“Well, here’s one of them.”
“Don’t get saucy because your mother is standing by. Go and find Maurice Blake. Go ahead, won’t you, Joe? Tell him that everything is all right. She is proud.”
“That’s a nice sounding word for it––pride. Stuck on herself is what I’d say.”
“No, she isn’t. You must allow a woman self-respect, you know.”
“I guess so. And it must be her long suit, seeing she’s always leading from it.”
“Oh, keep your fishermen’s jokes for the mugging-up times on your vessel. You go and get Maurice Blake––or find Mr. Clancy and have him get him––if he hasn’t gone on the Flamingo.”
So I went out. On a cruise along the water front I found a whole lot of people. I saw Wesley Marrs and Tommie Ohlsen––sorrowful and neither saying much––looking after their vessels––Ohlsen seeing to a new gaff. “I ought to’ve lost,” said Ohlsen. “Look at that for a rotten piece of wood.” Sam Hollis was around, too, trying to explain how it was he didn’t win the race. But he couldn’t explain to anybody’s satisfaction how his stays’l went nor why he hove-to when that squall struck him––the 287 same squall that shot the Johnnie Duncan across the line. Tom O’Donnell was there, looking down on the deck of the vessel in which he took so much pride. “Two holes in her deck where her spars ought to be,” he was saying when I came along. I asked him if he had seen Maurice that morning, and it was from him I learned for certain that Maurice had shipped on the Flamingo. “I didn’t see her leaving, boy, but Withrow himself told me this morning. ‘And I hope he’ll never come back,’ he said at the same time. ‘’Tis you that takes a licking hard. But maybe ’tis the insurance,’ I says. ‘If that’s what you’re thinking,’ says he, ‘she isn’t insured.’ ‘Then it must be the divil’s own repair she’s in when no company at all will insure her,’ I says. Sure, we had hard words over it, but that won’t bring back Maurice––he’s gone in the Flamingo, Joe.”
I went after Clancy then, and after a long chase, that took me to Boston and back, I caught up with him. He was full of repentance and was gloomy. It was up in his boarding-house––in his room. He, looking tired, was thinking of taking a kink of sleep.
“Hulloh, Joe! And I don’t wonder you look surprised, Joe. I must be getting old. Thursday morning I got up after as fine a night’s sleep as a man’d want. That was Thursday. Then Thursday 288 night, Friday, Friday night, Saturday––two nights and three days, and I’m sleepy already. Sleepy, Joe, and I remember the time I could go a whole week, and then, after a good night’s sleep, wake up fine and daisy and be ready for another week. Joe, there’s a moral in that if you can only work it out.”
Clancy stayed silent after that, not inclined to talk, I could see, until I told him about Maurice having shipped in the Flamingo and the hard crew that had gone in her.