The Deep Sea's Toll

by James B. Connolly

Oddie threw up his hands. “They’re goin’! To-night will see her and them buried in the sand.” He turned to his crew, standing in subdued groups about the Delia’s deck. “I want a man to go with me in the dory. Maybe we c’n get them off.”

There were plenty ready to go; but he wanted only one. “No,” he said to one, “you’ve got a wife,” and to another, “You’ll be missed, too. I want somebody nobody gives a damn about—like myself!” and took a young fellow—there is always one such in every crew of fishermen—that swore he had not mother, father, brother, sister, nor a blessed soul on earth that cared whether he ever came home or was lost. And doubtless he was telling the truth, for he certainly acted up to it. A hard case he was, but a good fisherman. And courage? He had courage. He laughed—no affected cackle, but a good round laugh—when he leaped over the side and into the dory with Patsie Oddie.

“If I don’t come back,” he called to his bunkmate, “you c’n have that diddy-box you’ve been so crazy to get—the diddy-box and all’s in it. For the rest, you c’n all have a raffle and give the money to the Widows’ and Orphans’ Fund, back in Gloucester.”

“Malachi-boy, but you’re a man after my own heart,” said Oddie, as the dory lifted on to the seas and away from the shelter of the Delia’s side. And Malachi laughed at that. There was what he lived for—where Patsie Oddie praised one must have been a man.

A dory is the safest small boat that the craft of man has yet devised for living in troubled waters. Handled properly, it will live where ships will founder. And yet, though Patsie Oddie and Malachi Jennings were the two men to the oars, it was too much even for the dory in that sea; and over she went before they were half-way to the Eldorado. The crew of the Delia, seeing them bob up, and for the time safely clinging to the plug-strap, whisked another dory to the rail and ready, but their Skipper waved them back.

“Pay out an empty dory!” came his voice above the wind’s opposition. Which they did, and speedily, and Patsie and Malachi got into it; and with great care, the two men lying in the bottom of it were hauled alongside the Delia and helped aboard.

“No man can row a dory this day,” was Patsie’s first word. “And a man with big boots and oilskins overboard in that sea—too small a chance. But put a longer line on that same dory and pay it out again.” Which they did also, and in that way began to take the gang off the Eldorado.

Five trips of the dory were made, two of the Eldorado’s crew coming back each trip, one crouched in the stern and the other lying flat on the bottom amidships. It was the roughest kind of a passage, and even when the dory would come alongside the Delia the most careful handling was needed to get them safely aboard.

Orcutt, of course, was the last man to come aboard. Bad as he was, he could do no less than that—stand by his vessel to the last. When he came alongside the Delia, he rose from the bottom of the dory, his companion having safely boarded the Delia, and lunged for the rail. Never a quick man on his feet, nor quick to think and act, and now trembling with anxiety, Orcutt made a mess of boarding. He had to stop long enough, too, to look up at Oddie and think what a fool of a man Oddie was altogether—a mind like a child! So, in the middle of it all, he did not get the rise of the dory to throw him into the air. He waited just that instant too long—it took nerve—and then he had to hurry, and the uprise of the dory was not there to throw him into the air and on to the Delia’s rail. Clothes soaked in brine and heavy boots, a man is not a buoyant thing in the water, and this was a heavy sea. So Orcutt, falling between dory and vessel, went down—deep down—and when he came up it was where the tide swept down under the vessel’s quarter.

Patsie Oddie, standing almost above him, caught the appeal of Orcutt’s eyes, and then saw him go under again. “If he comes up again ’twill be clear astern,” thought Oddie, “and the third time with all that gear on him he’ll never come up—and if ’tisn’t Providence, then what is it?” And this was a cold winter’s day, and Oddie himself soaked in sea-water. “And if he don’t come up,” thought Oddie, “if he don’t come up— Lord God, must I do more than I’ve done already for a man I don’t like—a man that I know is no good—for a man in my way—a man, too, that would no more go overboard for me, even on the calmest day, than he’d cut his own throat?” And there was that queer smile that Orcutt had thrown at him as he stood up in the dory— Oddie did not forget that. And then he saw Orcutt’s sou’wester on the water and the man himself beneath it.