She’s a seiner out of Gloucester,––
was the way the fishermen of the port used to sing about the Lucy; while Tommie Clancy was Maurice Blake’s closest friend.
With ballast stored, masts stepped, rigging set up, and sails bent, setting as sweet as could be to her lines and the lumpers beginning to get her ready for the mackerel season, the Fred Withrow was certainly a picture.
After a couple of extra long pulls, blowing the smoke into the air, and another look above and below, “That one––she’ll sail some or I don’t know,” said Wesley.
“She sure will,” said Tommie; “and it’s a jeesly shame Maurice isn’t to have her.” Then turning to me, “What in the devil’s name ails that man you work for, Joey?”
I said I didn’t know.
“No, nor nobody else knows. I’d like to work in that store for him for about ten minutes. I think I’d make him say something in that ten minutes that would give me a good excuse for heaving him out the window. He had an argument with Maurice, Wesley, and Maurice don’t 4 know what it was half about, but he knows he came near to punching Withrow.”
And Wesley and Tommie had to talk that out; and between the pair of them, thinking of what they said, I thought I ought to walk back to the store with barely a civil look for my employer, who didn’t like that at all, for he generally wanted to hand out the black looks himself.
Then the girls––my cousin Nellie and her particular chum, Alice Foster––came in to weigh themselves, and also to remind me, they said, that I was to take them over to Essex the next day for the launching of the new vessel for the Duncan firm, which had been designed by a friend of Nell’s, a young fellow named Will Somers, who was just beginning to get a name in Gloucester for fast and able models of vessels. Withrow, who was not over-liberal with his holidays, said I might go––mostly, I suspect, because Alice Foster had said she would not make the trip without Nell, and Nell would not go unless I went too.
Then Nell and Miss Foster went on with the business of weighing themselves. That was in line with the latest fad. It was always something or other, and physical culture was in the air at this time with every other girl in Gloucester, so far as I could see––either Indian-club swinging or dumb-bell drilling, long walks, and things of 5 that kind, and telling how much better they felt after it. My cousin Nell, who went in for anything that anybody ever told her about, was trying to reduce her weight. According to some perfect-form charts, or something or other on printed sheets, she weighed seven pounds more than she should for her height. I thought she was about the right weight myself, and told her so, but she said no––she was positively fat. “Look at Alice,” she said, “she’s just the thing.”