before the old man was warned by Prudence's muffled scream that something had gone wrong, the starched dress plumped down over his head and shoulders, and he was bound fast and blinded in its folds.
"Drat the thing! What did I tell ye?" bawled Cap'n Ira. "Take this here thing off'n me! Want to make me more of an old Betty than I be a'ready—a-dressin' me in women's clothes? I swan!"