Part 3

“Mr. Marston's orders are, Captain Mayo, that you turn here and go west. Do you know the usual course of the Bee line steamers?”

“Yes, sir.”

“He requests you to turn in toward shore and follow that course.”

“Very well, sir.” Captain Mayo walked to the wheel. “Nor' nor'west, Billy, until I can give you the exact course.”

“Nor' nor'west!” repeated the wheelsman, throwing her hard over, and the Olenia came about with a rail-dipping swerve and retraced her way along her own wake of white suds.

Miss Marston preceded the captain down the ladder and went into the chart-room. “A kiss—quick!” she whispered.

He held her close to him for a long moment.

“You are a most obedient captain,” she said.

When he released her and went at his task, she leaned upon his shoulder and watched him as he straddled his parallels across the chart.

“We'll run to Razee Reef,” he told her, eager to make her a partner in all his little concerns. “The Bee boats fetch the whistler there so as to lay off their next leg. I didn't know that Mr. Marston was interested in the Bee line.”

“I heard him talking about that line,” she said, indifferently. “Sometimes I listen when I have nothing else to do. He used a naughty word about somebody connected with that company—and it's so seldom that he allows himself to swear I listened to see what it was all about. I don't know even now. I don't understand such things. But he said if he couldn't buy 'em he'd bu'st 'em. Those were his words. Not very elegant language. But it's all I remember.”

Before he left the chart-room Mayo took a squint at the barometer. “I'm sorry he has ordered me in toward the coast,” he said. “The glass is too far below thirty to suit me. I think it means fog.”

“But it's so clear and beautiful,” she protested.

“It's always especially beautiful at sea before something bad happens,” he explained, smiling. “And there has been a big fog-bank off to s'uth'ard for two days. It's a good deal like life, dear. All lovely, and then the fog shuts in!”

“But I would be happy with you in the fog,” she assured him.

He glowed at her words and answered with his eyes.

She would have followed him back upon the bridge, but the steward intercepted her. He had waited outside the chart-room.

“Mr. Marston's compliments, Miss Marston! He requests you to join him at cards.”

She pouted as she gave back Mayo's look of annoyance, and then obeyed the mandate.

Mr. Marston was stroking his narrow strip of chin beard with thumb and forefinger when she arrived on the quarter-deck. The men of business were below, and he motioned to a hammock chair beside him.

“Alma, for the rest of this cruise I want you to stay back here with our guests where you belong,” he commanded with the directness of attack employed by Julius Marston in his dealings with those of his ménage.

“What do you mean, father?”

“That—exactly. I was explicit, was I not?”

“But you do not intimate that—that I have—”

“Well?” Mr. Marston believed in allowing others to expose their sentiments before he uncovered his own.

“You don't suggest that there is anything wrong in my being on the bridge where I enjoy myself so much. I am trying to learn something about navigation.”

“I am paying that fellow up there to attend to all that.”

“And it gets tiresome back here.”

“You selected your own company for the cruise—and there is Mr. Beveridge ready to amuse you at any time.”

“Mr. Beveridge amuses me—distinctly amuses me,” she retorted. “But there is such a thing as becoming wearied even of such a joke as Mr. Beveridge.”

“You will please employ a more respectful tone when you refer to that gentleman,” said her father, with severity. But he promptly fell back into his usual mood when she came into his affairs. He was patronizingly tolerant. “Your friend, Miss Burgess, has been joking about your sudden devotion to navigation, Alma.”

“Nan Burgess cannot keep her tongue still, even about herself.”

“I know, but I do not intend to have you give occasion even for jokes. Of course, I understand. I know your whims. You are interested, personally, in that gold-braided chap about as much as you would be interested in that brass thing where the compass is—whatever they call it.”

“But he's a gentleman!” she cried, her interest making her unwary. “His grandfather was—”

“Alma!” snapped Julius Marston. His eyes opened wide. He looked her up and down. “I have heard before that an ocean trip makes women silly, I am inclined to believe it. I don't care a curse who that fellow's grandfather was. You are my daughter—and you keep off that bridge!”

The men of business were coming up the companion-way, and she rose and hurried to her stateroom.

“I don't dare to meet Nan Burgess just now,” she told herself. “Friendships can be broken by saying certain things—and I feel perfectly capable of saying just those things to her at this moment.”

In the late afternoon the Olenia, the shore-line looming to starboard, shaped her course to meet and pass a big steamer which came rolling down the sea with a banner of black smoke flaunting behind her.

The fog which Captain Mayo had predicted was coming. Wisps of it trailed over the waves—skirmishers sent ahead of the main body which marched in mass more slowly behind.

A whistling buoy, with its grim grunt, told all mariners to 'ware Razee Reef, which was lifting its jagged, black bulk against the sky-line. With that fog coming, Captain Mayo needed to take exact bearings from Razee, for he had decided to run for harbor that night. That coastline, to whose inside course Marston's orders had sent the yacht, was too dangerous to be negotiated in a night which was fog-wrapped. Therefore, the captain took the whistler nearly dead on, leaving to the larger steamer plenty 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 to exercise any authority over his daughter when she was ashore.

She was not wilful; she was not obstinate; she gave him affection. But she had become a young woman while his slow thoughts were classing her still as a child. She was always ahead of all his calculations. In his absences she jumped from stage to stage of character—almost of identity! He had never forgotten how he had brought back to her from New York, after one voyage, half a gunny sackful of tin toys, and discovered that in his absence, by advice and sanction of her aunt, who had become her foster-mother, she had let her dresses down to ankle-length and had become a young lady whom he called “Miss Candage” twice before he had managed to get his emotions straightened out. While he was wondering about the enormity of tin toys in the gunny sack at his feet, as he sat in the aunt's parlor; his daughter asked him to come as guest of honor with the Sunday-school class's picnic which she was arranging as teacher. That gave him his opportunity to lie about the toys and allege that he had brought them for her scholars.

Captain Candage, on the deck of his ship, found that he was able to muster a little courage and bluster for a few minutes, but he did not dare to look at her for long while he was asserting himself.

He looked at her then as she stood in the gloomy companionway, a radiant and rosy picture of healthy maidenhood. But the expression on her face was not comfortingly filial.

“Father, I must say it again. I can't help saying it. I am so unhappy. You are misjudging me so cruelly.”

“I done it because I thought it was right to do it. I haven't been tending and watching the way a father ought to tend and watch. I never seemed to be able to ketch up with you. Maybe I ain't right. Maybe I be! At any rate, I'm going to stand on this tack, in your case, for a while longer.”

“You have taken me away from my real home for this? This is no place for a girl! You are not the same as you are when you are on shore. I didn't know you could be so rough—and—wicked!”

“Hold on there, daughter! Snub cable right there! I'm an honest, God-fearing, hard-working man—paying a hundred cents on the dollar, and you know it.”

“But what did you just shout—right out where everybody could hear you?”

“That—that was only passing the compliments of the day as compared with what I can do when I get started proper. Do you think I'm going to let any snub-snooted wart-hog of a lime-duster sing—”

“Father!”

“What's a girl know about the things a father has to put up with when he goes to sea and earns money for her?”

“I am willing to work for myself. You took me right out of my good position in the millinery-store. You have made me leave all my young friends. Oh, I am so homesick!” Her self-reliance departed suddenly. She choked. She tucked her head into the hook of her arm and sobbed.

“Don't do that!” he pleaded, softening suddenly. “Please don't, Polly!”

She looked up and smiled—a pleading, wan little smile. “I didn't mean to give way to it, popsy dear. I don't intend to do anything to make you angry or sorry. I have tried to be a good girl. I am a good girl. But it breaks my heart when you don't trust me.”