For the freedom of the seas

by Ralph Henry Barbour

Billy blinked and hesitated. Finally: “Well, I was leaning over the rail aft last night after we left New Bedford and the cap and the junior was talking it over in the cabin and it sort of floated out!”

“You made believe you didn’t know anything about it!” charged Nelson. Billy Masters grinned.

“Sure! A fellow don’t repeat what he ain’t supposed to know, does he?”

“What are you doing now?” Nelson laughed.

“Oh, it don’t matter now. It’s all over. Gee, you’re a lucky guy, Chatty. You get swell grub in the hospitals!”

After a week of it, however, Nelson didn’t agree with Billy. But a minor surgical case such as he was is not likely to find hospital food quite satisfying. After the first two days Nelson’s normally healthy appetite returned in its full vigor and more than once he would gladly have exchanged his rations for the solid “chow” of the Wanderer’s forecastle. The bullet had slightly splintered the bone of the upper arm. The doctor called it the “humerus,” a name for it which Nelson entirely disapproved of. Two weeks was the period of convalescence, in any case, and for a full fortnight Nelson mooned around the hospital and the town. During that time the Wanderer came into port but once and Billy Masters and Lanky Staples came to see him and told him of their doings. He hadn’t missed much in the way of excitement, however, for the patrol boat had done nothing more adventurous than fire at a butter firkin, narrowly escape collision with a trawler in a fog and back into a wharf at Provincetown. Lanky expressed disgust at the monotonous emptiness of existence and Billy hinted darkly at deserting and enlisting in the British Army in Canada if things didn’t pick up pretty soon.

Nelson had plenty of time for thought during that dragging fortnight, and the more he thought the more he was inclined to agree with Lanky and Billy. He had enlisted in the Naval Reserves because he wanted to fight the Germans. Apprehending a spy or two might be useful work, but it wasn’t to his mind vital enough to the matter in hand, which was beating Germany. He had spoken very nearly the truth when he had told Ensign Stowell that it wasn’t exactly revenge for a personal injury inflicted that he sought, but he was, after all, quite human, and there were times when revenge seemed very desirable to him. He still refused to believe, in the face of all probability, that his father was really dead, although none of his relatives up in Maine shared his confidence. Nelson’s nearest relation now was his Uncle Peter, a mild-mannered, elderly man who had once served as mate on a lumber schooner but who now eked out a scant living as proprietor of a little store in the home town. Uncle Peter firmly believed that his younger brother was dead, and, or so it had seemed to Nelson, had taken a sort of sad satisfaction in so believing. He had frowned on the boy’s expressed determination of entering the Navy and had even done what little was in his power to thwart him. After a fortnight at home, a home now presided over by an ancient, sharp-featured woman housekeeper whom Nelson had grown into the habit of calling “Aunt Mehitabel,” although she was no relation, he had bidden a constrained good-bye to Uncle Peter and a sad one to Pickles and, possessed of the munificent sum of eighty-odd dollars, had made his way to Boston. There a cousin by marriage had taken him in overnight and the next day he had sought advice, enlisted in the Reserves and been sent to Newport.

The months that followed had been pleasant and busy, and he had succeeded for whole hours at a stretch in forgetting to be lonely. He had made many acquaintances but no firm friends. He didn’t make friends readily, it seemed, although he was naturally affectionate and, now that he no longer had his father to chum with, would gladly have spent some of that pent-up affection on one of his fellows. But that experience on the night of the fourteenth of October had sobered him even more than he himself realized and possibly his quiet, silent ways unintentionally held others off. He had done well at the station, for he had more or less nautical knowledge to build on and was keen to observe and quick to learn. He had sought to specialize in gunnery, but owing to the crowded condition of the station at the time and to confusion resultant on constant changes in plans and methods, he had made only slight progress when his transference to the coast Patrol Service came. He left the station with the rating of second-class seaman and with a good all-around knowledge of a seaman’s duties.

As the time to report aboard the Wanderer drew near he found that, while he was impatient for duty again, existence aboard the patrol boat appealed but little to him. He set his wits to work in the endeavor to find some means of securing a transfer, but when the morning of his discharge from the hospital arrived, he had failed so far to find any. The Wanderer was at Buzzard’s Bay and he was to go there by train, arriving at four-twenty in the afternoon. Between New Bedford and Buzzard’s Bay Fate stepped in and took a hand in his affairs.

The train was a leisurely one and stopped frequently. Nelson, hunched in the window end of a red velvet seat, with his canvas bag between his feet—that bag holding nearly all his worldly possessions until such time as the slow-moving arm of the Law, set in motion by Uncle Peter, had distributed his father’s estate—looked out on the pleasant vistas of villages and harbors and open water warming in the May sunlight and felt, for some reason, rather pathetic. It was what he himself would have called “a corking day,” and yet the very “corkingness” of it somehow depressed him. He was so busy feeling depressed that he scarcely noticed when, after leaving one of the small stations along the route, someone took the other half of his seat. Nelson merely drew into himself a bit more, kicked his bag a little further toward the window and went on being mournful. He didn’t see that the newcomer observed him more than once with kindly interest and seemed inclined to open a conversation. He was a man of apparently fifty years, with a pair of very deep blue eyes behind shell-rimmed glasses, a closely-cropped gray mustache and a sun-tanned face. He sat very erect in his seat, a light overcoat, carefully folded, laid across the knees of his immaculate steel-gray trousers, and at intervals ran his gaze over a Boston morning paper which, however, failed to hold his attention for long at a time. It was he who finally commenced the conversation.