"It's up with the dawn for you and me—and then success."
Curious how success reacts even on the best balanced brain and obliterates the most obvious considerations. Harrison Smith entirely forgot the second blue dot on the map—the one situated a mile outside the village where a little footpath converged with the high road.
CHAPTER 22.
PLAIN SAILING.
The steam trawler "Felice" out of Cherbourg was not much to look at, but none the less she was a lady of virtue and of good intention. Her engines had lost the sweet voice of youth through long argument and bitter contest with the stern affronts of life. Where once they had hummed and purred now they racketed and nagged, but they got through the work none the less well on that account. The life of a fish wife hardens the temperament and loosens the tongue and the "Felice" was no exception to the rule. A plain, strident, powerful old woman bucketing through calm and trouble with the same reproach for either. The "Felice" wore rusty black—coarse and patched. She had long ago forsaken her girlish waist band of royal blue esteeming such fallals better suited to the children of the fleet. She was a no-nonsense lady, one of the "up and doing and you be damned" sort, but she boasted at least one unusual feature, the pride and envy of her fellows. She was fitted with an aerial, the relic of an age when small vessels went forth to sweep up big mines very often to be swept up themselves while so engaged and to mention the fact by wireless in the short interval between being struck and sinking.
Anthony Barraclough, wrapped in a suit of borrowed oilskins, leaned against the deck-house and grinned at the breaking day. Like a fire opal the sun rose out of the sea, its first rays dissipating the ghostlike wisps of fog that drifted over the water. The "Felice" was shouldering her way up channel against the slap of a running tide and the greeny-black waves, as yet undyed by the morning blue, spumed and spattered over the bows and wetted her decks with a sharp salt rain.
"Oh, Lord!" said Barraclough, dashing the spray out of his eyes. "Oh,
Lord! it's good to be alive."
His hand travelled to an inside breast pocket and stayed there, his fingers lovingly caressing a case of morocco leather.
"And it's good to have brought it off. Damned good." His eyes looked aloft to the sagging wires of the aerial.
"Wonder if I dare send 'em a message. Better not perhaps. Besides, I want the fun of springing it on 'em myself. Still, I might give 'em a hint—something to set 'em thinking."