“‘Yah,’ he says, ‘your oil-skins is too loose.’ ‘What?’ I hollers after him—he goin’ up the dock like a streak. ‘Take to the weather-rail—it’s only a mile to shore,’ he waves his hand and hollers back to me. And then his wife popped around the corner. ‘Jimmie!’ says she. ‘Jennie!’ says he, and in a second it was all off. The pair of them flew up the dock like a pair of gulls before a no’the-easter and I picked up my pots and brushes and went up to the office and told the old man that I guessed I’d quit.”
“Did I? And why wouldn’t I? Jimmie’s job is waitin’ for him if he ain’t too crazy to take it, and if he is it don’t matter to me. There’s my glue-factory job the first of the month. ‘Your oil-skins is too loose,’ says he. He must be crazy, Peter—plumb crazy.”
It was in the middle of the morning when the Colleen Bawn came to anchor. It was late in the afternoon, almost dark, and Peter was fillin’ his last pipe at Crow’s Nest, when the Superba came to anchor in the stream. By and by Dickie Mason came up the dock and hailed for “twenty-five thousand haddock and ten thousand cod.”
“Twenty-five thousand haddock and ten thousand cod—aye, aye. Any news?”
“Well, yes; and, if it turns out to be true, it’s pretty bad.”
“That so, Captain? What is it?”
“I think we’ve seen the last of the Colleen Bawn and Tom O’Donnell. Last night, comin’ on dark, he left us on Georges for a short cut across the shoals. The gale hit in right hard after, and I guess he’s gone—you know how loose and wracked his vessel is—and the last we saw of her she was swung out and goin’ before it—all four lowers, and a livin’ gale. She couldn’t have lived through it. We swung off and came around. We drove all the way and just got in. It’s too bad if it turns out to be so—though maybe he’ll wiggle home in spite of it. Of course, he’d get her to home if anybody could, but you know them shoals in a gale and how loose and wracked his vessel was.”
“Yes,” said Peter. He leaned over the taffrail of Crow’s Nest and put it as politely as he could. “Yes, she’s loose and wracked, Captain Mason, but there’s a few planks of her left, and if you was up here, Captain Mason, and could look over the tops of buildings same’s I can, you’d see her main truck stickin’ up above the railway. I heard them sayin’ she left the same time your vessel did, but she got home so long ago, Captain, that her fish is out and her crew got their money, and if you was to drop up to the Anchorage you’d probably find Tommie Clancy and a few more of her gang havin’ a little touch—and maybe they’ll tell you how they did it.”
Peter spoke with some moderation while his head was outside and his voice within range of the astounded master of the Superba, but once inside, with only his trusted staff to testify, he gave vent to less restrained comment. “Them young skippers, and some of them late models, give me a pain in the waist. ‘The last we see of her,’ says he, ‘she was goin’ over the shoals, and you know how loose and wracked she was, Peter.’ And so she is. But, Lord! I’d like to told him she’d be comin’ home trips yet when his fancy model’d be layin’ to an anchor. Lemme see now—telephone one of you the Superba’s trip—twenty-five thousand haddock and ten thousand cod. And make a note on a slate of the Colleen Bawn’s trip. She don’t sail for the firm, but I do like to keep track of her. Forty thousand haddock and ten thousand cod—loose she is, and her deck crawly under your feet, and they have to wear rubber boots in her forehold, when Tom O’Donnell starts to drive her, and iron bands around her for’ard to hold her together. But, Lord she was an able vessel once—an able vessel once. I think I’ll be goin’ along to supper pretty soon—yes, sir, an able vessel was the Colleen Bawn.