Part 10

Gradually it came into his brain, even though the yet insufficient light revealed nothing of the boy’s face, that all was not quite natural. Once more a call, but no answer, not even the old familiar shifting of the legs. “Is it asleep you are, boy, and have you been asleep all night? Lad, lad, but if you’ve been asleep--” and bent over and lifted the sou’wester.

The face was calm--calm as a waxen mask in a window. But the eyes--wide open! Quickly he drew off the boy’s mitts and felt of the hands within. The ice on the gunnels of the dory was not colder. Martin’s brain did not grasp it, what with his body being so numb, but his heart crowded itself inside him.

He dropped back to his seat and resumed the oars. But only for a few strokes. He stood up, and with the bailer began to pound the ice off the dory. “She’ll sink else,” he said--“she’ll sink else, lad, and we’ll never get you ashore.” He broke the bailer trying to pound the ice off. He took the handle of an oar then--one of Eddie’s oars he noted dully, one of the oars which he had lightened by cutting down, to fit the boy’s feebler arms.

The ice cleared away, he went back to his rowing. But again only a few strokes, when it seemed to sweep over him what it meant--the frozen body of the poor boy-- Jack Teevens’s boy. He rubbed an iced mitt across his eyes. “God, what a death for you, child! What a death! And such a beautiful boy! If ’twas a tough old knotted trawler like me-- And me that was to watch out for him! Yet to watch I meant, lad, but ’twas a long night--and a cold. And not overwarm myself was I, and I’m misdoubting, too, I slept to the oars. O God, ’tis cruel--cruel!” and dropped his head on his hands.

He tried to think it out; but he had such horrible thoughts that he knew that course would never do. He lifted his body from his seat and tried to stand up. He could not, the first time, or the second, but the third he held his feet. The dory was again sagging under the weight of ice; from stem to stern, gunnels, thwarts, planks inside and out, were nearly a foot thick with it. The painter coiled in the bow was big around as a barrel. Across the body of the dead boy it was beginning to pack solid. Martin gouged the gob-stick from out of the frozen bottom and began to break the ice off. He could hardly hold it with one hand, and so put both to it.

A good part of the ice knocked loose and thrown over, he reapplied himself to the oars. It was plain enough to him now. “However else it comes, ’tis for you, Martin Carr, to stand to your rowin’--to stand to it till you can push your arms out no more from your shoulders, till your fingers will cling no longer to the handles, till--till you’re cold and stiff, no less, Martin Carr, than the poor boy there before you. If that comes, well and good, you’ve done your best. ’Tis to shore you must reach, or be picked up, or die to your oars. And mind it always, Martin Carr-- Christian burial for Jack Teevens’s boy.”

So he rowed on. All that day and all that long night he rowed--all through a snow-storm that enveloped him like ever-rolling white clouds, and through which only his fisherman’s instinct kept him to his course. “‘Twill be east-no’the-east this wind--if I know wind at all, and ’tis no’the by west you’re to head, Martin. Two points for’ard of the port beam you’ll keep that wind, and there you are, Martin, for the nearest point of Newf’undland--if ever you get there. But, oh, ’tis mortal cold and mortal tirin’,” he muttered, and yet rowed on, regarding his arms not as his own, but as a mechanism directed by some inner force and instinct that he did not recognize as part of himself.

Four full days and nights, and for the first time Martin Carr almost admitted himself beaten. His fingers, he observed, were stiffening more frequently; the rapping against the hard gunnel no longer brought the blood. Certainly they would freeze up soon. And if they froze he would be unable to row. They might freeze stiff and straight, like Eddie’s there. And if so? He groaned--he would be unable to grasp the oars. But hold--he would fix that. If freeze his fingers must, he would see that they froze so as to be of some use to a man. And conscientiously he curled them around the handles of the oars. Stubborn they were at first, but he forced them into position and held them motionless till they were securely frozen to the handles of the oars.

And so, the oars secured beyond accident or future weakness, Martin Carr resumed his solemn way to the shore. How far to the shore then? He did not know--maybe forty, maybe fifty, maybe sixty, maybe one hundred miles. For all he knew he might have been rowing zigzag all over the ocean, running S’s, as sometimes green hands steered a vessel over the wide sea.

However, row he did, gray winter skies and grim slate-colored seas about him. Lonesome? Aye, it was lonesome. In thirty years of fishing Martin Carr had never known so lonesome a time. Consider it--no sail, no smoke, no gull even to come screaming astern, and the boy’s frozen body ever facing him in the stern.

Only the slap of chopping seas under the dory’s low gunnels--that and the tumble of green-gray seas--interminable seas, curling like serpents, rolling always toward one and spitting foam as they rolled. Always that--that and the frozen body in the stern, and the thoughts that _would_ come to him. Such thoughts!

Sometimes Martin Carr thought he would move the body to the bow, where he might not have it forever before his eyes. But again he wasn’t quite sure that he would not see it just as clearly even if behind him; and somehow he was not quite sure that he did want it moved, even if he could do it now, which he doubted, his own fingers frozen as they were to the oars. Or his hands once removed, he was not sure he could reshape them to the handles of the oars again. So perhaps it was just as well, and he faced the dead boy anew.

For two days and two nights more, with his dead dory-mate’s face ever staring at him from the stern--for six frosty days and six freezing winter nights in all--through that northern wind, and sea, and snow, and hail, Martin Carr rowed the dory. And made land at last. It did not look much--an iron-bound shore, where the sheer rock rose straight as the wall of a church and against which the high seas beat furiously. He could not land there--he had to hunt a harbor. He made out one at last--an inlet, with signs of people near by. His eyes were no more than pin-points in his head, but he could make out the five or six low huts set up on the rocks, and for them he headed. The way was caked in ice, and that made hard work of it for a man who had come so far without food or drink to force his way through. Using the oars as poles, he might with less labor have beaten a channel through, but his fingers, frozen to the oars, were not yet to be unsealed. He could do only one thing, and that was row. And so he rowed, ever rowed, making a channel by forcing the bow of the dory over the ice till of its own weight it broke through and went on.

In that laborious fashion he advanced. Hours in that little bay alone, but at length he reached the shore. He made sure it was the shore by a long examination before he relinquished the oars. To free himself of the oars, he had to knock the ends of them one over the other--had to do that to loosen the ice from about his hands so that he could slip his fingers free. They came away as he had frozen them, shaped in cylindrical form to the handles. Taking note of how smoothly they came away, he reflected that he might with safety have slid them off before this--if for no more than to break the ice off his unshaven chin or to wipe the hail from his eyes, or to set back on Eddie’s head the sou’wester which had blown off in the night. But a man sees many things when it is past the time.

However, that wasn’t getting on. There was Eddie yet to be taken care of. Christian burial he had asked for, and Christian burial he should have. He crawled out of the dory, and reached over the gunnel with one leg till the toe of his boot touched the ice on solid land. Finding it firm, he drew his other leg after the first.

He pushed away from the dory. One step, and down he went to hands and knees, and could not get up, try as he would. He almost cried--perhaps if he had been stronger he would have cried. He, Martin Carr, whose strength used to be the boast of every crew that ever he sailed with, here he was, weak as a young child.

But he must get on. If he couldn’t walk, he could creep. And so creep he did, on hands and knees, a hundred yards, perhaps, to the door of the nearest hut.

They opened to his knock, a bearded man and behind him a stout woman, with a brood of fat children peering out curiously. Seeing how it must be with him, they lifted him up, set him down on a chair, and told him that in a minute or two the hot tea would be ready for him; or if he would wait but ten minutes, they would run over to the store and get him a glass of brandy--good brandy from Saint Pierre.

“I want no tea and I want no brandy,” said Martin Carr, “and yet thanks to ye the same. I’ve a dory-mate below, and he’s waitin’ burial. Help me with him, help me get him ashore, for I’m weak to cryin’ ’most, and after that prayers and a burial and Martin Carr will never forget ye both.”

Back to the dory they went with him, the man that Martin Carr had knocked up and two of his neighbors. Under Martin’s directions they essayed to lift the body from the dory, one being within the dory and two ashore. They had the body among them, suspended between the dory and shore, but it was an awkward weight, and the feet of one slipping, through the ice and out of sight went the body.

“He’s gone!” they shouted, and stared at the hole in the ice.

“Christ in heaven!” Martin crawled to the hole, and with no further word dropped through and after the body. They saw him disappear and shivered.

Next they saw the body handed up by a pair of frozen hands. It was just deep enough there for Martin’s head, as he stood on bottom, to all but show clear. They took the body from him, seeing only the half-submerged head, the upstretched arms, and at the end of them the frozen, hooked fingers trying to balance the frozen body.

Martin followed the body, was helped up the beach, and there lay prone. It was some time before he could move, and his first clear speech was an apology. “I’m fair worked out,” he said. “I’ve come a long way--days and nights--days and nights-- I don’t know how many; but it seems like years of rowin’ I’ve had and nothin’ to eat--nor drink. Don’t mind if I refused your drink a while ago-- I’ll take it now that Eddie’s safe, and thank ye kindly for the same.”

They buried Eddie--dug his grave through the many feet of snow, lowered him into the warm, brown earth, and had the good father say prayers over him. Martin was there--stayed to the last shovelful and sent his own prayer with it.

Not till that was done did he hunt for a doctor. The doctor threw up his hands when he saw the sight, but without delay went to work. To save the arms and legs the entire ten fingers and toes would have to come off. The doctor told him that. “Go ahead,” said Martin.

Bandaged up and rested, the doctor asked him his story. And he told it--simply, with emphasis only on the fate of the poor lad, Jack Teevens’s boy.

“But when he was gone beyond all hope, when he was actually dead,” insisted the doctor, “why didn’t you take your cardigan jacket off him, and your oil-jacket, and put them back on yourself? He was dead, and much as you cared for him he would be no worse off. And you--with your constitution--you might have saved yourself from freezing up. Why didn’t you?”

“Take the clothes off the poor dead boy?” protested Martin. “Take them back after I’d put them on him? Twist and toss about his poor body after he was cold in death? I couldn’t-- I couldn’t.”

“God help you,” exclaimed the doctor--“you’re ruined for life!”

“Aye,” assented Martin, “ruined I am.”

“You take it calmly enough. Do you realize what it means, man? You, who were such a magnificent man when you were whole and sound, do you know what it means?”

Martin regarded the doctor. “Do I know?” he gazed on his bandaged hands, and looked down on his poor stumps of feet. “God help me, ’tis well I know it. Ye’ll never fish again, Martin Carr; ye’ll never haul trawl or row dory again, nor stand to a wheel, nor reef a sail. The best part of your life’s gone. Ye’re such a creature, Martin Carr, as men throw pennies to in the street. But the last thing ye did in your full man’s life--maybe Jack Teevens will remember it when in another world he meets ye, that out of love of him ye stood by his boy--were a full dory-mate to him--and at the last gave him Christian burial.”

The Salving of the Bark Fuller

I

To Captain Dixey, of the iron sea-going tug _Ice King_, lying tied up to her dock in Boston Harbor, came one winter’s morning a man in a fur coat and much bediamonded. “My name,” said the visitor, “is Wiley.”

“And wily is your nature,” thought Dixey, who, according to report, was not too unsophisticated himself.

“And I want to know what it will cost me for the services of your tug for one, two, three, or four days--a week, if necessary.”

“That will depend on the service.”

“Well, suppose I can’t just say what the service will be?”

“Then I can’t tell you just what the price will be.”

“Haven’t you a fixed price by the day?”

“For a fixed service, yes. A man comes to me and says, ‘What do you want to run down to Newport News to tow a barge, or say two barges, of coal--fifteen or eighteen hundred tons in a barge--to Boston?’ I tell him. I’ll tell you, if it’s anything of that kind.”

“’Tisn’t quite that.”

“Well, a man comes to me and says, ‘Say, I have a vessel under the lee of Cape Cod’--say it’s blowin’ a no’wester like now--a vessel say to anchor at Provincetown or Chatham----”

“Yes, yes, at Chatham----”

“-- And you ask me what I’ll go and get her for and tow her to Boston? I’ll soon tell you, if you’ll tell me what her tonnage is.”

“Say a two-thousand-ton bark, and loaded with mahogany.”

“That’s a pretty big vessel and a pretty valuable cargo, and the wind’s liable to stay no’west for a while--blowin’ hard as it promises to, and a hard drag around Cape Cod and across the Bay in a no’wester----”

“I know, I know--but how much?”

“Me to leave right away?”

“Well, maybe not at once--say in a few hours. But I’m ready to engage you at once.”

“Well----”

“But wait--it isn’t exactly a tow from anchorage.”

“No?”

“No. You see, it’s this way. I’m interested in this bark, and there’s a desperate sort of captain aboard, and she’s leaking, and I’m afraid that despite all instructions he’ll try and beat her around the Cape. And he mayn’t make it. And if he tries it and anything goes wrong--if he has to get help--say her sails blow off and she leaking-- I’d like to be right there and pick her up.”

“Why, that’s salvage, and a towboat could claim salvage--if she really needed help.”

“The towboat could claim? You mean the owners of the towboat could claim the salvage?”

“Why, of course, the owners.”

“Well, if I charter her I’d be the same as the owner, wouldn’t I?”

“M-m-- I don’t know but what you would.”

“Well, there it is.”

“H’m--where’d you say she was layin’-- Chatham?”

“I didn’t say.”

“No? I thought you did.”

“You think too fast. How much for your boat from now till the job’s over?”

“Well, two thousand tons--her hull’d be worth a lot in itself. And mahogany--a two-thousand-ton ship ought to be carryin’ about a couple of million feet of lumber. And mahogany worth--how much a thousand is mahogany worth, anyway?”

“I don’t know.”

“No? Well, it’s worth a whole lot, that’s sure. Here’s the _Morning Commercial News_’ll tell. M-m--here’s pine, rough--spruce, planed--m-m--oak--m-m--mahogany--whew! Say, mahogany’s away up, isn’t it? Let me see now. I’ll do that job----”

“Charter me your tug----”

“Yes, charter you the tug for five thousand dollars for the whole job, and two hundred dollars a day--the two hundred a day in case there’s nothing doin’, in case that Skipper shouldn’t go clear crazy, you see, and put out and she leakin’.”

Wiley put on his hat. “You don’t want much, do you? Five thousand dollars! I’ll give you a thousand for the whole job, or two hundred for every day you’re under charter if we don’t get her.”

“No, no--a cargo of mahogany. Five thousand or nothing.”

“Don’t be unreasonable. You know I can get plenty for a thousand----”

“Not too many sea-going tugs right now. There’s always good pickin’ for a big tug in the Bay this time of year. And there’s a risk in your job.”

“A little. But I can get a tug just as good as yours for a thousand.”

“Can you? Then why don’t you?”

“Well, I will. Good-day.”

Captain Dixey gazed after Wiley going up the dock. “And so he can--for a thousand--if he don’t tell them too much. But that would be a rich haul, and I don’t see why I can’t do a little salvage business on my own account. Why not? She’s anybody’s prize that can get her. Two thousand tons and a bark--in the lee of the Cape somewhere, and loaded with mahogany--he said something about Chatham. It oughtn’t be too hard to find out.”

Within ten minutes Captain Dixey was sending off telegrams like an Associated Press-man. He got the answer he wanted, and some hours later, when the man in the fur coat was putting out in another iron sea-going tug, the _Durlich_, Dixey, in the _Ice King_, was not half a mile behind him going across the Bay.

II

At about the same hour that the _Durlich_ and the _Ice King_ had breasted Cape Cod Light, the American fisherman _Buccaneer_, Crump Taylor master, lay hove-to on the Western Banks. On her deck were the two men on watch, alternately looking out for the big seas, and hailing one to the other when a particularly high one threatened to break over her rail.

Young Arthur Gillis, standing forward, suddenly called out to Sam Leary, his watchmate, who was aft, “Here’s one coming aboard, Sam, I think.”

Sam turned, brushed the spray from his eyes with a wet woollen mitt, and had a look. He did not have to look twice. “_Think_ she’s coming! _Think!_” and leaped for the lee of the mainmast, where he hooked his fingers to a couple of belaying-pins in the fife-rail. Another squint then from around the mast. “_Think!_” and with a toe to the fife-rail and both hands to the halyards of the furled-up mainsail, he began to climb. “And climb you, too!” Another glance between the mast and bolt-rope of the sail. “_Think_, do you? Climb’s all I got to say. Climb, you alabaster idjit, and don’t stop till you’re to the masthead! She’s a Himalaya mountain.”

Sam was by then strategically astraddle the main gaff, from where in comfort he could observe Gillis, who was to the lantern-board in the fore-rigging and still climbing. The sea struck her, and over rolled the little _Buccaneer_, over, over, till her masts were all but flat out on the water. Her waist must have been buried under ten feet of water, but Sam from his perch could manage to keep his head clear of the sea.

He saw that his watch-mate was safe. “Hi, there! are the companion-way hatches down?”

“I think so.”

“You think so! Some day you’ll think you’re alive, and you’ll wake up dead. Is she lifting any for’ard? Can you tell from where you are? Will she come up?”

“I think----”

“Blast you and your thinkin’. Do you ever do anythin’ but think? Don’t you ever _know_ anything?”

“She _is_ lifting.”

“All right, then. How’d you like to be below now, wonderin’ what’s happened her?”

“Not me. ’Tain’t so bad up here, is it?”

“‘Twon’t be--if she comes up.”

“Was this one ever hove down before, Sam?”

“Twice.”

“Worse than this were you ever?”

“Once ’twas worse. This same man in her--he’s a dog, is Crump--nothing jars him. Both mastheads under that time.”

“And come up, did she?”

“And come up, did she?” snorted Sam. “Ain’t she here, and ain’t I here? Watch out--she’s righting now.”

Up she came--a noble little vessel--slowly at first, but more rapidly as she began to free herself of the weight of water on her deck. Her final snap nearly threw Gillis from the rigging. A wild lunge, and he managed to retain his grip in time to save his life.

Sam had to hide his emotion at his mate’s close call. “Didn’t I tell you to hang on? Think you was in a swing at a picnic? H’m--there’s the Skipper bangin’--the hatch is jammed.”

Indications of action were proceeding from the cabin. Calm taps followed by quick strokes, and they seeming inadequate to proper results, one final impatient smash with the axe. Out came the dripping head and shoulders of Crump Taylor.

He surveyed the clean-swept deck. Disgust overcame him. “If that ain’t a clean job--what? I was hopin’ there’d be somethin’ left, but Lord! not so much as would make a boy’s size match to light a cigarette with. Gurry-kids, booby-hatches--not even a stray floatin’ thole-pin left of the dories.” After which he had time for the watch. “So there you are, eh? And which of you two guardian angels was it left that hatch open? Which? Nobody? It opened itself, I s’pose. It’ll get so a man won’t dare to turn in for a nap ’thout he has a rubber suit on. If we get that cabin dry in a month we’ll be doin’ well. And as fine a fire in the stove----”

“Wet the bunks, Skipper?” queried Gillis.

“Wet the bunks, you blithering idjit? Wet, is it?” He regarded Gillis more curiously, then gave him up; and stepping on deck, followed by the rest of the cabin gang, mingled in the waist with the crowd from the forec’s’le.

All hands gazed disconsolately about the deck, but, wise men all, allowed the Skipper to do the talking. “If this ain’t been the twistedest, unluckiest trip! Five weeks from home, and what’ve we got to show? Lost half our gear, and ’most lost four men and two dories. And now we’ve lost the dories altogether--and every blessed thing that ain’t bolted to her deck. Blessed if I don’t think when I get home I’ll go coastering! Yes, sir, coastering. Cripes, but look--even the rails gone from her! Look, will you, no more than the stanchions left to her.”

“A clean deck, Skipper, makes good sailin’,” put in Sam from the gaff.

“Does it, you--you-- I b’lieve ’twas you, Sam Leary, left that slide open. A clean deck makes good sailing, do it? Well, try her on sailing, then. Come off that gaff, you menagerie monkey, and give the gang a chance to loose that mains’l. That’s what. Slap it to her and put for home. And _drive_ her. If we can’t do nothing else, we c’n make a good passage of it.”

And with everything on, away went the deck-swept _Buccaneer_ to the west’ard.

III

The master of the bark _Henry Fuller_, mahogany-laden and Boston-bound, and, now to anchor in Chatham Harbor on the Cape Cod shore, stood conning a telegram.

“In two hours or so now he ought to be outside and waiting for us. ‘Slip your chains and let her go.’ All right. Only, instead of slipping I’ll see that they part--in the most natural way in the world--and out we’ll go proper.”

And out she went, threatening all sorts of destruction, but curiously missing whatever lay in her road. Thus far all had gone well. But the best-laid plans----

Instead of a moderate gale, the master of the _Fuller_ found a blizzard to combat--a northwester, which in winter is always cold. This one was so cold that in the first sweep of it they almost froze up--in fact, came so near to freezing that by midnight all hands were spending more time below than on deck in the effort to keep warm.

“Why in the devil’s name didn’t he warn me of this?--up there in Boston, where they have all kinds of weather-bureau information. Why in the devil’s name didn’t he?” complained the master of the _Henry Fuller_.