The Seiners Part 4

I did not wait for any more--I knew Johnnie was safe with Clancy--but ran to the office of the Duncans and told them that Johnnie had fallen into the dock and got wet, and that it might be well to telephone for a doctor. His grandfather knew it was serious without my saying any more, and rang up at once.

That had hardly been done when Clancy came in the door with Johnnie in his arms. The boy was limp and unconscious and water was dripping from him. Old Mr. Duncan was worried enough, but composed in his manner for all that. He met Clancy at the door. "This way, Captain; lay him on this couch. The doctor will be here in a very few minutes now. Perhaps we can do something while he is on the way. Just how did it happen?

and we'll know better what to do, perhaps."

Clancy told his story in forty words. "He's probably shook up and his lungs must be full of water. But he may come out all right--his eyelids quivered coming up the dock. Better strip his s.h.i.+rt and waist off. He's got a lot of water in him--roll him over and we'll get some of it out."

He worked away on Johnnie, and had the water pretty well out of him by the time the uncle and the doctor came. It was hard work for a time, but it came at last to when the doctor stood up, rested his arms for a breath, said, "Ah--he's all right now," and went on again. It was not so very long after that that Johnnie opened his eyes--for about a second. But pretty soon he opened them to stay. His first look was for his grandfather, but his first word was for Clancy. "I could see you when you jumped, Captain Clancy--it was great."

Then they bundled Johnnie into a carriage and his uncle took him home.

"Lord, but I thought he was gone, Joe. But let's get out of this,"

said Clancy, and we were making for the door, with Clancy's clothes still wringing wet, when we were stopped by the elder Mr. Duncan, who shook hands with both of us and then went on to speak to Clancy.

"Captain Clancy----"

"Captain once, but----"

"I know, I know, but not from lack of ability, at any rate. Let me thank you. His mother will thank you herself later, and make you feel, I know, her sense of what she owes to you. And his cousin Alice--she thinks the world of him. There, I know you don't want to hear any more, but you shall--maybe later--though it may come up in another way. But tell me--wait, come inside a minute. Come in you, too, Joe,"

he said, turning to me, but I said I'd rather wait outside. I wanted to have a smoke to get my nerves steady again, I guess.

So Clancy and Mr. Duncan went inside, and through the window, whenever I looked up, I could see them. As their talk went on I could see that they were getting very much interested about something or other.

Clancy particularly was laying down the law with a clenched fist and an arm that swung through the air like a jibing boom. Somebody, I knew, was getting it.

When they came out Mr. Duncan stopped at the door, and said, as if by way of a parting word, "And so you think that's the cause of Withrow's picking a quarrel with Maurice? Well, I never thought of that before, but maybe you're right. And now, what do you say to a vessel for yourself?"

"Me take a vessel? No, sir--not for me. But when you've got vessels to hand around, Mr. Duncan, bear Maurice in mind--he's a fisherman."

We left Mr. Duncan then, he making ready to telephone to learn how Johnnie was getting along. Clancy said his clothes were beginning to feel so dry that he did not know as he would go to his boarding-house.

"I think we'd better go up to the Anchorage and have a little touch.

But I forgot--you don't drink, Joe? No? So I thought, but don't you care--you're young yet. Come along, anyway, and have a smoke."

And so we went along to the Anchorage, and while we were there, I smoking one of those barroom cigars and Clancy nursing the after-taste of his drink and declaring that a touch of good liquor was equal to a warm stove for drying wet clothes, I told him what I would have told him in Crow's Nest if there had not been so many around--about Minnie Arkell calling Maurice back into her grandmother's house, and then Sam Hollis coming along and going in after him.

"What!" and stopped dead. Suddenly he brought his fist through the air. "I'll"--and as suddenly stopped it midway. "No, I won't, either.

But I'll put Maurice wise to them. What should he know at his age and with his up-bringing of what's in the heads of people like them. And if I don't have something further to say to old Mr. Duncan! But now let's go back to Arkell's--come on, Joe."

But I didn't go back with him. I didn't think that I could do Maurice any good then, and I might be in the way if Clancy wanted to speak his mind out to anybody. I went home instead, where I expected to have troubles of my own, for I knew that my mother wouldn't like the idea of my going seining.

VI

MAURICE BLAKE GETS A VESSEL

Three days after Johnnie Duncan fell out of Crow's Nest the new Duncan vessel designed by Will Somers was towed around from Ess.e.x.

She had been named the Johnnie Duncan. I spent the best part of the next three days watching the sparmakers and riggers at work on her.

And when they had done with her and she fit to go to sea, she did look handsome. She had not quite the length of the new vessel of Sam Hollis's, which lay at Withrow's dock just below her, and that probably helped to give her a more powerful look to people that compared them. Too able-looking altogether to be real fast, some thought, to hold the Withrow vessel in anything short of a gale, but I didn't feel so sure she wouldn't sail in a moderate breeze, too.

I had seen her on the stocks, and knew the beautiful lines below the water-mark. And she was going to carry the sail to drive her. I took particular pains to get the measurements of her mainmast while it lay on the dock under the shears. It was eighty-seven feet--and she only a hundred and ten feet over all--and it stepped plumb in the middle of her, further forward than a mainmast was generally put in a fisherman. To that was shackled a seventy-five foot boom, and eighty-odd tons of pig-iron were cemented close down to her keel, and that floored over and stanchioned snug. For the rest, she was very narrow forward, as I think I said--everybody said she'd never stand the strain of her fore-rigging when they got to driving her on a long pa.s.sage. And she carried an unG.o.dly bowsprit--thirty-seven feet outboard--easily the longest bowsprit out of Gloucester. Topmasts to match, and there was some sail to drive a vessel. But she had the hull for it, full and yet easy, with the greatest beam pretty well aft of the mainmast, and she drew fifteen and a half feet of water.

I was still looking her over, her third day in the riggers' and sailmakers' hands, when Clancy came along.

"Handsome, ain't she, and only needing a skipper and crew to be off on the Southern cruise, eh, Joe?"

"That's all. And according to the talk, you're to be the skipper."

"Well, talk has another according coming to it."

"I'm sorry to hear that. But what happened at Mrs. Arkell's the other day?"

"What happened? Joe, but I was glad you didn't come with me. You'd have felt as I did about it, I know. There they were--the two of them--Hollis and Withrow--yes, Withrow there--when I broke in on them, and Maurice between them--drunk. Yes, sir, drunk and helpless. They called it a wine-party, as though a man couldn't get as good and drunk on wine in a private residence as ever he could on whiskey or rum in the back room of a saloon. Well, sir, I asked a question or two, and they tried to face me out, but out they went--first Hollis, and then Withrow, one after the other, and both good and lively. And then Minnie Arkell popped in from her own house by way of the backyard. She didn't expect to see me--I know she didn't. Had gone over to her house when the men began to drink, she said, and had just come over to see granny.

"Well, I told her what I thought. 'It means nothing to you,' I said, 'to see a man make a fool of himself--that's been a good part of your business in life for some time, now--to see men make fools of themselves for you. Withrow had reasons for wanting him disgraced--never mind why. Sam Hollis, maybe, has his reasons too. And the two of them are being helped along by you. You could have stopped this thing here to-day, but you didn't.' 'No, no, Tommie,' she says.

'Yes, yes,' I went on, 'and don't try to tell me different. If I didn't know you since you were a little girl you might be able to convince me, but I know you. Maurice, when he was himself, pa.s.sed you by. You were bound to have him. You know a real man, more's the pity, when you see one, and you know that Maurice, young and green and soft as he is, has more life and dash than a dozen of the kind you've been mixing with lately.'

"Oh, but I laid it on, Joe. Yes. A shame to have to talk like that to a woman, but I just had to. I didn't stop there. 'You're handsome, and you're rich, Minnie Arkell; got a lot of life left in you yet, and go off travelling with people who get their names regularly in the Boston papers; but just the same, Minnie Arkell, there are women in jail not half so bad as you--women doing time who've done less mischief in the world than you have.'"

"Wasn't that pretty rough, Tommie?"

"Rough? Lord, yes--but true, Joe, true. And if you'd only see poor Maurice lying there! Cried? I could've cried, Joe--not since my mother died did I come so near to it. But it was done.

"Well, I made Minnie go and get her grandmother. And, Joe, if you'd seen that fine old lady--oh, but she's got a heart in her--stoop and put Maurice's head on her bosom as if he was a little child. 'The poor, poor boy. No mother here,' she said, 'and the best man on earth might come to it. Leave him to me, Tommie.' Lord, I could have knelt down at her feet--the heart in her, Joe."

"And how has Maurice been since?"

"All right. That was the first time in his life that he was drunk. I think it will be his last. But let's go aboard the Johnnie."

After looking over the Johnnie Duncan and admiring her to our hearts'

content, we sat down in her cabin and began to talk of the seining season to come. Others came down and joined in--George Moore, Eddie Parsons among others--and they asked Clancy what he was going to do.

Was he going to see about a chance to go seining, or what? Moore said he's been waiting to see what Maurice Blake was going to do; but as it was beginning to look as though Maurice was done for, he guessed he'd take a look around. He asked Clancy what he thought, and Clancy said he didn't know--time enough yet.

Maurice Blake himself dropped down then. He was looking better, and everybody was glad to see it. He'd quit drinking--that was certain; and now he was a picture of a man--not pretty, but strong-looking, with his eyes glowing and his skin flus.h.i.+ng with the good blood inside him. He took a seat on the lockers and began to whittle a block of soft pine into a model of a hull, and after a while, with a squint along the sheer of his little model, he asked if anybody had seen Tom O'Donnell or Wesley Marrs. Several said yes, they had, and he asked where, and when they told him he got up and said he guessed he'd go along--as he couldn't get a vessel himself, he might as well see about a chance to go hand. "And as we've been together so much in times gone by, Tommie, and you, Eddie and George, what do you say if we go together now?"

"All right," said Clancy, "but wait a minute--who's that in the gangway?"

It turned out to be Johnnie Duncan. He had a fat bundle under his arm, and bundle and all Clancy took him up, tossed him into the air, said "All right again, Johnnie-boy?" and kissed him when he caught him down.

Johnnie started to undo his bundle. "I tell you it's great to be out again--the way they kept me cooped up the last few days," and then, cutting the string to hurry matters, opened the bundle and spread a handsome set of colors on the lockers. "The Johnnie Duncan's," said he. "I picked out the kind they were to be, but mummer worked the monograms herself. See, red and blue. And see that for an ensign! and the firm's flag--and the highs--look!--the J. A. D. twisted up the same as on the handkerchiefs we strained the coffee through last week.

And the burgee--the letters on the burgee--my cousin Alice worked them. And these stars--see, on the ensign--mummer and my cousin both worked them. Gran'pa said the vessel ought to be sure a lucky one, and all she needs is an able master, he says, and if Captain Blake will take her he'll be proud to have him sail the Johnnie Duncan----"

Maurice Blake stood up. "Me?"

"Yes," said Johnnie. "Gran'pa says that you can have her just as soon as you go to the Custom House and get your papers. There, I think I remembered it all, except of course that the colors are from me and mummer and my cousin Alice, and will you fly them for us?"

Maurice laid down his model and picked up the colors. Then he looked at Johnnie and said, "Thank you, Johnnie; and tell your mother, Johnnie, and your cousin, that I'll fly the Johnnie Duncan's colors--and stand by them--if ever it comes to standing by--till she goes under. Tell your grandfather that I'll be proud to be master of his vessel and I'll sail her the best I know how."

"That's you, Maurice," said Clancy.