Part 15

And what was it his soul was wrestling with? What would any man’s soul be wrestling with if he saw whereby a rival might be disposed of for good and for all? Especially when that rival was the kind of a man that the woman in the case could not but realize after a great while was not the right kind--that no woman could continue to respect, let alone love.

And then? He had only to let him alone now--say no word, and there it was--destruction as certain as the wind and sea that were making, as certain as the sun that was rising somewhere to the east’ard.

All that, and the primal passions of Patsie Oddie for the untamed soul of Patsie Oddie to contend with. No wonder he looked like another man in the morning--that in the agony of it all he groaned--and he a strong man--groaned, yes, and pressed his hands to his eyes as one who would shut out the sight of horrid images. Only to think of Patsie Oddie groaning! Yet groan he did, and questioned his soul--talking to something inside of him as if it were another man. “But it won’t leave me a better man before God--and God knows, too, it won’t make Delia happier. God knows it won’t--it won’t----”

It was light enough then for Patsie Oddie to see that the _Eldorado_ was drifting, drifting, not rapidly as yet, but certainly and to sure destruction, with the ten souls aboard of her doomed as so many thousands of others had been doomed before them. And the wind was ever making, and the sea ever rising. She had both anchors out then, as Patsie Oddie saw, and he saw also when her chain parted. “Now she’s draggin’,” he muttered then, and waited to see what action Orcutt would take. “Why in God’s name don’t he do something?” and ordered the man at the wheel on the _Delia_ to stand down.

Rounding to and laying the _Delia_ as near to the _Eldorado_ as he dared in that sea, he roared out to Orcutt: “What in God’s name are you doing there, Artie Orcutt? Don’t you see your one anchor can’t hold her? Cut the spars out of her--both spars, man!”

Orcutt was frightened enough then, and in short order had the spars over the side. That helped her, but it could not save her. It was too late. She was still dragging--slowly, slowly, but sure as fate, and promising to drag more rapidly as the water grew shoaler. And it was getting shoaler all the time.

Oddie threw up his hands. “They’re goin’! To-night will see her and them buried in the sand.” He turned to his crew, standing in subdued groups about the _Delia’s_ deck. “I want a man to go with me in the dory. Maybe we c’n get them off.”

There were plenty ready to go; but he wanted only one. “No,” he said to one, “you’ve got a wife,” and to another, “You’ll be missed, too. I want somebody nobody gives a damn about--like myself!” and took a young fellow--there is always one such in every crew of fishermen--that swore he had not mother, father, brother, sister, nor a blessed soul on earth that cared whether he ever came home or was lost. And doubtless he was telling the truth, for he certainly acted up to it. A hard case he was, but a good fisherman. And courage? He had courage. He laughed--no affected cackle, but a good round laugh--when he leaped over the side and into the dory with Patsie Oddie.

“If I don’t come back,” he called to his bunkmate, “you c’n have that diddy-box you’ve been so crazy to get--the diddy-box and all’s in it. For the rest, you c’n all have a raffle and give the money to the Widows’ and Orphans’ Fund, back in Gloucester.”

“Malachi-boy, but you’re a man after my own heart,” said Oddie, as the dory lifted on to the seas and away from the shelter of the _Delia’s_ side. And Malachi laughed at that. There was what he lived for--where Patsie Oddie praised one must have been a man.

A dory is the safest small boat that the craft of man has yet devised for living in troubled waters. Handled properly, it will live where ships will founder. And yet, though Patsie Oddie and Malachi Jennings were the two men to the oars, it was too much even for the dory in that sea; and over she went before they were half-way to the _Eldorado_. The crew of the _Delia_, seeing them bob up, and for the time safely clinging to the plug-strap, whisked another dory to the rail and ready, but their Skipper waved them back.

“Pay out an empty dory!” came his voice above the wind’s opposition. Which they did, and speedily, and Patsie and Malachi got into it; and with great care, the two men lying in the bottom of it were hauled alongside the _Delia_ and helped aboard.

“No man can row a dory this day,” was Patsie’s first word. “And a man with big boots and oilskins overboard in that sea--too small a chance. But put a longer line on that same dory and pay it out again.” Which they did also, and in that way began to take the gang off the _Eldorado_.

Five trips of the dory were made, two of the _Eldorado’s_ crew coming back each trip, one crouched in the stern and the other lying flat on the bottom amidships. It was the roughest kind of a passage, and even when the dory would come alongside the _Delia_ the most careful handling was needed to get them safely aboard.

Orcutt, of course, was the last man to come aboard. Bad as he was, he could do no less than that--stand by his vessel to the last. When he came alongside the _Delia_, he rose from the bottom of the dory, his companion having safely boarded the _Delia_, and lunged for the rail. Never a quick man on his feet, nor quick to think and act, and now trembling with anxiety, Orcutt made a mess of boarding. He had to stop long enough, too, to look up at Oddie and think what a fool of a man Oddie was altogether--a mind like a child! So, in the middle of it all, he did not get the rise of the dory to throw him into the air. He waited just that instant too long--it took nerve--and then he had to hurry, and the uprise of the dory was not there to throw him into the air and on to the _Delia’s_ rail. Clothes soaked in brine and heavy boots, a man is not a buoyant thing in the water, and this was a heavy sea. So Orcutt, falling between dory and vessel, went down--deep down--and when he came up it was where the tide swept down under the vessel’s quarter.

Patsie Oddie, standing almost above him, caught the appeal of Orcutt’s eyes, and then saw him go under again. “If he comes up again ’twill be clear astern,” thought Oddie, “and the third time with all that gear on him he’ll never come up--and if ’tisn’t Providence, then what is it?” And this was a cold winter’s day, and Oddie himself soaked in sea-water. “And if he don’t come up,” thought Oddie, “if he don’t come up-- Lord God, must I do more than I’ve done already for a man I don’t like--a man that I know is no good--for a man in my way--a man, too, that would no more go overboard for me, even on the calmest day, than he’d cut his own throat?” And there was that queer smile that Orcutt had thrown at him as he stood up in the dory-- Oddie did not forget that. And then he saw Orcutt’s sou’wester on the water and the man himself beneath it.

No more thought of that. Overboard went Oddie with all his own weight of clothes, oilskins, woolens, and big boots, while quick-witted men hove the bight of the main-sheet after him; and Oddie, grappling with the smothering and frightened Orcutt, smashed him full in the face. “Blast you, Artie Orcutt, there’s fun in beating you even here,” and hooked on to the collar of Orcutt’s oil jacket with one hand and grabbed the main-sheet just before the tide would have carried them out of reach.

Safe on the deck of the _Delia_, Orcutt offered his hand to Oddie, who did not seem to notice, but said, “If you go below, Captain Orcutt, you’ll find a change of dry clothes in my room, and you c’n turn in there and rest yourself.”

“But I want to thank you,” said Orcutt, overwhelmed.

“Take your thanks to the divil,” said Oddie to that. “’Twas for no love of you I stood by. You c’n have the best on this vessel, but take your hand? Blast you, no! Go below, or I’ll throw you below.” And Orcutt went below without delay.

It was late in the afternoon then. Even while they were hoisting that last dory over the rail Oddie had given his orders to drive out. At first all thought she would come clear, but in a little while they began to doubt, and doubt turned to misgiving, and misgiving to certainty. Sea and wind were too much for them now. In saving the _Eldorado’s_ crew they had waited too long--the tide was now against them also--and now it was no use. It was Oddie himself who said so at last, and went aloft before it was too dark to take a look at the surf they were falling into.

He stayed aloft for about ten minutes, and when he came down all hands knew it was to be desperate work that night.

“Put her about,” was his first order, and “Take a sounding, Martin,” his second.

She came about in the settling blackness and started for shoal water.

“You might’s well put her sidelights up,” he said next. “Nobody’ll get in our road to-night--nor we in anybody else’s--but we’ll go ship-shape. And what do you get?” he asked of Martin, when the lead came up.

“Eighteen fathom,” was the word from Martin. Eighteen fathom, and this a winter gale and a winter sea, and the strongest of tides against them!

“Eighteen fathom and goin’ into it straight’s ever a vessel c’n go,” said Oddie. “Wicked ’tis, but the one thing’ll make me laugh when we go----”

“Sixteen fathom!” from Martin.

“Sixteen? She’s sure shoaling----”

Oddie was at the wheel himself then, and the _Delia_ was beginning to feel the pounding. They could not see the sky at all, it was that black, but all around they could see the combers breaking white--so white that they made a kind of light of their own. And then it was, with the Lord knows how much wind behind them and seas mast-head high and the little vessel taking it fair abeam, that the crew of the _Delia_ and the crew of the _Eldorado_ guessed what was running in Patsie Oddie’s mind. He was to drive her across the bar! With all the sail in the _Delia_ on her, to let her take the full force of it and bang her across the shoals, where soon there would not be enough water to let her set up on an even keel!

Martin Carr was heaving the lead all the time, and all noted how he made himself heard when it came to ten fathom.

“Ten fathom!” the crew repeated, and murmured it over till one got courage to ask, “Is it going to drown us you are, Captain Oddie?”

“I’m trying to save you, boys,” he answered, and his voice was as tender as could be and yet be heard above a roaring gale.

“Nine and a half,” and then, “Nine fathom!” came from Martin Carr, barely able to hold his place by the rail, the vessel was pitching so.

It was at eight fathoms that Artie Orcutt raised a cry of protest, and, hearing that, Oddie ordered Martin to sound no more. “Bring the lead here, Martin,” said Oddie, and taking a big bait knife he always kept on the house, with one stroke cut the lead-line off short. Then he opened the slide of the cabin companion-way and hove the lead on to the cabin floor with a “There, now, maybe we _are_ goin’ to be lost. I think myself that maybe we will, but some of ye mayn’t die of fright now, anyway.”

She was fair into it then, making wild work of it, with Oddie himself to the wheel, and all his great strength needed to hold her. He called one of his men to help him once, and he, feeling the full force of it, now and again would start to ease her up a little, but the moment a spoke went down so much as a hair’s breadth Patsie Oddie’s big arms would work the other way. “Maybe you think this is a place to tack ship,” Oddie said once, and the wheel stayed up and she took it full force.

How Oddie ever expected to save the _Delia_ nobody ever knew, beyond trying to lift her across with the sheer weight of the wind to her sails. And that would be sheer luck, such luck as had never befallen a vessel in their plight before. Other men of courage with stout vessels must have tried that, they knew, and none of them had ever got over, nor come back to tell how close they came to it.

And that was all there was to it--sheer luck, Oddie would have told them, had they asked him. And yet it was not luck altogether. True, he knew no channel across--there was no channel across--and yet he knew there were little gullies scooped out here and there on the sand-ridges. And if a man could make one now and one again, jumping over the almost dry beach, as it were, between them--who knows?--it might be done. On a black night like this nobody could see the gullies, or on any kind of a night, for that matter; but then there was that something--he did not know what to call it--inside of him that told him the things he could not hear nor see nor feel. And then again, let a vessel alone, and she will naturally shy for the deep water. Force her with the rudder, and she will go where the rudder sends her. Oddie forced her, but only to make her take the full weight of the wind. It was necessary to drive her over if ever she was to get over at all. That same something inside told him when her nose was nearing the high shoals--it came to him as if her quivering planks carried the message; there it was, put her off now, and now again, now hold her that the wind may have its lifting effect, now let her go and she’ll find the way. That was the way of it--bang, bang, bang, on her side mostly, with her planks smashing against the bare bottom as she drove over the sand-ridges--her stem rushing through at an awful clip when she found a gully a little deeper than usual.

The great seas broached over her, and it became dangerous to remain on deck. So Oddie ordered all hands below and the slides drawn tight after them, fore and aft.

“I don’t see the difference whether we’re washed off up here or drowned below,” said one. “Go below, just the same,” said Oddie, and below they all went, while Oddie, lashing himself hard and fast, prepared for what further fury wind and sea had in store for himself and the _Delia_.

It was a sea to batter a lighthouse down. It takes shoal water for wicked seas, and this certainly was shoal water, with the sand off bottom swirling around deck. A noble vessel was the _Delia_, but when the sea took charge that night everything was swept clean from her decks. Dories first--her own eight and the four of the _Eldorado’s_ that had been picked up, twelve in all--went with one smash. Oddie allowed himself a little pang as he watched them and heard the crash. It was too dark to see them clearly; but he knew how they looked, floating off in the white combers in kindling-wood. The booby-hatches went next, and after them the gurry-kids--match-wood all. Everything that was not bolted went. The very rails went at last, crackling from the stanchions as if they were cigar-box sides when they did go.

“‘Twill be the house next,” muttered Oddie. “And then her planks will come wide apart--and then----” He rolled it between his teeth. “Well, then we’ll all go together. But”--he locked his jaws again--“drive her you must, Patsie Oddie,” and bang, bang, smash, bang, and smash again he held her to it.

And in the morning she came clear; still an awful sea on and wind to tear the heart out of the ocean itself, but clear water--beautiful, clear water. By the morning light he saw what he could not see in the dark night, that her port anchor was gone from her bow--scraped off against the bottom--and that her decks were covered with the sand off the bottom also; but she herself--his darling _Delia_--was all right. There was nothing gone that could not be replaced--maybe a bit loose in the seams, but, Lord, Gloucester was full of good calkers--and now they had the beautiful clear water. God be praised! And, after all, if never a woman in all the world smiled on him again, ’twas worth while saving men’s lives.

Oddie drew the slide back from the cabin companion-way. “Set the watch,” he called, and the first on watch, Martin Carr, came up and took the wheel from him.

“Gloucester,” said Oddie--“you know the course, Martin. And be easy on her. ’Tisn’t in nature for a vessel not to loosen a bit after last night, but there’ll be nothing the pumps won’t clear. I know that by the heave of her under me. She’s all right, Martin--a great vessel. We owe our lives to her ableness this night, but pump her out,” and went below to draw off his boots. His legs were so swollen that he had to split the leather from knee to heel to get them off, and when he turned them upside down sand ran out of the legs of them. “A wild night,” he said, and looked curiously at the sand--a wild night it was--“and I’m tired. Since leavin’ Gloucester I’ve not seen my bunk. Call me in two hours,” and turned in on the floor and fell instantly asleep.

After a storm it should be good to see the fine green water rippling again under the sun, but to Patsie Oddie it brought no sense of joy. He only glowered and glowered as down the coast he sailed the _Delia_. Even the sight of Cape Sable, which generally brings a smile to the faces of fishermen homeward bound, had no effect on him. He drove her on, and even seemed to welcome the cold nor’-wester that met him when he straightened out for what in a fair wind, and his vessel tight, would have been one long last riotous leg.

He smashed into that nor’-wester, and it smashed into him. Tack, tack, tack--the _Delia_ did not have her own way all the time. Three days and three nights it was, with the able _Delia_ gradually encasing herself in ice. Only the ice seemed to please Patsie Oddie. The day he left Gloucester it had been just like that on incoming vessels. And that was a bitter day, and it was a bitter day again when he was coming back--and not with cold alone. Ice, ice, ice--“Let her ice up,” and from Cape Sable to the slip in Gloucester Harbor he kept her going.

The _Delia_ was no sooner tied to the dock than away went the crew of the _Eldorado_. Away also went the _Delia’s_ crew as soon as they had tidied things up and the Skipper had given the word.

Patsie himself did not hurry. There was nothing for him to hurry for. So he cleaned up, changed his clothes, locked the cabin of the _Delia_, and went slowly up the dock.

He was hailed on the way by any number of people--fishermen, dealers, lumpers, idlers. Those who knew him tendered congratulations or shook hands, slapped him on the shoulder--he had done a fine thing. Some there were who stood in awe of him, only looked at him, examined face and figure for further indications of the daring of the man. The whole water-front was talking over it. Rapidly the whole town was learning it.

Patsie nodded, shook hands, said, “How is it here?” and “Thank ye kindly,” and went on his way to the owner’s store. He reckoned up his trip, ordered a few things immediately needed on the vessel, and said, “That’s all I’m thinkin’ for now,” and went up the street. On the way he passed Delia Corrigan’s house. He did not mean to, but he could not help it--he looked up for sign of her as he got abreast of the windows. There she was, cold as it was, window raised and calling to him. He waited to make sure, and she again said, “Won’t you come in?”

Patsie went up the steps and into the snug livingroom, where Delia was waiting--a rosy, wholesome-looking young woman, now bravely trying to smile.

“Home again, Patsie?”

“Home again, Delia--yes.”

“And a fine thing you did.”

“No fine thing that I can see to it. There were men on a vessel that might have been lost, and I took them off and gave them a passage home.”

“Patsie----”

“Yes?”

“You left me in a hurry that morning, Patsie. You shouldn’t have rushed out so. After you were gone Captain Marrs stepped in to tell me about his rescue of Captain Orcutt and part of his crew. And then he began to tell me other things--about you. He’s a good friend of yours, Patsie. It was good to listen to him, though I knew it all before--and more. Don’t fear that all the good things you did aren’t known to me. But after a time I began to see what it was he meant, and without letting him finish I ran out to see you. But you were gone. I could just see your vessel going out by the Point in all that gale. You put to sea in all that gale, Patsie?”

“Put to sea? Yes, and lucky I did, maybe, for I was no more than in time to bring back the man you want--and he’d never seen Gloucester again if I hadn’t.”

“Who was that?”

“Who was that? Why, Delia!”

“Who was that?”

“Who? Why, who but Orcutt.”

“Captain Orcutt? No, Patsie--it wasn’t Orcutt. He did come back in your vessel, the man I want--but it wasn’t Orcutt.”

“Not Orcutt? Not Orcutt?”

“No, not Orcutt. Oh, Patsie, but it is hard on a woman! Oh, if you only knew what a hard man you are to make understand! I suppose I have to do it--you’re that backward yourself. It’s hard on me, Patsie, but you’ll go no more to sea in a gale, and me here shaking with fear for you. You did bring back the man I want, Patsie. Over Sable Island bar he drove the _Delia_, but it wasn’t Orcutt.”

Patsie, trembling, stared at her. “Not Orcutt, Delia?”

“Patsie, I’ve said it a dozen times. It wasn’t Orcutt, and yet ’twas somebody in your vessel. Oh, why did you mistake me that morning, Patsie? Would I be a woman and not have a word of pity for a man that came so nigh being lost as Captain Orcutt would have been but for Wesley Marrs? And you are such a backward man, Patsie. Don’t you hear me, Patsie? Then look at me, dear--look at me--it wasn’t-- And who can it be? Who was it, Patsie, that drove the _Delia_ over Sable Island bar, himself to the wheel?”

“Oh!” gasped Patsie--“Delia mavourneen, mavourneen, mavourneen!”

He drew back a step, got another look at her face, and clasped her again. “And ’twas me all the time, asthore?”

“You all the time. And if you hadn’t been in such a hurry I’d have told you that morning.”

“Oh, Delia, Delia,” and from his beard she caught the murmur--“and the black, black night I put in on Sable Island bar! Oh, the black, black night I almost left him and his men to die. Oh, Delia, Delia, there was hate and murder in my heart that night.”

“Never mind that now, Patsie. You had it out with yourself, and it wasn’t hate nor murder at the last, Patsie.”

“Delia, dear, but ’tis a wicked man couldn’t be good with you,” and gathered her to him.

“Yes, but----”

“But what, alanna?”

“My breath, dear.” She raised her head and looked into his eyes. “Patsie, Patsie, but the strength of you!”

End of Project Gutenberg's The Deep Sea's Toll, by James B. Connolly