Part 26

While Gregory with great caution moved the boat close by the rocks, I peered constantly through the water-glass into the grayish depths where the fierce-jawed moray has his hunting-grounds, and where the sharp-stinging medusa drifts along, moving out of the way of no creature whatsoever. It was an enchanted world that lay beneath us, and I saw many strange things which cannot be described here.

But I must explain about the water-glass, an article with which all fishermen of the Bermudas are familiar. Like many another indispensable thing, it is of simple construction, being nothing more than a wooden bucket with a bottom of glass. By placing it on the surface of the water and inserting one’s face in the open top, it is possible to see distinctly whatever may be beneath.

We worked our way at times into small bays where green sea-lettuce lay in the shallow water in masses. These we overturned with our oar and boat-hook, hoping to come upon the wily object of our pursuit.

The lair of the scuttle, according to Gregory, may be discovered by certain unmistakable signs. It is the accustomed way of the creature to drag his prey to his hiding-place, there to devour it at leisure. Crafty in the capture of his victims, and wily in the concealment of himself from observation, he makes no attempt to hide the débris of his feasts. He thrusts his garbage forth from his stronghold, unconcerned as to where it fall, provided the entrance be clear for his own movements. If he has feasted high on lobster or oyster, crab or clam, a mountain of shells proclaims his lair. The heap may grow until it would fill a basket as large as a man could lift.

Knowing his weakness for these dainties, Gregory gathered a supply, hoping to lure the scuttle into his power. He did, in fact, nearly succeed on one occasion by lowering a tempting morsel near where the creature lay concealed. A long arm snatched and held the bait until the sharp, hidden hook tore loose, and Gregory almost fell over as he jerked the stout line.

This method might have succeeded if I had not been anxious to take my departure from the islands and so urged haste. Whereupon Gregory, who was big and powerful and did not fear a personal encounter with the scuttle, became more aggressive.

On the following day, when the tide was motionless and the water glassy, he saw the scuttle disappear under a narrow ledge a couple of fathoms down in the clear, greenish channel. He was overboard in an instant, and with a few quick strokes reached the bottom. Looking down through the water-glass I could see the whitish soles of his bare feet as he made tremendous upward thrusts with his legs.

The scuttle was disturbed by the suddenness of the attack, and as he had not selected a favorable place for concealment, decided to make off, and lost no time in doing so. He may have caught sight of the whites of Gregory’s determined eyes. He was barely quicker, however, than the quick arm of the man, and might have been seized had he not played a scurvy trick: the water suddenly turned black--black as Gregory’s own face.

It appears that the creature always bears a sac of inky fluid ready in an instant to darken the water all about him, and can dart away under an impenetrable cloud of his own conjuring. This characteristic, which I had hitherto read of, I now saw verified. By magic the scuttle had disappeared, and a moment later there was a porpoise-like snort as Gregory’s head popped above the surface.

Later, we had proof also of the scuttle’s mysterious power of suddenly changing his color. Like the chameleon, he may appear conspicuously dark at one moment and inconspicuously pale at another, against the grayish, ragged wall of the coral reef. This I made sure of as our boat came close to another of his hiding-places. Although he was in full sight, it took me some minutes to realize that the ghostly outlines pointed out to me were not a part of the gray background of jagged rock. He can, moreover, instantly turn brown or become spotted, as I later saw with my own eyes after we had got him into our power.

It was clear that there was nothing more to be done in that locality; so Gregory clambered aboard and we held counsel together as the boat drifted broadside up the channel with the tide; and the earnestness of the black man made so profound an impression on me that when we parted in the evening I was not without hope that my mission would eventually be crowned with success.

But the next day we were again disappointed. Gregory dived and had the scuttle in his arms almost before I could brush from my eyes the salt water his splash threw over me. As he came up alongside, however, trouble began, for the scuttle got a grip on the bottom of the boat with his many sucker-covered arms, and, while Gregory was getting his breath, his hold slipped, and again the creature was off. Just how he managed to disappear so suddenly remains a mystery; neither Gregory, who went under again, nor I, who promptly reached for the water-glass, got the faintest glimpse of him. Doubtless he shot away body foremost, after the manner of his kind, every one of his eight arms contributing to the haste of his departure.

Failing in all these manœuvres, I began to scout among lonely pools under the cliffs, where, if cautious, one may see strange sea-folk when the tide is out. Gregory, left alone with his stratagems, disappeared for a few days. The last glimpse I had of him was of a very black man with a very earnest face, loading a huge wicker contrivance into a boat. I had considerable faith in his resourcefulness, for he knew the reefs and caves as well as did the scuttle himself.

But my solitary patrol of the rocky shore proved fruitless, and I was glad, two days later, to find Gregory sitting on a stone wall down by the little dock, swinging his bare feet and enjoying the hot sunshine, but not much inclined to talk. He told me that he had gone to a distant island village in search of a large trap-device used for catching fish. This, with the help of another fisherman, he had lowered into a deep cleft among the reefs two or three miles to the westward. I was to go with him the next day to see if by any possibility the scuttle had been deluded into entering it, for it was baited with something which the always hungry monster was pretty sure to investigate.

We were off early in the morning, but made slow progress, as there was little wind. It was fully three hours before we arrived at the sunken trap, which Gregory located by the bearings of certain distant cliffs, for there were few portions of the reef showing at high tide. The breeze being light, the stone killick with line attached was thrown overboard without lowering the sail. Through the water-glass we made out the framework of the big trap on the bottom. I let out more anchor-line, the sloop drifting astern until we were nearly over the trap, when Gregory yelled that the scuttle was ours.

He let down a grapple, and after some heaving and hauling we dragged the cumbersome contrivance on board. The hatch over the water-filled well of the sloop was shoved back to make ready for the entrance of our captive. I kept a firm grip on the trap while Gregory, all the while shouting instructions to me and abuse at the scuttle, undid the fastenings at one corner. It took a deal of punching with an oar to dislodge the creature, whose eight arms were reaching in all directions. When one of them thrust through an opening and took a turn around Gregory’s bare arm, the whites of the man’s eyes were even more conspicuous than his white teeth. There was a ripping sound as he tore the arm away from that sucker-covered arm of the scuttle, but no harm was done to either combatant.

What with the lurching of the sloop, the rocking of the big unsteady trap, the resistance of our captive, and Gregory’s shouting, there was considerable turmoil for so limited an area as that we occupied on our small craft. The scuttle was gradually crowded down, and was presently forced to take refuge in the well to escape the black man’s oar. In the bottom of the trap lay the empty shell of the great crayfish which had tempted the creature to his undoing. With the hatch back in place, and the trap lashed against the windward side of the mast, our work was done.

After a pull on the sheet, I took the tiller and my companion rested from his labors; but his tongue was loosened, and by the time we came to anchor in the twilight, he had said more about the scuttle than I have been able to recall, and a good deal that I am not hopeful of being able to verify. Nevertheless, he had earned his reward, and as the lights were beginning to glimmer around the harbor, he went to his home with a comfortable jingle of coins in his pocket.

When the steamer sailed away to the north, the scuttle was a captive on board, staring with unwinking eyes at the passengers who came to gaze at him. He escaped from confinement twice during the voyage, and we had no small difficulty in getting him properly secured. We learned that a large prisoner, if he is persistent enough, may take flight through a comparatively small hole, and we were therefore unremitting in our watchfulness until the captive was landed securely within the walls of the ancient fortress at the Battery.

And that is how the octopus came to the Aquarium.

IN NOVEMBER

BY EDITH WYATT

THEY had pitched camp in the shelter of a great buff-colored dune, with two up-turned canoes, and a small tent with a flap staked over it.

Lake Michigan, all green and mist-blown, banded the whole north horizon, to break along the curving beach in little hoary crowns of foam and bubbles. Southwest, southeast, and south, the broad, full contours of the dunes purled far away, beneath the gray and purple sky of the late autumn. They were grown with red-oak and yellow poplar-brush toward the west. Toward the southeast and south their long pure curves, low-swooping like a swallow’s flight, ran nude and pale, in shadows exquisitely changing in the rising afternoon.

Beside a smoky fire, between the tent and the lake, a sunburned young woman with roughly blown hair, in corduroy skirt and a boy’s overcoat, dark and shabby, now hid her eyes from the smoke, in the crook of her arm, and now rubbed vaseline on a stiff shoe in her lap.

These occupations so closely engaged her attention that she did not at first observe, across the beach, the approach of a little sandy woman between fifty and sixty, in a short walking-skirt and a felt walking-hat tied down with a veil. Her shoes looked damp. She glanced rather shyly, but with a sort of liking and friendliness, at the tent and the fire.

'Come and dry your shoes,' said the girl hospitably, lifting her eyes. She was a rather pretty blonde girl, with a good-humored, quiet expression.

'Are you folks camping out here?' said the visitor, still looking with an air of satisfaction and pleasure at the camp. 'You’re from Chicago, relatives to Mrs. Horick in South Laketown, ain’t you? So I heard. I’ve sewed some for her. Oh, I just wisht I was you. Few cares enough for camping to do it this time of year. Your folks come here to fish?'

'No,' said the girl quietly. 'One of my cousins was taken sick this fall, and told to live outdoors. So he decided to come out here and camp with his wife and little boy and me. For a while.'

'You have a nice place for it.'

'My cousins have gone to the station on some errands,' said the girl reflectively, polishing her shoe. She could not very well say to her relative’s dressmaker, that the camp had feared the visit of Mrs. Horick on that very afternoon.

Mrs. Horick was a pretty, competent, hard-edged young woman, who enjoyed such things in life as tight face-veils, high traps, and docked horses. The adult campers had drawn lots to select her victim for the afternoon. The lot had fallen to Jim Paine. But Jim took so unbridled a pleasure in displeasing Mrs. Horick that it was decided such a fate would be too cruel to her. The lots were drawn again. This time the lot fell to Alice Paine. But Mrs. Horick depressed Alice, sometimes for several hours after her departure. The lots were drawn again. This time the lot fell to Elsie Norris. With whoops, it was determined Elsie must remain. She would not care a fig what Mrs. Horick said or thought, would be entirely amiable with her, and, besides, had no shoes to walk to the station in. One pair was wet. The other was too stiff to put on. After dressing Elsie in the most handsome garments the camp afforded, the others had left her, early in the afternoon, with Shep, Rabbie’s collie, wandering around within call, and occasionally barking at imaginary wolves in the brush.

'Perhaps you met my cousins on your way,' said Elsie.

'No. I didn’t come from that direction. I came from Gary. It ain’t much of a place to live. But I got a real good airy room, with a back-porch of my own, in a carpenter’s family there. Miss Brackett’s my name. I’m about the only dressmaker in the place, so’s I get plenty of custom, more 'n all that I can do; and well-paid, too, you can say in a way,' she added with a sigh; 'and in a way, not; because I hate sewing. But then I walk a good deal around here. There’s some fine walks through the oaks and in the dunes; just as fine as any one could wish,' she said with a look of content. 'It makes me just about homesick to see your camp. I was camping myself six years ago.'

'Were you? Here?'

'No,' said Miss Brackett, with a little hesitation. In response to Elsie’s invitation, she had seated herself on a log, near the fire. There was evidently something very stirring in their little camp to her. For a moment she even looked as if she were going to cry. 'It was on the plains,' she said finally, with a certain pride. 'A long wagon-trip, a whole year long.'

'How fine!'

'Yes,' said Miss Brackett, looking at the dunes and the surging lake. 'It was, as you might say, a great experience. You hardly would believe me, but before that time, why, I hardly knew there was such a place as outdoors; not till I was forty-six years old; and that’s a fact.'

Elsie glanced up at her inquiringly. She had heard of persons who acquired Spanish at ninety, or who experienced a passionate personal infatuation for the first time at sixty, but never of an adult creature, devoted to an indoor existence, who suddenly felt in middle age a real response to the great inarticulate voices of the earth.

'Up to then, I lived on the West Side, in Chicago, with my married sister. My father left the place to her and to me. Most of the rest of the property went to my young half-brother Kip. But when Nettie’s children were nearly grown, it seemed as though there wasn’t any room left in the house for me; and yet they needed me, you see, to sew for them, right straight along. I used to sew, sew, sew till midnight and past, often, tucking on the girls' summer dresses, especially that last spring when I was at home; and I began to cough then and get so dreadful tired. That winter Nettie thought each of the girls ought to have their own room. It was no more than right, either. Nettie and me, we each had our own room when we was young girls. So I used to sleep just on two chairs with quilts in the back parlor, and couldn’t seem to rest very good, and, besides, had to get up and get dressed and the room fixed, real early, so Will could come there and read his morning paper. Well, I used to keep all my things in shoe-boxes, up in the attic, so they’d be out of the way. They used to laugh, and laugh, about those boxes; and one night we was all sitting on the steps, and they were laughing, and my youngest niece, Baby, she got real mad. She 's so warm-hearted and she never wanted to take my room, and only did because it provoked Nettie so, for her not to. Babe turned real white, and she said all of a sudden, "The reason why Aunt Min hasn’t anything but shoe-boxes to keep her things in is just because we’ve turned her out of everything," she said. "You ought to be ashamed of yourselves." And she jumped up and ran into the house.

'That night my brother Kip happened to be there. He’d been West ever since he was fifteen. He’s a lot younger than Nettie and me--only twenty-five, then. We thought Kip was an awful wild, queer sort of fellow, then; we didn’t know him at all. I felt just like the rest. He’d run through all that was left him long ago; and he’d married an actress and was separated from her. He was a sort of a Socialist too, and even had tramped some. But he seemed to be real kind in some ways. When Babe said that, he looked at me quite hard. When he went home he says to me, "You look sick, Min," he says, and he took hold of my hand. "You’ve got fever. Why don’t you see a doctor?"

'Well, I don’t know what got into me. After they was all gone that night, I just broke down, and cried and cried. I did feel dreadful sick and feverish, and I hadn’t no money of my own to see a doctor, and felt just all gone really. I managed to get up and fix the room before any of them come down. But then I had to lie on the sofa, and couldn’t get to breakfast. And after breakfast--would you believe it?--a doctor come. Kip sent him, himself. But he frightened Nettie to death. I felt dreadfully sorry for her.'

'He told your sister how ill you were,' said Elsie gravely.

'Oh, yes. But it wasn’t so much that, as she was so afraid some of the children might catch my trouble. She was all right though as soon as they got me to the hospital, though she was provoked too, because it took so much of her time to come there to see me. She come twice before I went away. The doctor said that going away was my only chance. For all that I was up and around, he thought I couldn’t live a year.'

Neither of them spoke for a moment, looking away at the dunes.

'Then--what do you think--Kip had an intimate friend, quite a rich young man, Will Bronson, who was sick the same way I was. That’s how Kip come to notice my sickness so. The doctors wanted him kept out of doors, and he and Kip was going on this wagon-trip. But his mother was nearly crazy worrying over it, and worrying the young man and crying all day and night. She thought Kip never could take care of him. Well, those boys wanted me to go off with them on the wagon-trip. They said I could cook for them, and it would relieve the mother. And it did. They took me to see her. And she thought if a person like me could go on a wagon-trip it couldn’t be so awful after all. Well, the short and the long of it was, we went to Fort Leavenworth, and the boys got a wagon and provisions and blankets and thick shoes and things for me, and they got two good mules from the government post, and we started off.'

Miss Brackett sat erect. A look of elation burned in her violet eyes.

Elsie drew a deep breath and laughed.

'Yes. I didn’t like the idea at first: all the rough clothes, and our being alone on the plains, and after a while going to be right in the desert--it seemed to me terrible. But it was the only thing there was for me to do. I just kep' my mouth shut tight through all that time. And then, I don’t know, more and more, oh, I just come to love it!'

After a moment Elsie said, 'And did you really have any hardships?'

'What do you call hardship? The rainy reason was bad. But I’ve been lots wetter longer at a time, through whole winters, when I’d lend my rubbers to the children. Sometimes it was terrible cold. But then we always had a good fire. I’ve been lots colder in the back parlor and on crowded street-car platforms, and lots and lots more uncomfortable. Once we got off the trail. Once we had a bad time about finding water. One night, after the mules was hobbled they jumped along so far, even hobbled, that we couldn’t get them for hours. Kip and Will Bronson was gone six hours in different directions; and I was afraid they was lost. But I’ve had more hardship, you might say, and not that I want to complain either, in one week on the West Side at home, than in a whole year of what they called roughing it. And for hard feelings, and real mean bad ways of acting, I’ve seen more of them over getting out one shirt-waist in a dressmaker’s shop, than in that whole time on the wagon-trip. Even though once we had a man in our camp that we heard afterwards was a criminal and fugitive from justice,' she added with a laugh.

'What sort of a man was he?'

'A very considerate, pleasant sort of man. He was a short, thick-set fellow from Missouri, with a hard sort of chin. He come riding up near the Baton Pass, and asked to stay the night and get supper and breakfast with us. Well, it so happened I had caught cold and wasn’t feeling extra. The boys was worried and sort of mad,--that was the worst trouble we had,--because I would mend and cook just the same. The boys cooked terrible, and it seemed as though I couldn’t have no peace of mind, unless I did it. It made me feel so as though I was no use to them and not paying my share by what I did, you know. Well, this man from Missouri was a fine cook. He stayed with us three days, and by the time he went I was all right again. He was real helpful. They never got him. When we come to Trinidad, we was good and surprised to find he was a cattle thief that shot a sheriff that tried to arrest him.'

The lake was paler now. White clouds plumed on the horizon, and an evening glow, green and faintly flushing, was reflected delicately from the west. The dunes were browner and darker. The visitor sat thinking, evidently, of her long, free wandering days. Elsie, putting on her shoes, sat thinking of her wayfaring companion’s mean and hateful life in the very midst of what is called civilization and respectability; of her struggle for existence--a struggle in which she had been all but killed by the greedinesses around her; a struggle just as sharp as any of the nail-and-claw-depredations commonly attributed exclusively to wilder-nesses. They watched the sky change, in an unspoken friendliness.

'And now, you are much better?' said Elsie quietly.

'Yes. Now I’m well, thank God! And the Bronson boy as sound as a bell. That was the most lucky illness you can imagine for me. I couldn’t go back after that to the way I lived before. I always would live different--more outdoors, and just looking after myself better. Since that time, I’ve been lots more use to myself and everybody else. After we got to California, I sewed here and there for the people where we boarded first, and they liked my sewing so much, and I made so much money, that when Kip got a job to Gary, engineering for the electric plant, and I come too, to keep house for him, I put up a sign and gradually I’d worked up a good trade, before he was married. Why I’m going to be able to send Babe to Vassar, and plenty for me to take a trip west, too, next summer. Kip married such a nice girl.' She rose. 'I’ve talked you to death. But when you spoke about your cousin, it brought everything right out of my lips some way. I hope he’s not so very sick.'

'No. He will be well again. He has a splendid constitution.'

Miss Brackett shook hands with her. 'I wish you would come in for a minute and see me, if you ever have time some day when you’re in Gary.'

'I will.'

'Good-night.'

'Good-night.'

As her visitor disappeared over the rounded ridge of the dune, Elsie heard the home-coming voices of the campers. They had brought peanut-taffy to her, and they praised her none the less highly for her intended sacrifice to the Moloch of Mrs. Horick and the dullness of the world that she had not needed to make this sacrifice.