Cap’n Dan’s Son BY Bernard Teevan
THE old sailor, Cap’n Dan, sat on the edge of the deck house of the sloop Agnes T., watching the fleet coming in from the day’s work at “dragraking.” The “handrakers” were already in, the contents of their baskets emptied into his, and piled up neatly in the hold, their scores tallied up in the little leather-covered notebook that was Cap’n Dan’s daybook, ledger, journal, and everything else known to the practice of accounts.
The handrakers had all brought in a good day’s catch. If the dragrakers did as well, the Agnes T. would have a heavy load to carry to the city, and the money to meet the note which would soon be due would be ready when the time came to pay it.
Cap’n Dan cast an eye aloft at the empty bushel basket which had been hoisted at the masthead to let every one know the Agnes T. was ready to buy clams. Then he looked out toward the mouth of the harbor, where the first of the fleet of dragrakers was coming in around the point. In that instant the expression of his face altered, and his troubled glance changed to one of pride and pleasure.
The cut of the head of the mainsail told him that, as usual, it was the Victorine that was leading the fleet, outpointing and outfooting the Ranger, Nautilus, and the Dashaway, to say nothing of the other sloops less famed for their speed. Parental pride shone clear in his gray eyes, for was not the Victorine his own boat, and was not his only son, Young Dan, sailing her?
Young Dan, at twenty-one, had already won the reputation of being the smartest boatman in Lockport. The way he would carry on sail was, in the words of the clammers, “a caution.” Me was the light of his father’s eye, and Cap’n Dan had begun to lean rather heavily on his son.
He was looking forward to the time when Dan’s already keen business ability would be sufficiently recognized to have the dealers up in the market place the same reliance on his word as they had for so many years placed on the father’s. Then he could step aside and take a rest, that rest so many men look forward to before the great rest comes.
When Young Dan caught sight of his father he arose from his seat on the wheel box and swung his arm in salutation. Then he gave the wheel a couple of turns, shot the Victorine up in the wind, and laid her alongside the Agnes T. as if the sloop were a fast horse, that a skillful driver had stopped at a carriage block.
“What luck, Dannie?” called his father. “I see you wasn’t the last one in.”
“Had a bully day, dad. Struck a fresh bed off West P’int, and got a jim-dandy load. Goin’ to send any to market to-night?” Then, casting back to his father’s allusion to his beating the other boats, he added dryly: “Oh, yes, there’s some go in the old Victorine yet. Them fellers make me tired with their talk about beatin’ her.”
“Just as soon as we c’n git the Agnes T. loaded, Dan, I want you to start for the market. Dolan telegraphed me to-day they wanted all I could send ’em, and as soon as I could get ’em off.”
As the boy had stepped aboard the sloop by this time, the captain added, in a whisper: “You know that Voorhees note falls due day after to-morrow, and I need the money to meet it.”
Dan nodded his head, and some of the gravity that had settled down again on his father’s face was reflected on his own. Then he started in on the heavy task of transferring his day’s catch from the deck of the Victorine to the hold of the market boat.
While he and the three men who made up the working crew were hard at this, the remaining boats of the fleet were coming up, one by one, and ranging themselves on either side of the market boat. With jibs hauled down, and mainsails slatting in the breeze, they all lay head to the wind, while their crews passed basket after basket down into the hold of the Agnes T., to the accompaniment of loud interchanges of talk and chaff.
Before the sun had vanished in the west, the loading was accomplished, the sloops had pushed off, one by one, and worked away to their anchorages for the night, and Young Dan and Jim Humphreys, who comprised his crew, had hoisted the mainsail on the Agnes T.
His father hauled his skiff alongside as Young Dan and Humphreys went forward to get in the anchor, and, as the pawls clinked against the ratchets, with that sound which is so musical to a seaman’s ears, Cap’n Dan picked up the oars and started to pull toward the shore.
“Be careful, Dannie,” he called across the water. It was the usual warning and farewell. “Don’t carry that tops’l after dark. It begins to look squally off to wind’ard.”
“All right, father!” yelled Young Dan, as the anchor broke from the ground and he ran aft to the wheel. “We’ve got to get these clams to market, you know.”
He spun the wheel over as Humphreys hoisted the jib, and the sloop filled away, with her bowsprit pointing out toward the mouth of the harbor.
By the time the Agnes T. had cleared the point, Young Dan found that the wind had freshened considerably, and was now coming out of the northwest in such vigorous puffs that carrying the topsail was out of the question. Humphreys suggested turning in a reef, but Young Dan said he guessed that wasn’t necessary just yet. He asked Jim to take the wheel while he went below to put on his coat. When he had taken his place again, Humphreys dropped down into the cabin, lit the fire, and put the kettle on for tea.
Young Dan ate his evening meal as he sat at the wheel, and before it was finished the increasing force of the wind made steering with one hand and holding his teacup in the other a rather difficult business. When it was finished, and Humphreys had cleared away the dishes, he came up on deck and settled down in the lee of the deck house, with his coat collar turned up around his ears.
“Gee, Dannie, but it’s blowin’!” he commented. “And ain’t she a-travelin’, though? Do you want me to get out the lights?”
“Oh, never mind ’em,” replied Young Dan, with the sailor’s too common disregard of the use of side lights. “We can light ’em up when we get around the fort. Come and take the wheel, will you, Jim? I want to fix that jib. She’s slattin’ round there, and ain’t half drawin’.”
Jim uncoiled himself from his corner, in the lee of the house, and took the wheel as Young Dan went forward. They were off Coffin’s Beach by this time, and Jim could see the summer hotels lifting their huge bulks up against the dark-blue sky, studded with stars that twinkled with unusual brilliancy in the frosty night air.
As the sloop was running dead before the wind, the mainsail was doing all the work, and the jib was slatting to and fro, and not doing what the young skipper thought it should. That was how his passion for carrying sail showed itself, and that was the cause of the tragedy that followed.
Picking up the long oar lying along the rail, he took a turn of the sheet around it at the clew of the jib, and boomed the sail out to port, where it caught the full strength of the wind. As it bellied out, causing the sloop to fairly jump through the water, Young Dan watched it for a moment, and then called out to his companion:
“How’s that, Tim? Ain’t she a-pullin’?”
Before Humphreys could make a reply, he heard a crash, and the wheel was jerked out of his hands.
To his horror, he saw the mast break off just under the hounds. With the topmast and all the gear, it fell to the deck, striking Young Dan, and burying him beneath the wreckage.
The shock of the accident stunned Humphreys for a moment. Then he jumped forward along the tossing deck to drag his companion’s body out from under the splintered spars, sails, and rigging.
The jib was lying in a tangled heap, and the mainsail was hanging broad off to leeward, dipping down into the seas as the sloop rolled, and coming up with a jerk, as if it meant to pluck the cleats and blocks and traveler clear from their fastenings.
Humphreys caught hold of Young Dan’s feet, and, gently as he could, pulled him out from beneath the piled-up gear. Stricken as he was by the shock of the catastrophe, terror caught a fresh grip on him as he saw the boy’s face.
Ashy white, he lay with his eyes closed as if in death. Across his forehead a great cut ran, with the blood slowly and steadily oozing out, and down through his hair, already matted with the thick stream.
Humphreys sickened at the sight, and tried to turn his head away. For the moment he was panic-stricken, then he shook himself together, and half carried, half dragged the body of the boy down into the cabin and stretched him gently on the blankets in the berth. Then he jumped on deck again.
For the time one idea possessed him: He must get a doctor for Dannie. He never thought to let the anchor go, never thought to light a signal lamp. He wanted to get a doctor at once, and he knew there were two or three doctors at the quarantine station over by the fort.
Humphreys had lost his head, in the desire to carry out this plan of action. He tumbled the skiff overboard, shipped the oars, and, hatless, and without taking time to pull off his coat, he began to row to the government reservation, where the one thing needed, a doctor, was to be found.
No one knows how long it took him to pull across the mile of water, nor how long it was before he rushed, breathless, up to the doctor’s door. Without even sinking down into the chair the kindly health officer pushed over to him, he stammered out the story of the tragedy that had been enacted out in the bay, on the deck of the Agnes T.
Before Jim had finished his tale, the health officer called to one of his assistants to ring up the boat and let the captain know they were going out. Then he busied himself putting some instruments into a black bag, and, before Jim had completely recovered his wind, he was in danger of losing it again as he followed the doctor and his assistant down the path to the landing, where the little white tug, with its tall, yellow stack, was moored.
As they went along, the health officer asked Humphreys for the address of the injured boy’s father.
“We’ll send him a telegram,” he said. “Then he’ll probably come out to look for the sloop, too. You say she had no lights burning? Hum! That makes it so much harder to find her.”
They stopped at the office of the press association, down at the pier, and the operator sent the message to Lockport, following it with a brief story of the accident to the main office up in the city. Then they stepped aboard the tug, the lines were cast off, and the search for the Agnes T. began.
What that night was to Humphreys, and to Cap’n Dan, who, on receipt of the telegram, had hired the only tug in Lockport and started out to find his son, only they could tell. Calculating on the direction of the wind, and the set of the tides, the two tugs cruised about until the day began to break along the eastern horizon.
Working gradually to the eastward, backward and forward on long stretches, the tugs gradually, as if by a common instinct, drew together. By the time the dawn had broken, and Humphrey could make out the other tug, he told the health officer she was from Lockport, and that probably Cap’n Dan was aboard her.
He stepped outside the pilot house, with a pair of binoculars in his hand, and, as he did so, he noticed a man do the same thing on the other boat.
Putting the glasses to his eyes, a glance told him that it was Young Dan’s father. Humphreys swung his arm over his head, and then saw the captain turn and speak to the man in the pilot house. A moment later, just as the tug headed for the health officer’s boat, the captain of the latter, who had been scanning the horizon, gave a start, and cried out: “There she is!” Pointing off to the eastward, he twirled the spokes over, gave a pull on the jingle bell, and whistled down the tube to the engineer to “give her all the steam she could carry.”
The eyes of every one on the two boats turned in the direction in which the quarantine tug was headed, and then the sound of the jingle bell on the Lockport boat came across the water.
Head and head, they raced to the eastward, smoke pouring from their funnels, and a broad wave of foaming water piled up before their bows. The light was now strong enough for them to make out the Agnes T., aground on the long, sandy beach at the eastern end of the harbor.
As she lay with her bow buried in the sand, and listed over by the weight of the outswung boom and the wreck of the topmast, the sloop made a tragic picture in itself. The cold, gray light of the dawn fell down and around the Agnes T., making her stand out against the steel-blue water and the pale sand hills, looming large against this background until her proportions seemed gigantic.
The mainsail hung idly down from the gaff, that had been held just below the break in the mast by the jamming of the hoops. The main sheet trailed overboard in long, tangled loops, the shrouds and halyards drooped in picturesque confusion. Jib and mainsail were gray with the night dew and the reflected light.
The little waves rolled up and broke along her sides and spent their tiny force upon the beach. So they were doing yesterday, when Young Dan was living; so they were doing to-day, when the boy was lying stretched out in the berth, a ghastly, solitary tenant.
As the two tugs came nearer and nearer to her, the Lockport boat gradually drew ahead of the health officer’s tug. They could see Cap’n Dan go aft with one of his best men and stand by the painter of the skiff that was towing astern. Humphrey noticed a couple of men standing on the beach, near the wrecked sloop, and through the glasses he made them out to be patrols from the life-saving station.
He could also see a big power boat coming down from the village that lay inside the point, still farther to the eastward, and he wondered if her business lay with the Agnes T. The leading tug slowed down as she reached a point in the channel, off the wreck. Cap’n Dan and the man near him dropped over into the skiff and pulled like madmen for the sloop.
Just as they came alongside of her, the power boat swung up by the wreck, and a man standing up in the bow called to the captain:
“Keep off that boat! There’s a dead man aboard of her, and I’m the coroner. I warn you——” His words trailed off into silence as he caught sight of Cap’n Dan’s face.
Even the crass spirit of a jack-in-office could not resist the mute protest he saw in every line of it. Stern, rigid, a very mask of immobility, given a dignity that made it noble by its grief and suffering, the father’s face awed everything into silence.
Moving as in a trance, Cap’n Dan climbed over the rail of the sloop and stepped down into the cabin.
As he disappeared from sight, the spell of silence laid on the coroner was broken, and he began to mutter protests against “violations of the law,” and declaring “he’d stop this thing right now, before it went any further.”
Presently Cap’n Dan emerged from the cabin, carrying the limp body of his son in his arms. As he stepped into the cockpit, the coroner’s voice was hushed.
The father straightened himself up with a dignity that made the movement noble, and faced the official with eyes that looked across the boy’s body.
Between the time he had gone down into the cabin and came out of it, twenty years seemed to have been added to his age. In his grief, he looked like some old chieftain who had given up the life of his favorite son in his country’s cause, and was now bearing the body home to his castle to mourn over it.
A little shadow of deeper pain passed across his face as he looked at the intruder on his woe, and then he said simply:
“He is my son.”
At the sound of his voice, and the look in his face, the coroner recoiled from the captain as if he had been struck. The man in the skiff uncovered his head. He thought Young Dan was dead.
The captain, still holding the boy in his arms, stepped down into the skiff and held him close to his breast as the man at the oars pulled slowly toward the tug. By this time the health officer’s boat had come up to the skiff, and the doctor, leaning over the rail, said quietly: “Let me see him, captain.”
Cap’n Dan looked up at the doctor.
“He’s dead,” he said, almost in a whisper.
“Won’t you let us see him? There may be a chance,” the doctor pleaded.
Then Cap’n Dan held his son out to the two doctors, who laid him down on a blanket on the deck.
There was a moment of silence as the two worked over the body; then, with an exclamation of satisfaction, one of the doctors sprang to his feet.
“I thought so!” he cried. “I thought he was still breathing! He’s badly hurt, but the poor lad is not dead!”
Cap’n Dan stood as if turned to stone. A great tear rolled down his face, but he said nothing. He watched with indescribable pathos as the surgeons brought their skill into play, and finally, when Young Dan began to babble an incoherent string of words, he drew one weather-beaten hand across his eyes, as if in a daze.
A while later, Young Dan sighed and looked into his father’s face.
“Was I in time, dad?” he whispered softly.
Cap’n Dan smiled down at him, and lied so bravely that the recording angel must have stopped to mend his pen just then, and forgot to mark it down against him.
“Plenty, Dannie, plenty,” he replied.
And then he leaned still farther down and kissed him.