Billy Topsail & Company Part 7

"Good-bye, Donald," he called.

When the pan touched the other side Job North stepped aboard without a word. He was a heavy man. With his great body on the ice-cake, the difficulty of return was enormously increased, as Donald had foreseen.

The pan was overweighted. Time and again it nearly shook itself free of its load and rose to the surface. North was near the centre, plying his gaff with difficulty, but Donald was on the extreme edge.

Moreover, the distance was twice as great as it had been at first, and the waves were running high, and it was dark.

They made way slowly. The pan often wavered beneath them; but Donald was intent upon the thing he was doing, and he was not afraid. Then came the time--they were but ten yards off the standing edge--when North struck his gaff too deep into the water. He lost his balance, struggled to regain it, failed--and fell off. Before Donald was awake to the danger, the edge of the pan sank under him, and he, too, toppled off.

Donald had learned to swim now. When he came to the surface, his father was breast-high in the water, looking for him.

"Are you all right, Donald?" said his father.

"Yes, sir."

"Can you reach the ice alone?"

"Yes, sir," said Donald, quietly.

Alexander Bludd and Bill Stevens helped them up on the standing edge, and they were home by the kitchen fire in half an hour.

"'Twas bravely done, b'y," said Job.

So Donald North learned that perils feared are much more terrible than perils faced. He had a courage of the finest kind, in the following days of adventure, now close upon him, had young Donald.

CHAPTER VII

_In Which Bagg, Imported From the Gutters of London, Lands At Ruddy Cove From the Mail-Boat, Makes the Acquaintance of Jimmie Grimm and Billy Topsail, and Tells Them 'E Wants to Go 'Ome. In Which, Also, the Way to Catastrophe Is Pointed_

The mail-boat comes to Ruddy Cove in the night, when the shadows are black and wet, and the wind, blowing in from the sea, is charged with a clammy mist. The lights in the cottages are blurred by the fog. They form a broken line of yellow splotches rounding the harbour's edge.

Beyond is deep night and a wilderness into which the wind drives. In the morning the fog still clings to the coast. Within the cloudy wall it is all glum and dripping wet. When a veering wind sweeps the fog away, there lies disclosed a world of rock and forest and fuming sea, stretching from the end of the earth to the summits of the inland hills--a place of ruggedness and hazy distances; of silence and a vast, forbidding loneliness.

It was on such a morning that Bagg, the London gutter-snipe, having been landed at Ruddy Cove from the mail-boat the night before--this being in the fall before Donald North played ferryman between the standing edge and the floe--it was on such a foggy morning, I say, that Bagg made the acquaintance of Billy Topsail and Jimmie Grimm.

"h.e.l.lo!" said Billy Topsail.

"h.e.l.lo!" Jimmie Grimm echoed.

"You blokes live 'ere?" Bagg whined.

"Uh-huh," said Billy Topsail.

"This yer '_ome_?" pursued Bagg.

Billy nodded.

"Wisht _I_ was 'ome!" sighed Bagg. "I say," he added, "which way's 'ome from 'ere?"

"You mean Skipper 'Zekiel's cottage?"

"I mean Lun'on," said Bagg.

"Don't know," Billy answered. "You better ask Uncle Tommy Luff. He'll tell you."

Bagg had been exported for adoption. The gutters of London are never exhausted of their product of malformed little bodies and souls; they provide waifs for the remotest colonies of the empire. So, as it chanced, Bagg had been exported to Newfoundland--transported from his native alleys to this vast and lonely place. Bagg was scrawny and sallow, with bandy legs and watery eyes and a fantastic cranium; and he had a snub nose, which turned blue when a cold wind struck it. But when he was landed from the mail-boat he found a warm welcome, just the same, from Ruth Rideout, Ezekiel's wife, by whom he had been taken for adoption.

Later in the day, old Uncle Tommy Luff, just in from the fis.h.i.+ng grounds off the Mull, where he had been jigging for stray cod all day long, had moored his punt to the stage-head, and he was now coming up the path with his sail over his shoulder, his back to the wide, flaring sunset. Bagg sat at the turn to Squid Cove, disconsolate. The sky was heavy with glowing clouds, and the whole earth was filled with a glory such as he had not known before.

"Shall I arst the ol' beggar when 'e gets 'ere?" mused Bagg.

Uncle Tommy looked up with a smile.

"I say, mister," piped Bagg, when the old man came abreast, "which way's 'ome from 'ere?"

"Eh, b'y?" said Uncle Tommy.

"'Ome, sir. Which way is 'ome from 'ere?"

In that one word Bagg's sickness of heart expressed itself--in the quivering, wistful accent.

"Is you 'Zekiel Rideout's lad?" said Uncle Tommy.

"Don't yer make no mistake, mister," said Bagg, somewhat resentfully.

"I ain't nothink t' n.o.body."

"I knowed you was that lad," Uncle Tommy drawled, "when I seed the size o' you. Sure, b'y, you knows so well as me where 'Zekiel's place is to. 'Tis t' the head o' Burnt Cove, there, with the white railin', an' the tater patch aft o' the place where they spreads the fish.

Sure, you knows the way home."

"I mean Lun'on, mister," Bagg urged.

"Oh, home!" said Uncle Tommy. "When I was a lad like you, b'y, just here from the West Country, me fawther told me if I steered a course out o' the tickle an' kept me starn fair for the meetin'-house, I'd sure get home t' last."

"Which way, mister?"

Uncle Tommy pointed out to sea--to that far place in the east where the dusk was creeping up over the horizon.

"There, b'y," said he. "Home lies there."

Then Uncle Tommy s.h.i.+fted his sail to the other shoulder and trudged on up the hill; and Bagg threw himself on the ground and wept until his sobs convulsed his scrawny little body.

"I want to go 'ome!" he sobbed. "I want to go 'ome!"

No wonder that Bagg, London born and bred, wanted to go home to the crowd and roar and glitter of the streets to which he had been used.