BILLY TOPSAIL & COMPANY

15

CHAPTER I

In Which Jimmie Grimm, Not Being Able to Help It, Is Born At Buccaneer Cove, Much to His Surprise, and Tog, the Wolf-Dog, Feels the Lash of a Seal-hide Whip and Conceives an Enmity

Young Jimmie Grimm began life at Buccaneer Cove of the Labrador. It was a poor place to begin, of course; but Jimmie had had nothing to do with that. It was by Tog, with the eager help of two hungry gray wolves, that he was taught to take care of the life into which, much to his surprise, he had been ushered. Tog was a dog with a bad name; and everybody knows that a dog with a bad name should be hanged forthwith. It should have happened to Tog. At best he was a wolfish beast. His father was a wolf; and in the end 16 Tog was as lean and savage and cunningly treacherous as any wolf of the gray forest packs. When he had done with Jimmie Grimm––and when Jimmie Grimm’s father had done with Tog––Jimmie Grimm had learned a lesson that he never could recall without a gasp and a quick little shudder.

“I jus’ don’t like t’ think o’ Tog,” he told Billy Topsail and Archie Armstrong, long afterwards.

“You weren’t afraid of him, were you?” Archie Armstrong demanded, a bit scornfully.

“Was I?” Jimmie snorted. “Huh!”

The business with Tog happened before old Jim Grimm moved south to Ruddy Cove of the Newfoundland coast, disgusted with the fishing of Buccaneer. It was before Jimmie Grimm had fallen in with Billy Topsail and Donald North, before he had ever clapped eyes on Bagg, the London gutter-snipe, or had bashfully pawed the gloved hand of Archie Armstrong, Sir Archibald’s son. It was before Donald North cured himself of fear and the First Venture had broken into a blaze in a gale of wind off the Chunks. It was before Billy Topsail, a lad of wits, had held a candle over the powder barrel, when the wreckers boarded the Spot Cash. It 17 was before Bill o’ Burnt Bay had been rescued from a Miquelon jail and the Heavenly Home was cut out of St. Pierre Harbour in the foggy night.