Within the Capes

by Howard Pyle

A burly red-faced man was standing on the crest of the white sand hill, his figure sharply marked against the blue sky behind him. His hands were thrust deeply into his breeches pockets, and he stood with his legs a little apart. He had a short cutty pipe betwixt his teeth;—the bowl was turned topsey-turvey, and there was no light in it. When he saw that Tom and Jack were looking at him, he spoke again, without taking the pipe from out his mouth.

“Are you fellows the first and second mates of the Nancy Hazlewood, privateersman?”

Jack nodded his head.

The man turned and beckoned two or three times, and then came slowly and carefully down the steep side of the sand dun, half sliding, half stumbling. The first thing that he said when he came to where they were, was:

“I just tell you what it is, mates; that mess of fish smells mighty good.” Then he asked which of them was the first mate.

“I’m the first mate,” said Jack.

By this time three or four heads rose above the crest of the hill, and a little knot of sailors gathered on the top of the dun; then they came jumping and sliding and stumbling down to where the others were standing.

But all this time Tom was like one in a dream. I think that he must have been dazed by the suddenness of the coming of that for which he had longed so bitterly and so deeply. He tried to realize that they were rescued; that these men were about to take them away; that they were really to leave the island that had been their prison for so many long and weary days, and that in a few weeks at the furthest, he would be in Eastcaster again, and would see Patty, and would be talking with her of all these things. Many a time in the silence of the lonely night, he had pictured their rescue to himself, and in the sleep that followed, he had perhaps dreamed that a boat was lying on the beach below their hut, and then had wakened to the bitterness of its being only a dream. But now that rescue had in truth come to them, he could no more realize it than you or I can realize that we are really to see the other world, some time to come. So he stood leaning against the poor old shattered cutter that had sheltered Jack and him for so long, and as he leaned there he looked about him, wondering dully, whether or not he would not awaken in a few minutes and find this too to be only a dream. He heard the man who had hailed them, telling Jack that he was the first mate of the barque Baltimore, of Baltimore, and that they were bound for New York from Key West, having run fifty miles out of their course to pick them up at this island. He heard him ask Jack which one of them had set the bladder of porpoise hide adrift, that the Baltimore had picked up off the Florida coast, and saw that Jack jerked his thumb toward him, and that the mate of the Baltimore was looking at him, and was saying that it was a d—d clever Yankee trick. He saw the sailors crowding around, looking here and there; peeping and prying into the doorway of the hut, and talking amongst themselves. “Blast my eyes, Tommy, look at this here shanty!” “Well, I’m cussed if they hain’t got a ship’s boat slung up for a roof!” “Damme! look at his beard and hair; (this in a hoarse whisper) he’s the second mate, Bill;—Granger, you know.”

Then he heard Jack ask the mate of the Baltimore for a chew of tobacco. He cut off the piece of the plug with his old broken jack-knife, and Tom watched him doing it as though it was a matter of the greatest moment to him. I can recollect that he thought dully how Jack must enjoy his tobacco after having been so long without it.

After a while there was a movement, and he heard Jack calling to him to come along, as they were all going over to the boat, but it was still in the same dazed state that he walked along the beach with the others until they came around the end of the sand hills, saw the bay open before him, and the barque floating like a swan upon the smooth surface of the water. A ship’s boat was lying high and dry on the sand of the beach, and two sailors were sitting in the stern, smoking comfortably and talking together. They tumbled out of the boat and stood looking as the others drew near, and Tom thought what a strange sight Jack and he must be—ragged, tattered, patched, half-naked, with beards reaching to their breasts, and heads uncovered, excepting for the mat of hair that hung as low as their shoulders. He had not thought of their looking strange before this.