“Hanged hisself! Oh, dear! Why have thee ol’ Skip’ Jim be so fearful wicked?”
It was an unhappy question.
“Well,” Tom Timms answered, in a colorless drawl, “he got a trap-leader when he found out what you done. He just sort o’ went an’ got a trap-leader an’ hanged hisself in the fish-stage—when he found out what you done.”
The Syrian glanced at me. I glanced at him. Our eyes met; his were steady, innocent, pitiful; my own shifted to the closing bank of gray fog.
“Business,” he sighed, “is business.”
The words repeated themselves interminably—a monotonous dirge. Business is business.... Business is business.... Business is business....
VI—A COMEDY OF CANDLESTICK COVE
It was windy weather: and had been—for an exasperating tale of dusks and dawns. It was not the weather of variable gales, which blow here and there, forever to the advantage of some Newfoundland folk; it was the weather of ill easterly winds, in gloomy conjunction bringing fog, rain, breaking seas, drift-ice, dispiriting cold. From Nanny’s Old Head the outlook was perturbing: the sky was hid, with its familiar warnings and promises; gigantic breakers fell with swish and thud upon the black rocks below, flinging lustreless white froth into the gray mist; and the grounds, where the men of Candlestick Cove must cast lines and haul traps, were in an ill-tempered, white-capped tumble—black waves rolling out of a melancholy fog, hanging low, which curtained the sea beyond.
The hands of the men of Candlestick Cove were raw with salt-water sores; all charms against the affliction of toil in easterly gales had failed—brass bracelets and incantations alike. And the eyes of the men of Candlestick Cove were alert with apprehensive caution: tense, quick to move, clear and hard under drawn brows. With a high sea perversely continuing beyond the harbor tickle, there was no place in the eyes of men for the light of humor or love, which thrive in security. Windy weather, indeed! ’Twas a time for men to be men!
“I ’low I never seed nothin’ like it,” Jonathan Stock complained.