Blow the Man Down, Holman Day [e ink epub reader TXT] 📗

of room in the open sea.
With considerable amazement Mayo noticed that the other fellow was edging toward the whistler at a sharper angle than any one needed. That course, if persisted in, would pinch the yacht in dangerous waters. Mayo gave the on-coming steamer one whistle, indicating his intention to pass to starboard. After a delay he was answered by two hoarse hoots--a most flagrant breach of the rules of the road.
"That must be a mistake," Captain Mayo informed Mate McGaw.
"That's a polite name for it, sir," averred Mr. McGaw, after he had shifted the lump in his cheek.
"Of course he doesn't mean it, Mr. McGaw."
"Then why isn't he giving us elbow-room on the outside of that buoy, sir?"
"I can't swing and cross his bows now. If he should hit us we'd be the ones held for the accident."
Again Mayo gave the obstinate steamer a single whistle-blast.
"If he cross-signals me again I'll report him," he informed the mate. "Pay close attention, Mr. McGaw, and you, too, Billy. We may have to go before the inspectors."
But the big chap ahead of them did not deign to reply. He kept on straight at the whistler.
"Compliments of Mr. Marston!" called the secretary from the bridge ladder. "What steamer is that?"
"_Conorno_ of the Bee line, sir," stated Captain Mayo over his shoulder. Then he ripped out a good, hearty, deep-water oath. According to appearances, incredible as the situation seemed, the _Conorno_ proposed to drive the yacht inside the whistler.
Mayo ran to the wheel and yanked the bell-pull furiously. There were four quick clangs in the engine-room, and in a moment the _Olenia_ began to quiver in all her fabric. Going full speed ahead, Mayo had called for full speed astern. Then he sounded three whistles, signaling as the rules of the road provide. The yacht's twin screws churned a yeasty riot under her counter, and while she was laboring thus in her own wallow, trembling like some living thing in the extremity of terror, the big steamer swept past. Froth from the creamy surges at her bows flicked spray contemptuously upon Julius Marston and his guests on the _Olenia_'s quarter-deck. Men grinned down upon them from the high windows of the steamer's pilot-house.
A jeering voice boomed through a megaphone: "Keep out of the way of the Bee line! Take the hint!"
An officer pointed his finger at Marston's house flag, snapping from the yacht's main truck. The blue fish-tail with its letter "M" had revealed the yacht's identity to searching glasses.
"Better make it black! Skull and cross-bones!" volunteered the megaphone operator.
On she went down the sea and the _Olenia_ tossed in the turbulent wake of the kicking screws.
Then, for the first time, Captain Mayo heard the sound of Julius Marston's voice. The magnate stood up, shook his fist at his staring captain, and yelled, "What in damnation do you think you are doing?"
It was amazing, insulting, and, under the circumstances as Mayo knew them, an unjust query. The master of the _Olenia_ did not reply. He was not prepared to deliver any long-distance explanation. Furthermore, the yacht demanded all his attention just then. He gave his orders and she forged ahead to round the whistler.
"Nor'west by west, half west, Billy. And cut it fine!"
The fog had fairly leaped upon them from the sea. The land-breeze had been holding back the wall of vapor, damming it in a dun bank to southward. The breeze had let go. The fog had seized its opportunity.
"Saturday Cove for us to-night, Mr. McGaw," said the master. "Keep your eye over Billy's shoulder."
Then the secretary appeared again on the ladder. This time he did not bring any "compliments."
"Mr. Marston wants you to report aft at once," he announced, brusquely.
Mayo hesitated a moment. They were driving into blankness which had shut down with that smothering density which mariners call "a dungeon fog." Saturday Cove's entrance was a distant and a small target. In spite of steersman and mate, his was the sole responsibility.
"Will you please explain to Mr. Marston that I cannot leave the bridge?"
"You have straight orders from him, captain! You'd better stop the boat and report."
The skipper of the _Olenia_ was having his first taste of the unreasoning whim of the autocrat who was entitled to break into shipboard discipline, even in a critical moment. Mayo felt exasperation surging in him, but he was willing to explain.
The whistler and Razee Reef had been blotted out by the fog.
"If this vessel is stopped five minutes in this tide-drift we shall lose our bearings, sir. I cannot leave this bridge for the present."
"I'm thinking you'll leave it for good!" blurted the secretary. "You're the first hired man who ever told Julius Marston to go bite his own thumb."
"I may be a hired man," retorted Mayo. "But I am also a licensed shipmaster. I must ask you to step down off the bridge."
"Does that go for all the rest of the--passengers?" asked the secretary, angry in his turn. He dwelt on his last word. "It does--in a time like this!"
"Very well, I'll give them that word aft."
Captain Mayo caught a side glance from Mate McGaw after a time.
"I have often wondered," remarked the mate to nobody in particular, "how it is that so many damn fools get rich on shore."
Captain Mayo did not express any opinion on the subject. He clutched the bridge rail and stared into the fog, and seemed to be having a lot of trouble in choking back some kind of emotion.


III ~ THE TAVERN OF THE SEAS
Now, Mister Macliver, you knows him quite well,
He comes upon deck and he cuts a great swell;
It's damn your eyes there and it's damn your eyes here,
And straight to the gangway he takes a broad sheer.
--La Pique "Come-all-ye."
Into Saturday Cove, all during that late afternoon, they came surging--spars and tackle limned against the on-sweeping pall of the gray fog--those wayfarers of the open main.
First to roll in past the ledgy portals of the haven were the venerable sea-wagons--the coasters known as the "Apple-treers." Their weatherwise skippers, old sea-dogs who could smell weather as bloodhounds sniff trails, had their noses in the air in good season that day, and knew that they must depend on a thinning wind to cuff them into port. One after the other, barnacled anchors splashed from catheads, dragging rusty chains from hawse-holes, and old, patched sails came sprawling down with chuckle of sheaves and lisp of running rigging.
A 'long-coast shanty explains the nickname, "Apple-treers":
O, what's the use of compass or a quadrant or a log?
Keep her loafin' on her mudhook in a norther or a fog.
But as soon's the chance is better, then well ratch her off once more,
Keepin' clost enough for bearings from the apple-trees ashore.
Therefore, the topsail schooners, the fore-and-afters, the Bluenose blunt-prows, came in early before the fog smooched out the loom of the trees and before it became necessary to guess at what the old card compasses had to reveal on the subject of courses.
And so, along with the rest of the coastwise ragtag, which was seeking harbor and holding-ground, came the ancient schooner _Polly_. Fog-masked by those illusory mists, she was a shadow ship like the others; but, more than the others, she seemed to be a ghost ship, for her lines and her rig informed any well-posted mariner that she must be a centenarian; with her grotesqueness accentuated by the fog pall, she seemed unreal--a picture from the past.
She had an out-thrust of snub bow and an upcock of square stern, and sag of waist--all of which accurately revealed ripe antiquity, just as a bell-crowned beaver and a swallow-tail coat with brass buttons would identify an old man in the ruck of newer fashions. She had seams like the wrinkles in the parchment skin of extreme old age. She carried a wooden figurehead under her bowsprit, the face and bust of a woman on whom an ancient woodcarver had bestowed his notion of a beatific smile; the result was an idiotic simper. The glorious gilding had been worn off, the wood was gray and cracked. The _Polly's_ galley was entirely hidden under a deckload of shingles and laths in bunches; the after-house was broad and loomed high above the rail in contrast to the mere cubbies which were provided for the other fore-and-afters in the flotilla which came ratching in toward Saturday Cove.
The _Polly_, being old enough to be celebrated, had been the subject of a long-coast lyric of seventeen verses, any one of which was capable of producing most horrible profanity from Captain Epps Candage, her master, whenever he heard the ditty echoing over the waves, sung by a satirist aboard another craft.
In that drifting wind there was leisure; a man on board a lime-schooner at a fairly safe distance from the _Polly_ found inclination and lifted his voice:
"Ow-w-w, here comes the _Polly_ with a lopped-down sail,
And Rubber-boot Epps, is a-settin' on her rail.
How-w-w long will she take to get to Boston town?
Can't just tell 'cause she's headin' up and down."
"You think that kind o' ky-yi is funny, do you, you walnut-nosed, blue-gilled, goggle-eyed son of a dough-faced americaneezus?" bellowed Captain Candage, from his post at the _Polly's_ wheel.
"Father!" remonstrated a girl who stood in the companionway, her elbows propped on the hatch combings. "Such language! You stop it!"
"It ain't half what I can do when I'm fair started," returned the captain.
"You never say such things on shore."
"Well, I ain't on shore now, be I? I'm on the high seas, and I'm talking to fit the occasion. Who's running this schooner, you or me?"
She met his testiness with a spirit of her own, "I'm on board here, where I don't want to be, because of your silly notions, father. I have the right to ask you to use decent language, and not shame us both."
Against the archaically homely background the beauty of the young girl appeared in most striking contrast. Her curls peeped out from under the white Dutch cap she wore. Her eyes sparkled with indignant protest, her face was piquant and was just then flushed, and her nose had the least bit of a natural uptilt, giving her the air of a young woman who had a will of her own to spice her amiability.
Captain Candage blinked at her over the spokes of the wheel, and in his father's heart acknowledged her charm, realizing more acutely that his motherless girl had become too much of a problem for his limited knowledge in the management of women.
He had not seen her grow up gradually, as other fathers had viewed their daughters, being able to meet daily problems in molding and mastery.
She seemed to reach development, mental and physical, in disconcerting phases while he was away on his voyages. Each time he met her he was obliged to get acquainted all over again, it appeared to him.
Captain Candage had owned up frankly to himself that he was not able