Michel dug busily for clams, detecting their presence with the keenness of experience, and then with a full pail started homeward. As he skirted the town, the clack of many wooden shoes hurrying over the cobbles caught his ear. A crowd was running through the streets. Full of curiosity, Michel ran too, headlong for the square in the center of the town.
The wooden shoes were still thumping in from all sides, and about the telegraph office pressed a silent group of women, the tragedy of the sea written on their faces. No one spoke. Only the rapid click of the telegraph key came through the open door. Then a man appeared, holding high a bit of paper.
‘Susanne Allanic,’ he called; and added quickly, ‘Your man’s safe!’
Susanne, standing on the edge of the crowd, with a baby in her arms, threw up her head, gave a cry, and broke into sobs.
‘What’s the matter?’ asked Michel sharply, for Allanic was one of the Jeanot’s crew.
‘The Jeanot’s gone down,’ said a woman breathlessly; ‘four men are missing. We don’t know who they are.’
Michel stood stunned. The sunlight seemed suddenly wiped from the world. ‘The Jeanot’s gone down! The Jeanot’s gone down!’ kept pounding through his brain. He knew he should have to tell his grandmother, and in just those words; he could think of no others. At the gate he met her. Her face was as white as his own, and he knew that she had heard.
‘The Jeanot——’ he stammered, trembling.
‘Yes,’ said his grandmother, ‘but Ives will telegraph.’ And she took the pail of clams from him and went into the house to make the chowder.
They all knew now that last night’s storm was but the spent end of a great tempest, which had swept the coast from Spain northward, and that the Jeanot, struggling to keep to the open sea, had been forced on the rocks below the Bay of Biscay.