“So you come from Bolderhead, do you?” quoth Tom to me, one day when we were lounging together forward of the capstan, and he was mending his pipe.
“That’s where we live in the summer,” I admitted.
“Jest summer visitors, are ye?”
“Well, my mother has a house there.”
“Yes. Ye ain’t a native, though, eh?” and before I could reply to this, he continued: “I been studying about Bolderhead ever since you come aboard. There was something curious happened at Bolderhead—or just off the inlet—and it’s all come back to me now.”
“What was it?” I asked, idly.
“Well, it’s quite a yarn,” he said, wagging his head. “I was running in the old hooker, Sally Smith, from Portland to New York. She carted stone. There warn’t but five of us aboard, includin’ the cap’n and the cook. But our freight warn’t perishable,” and he chuckled, “so speed didn’t enter into our calculations. One day there come up a smother of fog as we was just off Bolderhead Neck. We’d run some in-shore. It fell a dead calm—one o’ them still, creepy times when you can hear sheep bells and dinner horns for miles and miles.
“Well, sir! we lay there in this smother of fog and all of a suddent we heard somebody hootin’. Cap he halloaed back. ‘Blow yer scare!’ sings out the same faint voice. ‘Keep it blowin’.’
“‘There’s somebody out yon tryin’ to make the Sally,’ says the Cap’n. I stepped on the tread of the siren and kept her blattin’ now and then and, after some minutes, we heard a splashin’ alongside and there was a man swimming in the sea.”
“He had swum out from shore?” I asked, just to keep the conversation going. I wasn’t really interested.