“Picked her up out of the sea!” we both exclaimed.
“Didn’t you ever hear about that?” he asked. “Well it’s so common known around here there’s no need in my concealing it from you.
“Captain Hawes was up on the Grand Banks fishing, along in the fifties, and had all his small boats out from the ship when a hurricane struck him. The sea was standing right up on its legs. Just as he was trying to get back his men, and letting all the cod go to do it, too, there he see a big sloop right on top of him, almost riding over him, on the crest of a wave as high as that dune back there. High and solid like that, and yellow. But instead of comin’ over on him, like he fully expected an’ was praying against, the vessel slipped back. By the time he rode the crest, there she was diving stern down into the bottom of the trough. And she never come up again. The only thing that come up was this here Mattie. Sebastian Sikes, he was out in a small boat still, and he leaned over and grabbed her up, a little girl, tied to a life-preserver. The captain was for letting her go adrift again when he come ashore, but Mis’ Hawes wouldn’t let him. She said as long as Mattie was the only thing he salvaged out of the whole voyage, the Lord He meant they should keep her.
“The child couldn’t even speak the language at first. They thought it must be Portuguese she was jabberin’, but the sailors they said no, they wouldn’t claim it neither. So they come to think afterward it might have been French, her being picked up there off Newfoundland, and all them French sailors coming out that way from Quebec. But by the time somebody had thought of that, she had forgot how to speak it, anyway. She was only about five. The missis had her baptized ‘Matilda,’ after a black slave her father had brought home to Maine when she was a girl herself, up to Wiscasset. But ‘Mattie’ it came to be, and ‘Charles T. Smith,’ after the ship that saved her.”
“And didn’t he leave her anything in his will, after all that?”
“Neither Jeremiah Hawes nor his wife left any will,” replied Judge Bell. “The only will there is is the one the New Captain made. It’s up to Caleb Snow’s place.”
“Can I see it?”
“You can if he ain’t out winkling.” The judge picked up his “Natural Magic” as if he hoped that we were going.
“What’s ‘winkling’?” I whispered to Ruth, as we turned away.
“Oh, nothing important—something the children do out on the flats, gathering little shell-fish they use for bait.”