When the Cock Crows

by Waldron Baily

The Coroner complimented the jury upon their verdict and then discharged the panel. He next arranged with one of the boatmen present for the removal of the corpse to Beaufort, where he meant to have it embalmed and held for a reasonable length of time before burial, for identification. When these formalities were concluded the crowd quickly scattered. Some hastened away to attend their nets, which had been neglected for many hours, while the others set sail or cranked engines for the voyage home.

Captain Ichabod and his friends from the life-saving station decided that they would run over to Shackleford's Banks, and thence sail along shore to approximately the point where Ichabod had seen the rockets of a ship that doubtless went to pieces in the surf during the night of the gale. Their particular destination was a place where the strip of sand was so narrow that they could easily cross it on foot in the expectation of locating the wreck of the unfortunate vessel. Very soon after the party had set out, Captain Ichabod's spirits lightened. The congenial company of the coast-guard crew, now that he was away from the gruesome association of the Coroner's Court, induced a reaction in his mood, and he was almost cheerful. His companions were anxious to remove the old man's depression and made kindly effort to divert his thoughts into pleasant channels by droll stories and rough banter. When, finally, the party went ashore at Core Banks and walked up the beach along the edge of the breaking surf in search for signs of the wrecked ship, it was Ichabod that walked in the lead with brisk steps and animated face. It seemed scarcely possible in view of his agility and vigor that the old fisherman was indeed living on borrowed time.

It was not long before they began to see huge timbers that had been twisted and rent asunder, which now strewed the beach. They saw, too, others to which were attached sections of the deck and the deck-house, which were lazily riding back and forth to the rhythm of the sea. Now, a wave would drop its bit of flotsam upon the hard sand; then, a moment later, one of greater magnitude would envelop the stranded spar or plank or piece of cargo, and with its backward flow bear away the wreckage, to be again tossed hither and yon, until perhaps finally the tide at its full would leave it on the shore, to become the spoil of beach-combers—those ghouls ever ready to take advantage of the hapless mariner's mischance.

It was a fact that the whole shore line for over a mile was littered with parts torn away from the foundered schooner. Amid the mass were many barrels of rum and of molasses out of the cargo. As the little squad of men from the station, together with Captain Ichabod, drew near the strip of beach, they saw two fellows working with feverish haste to roll a barrel of molasses over the top of a sand dune, and then down on the Sound side. Captain Ichabod scrambled to the pinnacle of a near-by hill of sand. From this vantage point, he beheld a good-sized two-masted sharpie lying near the shore. The sight made him immediately aware that the beach-combers from up the coast were already on the job, and that the boat on the Sound side of the Banks belonged to them. He knew, too, that the pair working so desperately to get the barrel away from the wreckage were thus toiling in haste to get their loot aboard the sharpie.

For certain reasons, Captain Ichabod Jones had taken a strong dislike to the professional beach-combers. He believed that a man who would rush to the wreckage of a ship thrown on a barren shore away from civilization, and would appropriate without investigation the valuable articles thus cast up by the sea, was in very sooth not a good citizen—just a plain thief. More than once, indeed, he had seen fit to report men of this stripe, and had caused them no little trouble in the courts over this matter of their pilfering. It is just possible that, had Captain Ichabod not been robbed of the woman he loved years before by one of this class, he might have looked on their depredations with a more lenient eye. Be that as it may, it remains certain that he maintained a very genuine and very bitter spite against all beach-combers.

Captain Ichabod often asserted that it was right for the natives to remove to a place of safety above high tide any articles of value from a wreck on their shores, and then to wait during a reasonable time for the lawful owners to make their claim. But he had no tolerance for the fellow who would hurriedly and secretly remove to his own premises goods of a salvable sort. He declared this to be no better than theft.

The Captain quickly realized now that here was his opportunity. He motioned to his friends from the station to go on toward the two men busy with the barrel. He, himself, hastened down the slope of sand, in order that he might slip close unseen, and station himself between the beach-combers and their boat. By this method of approach both he and the men from the station would make sure of recognizing the offenders. As the old man drew near the sharpie, which lay with her sails flapping idly in the scant breeze, his eyes took in the name roughly painted on the stern rail of the boat, and he stared at it in shocked amazement. He stopped short and spelled the words aloud:

"R-o-x-a-n-a L-e-e!"

At the sound of the name in his ears, a strange expression came over the fisherman's features. It was an expression compounded of many warring emotions, which it might well have puzzled an observer to interpret. But his muttered soliloquy made his feeling clear.

"Wall, I'll be plumb damned! Here it is, most twenty year since I has spoke them words an' God knows I didn't aim to now, but bein' a leetle slow on spellin', an' kinder beflustered over identifyin' these-here thievin' cusses they got out before I realized what I was sayin'. That boat's named fer my old gal!"