Laughing Last, Jane Abbott [the false prince .txt] 📗

in everyone’s way and painted a gray hull and a pink-gray sail, checkered with white patches, or a dark-skinned Portuguese bending to the task of spiking shiny cod from the bottom of a dory and throwing them to the wharf to be measured and weighed.

Sidney never failed to thrill to the changing scenes that Rockman’s offered. She had become, like Mart and Lavender and a score of other youngsters, a familiar figure on the old wharf. With the ease of a Cape Coder born she talked to the Portuguese fishermen and to the men who worked in the shed and to Captain Hawkes, who when he was not on the Mabel T sat on a leaning pile smoking and waiting for tourists to engage him. She knew the fishermen and their boats by name and was as interested in how much old Amos Martin got for his beautiful catch as Amos himself. Rockman’s knew her as “that summer gal of Achsa Green’s.” “She beats all for askin’ questions,” it agreed, smilingly. “Ain’t anything misses that gal!”

Sidney certainly did not intend anything should. She had to make up for all the years she had not lived in Provincetown and if she watched and listened closely she might some day catch up with Mart and Lavender. She sat on the wharf late one afternoon, dangling her bare legs over its edge, and watched the sails and the circling seagulls and everything within sight and waited for Mart and Lavender to join her as they had agreed. Lavender was running an errand for Cap’n Hawkes and Mart had gone to Commercial Street for some candy.

It was too early in the day for the fishermen to come in. Sidney knew that. For that reason a dory approaching Rockman’s caught her eye. In it were two men, in oilskins and rubber boots. As it came near to the wharf a thickset fellow stepped out from the shed. Sidney had never noticed him before. And her eyes grew round as she observed that in place of one hand he wore an iron hook. Like a flash there came to her a confused memory of stories she had read of high piracy and buccaneers. She looked at the ugly hook and at the man and then at the approaching dory and every pulse quickened and tingled. Without moving a muscle she leapt to attention.

Partly concealed as she was by the pile of old canvas the man did not see her. Nor did the two in the dory notice her. As the dory bumped its nose against the wharf one of the men threw a line to the man on the dock who caught it dexterously with the iron hook. He had evidently been waiting for the dory. Then one of the two in the boat sprang to the wharf while the other busied himself in shutting off the engine.

“’Lo, Jed. Good catch?”

“Yep. Good catch.”

Not unusual words for Rockman’s wharf but they rang with strange significance to Sidney, athirst for adventure. Why, there were not any fish in the dory! And the man with the hook had called the other Jed! Jed Starrow! It was Jed Starrow. She peeked cautiously around the old sails. Jed Starrow was tall and very dark and had just the right swagger. If he had worn a gay ’kerchief knotted about his head, earrings, and a cutlass in his sash he would have been the pirate true; as it was easy for Sidney to see him like that in spite of his commonplace oilskins and his cap.

The two men walked slowly up the wharf, Jed Starrow a little in advance of the other. The man in the dory, having shut off the engine, lounged in the bow of the boat and lighted a pipe.

Sidney sat very still until Jed Starrow and his companion were out of sight. Then she climbed to her feet, slipped along the side of the shed and ran up the wharf until she could jump down on the beach. Here she waited Mart’s return.

Mart and Lavender came almost at the same moment, Mart with a bulging bag of assorted and dreadful-hued candies. Mysteriously Sidney beckoned to them to join her in the seclusion of the beach.

“Whatever’s happened?” mumbled Mart her mouth full of candy. “You act like you were struck silly.”

“I’ve found something out!” Sidney spoke in a sepulchral whisper though their voices could not have been heard by anyone on the wharf. “Lav, who is Jed Starrow!”

Lav stared at her in wonder.

“Why—why—he’s Jed Starrow. That’s all. Fellow ’round town. Owns the Puritan, that new schooner.”

“I believe—” Sidney spoke slowly. “I believe Jed Starrow is a—pirate!”

At this Lav and Mart broke into loud laughter. But Sidney stood her ground, not even flushing under their derision.

“You can laugh. But I know—I know—instinctively. I sometimes do know things like that. I guess it’s an occult power I have. And, anyway, Cap’n Davies hinted as much.”

“Oh, Cap’n Davies—he’s always snoopin’ round for trouble. We have plenty of rum-runners and I guess lots of things get smuggled—but pirates—”

“Captain Davies distinctly said pirates—” insisted Sidney who had not sufficient experience to properly classify rum-runners and smugglers. Anyway, pirates sounded more exciting.

“What’s started all this?” asked Lavender.

Sidney told of the landing of the dory and the man with the iron hook for a hand.

“Oh, that’s only Joe Josephs. He’s a wrecker.”

Mart was catching something of Sidney’s spirit; in truth Mart was unconsciously catching a great deal from Sidney these days.

“Well, he’s certainly doing something besides wrecking. It’s been an awful poor season for wrecks and gran’ma says Joe Josephs’ wife’s been to her sister’s at Plymouth and got a new coat and hat for the trip and she hasn’t had a new thing since Letty Vine give her her blue serge dress and that wasn’t new.”

“You see—” cried Sidney, exulting, “Joe Josephs has divided the spoils!”

“Oh, you girls are crazy! Why everyone in the town knows Jed Starrow. Don’t you think everyone ’ud know if he was a pirate? He’s lived here ever since he was born, I guess.”

“But, Lav, it was so funny for them to say just alike ‘good catch’ when they didn’t have any fish at all! It was a password. Pirates always have passwords.”

“Prob’bly a code,” jeered Lav, rocking with laughter. “You watch the sky anights; mebbe they use rockets to signal one another, too.”

Sidney was still sufficiently stirred by the whole incident as to be able to tolerate Lav’s stupidity.

“Of course I know pirates—even these days—wouldn’t use rockets and codes. I’m not as ignorant as all that. And I am going to watch, day and night. It’ll be easy for me to watch ’cause I’m a girl and no one will suspect what’s in my head.”

“I should say they wouldn’t! Gee!” and Lav permitted himself a last long laugh.

“And you may change your tune yet,” cried Sidney, really vexed, “When Mart and I discover something.”

“We’ll both keep our eyes open!” Mart agreed, admiring Sidney’s imagination even though she could not always follow it. “But we ought to keep quiet ’bout our suspicions, hadn’t we?”

Sidney hesitated. She did want to tell Mr. Dugald about the “good catch.” But Mart went on convincingly.

“If we told anyone we were on, y’see it might get to Jed Starrow himself.”

“That’d be the biggest joke in town,” Lav warned, with a chuckle.

Sidney ignored him. “Of course we must not breathe a word of our suspicions to a soul,” she averred. “And if either of us finds out anything she must tell the other at once. I think we will find something, too, for two heads are better than one.”

“Say, are you going to leave me out of your fun—just ’cause I laughed?”

Sidney did not want to leave Lavender out but she did want to punish him a little. She pretended to consider his question.

“If you find it all so highly amusing you might be tempted to tell someone—”

“What’ya mean? That I’d squeal on you? If you think that, well, I don’t want to be in on it—”

“Oh, Lav, of course I know you wouldn’t squeal,” cried Sidney, relenting. “And we will need you to help find things out. Oughtn’t we to have some sign or a word or something to sort of signal that one of us knows something to tell the others? What’ll it be—”

Mart scowled down at the sand. For the moment she was possessed with an envy for Sidney’s agile imagination, a disgust at her own stolid faculties. Why couldn’t she think of things right offhand the way Sidney could?

But it was Lavender who suggested the “signal.”

“Hook!” he offered and Sidney clapped her hands in delight.

“Oh, grand! No one would ever guess. And it sounds so shivery! Why, that man with the iron hook just has to be a pirate!” Then she suddenly grew embarrassed by her own enthusiasm. “It’s different with you two,” she explained, “you’ve lived here all your lives and you don’t know what it’s like to have to be a po—” She broke off, startled. One breath more and she would have revealed the truth to Lavender and Mart. “Middletown is the pokiest town—there’s nothing exciting ever happens there.”

“I don’t know as much exciting happens here. I s’pose enough happens, only you have to have something inside you that makes you think it exciting, I guess.” Which was Mart’s initial step into any analysis of emotion, but not her last.

Lavender turned toward the wharf. “I got to go and hunt up Cap’n Hawkes,” he announced regretfully. “So it’ll be ‘hook,’ will it? Well, I swear from henceforth I’ll watch every citizen of Provincetown to see if he has a cutlass at his belt or a tattoo on his chest. Come on, girls—sleuths, I mean—”

“I do hope,” sighed Sidney as she and Mart wandered homeward over the hard sand, “that one of us’ll have to say ‘hook’ soon. Don’t you?”

But in her heart Sidney had an annoying conviction that neither Mart nor Lav took her pirate suspicions quite as seriously as she did. At supper Lav deliberately kept the conversation on Jed Starrow and his activities with a disconcerting twinkle in his eyes. Mart assumed the same lofty tolerance of their secret game as she showed to their play on the Arabella—as though it were a sort of second-best fun.

“Well, I don’t care,” Sidney declared stoutly. To think of Jed Starrow as a wicked buccaneer and Joe Josephs, the wrecker, as his accomplice in piracy, satisfied her craving for adventure. For the next many days she let it color everything she saw, every word she overheard; the connecting links she forged from her own active imagination.