But I thought I understood what she meant. “Meaning your chum, Alice Foster?” I said.
“Yes, meaning my chum, Alice Foster. Why?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Sometimes I think she’s a kind of a frost.”
“No, she isn’t a frost, and don’t you come around here again and tell me so.”
Nor did I, for I would not have an argument with Nell for all the Alice Fosters in the world, for if Nell were anybody else but my first cousin, I think I would have fallen in love with her myself.
And then we put out to sea and again we were living the life of seiners, having it hard and easy in streaks. There were the times when we went along for a week and did not do a tap but eat, sleep, stand a trick at the wheel, a watch to the mast-head, and skylark around the deck, and read, or have a quiet game of draw or whist or seven-up below. But again there were times when we were 177 on fish, and our skipper being a driver, it was jump, jump, jump for a week on end. There was that time in August when the fish were so plentiful on Georges Bank, when, standing to the mast-head, you could see nothing but mackerel schooling for fifteen or twenty miles either side of the vessel. But, oh, they were wild! A dozen times we’d heave the seine––put off from the vessel, put out that two hundred and odd fathom of twine, drive seine-boat and dory to the limit, purse in––and not so much as a single mackerel caught by the gills. That happened fifteen or twenty times some days, maybe. We got our fill of sets that month. But then again there was a week off Cape Cod and in the Bay of Fundy and off the Maine coast when we ran them fresh to Boston market, when we landed more mackerel it was said in a single week than was ever landed before by one vessel. We were five days and five nights that time without seeing our bunks. It was forever out and after them, heave the seine, purse up and bail in, ice some, and dress the rest along the way, and the vessel with everything on driving for Boston.
We stood to it that week, you may be sure, until coming on the fifth day some of us fell asleep over the keelers as the Johnnie was coming into T Wharf. I remember that I could just barely see in a kind of a hazy way the row of people along the 178 cap-log when we made fast. And yet after that we had to hoist them out of the hold and onto the dock. That day, going out again, the skipper made all but the watch and himself turn in. That afternoon, when everybody had had a little kink, the skipper himself, who had been under a heavier strain than any of us, suddenly fell backward over the house and sound asleep. And there he lay all the rest of that day and that night.
After ten or twelve hours of it we tried to wake him, but not a budge. We tried again, but no use. At last he came to and without any help at all. Sitting up, he asked where we were, and being told, he said nothing for a moment or so, and then suddenly––“That so? How long was I asleep?” We told him––seventeen hours. “Good Lord!” he groaned, and after a mug-up scooted for the mast-head like a factory hand with the seven o’clock whistle blowing. “He’s a fisherman, the skipper,” said the gang as they watched him climb the rigging.
And he was a fisherman. All that summer he drove things with but little time for us ashore. Twice he put into Gloucester with a day to ourselves and another time we had a chance to run down after we had put into Boston for market, and that we suspected was because the skipper found he could not keep away himself any longer. 179 Things, we judged, were going pretty well with him in Gloucester. He did not pretend any longer now that he was not interested in Miss Foster, and from my cousin Nell I got occasional hints, most of which I confided to Clancy, who explained them as if they were so many parables.
“It’ll be all right,” said Clancy, “if only Minnie Arkell stands clear. I’m glad she’s away for the summer, but she’ll turn up in the fall. You’ll see her just before the race large as life, and some of her swell-dressed friends, and a yacht, I’ll bet.”