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CHAPTER XIII
NAT BURNS SHOWS HIS HAND
OFF Cape Sable the fleet was overhauled by a half-dozen schooners bound the same way, which displayed American flags at their main trucks as they came up.
“Gloucestermen!” said Nat Burns at the wheel of the Nettie B. “Set balloon jib and stays’l and we’ll give ’em a try-out.”
The men jumped to the orders, and the Nettie gathered headway as the American schooners came up. But the Gloucester craft crept up, passed, and with an ironical dip of their little flags raced on to the Banks.
Cape Sable was not yet out of sight when a topmast on the Rosan broke off short in a sudden squall. Bijonah Tanner immediately laid her to and set all hands to work stepping his spare spar, as he would not think of returning to a shipyard. Nat Burns, when he noticed the accident, laid to in turn and announced his intention of standing by the Rosan until she was ready to go on.
As these were among the fastest vessels in the fleet, the others proceeded on their way, and Nat seized the opportunity of the repairs to pay his fiancée a visit and remain to supper on the Rosan.
He found Nellie radiant and more beautiful than he had ever seen her. Protected from the cool breeze by a frieze overcoat, she stood bareheaded by the forerigging, her cheeks red, her brown eyes bright like stars, and her soft brown hair blowing about her face in alluring wisps.
He took her in a strong embrace. She struggled free after a moment, her cheeks flooded with color.
“Don’t, Nat!” she cried. “Before all the men, too! Please behave yourself!”
This last a little nervously as she saw the gleam in his eyes. Suddenly (for her) all the day seemed to have lost its exhilaration. She was always glad to see Nat, but his insistent use of his fiancé rights under all circumstances grated on the natural delicacy that was hers.
His ardor dampened by this rebuke, the gleam in Nat’s eye became one of ugliness at his humiliation before the crew of the Rosan. He scowled furiously and stood by her side without saying a word. It was in this unfortunate moment that Nellie seized on the general topic of the day.
“Guess you’ll have to get off and push the Nettie B. before you can beat those Gloucestermen, Nat,” she said, teasing him.
“Say, I’ve heard about all I want to hear about that!” he snarled, suddenly losing control of himself as they walked back to the little cabin. The girl looked at him in hurt amazement. Never in all her life had a man spoken to her in such a tone. It was inconceivable that the man she was going to marry could address her so, if he even pretended to love her.
“Possibly you have,” she returned, not without a touch of asperity; “but you know as well as I do that you will have to deal with a Gloucester-built schooner before you are through with this voyage.”
In her efforts to placate him she had touched upon his sorest spot. His defeat by the American fishermen had been hard for his pride.
“I suppose you mean that crooked Schofield’s boat?” he flashed back, his face darkening.
“What do you mean by that?”
They were below now in her father’s little cabin, and she turned upon him with flashing eyes.
“Just what I said,” he returned sullenly.
“You say things then that have no foundation in fact,” she retorted vigorously. “You have no right to say a thing like that about Code Schofield.”
“I haven’t, eh?” he sneered, furious. “Since when have you been takin’ his side against me? No facts, eh? I’ll show him an’ you an’ everybody else whether there’s any foundation in fact! What do you suppose the insurance company is after him for if he isn’t a crook?”
Like all the people in Freekirk Head, Nellie had heard some of the rumors concerning Code’s possible part in the sinking of the May Schofield. Nat, for reasons of his own, had carefully refrained from enlarging on these to her, and in the absorption of her wooing by him she had let them go by unnoticed. Now, for the first time, the consequences they might have in Code’s life were made clear to her.
“I–I don’t know,” she faltered, unable to reply to his direct question. “But I know this, that all his life Code has been an honest man and one of my best friends. I grew up with him just as I did with you, and I resent such talk about him as much as I would if it were about you.”
“Yes,” he sneered, “he has been entirely too much of a good friend. What was he always over to your place for, I’d like to know? And, even after he knew we were engaged, what was he doin’ down at Ma Sprague’s that night I called? An’ what did you go to his place for after the fire when I tried to get you to come to mine?”
The last question he roared out at the top of his voice, and the girl, now afraid of him, shrank back against the wall of the cabin.
She knew it was useless to say that she and Code had been like brother and sister all their lives, and that May Schofield was a second mother to her. All reason was hopeless in the face of this unreasoning jealousy. After a moment she found her speech.
“I guess, Nat,” she said, “you had better go back to your schooner until you are in a different mood.”
“Afraid to answer, ain’t you?” he cried. “When I face you down you’re afraid to answer an’ tell me I’d better go away. Well, now let me tell you something. You’re entirely too friendly with that crook, an’ I won’t have it! You’re engaged to me, and what I say goes. An’ let me tell you something else.
“The insurance company is after him because he sunk the May Schofield on purpose. But that ain’t the worst of the things he did–”
“What do you mean?” she flashed at him.
“You’ll find out quick enough, and so will he,” he snarled. “I’m not saying what is goin’ to happen to him, but when I’m through we’ll see if your hero is such a fine specimen.”
From fear to anger her spirit had gone, and now under the lash it turned to cold disdain. With a swift motion of her right hand over her left she drew off the diamond ring he had given her and held it out to him.
“Take this, Nat,” she said, so coldly that for once his rage was checked. He looked stupidly at the glittering emblem of her love, and suddenly became aware of the extent to which he had driven her. The reaction was as swift as the rage.
“Please, Nellie dear,” he begged, “don’t do that! Take it back. Forgive me. Everything has piled up so to-day that I lost my temper. Please don’t do that!”
But he had gone too far. He had shown her a new side to his character.
“No, Nat,” she said calmly, but still with that icy inflection of disdain; “this has gone too far. Take this ring. Some time, when you have made amends for this afternoon, I may see you again.”
“I won’t take it,” he replied doggedly. “Please, Nellie, forgive–”
“Take it,” she flashed, “or I will throw it into the ocean!”
She had unconsciously submitted him to a final test. He was about to let her carry out her threat if she saw fit when his cupidity overcame him. He reached out his hand, and she dropped the ring into it. She stood silent, pale, and cold, waiting for him to go.
He moved away. He had reached the foot of the companionway when he turned back.
“He has brought me to this,” he said so slowly and evilly that each word seemed a drop of venom. “But I’ll make him pay. I’m goin’ to St. John’s, and when I get back it will be the sorriest day in his life and yours, too. His life won’t be worth the thread it hangs on!”
With that he went up the companionway and, not noticing the greeting of Captain Tanner, dropped into his yellow dory that swung and bumped against the Rosan’s side. Swiftly he rowed to the Nettie B. and clambered aboard, bellowing orders to get up sail. In fifteen minutes the schooner was on the back track under every stitch of canvas she carried.
Bijonah Tanner stared blankly after the retreating Nettie. Then, knowing that his daughter had been with Nat, dropped down into the little cabin.
He found Nellie seated in the chair by the little table, and weeping.
CHAPTER XIV
A DISCOVERY
Taken aback as he had been by the strange doings of Nat’s schooner, his dismay then was a feeble imitation of the panic that smote him now. It had long been a favorite formula of Bijonah’s that “A schooner’s a gal you can understand. She goes where ye send her, an’ ye know she’ll come back when ye tell her to. She’s a snug, trustin’ kind of critter, an’ she’s man’s best friend because she hain’t got a grain o’ sense. But woman!”
Here Bijonah always ended, his hands, his voice, and his sentence suspended in mid air.
Now he was baffled completely. Here was a girl who was deeply in love, crying. He tiptoed cautiously to the deck again and stole forward to the galley as though he had been detected in a suspicious action.
After a while the storm passed, and Nellie sat up, red-eyed and red-nosed, but with a measure of her usual tranquillity restored.
“Idiot!” she told herself. “To howl like that over him!”
Nellie finally regained her poise of mind and remembered that she had been at the point of writing a letter to her mother (to be mailed by the first vessel bound to a port) when Nat had interrupted her.
The table at which she sat was a rough, square one of oak, with one drawer that extended its whole width. She opened the drawer and found it stuffed with an untidy mass of paper, envelopes, newspapers, clippings, books, ink, and a mucilage-pot that had foundered in the last gale and spread its contents over everything.
Such was her struggle to find two clean sheets of paper and a pen that she finally dumped the contents of the drawer on top of the table and went to the task seriously. The very first thing that came under her hand was a heavy packet.
Turning it face up, she read, with surprise, a large feminine handwriting which said:
Mr. Code Schofield, kindness of Captain B. Tanner
Letter enclosed
At the right-hand side of the envelope was this:
Nellie Tanner stared at the envelope. It was the handwriting that held her. She had seen it before. She had once been honorary assistant treasurer of the Church of England chapel, and it suddenly came to her that this was the handwriting that had adorned Elsa Mallaby’s checks and subscriptions.
She knew she had solved the problem the instant the answer came. Elsa had been to Boston to school, and the fact was very evident. She sat and stared at the black letters, flexing the packet filled with bills.
“Why should Elsa Mallaby be sending money to Code Schofield?”
Everybody in Freekirk Head knew that Code Schofield went up to Elsa Mallaby’s to dinner occasionally. So did other people in the village, but not so often as he. There had been a little gossip concerning the two of them, but, while Code was an excellent enough fellow, it was hardly probable that a rich widow like Elsa would throw herself away on a poor fisherman. They forgot that she had done so the first time she married, and that she had the sea in her blood.
These shreds of gossip returned to Nellie now with accrued interest, and she began to believe in the theory of fire being behind smoke.
She also remembered the night of the mass-meeting in Odd Fellows Hall when Code had made his suggestion of going to the Banks. There had flashed between Elsa’s velvet-dark eyes and Code’s blue ones a message of intimacy of which the town knew nothing. Every one saw the look, and nearly every one talked about it, but they did not know that only a couple of nights before Elsa had been the one to put Code on guard against his enemies, and that he was more than grateful.
“I’d just like to know what’s in that letter so as to tease him the next time we meet,” she said gaily to herself. She was now out of all mood for writing her letter home, and, stuffing the contents of the drawer back into place, she returned the latter to the table and went on deck.
The sea was running higher. The new topmast was up, and within half an hour the Rosan heeled to the wind and plowed her way northward after the remainder of the fleet.
CHAPTER XV
THE CATCH OF THE ROSAN
At the forecastle head of the Rosan stood a youth tolling the ship’s bell. The windlass grunted and whined as the schooner came up on her hawser with a thump, and overhead a useless jib slatted and rattled.
The youth could scarcely see aft of the foremast because of the thickness of the weather, but he could hear what was going on. There was a thump, a slimy slapping of wet fish, and a voice counting monotonously as its owner forked his forenoon’s catch into the pen amidships.
“Forty-nine,” said the voice. “All right, boys, swing her in.” And a moment later the dory, hauled high, dropped down into her nest. Immediately there was a slight bump against the side of the schooner, and the slapping and counting would begin again.
“Eighty-seven, and high line at that!” said the next man. “I’ll bet that’s the only halibut on the Banks, and he’s two hundred if he’s an ounce.”
The great, flat fish was raised to the deck by means of the topping haul that swung in the dories.
Bijonah Tanner, who stood by the pen watching the silver stream as it flowed over the side into the pen, mussed his beard and shook his head. The fish were fair, but not what should be expected at this time of year. He would sail along to another favorable anchorage. This was his first day on the Banks and two days after Nellie’s discovery of Elsa’s packet.
It was only noon, but Bijonah was speculating, and when he saw the fog bank coming he refused to run any risk with his men, and recalled them to the schooner by firing his shotgun until they all replied to the signal by raising one oar upright.
It must not be thought that it was the fog that induced Bijonah to do this. Dorymen almost always fish when a fog comes down, and trust to their good fortune in finding the schooner. Bijonah wanted to look over the morning’s catch and get in tune with the millions under his keel.
By the time the last dory was in, the pile of fish in the pen looked like a heap of molten silver.
The men stretched themselves after their cramped quarters, and greeted the cook’s announcement with delight.
“You fellers fix tables fer dressin’ down while the fust half mugs up,” said Tanner. “Everybody lively now. I cal’late to move just a little bit. The bottom here don’t suit me yet.”
He went down from the poop and walked the deck, listening between clangings of the bell for any sound of an approaching vessel. The crew worked swiftly at dressing and salting the catch.
“Haul up anchor,” he ordered when the work was done.
The watch laid hold the windlass poles and hauled the vessel forward directly above her hook. Then there was a concerted heave and the ground tackle broke loose and came up with a rush.
Under headsails and riding sail the Rosan swung into the light air that stirred the fog and began to crawl forward while the men were still cat-heading the anchor. The youth who had been ringing the bell now substituted the patent fog-horn, as marine law requires when vessels are under way.
With his eyes on the compass, Turner guided the ship himself. They seemed to move through an endless gray world.
For an hour they sailed, the only sounds being the flap of the canvas, the creaking of the tiller ropes, and the drip of the fog. Tanner was about to give the word to let go the anchor when, without warning, they suddenly burst clear of the fog and came out into the vast gray welter of the open sea.
Tanner suddenly straightened up, and slipping the wheel swiftly into the becket, he ran to the taffrail and looked over the side.
“Good God!” he cried. “What’s this?”
Not fifty feet away lay a blue dory, heavy and loggy with water, and in the bottom the unconscious figure of a man.
A second look at the face of the man and Tanner cried:
“Wheelan and Markle, overside with the starboard dory. Here’s Code Schofield adrift! Lively now!”
There was a rush aft, but Tanner met the crew and drove them to the nested boats amidships.
“Over, I say!” he roared.
The men obeyed him, and Wheelan and Markle were soon pulling madly to the blue dory astern.
When they reached it one man clambered to the bow and cut the drag rope that Code, in his extremity, had thrown over nearly two days before. Then, fastening the short painter to a thwart in their own craft, they hauled the blue dory and its contents alongside the Rosan.
Code Schofield lay with his eyes closed, pale as wax, and seemingly dead. In his right hand he still gripped convulsively the bailing-can he had used until consciousness left him.
Man, boat, and all, the dory was hauled up and let gently down on the deck. Then the eager hands lifted Schofield from the water and laid him on the oiled boards.
“Take him into my cabin,” ordered Tanner. “Johnson, bring hot water and rags. Cookee, make some strong soup. If there’s any life in him we’ll bring it back. On the jump, there!”
“Wal,” said one man, when Code had been carried below, “I thought my halibut was high line to-day, but the skipper beat me out in the end.”
CHAPTER XVI
A STAGGERING BLOW
“Here is something my father just asked me to give you.”
Nellie held out to Code the packet that she had discovered in the skipper’s drawer several days before. Code, seated on the roof of the cabin in the only loose chair aboard the Rosan, and wrapped in blankets, took the sealed bundle curiously.
He looked at the round, feminine handwriting across the envelope, and failed to evince any flash of guilt or intelligence.
It was three days after Code’s rescue by the Rosan and the first that he had felt any of his old strength coming back to him.
For the first twenty-four hours after being revived he did nothing but sleep, and awoke to find Nellie Tanner beside his bunk nursing him. Since then it had been merely a matter of patience until his exhausted body had recuperated from the shock.
For once Nellie had command of the Rosan, and everything stood aside for her patient. The delicacies that issued from the galley after she had occupied it an hour, and that went directly to Code, almost had the result of inciting a mutiny among all hands; terms of settlement being the retirement of the old cook and installation of this new find.
Code ripped open the packet. He stared in amazement at the yellow bills. Then he discovered the letter and began to read it. Despite the healthy red of his weather-beaten face, a tide of color surged up over it.
Nellie turned her head away and looked over the oily gray sea to where the men of the Rosan were toiling in their dories. In the distance there was a sail here and there, for the Rosan was slowly overhauling the fleet from Freekirk Head.
Code stole a swift glance at her, and forgot to read his letter as he studied the fresh roundness and beauty of her face. He vaguely felt that there was a reserved manner between them.
“The letter is from Mrs. Mallaby,” he said.
“Yes? That is interesting.”
The girl’s cool, level eyes met his, and he blushed again.
“She has a good heart,” he stumbled on, “and always thinks of others.”
“Yes, she has,” agreed the girl without enthusiasm, and Code dropped the subject.
“How did your father happen to have this for me?” he asked, after a pause.
“Well, you know, you surprised everybody by leaving the Head before the rest of the fleet. Elsa had it in mind to give you this packet, she says, before you left. But when you went so suddenly she asked father to give it to you. She said she expected the Rosan would catch the Lass on the Banks. At least, this is the yarn dad told me.”
“She seems to know considerable about the Banks and the ways of fishermen,” he said, with an unconscious ring of enthusiasm in his tone.
“Yes; you’d think she pulled her own dory instead of being the richest woman in New Brunswick.”
Code looked at his old sweetheart in amazement. He had never seen her so disagreeable. His eye fell upon her left hand.
For a moment his mind did not register an impression. Then all of a sudden it flashed upon him that her ring was gone.
“Oh, that explains everything!” he said to himself. “She has either lost it or quarreled with Nat, and it’s no wonder she is unhappy.”
Nellie was saying to herself: “The letter must have been very personal or he would have told me about it. He never acted like this before. There is something between them.”
Suddenly astern of them sounded the flap of sails, rattle of blocks, and shouted orders. They turned in time to see a schooner come up into the wind all standing.
She was clothed in canvas from head to foot, with a balloon-jib and staysail added, and made her position less than a hundred yards away.
Schofield gazed at the schooner curiously. Then he leaned forward, his eyes alight. There were certain points about her that were familiar. With a fisherman’s skill he had catalogued her every point. He looked at the trail-board along her bows, and where the name should have been there was a blank, painted-out space.
It was the mystery schooner!
Once more all the fears that had assailed Code’s mind at her first appearance returned. He was certain that there was mischief in this. But he sat quiet as the vessel drifted down upon the anchored Rosan.
As he looked her over his eyes were drawn aloft to a series of wires strung between her topmasts. Other wires ran down the foremast to a little cubby just aft of it.
“By the great squid, they’ve got wireless!” he said. “This beats me!”
At fifty yards the familiar man with the enormous megaphone made his appearance.
“Ahoy there!” he roared. “Any one aboard the Rosan seen or heard anything of Captain Code Schofield, of the Grande Mignon schooner Charming Lass?”
Code rose out of his chair, took off his hat ironically, and swung it before him as he made a low bow.
“At your service!” he shouted. “I was picked up three days ago, adrift in my dory. What do you want with me?”
This sudden avowal created a half panic aboard the mysterious schooner, and the man astern exchanged his megaphone for field-glasses. After a long scrutiny he went back to the megaphone.
“Congratulations, captain!” came the bellow. “When are you going to rejoin the Lass?”
“As soon the Rosan catches her,” replied Code, and then, exasperated by the unexpected maneuvers of this remarkable vessel, he cried: “Who are you and what do you want that you chase me all over the sea?”
Instantly the man put down the megaphone and gave orders to the crew, and in five minutes she was on her way north into the very heart of the fleet.
“I don’t know who she is or why she is or who is aboard her,” he told Nellie, after recounting to her the previous visitation of the schooner. “She reminds me of a nervous old hen keeping track of a stray chick. Pretty soon I won’t be able to curse the weather without being afraid my guardian will hear me. I say guardian, and yet I don’t know whether she is friendly or merely fixing up some calamity to break all at once. You know I have enemies. She may be working for them.”
The girl could offer no solution, nor could Bijonah Tanner, who had witnessed the incident from the forecastle head where he was smoking and anticipating the wishes of the cod beneath him. He had walked aft, and the three discussed the mystery.
“Ever see her before, captain?” asked Code.
If there was any man who knew schooners that had fished the Banks or the Bay of Fundy, it was Bijonah Tanner.
“Don’t cal’late I ever did. I’ve never saw jest that set to a foregaff nor jest that cut of a jumbo-jib afore.”
Tanner watched the schooner as she scudded away.
“Mighty big hurry, I allow,” he remarked. “But, Jiminy, doesn’t she sail! There ain’t hardly an air o’ wind stirrin’ and yet look at her go! She’s a mighty-able vessel.”
It was about four o’clock the next afternoon that the Rosan crept up in the middle of the fishing fleet. She had made a long berth overnight, dressed an excellent morning’s catch, and knocked off half a day because Bijonah did not feel it right to keep Code longer away from his vessel.
And Tanner managed the thing with a good eye to the dramatic. When he reached the rear guard of the fleet he began to work his vessel gracefully in and out among the sloops and schooners.
Code, seated in his chair on the cabin roof, did not realize what was going on until the triumphal procession was well under way.
Through the fleet they went–a fleet that was wearing crape for him–and from every vessel received a volley of cheers.
The Charming Lass greeted him with open arms. Pete Ellinwood swung him up from the transferring dory with a great bellow of delight, and he was passed along the line until, battered, joyous, and radiant, he arrived exhausted by the wheel, where he sat down.
When they all had drunk to the reunion from a rare old bottle, heavily cobwebbed, Code told his story. Then, while the men dressed down, he walked about, looking things over and counting the crew on his fingers.
“Pete!” he called suddenly, and the mate left the fish-pen.
“Where’s Arry Duncan?”
“Wal, skipper, I didn’t want to tell you fer fear you had enough on yer mind already, but Arry never come back the same day you was lost.”
“My God! Another one! I wondered how many would get caught that day!”
“An’ that ain’t all. He had your motor-dory with him–the one you caught us with out of Castalia.”
“How did he have that? I gave orders the motor-dories weren’t to be used.”
“Wal, cookee an’ the boy–they was the only ones aboard–tell it this way: Arry he struck a heavy school fust time he lets his dory rodin’ go, an’ most of his fish topped forty pound. In an hour his dory was full, and it was a three-mile pull back.
“When he got in he argued them others into givin’ him the motor-dory, ’cause it holds so much more. They helped him swing it over, an’ that’s the last they see of him.”
“But, if he had an engine, you’d think he could’ve made it back here or run foul of somebody or somethin’.”
“Yas, you would think so; but he didn’t, the more peace to him,” was Ellinwood’s reply.
“The poor feller!” said Code. “I’m sorry for his wife. Anything else happen while I was gone, Pete?”
“Now, let me think!” The mate scratched his head. “Oh, yes! Curse me, I nearly forgot it! You know that quair schooner that chased us down one day an’ asked the fool questions about you?”
“Yes. I saw that same schooner again yesterday. She asked more fool questions.”
“You did!” cried Ellinwood in amazement. “I didn’t see her, but I heard her, an’ I got a message from her for you. It was night when they come up on us an’ hailed.
“They said they had news of you, an’ would we send a dory over. Would we? They was about six over in as many minutes. But they wouldn’t let us aboard. No, sir; kept us off with poles an’ asked for me.
“When I got in clost they told me the Rosan had found you, and handed me an envelope with a message inside of it. Just as I was goin’ away there came the most awful clickin’ an’ flashin’ amidships I ever saw–”
“Wireless,” said Code.
“Wal, I’ve heard of it, but I never see it before; an’ I come away as quick as I could.”
“And the message?” asked Code curiously.
Pete laboriously unpinned a waistcoat-pocket and produced an envelope which he handed to Code. It was sealed, and the skipper tore away the end. The mystery and interest of the thing played upon his mind until he was in a tremble of nervous excitement.
At last he would know what the schooner was and why.
Eagerly he opened the message. It was typewritten on absolutely plain paper and unsigned, further baffling his curiosity. After a moment he read:
“Captain Schofield:
“Yesterday at St. Andrew’s suit was filed against you for murder in the first degree upon the person of Michael Burns, late of Freekirk Head, Grande Mignon Island. Plaintiff, Nathaniel Burns, son of the deceased. There is an order out for your arrest. This is a friendly warning and no more. You are now fore-armed!”
