“Steady, lad! Steady!� the mate’s voice quieted him. “You’re all right now. Be a sailorman. Don’t give up.�
The boy started to tell the tale of tragedy, but the mate of the Williwaw was gone and hurrying upward. On deck he shouted his discoveries to Captain Moran of the Williwaw, which now lay close by. No time was wasted in this urgent plight. A heavy line was brought across, a half-dozen men put aboard, and within a few minutes the I’ll Try was being towed through the sea. The funnel of the Williwaw now belched smoke as if she were steaming a race against time on the reach to Brixham Town. Around the breakwater’s end she swung in a flashing sweep to the outer and up to the very gates of the inner harbor before she stopped. Surmising tragedy, boats put off to meet them, and fishermen swarmed about the I’ll Try to assist. Broken men were tenderly carried away. The harbor-master’s telephone urged a surgeon to haste. The men on the landing-pier thrust and jostled, all eager to serve.
The survivors of the I’ll Try’s crew had come to port at last.
“The lad will pull through,â€� the surgeon announced to those who waited outside the harbor-master’s office, which had been turned into a temporary hospital. “The second hand may, though his ribs are caved in. The old man you call Scruggs the Ancient, must have died very lately because his body is still warm. And Captain Joshua—well—they say that when they found him, he tried to tell them something about the Harbor Lights.â€� The surgeon paused, looked away from the staring eyes, and then added softly: “He has found them.â€�
When, taken from her iced bunkers by hand, sorted, pulled ashore to the great flagged spaces of the fishmarket, carefully laid thereon and brought to the “liberalâ€� buyers’ attention by the sonorous clang of the auctioneer’s bell and voice, the catch of the I’ll Try brought six pounds, fourteen shillings and sixpence—nearly twenty-six dollars, to be divided amongst the sole survivors of the hapless crew. Captain Joshua’s share as owner and skipper came to nearly four pounds, or sixteen dollars! The undertaker charged fifteen pounds—about sixty dollars—for the coffin; the cemetery company charged five pounds, about twenty-five dollars, for the six-by-three feet of space which he might forever own as his last allotment of earth; and there were certain minor claims for flowers in that land where flowers run wild upon great cliffs, but must be paid for when laid upon a grave. All that was left thereafter, Captain Joshua’s grandsons and widowed daughter might have to live upon.
Up on the Brixham hills that night rain fell. Somehow it seemed to freshen the handful of flowers that some one had thrown on the grave of the lone and ancient mariner, as if he, who after all his sea-toil had come to land-rest, merited that humble recognition. Perhaps some one loved him, as well as Skipper Joshua. Perhaps God in His majestic but kindly pity would send other wild-flowers to climb across their graves, blanketing them in the radiance of that only One who marks the sparrow’s fall!
Transcriber’s Note: This story appeared in the April 1922 issue of Blue Book magazine.