In Which the Fog Thins and the Crew of the “Spot Cash” Fall Foul of a Dark Plot
Morning came to the Spot Cash, too––morning with a thick mist: morning with a slow-heaving sea and a vanished wind. Bill o’ Burnt Bay looked about––stared in every direction from the listed little schooner––but could find no familiar landmark. They were in some snug harbour, however, of a desolate and uninhabited coast. There were no cottages on the hills; there were no fish-flakes and stages by the waterside. Beyond the tickle––that wide passage through which the schooner had driven in the dark––the sea was heaving darkly under the gray mist. Barren, rugged rock fell to the harbour water; and rocky hills, stripped of verdure by the winds of a thousand years, hid their bald heads in the fog.
“I don’t know what it is,” said Bill o’ Burnt Bay to the boys; “but I know well enough what it ought t’ be.” 257
“’Tis never the Shore,” Billy Topsail declared.
“I’m ’lowin’,” said Skipper Bill, but yet doubtfully, “that ’tis one o’ the Pony Islands. They lies hereabouts,” he continued, scratching his head, “long about thirty mile off the mainland. We’re on a westerly shore, and that means Islands, for we’ve never come t’ the westerly coast o’ Newfoundland. If I could get a peep at the Bald-head I could tell for certain.”
The grim landmark called the Bald-head, however,––if this were indeed one of the Pony Islands––was in the mist.
“I’ll lay ’tis the Pony Islands,” Billy Topsail declared again.
“It may be,” said the skipper.
“An’ Little Pony, too,” Billy went on. “I mind me now that we sheltered in this harbour in the Fish Killer afore she was lost on Feather’s Folly.”[6]
“I ’low ’tis,” Skipper Bill agreed.