Chapter 26

“Certainly not! What have you to say to the ridiculous, nonsensical story that you attempted to elope with my daughter?”

Not by a flicker of the eyelids did the imperturbable maker of million-dollar checks show confusion.

“If such a lie needs denial from me I most firmly do deny it, sir.”

“You cheap renegade!” roared the captain.

“That will do, Mr. Bradish!”

The clerk obeyed the wave of his master's hand and retired quickly.

“Mr. Marston,” raved Mayo, “I'm fighting for all that's worth while to me in life. My reputation as a master mariner, my chance to make a living in my work. I was a fool on board your yacht! With all my soul I am penitent. I will-”

“Enough! Don't you dare to discuss my own daughter with me!”

“I don't intend to, sir. I'm going to believe that you don't know what your understrappers have done to me. You only see results. But find out what is being done in your name, Mr. Marston. Some day it will be bad for you if you don't stop 'em.”

“Is that a threat?”

“It's only my appeal for justice. My God, sir--”

“There's justice waiting for you.”

“Then send out for your marshals. Let them drag me into court! Your man Bradigh's mouth is closed now, but it has been open. I know what has been done to me. Let them put me on the stand. You don't dare to have me stand up in court and tell what I know.”

“Do you suppose I am running the Federal courts?”

“You'd better find out whether you have power or not. There are men in this world who will believe an honest man's true story!”

“Good day!” said Mr. Marston, significantly.

Mayo hesitated, gazed into the impassive countenance of the magnate, and then conviction of the uselessness of argument overwhelmed him. He started for the door.

“Certain sensible things can be done,” Marston called after him. “You'd better get out of New York. If you know of a place to hide you'd better get into it.”

Mayo did not reply. He strode out through the offices, descended to the street, and went on his way.

He did not notice that an automobile pursued him through the roaring traffic of the streets, halting ahead of him when, he had turned into one of the quieter thoroughfares.

The car was close to the curb, and Alma Marston put out her hand and signaled to him. “He gave-you no hope-nothing?”

“Nothing!”

“I have waited. I thought of asking you to come for a talk with me.”

He shook his head.

“Perhaps it's better as it is! There isn't very much to be said-not now!” She leaned over the side of the tonneau and the clatter of traffic enabled her to talk without taking the eavesdropping chauffeur into their confidence. “I am not worthy of your thoughts or your confidence after this, Boyd. What I was yesterday I am not to-day; I have told you that. No, do not say anything! I know, now, that I was only playing with love. I cannot name what I feel for you now; I have insulted the word 'love' too much in the past. I'm not going to say anything about it. Was it any excuse for me that you had sunk a ship, were going to prison for killing men, so the papers hinted? No, it was not! But I allowed myself to make it an excuse for folly.”

“You don't know what love is,” he declared. In the agony of his degradation he had no relish for softer sentiments. But he did not dare to look up at her.

“I _did_ not know! But perhaps some day I can show you that I do now know,” she replied, humbly. “That will be the day when I can give you the proofs against the men who have tried to ruin you. I am inside the camp of your enemies, Boyd, and I'll give you those proofs--even against my own father, if he is guilty. That's all! Let's wait. But while you are working I hope it's going to give you a bit of courage to know that I am working for you!” She patted his cheek. “Go on!” she called to her driver. The car jerked forward and was hidden among the chariots roaring down through the modern Babylon.

Without power for self-analysis, without being able to penetrate the inner recesses of his own soul in that crisis, he trudged on.

A little later, almost unconscious of volition in the matter, he found himself at a steamboat office buying a ticket. He was going back to the obscurity of Maquoit. But he was fully conscious that he was not obeying Julius Marston's injunction to go and hide. A deeper sentiment was drawing him. He knew where there existed simple faith in him and affection for him, and he craved that solace. There were humble folks in Maquoit who would welcome him.

“I'll go back--I'll go home,” he said. Once he would have smiled at the thought that he would ever call the Hue and Cry colony “home.”

XXVI ~ THE FANGS OF OLD RAZEE

A dollar a day is a Hoosier's pay, Lowlands, lowlands, a-way, my John! Yes, a dollar a day is a Hoosier's pay, My dollar and a half a day. --Old Pumping Song.

Before leaving New York Mayo made inquiries at offices of shipping brokers and trailed Captain Zoradus Wass to his lair in the loafers' room of a towboat office. Their conference was a gloomy one; neither had any comfort for the other. Mayo was laconic in his recital of events: he said that he had run away--and had come back. Of Marston and Marston's daughter he made no mention.

“I have been to see that fat whelp of a Fogg,” stated the old master mariner. “I ain't afraid of him. I had a good excuse; I said I wanted a job. I didn't let on to him that I advised you to slip your cable, but I might have curried favor with him by saying so. He seemed to be pretty well satisfied because you had skipped.”

“Captain Wass, that's the main thing I've come to talk over with you. Here's my ticket back home. But I feel that I ought to walk up to the United States marshal's office and surrender myself. And I want to ask you about the prospects of my getting bail. Can you help me?”

“I reckon if I saw you behind bars I'd do my best to get you out, son. But you steer away from here on a straight tack and mind your own business! When the United States wants you they'll come and get you--you needn't worry!”

“But I do worry, sir! I am dodging about the streets. I expect to feel a hand on my shoulder every moment. I can't endure the strain of the thing! I don't want anybody to think I'm a sneak.”

“As near's I can find out by nosing around a little that indictment is a secret one--even if it really was returned. And I'm half inclined to think there wasn't any indictment! Perhaps those officers were only sent out to get you and hold you as a witness. Fogg has been doing most of the talking about there being an indictment. However it is, if they don't want you just yet I wouldn't go up to a cell door, son, and holler and pound and ask to be let in. Law has quite a way of giving a man what he hollers for. You go away and let me do the peeking and listening for you around these parts. I'm collecting a little line of stuff on this water-front. Haven't much else to do, these days!”

“I reckon my first hunch was the right one, sir!' I'll go along home. If you hear anybody with a badge on inquiring for me tell him I'm fishing on the _Ethel and May_.”

“That's a mean job for you, son. But I guess I'd better not say anything about it, seeing what I have shanghaied you into.”

“It has not been your fault or mine, what has happened, sir. I am not whining!”

“By gad! I know you ain't! But get ready to growl when the right time comes, and keep your teeth filed! When it's our turn to bite we'll make a bulldog grip of it!” He emphasized the vigor of that grip in his farewell handshake.

But Mayo did not reflect with much enthusiasm on Captain Wass's metaphorical summons to combat.

Returning to Maquoit, the young man decided that he was more like a beaten dog slinking back with canine anxiety to nurse his wounds in secret.

His experiences had been too dreadful and too many in the last few days to be separated and assimilated. He had been like a man stunned by a fall--paralyzed by a blow. Now the agonizing tingle of memory and despair made his thoughts an exquisite torture. He tried to put Alma Marston out of those thoughts. He did not dare to try to find a place for her in the economy of his affairs. However, she and he had been down to the gates of death together, and he realized that the experience had had its effect on her nature; he believed that it had developed her character as well. Insistently the memory of her parting words was with him, and he knew, in spite of his brutal and furious efforts to condemn her, that love was not dead and that hope still lived.

He swung aboard the _Ethel and May_ one afternoon, after he had waited patiently for her arrival with her fare.

“I have come back to fish with you, Captain Candage, until my troubles are straightened out--if they ever are.”

Captain Candage was silent, controlling some visible emotions.

“I have come back to be with folks who won't talk too much about those troubles,” he added, gloomily.

“Exactly,” agreed the skipper. “Nothing is ever gained by stirring up trouble after it has been well cooked. Swing the pot back over the fire, I say, and let it simmer till it cools off of itself. I thought you would come back.”

“Why?”

“Well, I knew they had taken away your papers. Furthermore, Polly has been saying that you would come back.”

“And why did she think so?” asked Mayo, in milder tones.

“She didn't say why,” admitted Captain Candage. “Maybe women see into things deeper than men do.”

“It seems like coming home--coming home when a man is sick and tired of everything in the world, sir.”

“Reckon my Polly had something like that in mind. She dropped a few hints that she hoped you'd come and get rested up from your troubles.”

“And she has gone back to her work, I suppose?”

“No, she is still on her job at Maquoit, sir--calls it her real job. She isn't a quitter, Polly isn't. She says they need her.”

“Like the song says, 'The flowers need the sunshine and the roses need the dew,' that's how they need her,” averred Oakum Otie. “Though them Hue and Cry women and children can't be said to be much like roses and geraniums! But they're more like it than they ever was before, since Miss Polly has taken hold of 'em. It's wonderful what a good girl can do when she tries, Captain Mayo!”

Resuming his life on the fishing-schooner was like slipping on a pair of old shoes, and Mayo was grateful for that New England stoicism which had greeted him in such matter-of-fact fashion.

“What you want to tell me is all right and what you don't want to tell me is still better,” stated Captain Candage. “Because when you ain't talking about it you ain't stirring it!”

So, in that fashion, he came back into the humble life of Maquoit. There had been no awkwardness in his meeting with Captain Candage; it had been man to man, and they understood how to dispense with words. But Mayo looked forward to his meeting with Polly Candage without feeling that equanimity which the father had inspired.

He felt an almost overmastering desire to confide to her his troubles of the heart. But he knew that he would not be able to do that. His little temple had been so cruelly profaned. His humiliation was too great.

He was conscious that some other reason was operating to hold him back from explaining to her; and because he did not understand just what it was he was ill at ease when he did come face to face with her. He was grateful for one circumstance--their first meeting was in the old fish-house at Maquoit, under the hundred curious eyes of the colony. He had rowed ashore in his dory and went to seek her in the midst of her activities. She put out both her hands and greeted him with frank pleasure and seemed to understand his constraint, to anticipate his own thoughts, to respect his reticence.

“I'm glad you have come back to wait till all your troubles are settled. The most consoling friends are those who know and who sympathize and who keep still! Now come with me and listen to the children and see what the women are doing. You will be proud and glad because you spoke up for them that day when we went over to Hue and Cry.”

After that there was no constraint between them; they kept their own affairs hidden from each other. The autumn passed and the long, chill evenings came, and when the fishing-schooner was in port at Maquoit, between trips, Mayo and the girl spent comfortable hours together, playing at cards under the widow's red-shaded lamp and under the widow's approving eyes.

“No, they ain't courting, either,” she informed the pestering neighbors. “Do you suppose I have been twice married and twice a widder not to know courting when I see it? It's 'Boyd this' and 'Polly that,' to be sure, the whole continyal time; but she is engaged to somebody else, because she has been wearing an engagement ring that has come to her since she has been here. She showed it to me, and she showed it to him! And as for him, everybody 'longcoast knows how dead gone on him that millionaire girl is! Now everybody mind their own business!”

As the days passed the widow's counsel seemed to apply to all the affairs of Maquoit; folks went at their business in good earnest.

The winter wind nipped, the wharf piles were sheathed with ice, and only hardy men were abroad on the waterfront of the coast city, but the crew of the _Ethel and May_ were unusually cheerful that day.

The schooner had stayed on Cashes Banks and had ridden out a gale that had driven other fishermen to shelter. Then in the first lull she had sent her dories over the rail and had put down her trawls for a set, and a rousing set it was! It seemed as if the cod, hake, and haddock had been waiting for that gale to stop so that they might hunt for baited hooks and have a feast. Nearly every ganging-line had its prize. The bow pulley in each dory fairly chuckled with delight as the trawl line was pulled over it. Every three feet was a ganging-line. Each dory strung out a mile of trawl. And when the dories returned to the schooner and dumped the catch into the hold the little craft fairly wallowed under her load.

They caught the market bare; the gale had blown for nearly a week. Fish-houses bid spiritedly against one another, and when at last a trade was made and the schooner's crew began to pitchfork the fish into the winch buckets, and the buckets rose creaking out over the rail, the two captains went into the office of the fish-house to figure some mighty gratifying profits.

“Nothing like luck in the fishing game, gents,” observed the manager.

“Well, grit counts for something,” stated Captain Candage. “We've got a crew that ain't afraid of a little weather.”

“If that's the case, there may be something for you off-coast about now that's better than the fishing game.”

“What's that?” asked the old skipper.

“Wrecking. Seen the morning papers?”

“We've had something to do besides fool with papers.”

“That new Bee line steamer, _Conomo_, has been piled up on Razee Reef.”

“One time--this last time--she hugged too close!” snapped the young man. The others bent an inquiring gaze on him. But he did not explain. His thoughts were busy with the events of that day when the Bee line steamer started his troubles with Marston.

“Paper says she's considered a total loss,” went on the manager. “If that's so, and the underwriters give her up, there ought to be some fine picking for men with grit. The board of survey went out to her on a tug this morning.” He gave them their check, and they went aboard their schooner.

The affair of the _Conomo_ was not mentioned between them until they were at sea on their way to the eastward again. The piece of news did not interest Mayo at first, except as a marine disaster that had no bearing on his own affairs.

Captain Candage was stumping the quarter-deck, puffing at his short, black pipe. “I don'no' as you feel anyways as I do about it, Captain Mayo, but it ain't going to be no great outset to us if we make a leg out to Razee and see what's going on there,” he suggested.

“I have no objections,” returned Mayo. “But the way things are managed nowadays in case of wrecks, I don't see much prospect of our getting in on the thing in any way.”

“Mebbe not; but in case they're going to abandon her there'll be some grabbing, and we might as well grab with the rest of 'em.”

“If they can't get her off some junk concern will gamble on her. But we'll make an excursion of it to see the sights, sir. We can afford a little trip after what we pulled down to-day.”

There was no hope of reaching the wreck before nightfall, so they jogged comfortably in the light westerly that had succeeded the gale.

Captain Candage took the first watch after the second dog-watch, and at two bells, or nine o'clock, in the evening, Mayo awoke and heard him give orders to “pinch her.” He heard the sails flap, and knew that the men were shortening in readiness to lay to. He slipped on his outer clothing and went on deck.

“We're here,” stated the old skipper, “and it looks like some other moskeeters had got here ahead of us, ready to stick in their little bills when they get a chance.”

It was a clear night, brilliant with stars. In contrast with the twinkling and pure lights of the heavens, there were dim reds and greens and yellow-white lights on the surface of the ocean. These lights rocked and oscillated and tossed as the giant surges swept past.

“I make out half a dozen sail--little fellers--and two tugs,” said Captain Candage. “But get your eye on the main squeeze!”

Mayo looked in the direction of the extended mittened hand.

“Some iceberg, hey?” commented the skipper.

A short half-mile away, a veritable ghost ship, loomed the wrecked _Conomo_. Spray had beaten over her and had congealed until she seemed like a mass of ice that had been molded into the shape of a ship. She gleamed, a spectral figure, under the starry heavens.

A single red light, a baleful blob of color, showed from her main rigging.

They surveyed her for some time.

“I should say she was spoke for,” was Captain Candage's opinion. “It's high tide now, and a spring tide at that, and them tugs is just loafing out there--ain't making a move to start her. We can tell more about the prospect in the morning.”

Then the two captains turned in, for the _Ethel and May_ lay to docilely with a single helmsman at the wheel.

The crisp light of morning did not reveal anything especially new or important. There were half a dozen small schooners, fishermen, loafing under shortened canvas in the vicinity of the wreck. One of the tugs departed shoreward after a time.

Mayo had assured himself, through the schooner's telescope, that the remaining tug was named _Seba J. Ransom_.

“The captain of that fellow went mate with me on a fishing-steamer once,” he informed Captain Candage. “Jockey me down in reaching distance and I'll go aboard him in a dory. He may have some news.”

Captain Dodge was immensely pleased to see his old chum, and called him up into the pilot-house and gave him a cigar.

“It's only a loafing job,” he said. “I've got to stand by and take off her captain and crew in case of rough weather or anything breaks loose more'n what's already busted. They are still hanging by her so as to deliver her to the buyer.”

“Buyer?”

“Yep! To whatever junkman is fool enough to bid her in. She's stuck fast. Underwriters have gone back on that tug, and are going to auction her. I'm here to help keep off pirates and take her men ashore after she has been handed over. You a pirate, Mayo?” he asked, with a grin.

“I'm almost anything nowadays, if there's a dollar to be made,” returned the young man.

The _Ransom's_ captain gave him a wink. “I'm on to what happened on board the _Olenia_” he confided. “Feller who was in the crew told me. You're good enough for old Marston's girl. Why haven't you gone up to New York and taken--”

“Cut that conversation, Dodge,” barked Mayo, his face hard and his jaw jutting threateningly. “Good day!” added the young man, slamming the pilot-house door behind him.

His schooner, standing off and on, picked him up.

“There's no use hanging around here,” he informed the old skipper. “They're going to junk her, if they can find anybody fool enough to bid. She'll be guarded till after the auction.”

Therefore the _Ethel and May_ shook out all her canvas and headed full and by for Maquoit to secure her fresh supply of bait.

“It's a shame,” mourned Captain Candage, staring over the taffrail at the ice-sheathed steamer. “'Most new, and cost two hundred and fifty thousand dollars to build, if I remember right what the paper said when she was launched.”

“If she was making money they'll have another one in her place,” said Mayo.

“Don'no' about that, sir. The Bee line wasn't none too strong financially, I'm told--a lot of little fellers who put in what they could scrape and borrowed the rest. Depends on insurance and their courage what they do after this.” He offered another observation after he had tamped down a load in his black pipe. “Men will do 'most anything for money--enough money.”

“Seems as if I'd heard that statement before,” was Mayo's curt rejoinder.

“Oh, I know it ain't in any ways new. But the more I think over what has happened to the _Conomo_, the pickeder seems the point to that remark. And whilst I was standing off and on, waiting for you, I run close enough to that steamer to make out a few faces aboard her.”

Mayo glanced at him without comment.

“F'r instance, I saw Art Simpson. You know him, don't you?”

“He was captain of Mr. Marston's yacht once.”

“Why did he leave her?”

“I heard he had been discharged. That was what the broker said when he hired me.”

“Yes, that's what Simpson said. He made a business of going around and swearing about it. Seemed to want to have everybody 'longcoast hear him swear about it. When I see a man make too much of a business of swearing about another man I get suspicious. After Art Simpson worked his cards so as to get the job of second officer on board the new _Conomo_ I got _more_ suspicious. Now that I have seen how that steamer has been plunked fair and square on Razee, I'm _almighty_ suspicious. I'm suspicious enough to believe that she banged during Art Simpson's watch.”

“What are you driving at, Captain Candage? Are you hinting that anybody would plant a man for a job of that kind?”

“Exactly what I'm hinting,” drawled the skipper.

“But putting a steamer on the rocks at this time of year!”

“No passengers--and plenty of life-boats for the crew, sir. I have been hearing a lot of talk about steamboat conditions since I have been carrying in fish.”

“I've found out a little something in that line myself,” admitted Mayo.

“There's one thing to be said about Blackbeard and Cap'n Teach and old Cap Kidd--they went out on the sea and tended to their own pirating; they didn't stay behind a desk and send out understrappers.”

Mayo, in spite of his bitter memories of Julius Mar-ston's attitude, felt impelled to palliate in some degree the apparent enormities of the steamboat magnates.

“I don't believe the big fellows know all that's done, Captain Candage. As responsible parties they wouldn't dare to have those things done. The understrappers, as you say, are anxious to make good and to earn their money, and when the word is passed on down to 'em they go at the job recklessly. I think it will be pretty hard to fix anything on the real principals. That's why I am out in the cold with my hands tied, just now.”