One of the latest experiments in a fishermen’s model reached in then and her coming started a chorus. They were always trying new models in Gloucester, everybody was so anxious to have a winner. This one’s sails were still white and pretty and her hull still shiny in fresh black paint. The red stripe along her rail and the gold stripe along her run set off her lines; her gear didn’t have a speck on it, her spars were yellow as could be and to leeward we thought we could still smell the patent varnish. For that matter there were several there as new-looking as she was, our own vessel for one; but there had been a lot of talk about this one. She was going to clean out the fleet. She had been pretending to a lot, and as she hadn’t yet made good, of course she got a great raking.
“She’s here at last, boys––the yacht, the wonderful, marvellous Victory! Ain’t she a bird? Built to beat the fleet! Look at the knockabout bow of her!”
“Knockabout googleums––h-yah! Scoop shovel snout and a stern ugly as a battle-ship’s, and the Lord knows there was overhang and to spare to tail her out decent. Cut out the yellow and the red and the whole lot of gold decorations and she’s as homely as a Newf’undland jack.”
“Just the same, she c’n sail,” said somebody who wanted to start an argument.
“Sail! Yah! might beat a Rockport granite sloop. Ever hear of the Henry Clay Parker, Mister Billie Simms, and the little licking she gave this winner of yours? No? Well, you want to go around and have a drink or two with the boys next time you’re ashore and get the news. It was like a dogfish and a mackerel––the Henry just eat her up. And there’s the others. Why, this one underneath us’d make a holy show of her, I’ll bet. And there’s half a dozen others. There’s the––oh, what’s the use?”
“Oh, Eddie Parsons, a perfect lady and coming in like a high-stepper and yet you must malign her beauty and make light of her virtue,” and Clancy jammed Parsons’s sou’wester down over his eyes––“hush up, Eddie.”
Into the harbor and after the Victory heaved another one. And she was the real thing––handsome, fast and able. And she had a record for bringing the fish home––an able vessel and well-known for it. She could carry whole sails when some of the others were double-reefed and thinking of dragging trysails out of the hold. And her skipper was a wonder.
“You c’n cut all the others out––here comes the real thing. Here’s the old dog himself. Did he ever miss a blow? And look at him. Every man comes in here to-day under four lowers, no more, 114 and some under reefed mains’l, or trys’l, but four whole lowers ain’t enough for this gentleman––not for Wesley. He must carry that gaff-tops’l if he pulls the planks out of her. He always brings her home, but if some of the underwriters’d see him out here they’d soon blacklist him till he mended his ways. It’s a blessed wonder he ain’t found bottom before this. Look at her now skating on her ear. There she goes––if they’d just lower a man over the weather rail with a line on him he could write his name on her keel!”
And she certainly was something to make a man’s eyes stick out. There had been a vessel or two that staggered before, but the Lucy fairly rolled down into it, and there was no earthly reason why she should do it except that it pleased her skipper to sport that extra kite.