WETTING THEIR SALT
Pete Ellinwood, alone except for the cook, who sat peeling potatoes just outside the galley, paced the quarter-deck of the Charming Lass.
He seemed to be an older man than that night when, goaded beyond endurance by the taunts of the big Frenchman, he had fought a fight that would long be remembered in the streets of the roaring town of St. Pierre.
He felt that he had broken his promise to Ma Schofield that he would keep guard over her boy. Now, for all he knew, that boy was lying in jail at St. Andrew’s, or was perhaps defending his life in the murderer’s pen.
The night of the fight had been a wild one for Ellinwood.
At the cry of “Police!” the crowd had seemed to melt away from him like the bank fog at the sweep of a breeze. A dozen comrades had seized the prostrate Jean and hurried him away, and Pete, with 242 the instinct of self-preservation, had snatched up his clothes and dodged down a dark alley toward the dirty drinking-shops along the water-front.
There, as he dressed himself, he first asked the question, “Where is Code?”
Then, in a frenzy of remorse, he returned to the street and began a wild and fruitless search all night. Then he accidentally learned that the Nettie B. had been in port two days and that her crew had been ashore on the night of the fracas.
Sorrowful, bedraggled, and bruised, he rowed out to the Charming Lass just as the whole crew was setting out for shore to search for Code and himself.
During the night the barrels of fresh bait had been lightered to the Lass, and there was nothing for it but to make sail and get back on the Banks as soon as possible, leaving Code to his fate but carrying on the work he had begun.