Part 4

“They were courting you,” he stammered. “Them shore dudes was hanging around you. I ain't doubting you, Polly. But you 'ain't got no mother. I was afraid. I know I've been a fool about it. But I was afraid!” Tears sprinkled his bronzed cheeks. “I haven't been much of a father because I've had to go sailing and earn money. But I thought I'd take you away till-till I could sort of plan on something.”

She gazed at him, softening visibly.

“Oh, Polly,” he said, his voice breaking, “you don't know how pretty you are-you don't know how afraid I am!”

“But you can trust me, father,” she promised, after a pause, with simple dignity. “I know I am only a country girl, not wise, perhaps, but I know what is right and what is wrong. Can't you understand how terribly you have hurt my pride and my self-respect by forcing me to come and be penned up here as if I were a shameless girl who could not take care of herself?”

“I reckon I have done wrong, Polly. But I don't know much-not about women folk. I was trying to do right-because you're all I have in this world.”

“I hope you will think it all over,” she advised, earnestly. “You will understand after a time, father, I'm sure. Then you will let me go back and you will trust me-as your own daughter should be trusted. That's the right way to make girls good-let them know that they can be trusted.”

“You are probably right,” he admitted. “I will think it all over. As soon as we get in and anchored I'll sit down and give it a good overhauling in my mind. Maybe-”

She took advantage of his pause. “We are going into a harbor, are we, father?”

“Yes. Right ahead of us.”

“I wish you would put me ashore and send me back. I shall lose my position in the store if I stay away too long.”

His obstinacy showed again, promptly. “I don't want you in that millinery-shop. I'm told that dude drummers pester girls in stores.”

“They do not trouble me, father. Haven't you any confidence in your own daughter?”

“Yes, I have,” he said, firmly, and then added, “but I keep thinking of the dudes and then I get afraid.”

She gave him quick a glance, plainly tempted to make an impatient retort, and then turned and went down into the cabin.

“Don't be mad with me, Polly,” he called after her. “I guess, maybe, I'm all wrong. I'm going to think it over; I ain't promising nothing sure, but it won't be none surprising if I set you ashore here and send you back home. Don't cry, little girl.” There were tears in his voice as well as in his eyes.

The lime-schooner vocalist felt an impulse to voice another verse:

“Ow-w-w, here comes the Polly in the middle of the road, Towed by a mule and paving-blocks her load. Devil is a-waiting and the devil may as well, 'Cause he'll never get them paving-blocks to finish paving hell.”

Captain Candage left his wheel and strode to the rail. All the softness was gone from his face and his voice.

“You horn-jawed, muck-faced jezebo of a sea-sculpin, you dare to yap out any more of that sculch and I'll come aboard you after we anchor and jump down your gullet and gallop the etarnal innards out of ye! Don't you know that I've got ladies aboard here?”

“It don't sound like it,” returned the songster.

“Well, you hear what I sound like! Half-hitch them jaw taakuls of yours!”

Captain Candage's meditations were not disturbed after that.

With the assistance of his one helper aboard ship, “Oakum Otie,” a gray and whiskered individual who combined in one person the various offices of first mate, second mate, A-1 seaman, and hand before the mast-as well as the skipper's boon companion-the Polly was manoeuvered to her anchorage in Saturday Cove and was snugged for the night. Smoke began to curl in blue wreaths from her galley funnel, and there were occasional glimpses of the cook, a sallow-complexioned, one-eyed youth whose chief and everlasting decoration provided him with the nickname of “Smut-nosed Dolph.”

Then came some of the ocean aristocrats to join the humbler guests in that tavern of the seas.

Avant couriers of a metropolitan yacht club, on its annual cruise, arrived, jockeying in with billowing mountains of snowy canvas spread to catch the last whispers of the breeze. Later arrivals, after the breeze failed, were towed in by the smart motor craft of the fleet. One by one, as the anchors splashed, brass cannons barked salute and were answered by the commodore's gun.

Captain Candage sat on the edge of the Polly's house and snapped an involuntary and wrathful wink every time a cannon banged. In that hill-bound harbor, where the fog had massed, every noise was magnified as by a sounding-board. There were cheery hails, yachtsmen bawled over the mist-gemmed brass rails interchange of the day's experiences, and frisking yacht tenders, barking staccato exhausts, began to carry men to and fro on errands of sociability. In the silences Captain Candage could hear the popping of champagne corks.

“Them fellers certainly live high and sleep in the garret,” observed Oakum Otie. He was seated cross-legged on the top of the house and was hammering down the lumps in a freshly twisted eye-splice with the end of a marlinespike.

“It has always been a wonder to me,” growled Captain Candage, “how dudes who don't seem to have no more wit than them fellows haw-hawing over there, and swigging liquor by the cart-load, ever make money the way they do so as to afford all this.”

On that point Captain Candage might have found Mate McGaw of the Olenia willing to engage in profitable discussion and amicable understanding!

“They don't make it-they don't know enough to make it,” stated Otie, with the conviction of a man who knew exactly what he was talking about. “It has all been left to 'em by their fathers.”

The bearded and brown men of the apple-tree crews leaned the patched elbows of their old coats on the rails and gloomily surveyed the conviviality on board the plaything crafts. Remarks which they exchanged with one another were framed to indicate a sort of lofty scorn for these frolickers of the sea. The coasting skippers, most of whom wore hard hats, as if they did not want to be confounded with those foppish yacht captains, patrolled their quarter-decks and spat disdainfully over their rails.

Everlastingly there was the clank of pumps on board the Apple-treers, and the pumps were tackling the everlasting leaks. Water reddened by contact with bricks, water made turbid by percolation through paving-blocks, splashed continuously from hiccuping scuppers.

Captain Ranse Lougee of the topsail schooner Belvedere, laden with fish scraps for a Boston glue-factory, dropped over the counter into his dory and came rowing to the Polly, standing up and facing forward and swaying with the fisherman's stroke.

He straddled easily over the schooner's scant freeboard and came aft, and was greeted cordially by Captain Candage.

“Thought I'd show them frosted-cakers that there's a little sociability amongst the gents in the coasting trade, too,” he informed his host. “Furthermore, I want to borry the ex-act time o' day. And, furthermore, I'm glad to get away from that cussed aromy on board the Belvedere and sort of air out my nose once in a while. What's the good word, Cap?”

Captain Candage replied to the commonplaces of the other skipper in abstracted fashion. He had viewed Lougee's approach with interest, and now he was plainly pondering in regard to something wholly outside this chatter.

“Captain Lougee,” he broke in, suddenly, in low tones, “I want you should come forward with me out of hearing of anybody below. I've got a little taakul I want you to help me overhaul.”

The two walked forward over the deckload and sat on the fore-gaff, which sprawled carelessly where it had fallen when the halyards were let run.

“My daughter is below, there,” explained Captain Candage.

“Vacation trip, eh?”

“I don't think it can be called that, Captain Lougee,” stated the host, dryly. “She is having about as good a time as a canary-bird would have in a corn-popper over a hot fire.”

“What did she come for, then?”

“I made her come. I shanghaied her.”

“That's no way to treat wimmen folks,” declared Captain Lougee. “I've raised five daughters and I know what I'm talking about.”

“I know you have raised five girls, and they're smart as tophet and right as a trivet—and that's why I have grabbed right in on the subject as I have. I was glad to see you coming aboard, Captain Lougee. I want some advice from a man who knows.”

“Then I'm the man to ask, Captain Candage.”

“Last time I was home—where she has been living with her Aunt Zilpah—I ketched her!” confessed Candage. His voice was hoarse. His fingers, bent and calloused with rope-pulling, trembled as he fingered the seam of his trousers.

“You don't tell!” Lougee clucked, solicitously.

“Yes, I ketched her buggy-riding!”

“Alone?”

“No, there was a gang of 'em in a beach-wagon. They was going to a party. And I ketched her dancing with a fellow at that party.”

“Well, go ahead now that you've got started! Shake out the mainsail!”

“That's about all there is to it—except that a fellow has been beauing her home from Sunday-school concerts with a lantern. Yes, I reckon that is about all to date and present writing,” confessed Candage.

“What else do you suspect?”

“Nothing. Of course, there's no telling what it will grow to be—with dudes a-pestering her the way they do.”

“There ain't any telling about anything in this world, is there?” demanded Captain Lougee, very sharply.

“I reckon not—not for sure!”

“Do you mean to say that because your girl—like any girl should—has been having a little innocent fun with young folks, you have dragged her on board this old hooker, shaming her and making her ridiculous?”

“I have been trying to do my duty as a father,” stated Captain Candage, stoutly, and avoiding the flaming gaze of his guest.

Captain Lougee straightened his leg so as to come at his trousers pocket, produced a plug of tobacco, and gnawed a chew off a corner, after careful inspection to find a likely spot for a bite.

“I need to have something in my mouth about this time—something soothing to the tongue and, as you might say, sort of confining, so that too much language won't bu'st out all at once,” he averred, speaking with effort as he tried to lodge the huge hunk of tobacco into a comfortable position. “I have raised five nice girls, and I have always treated 'em as if they had common sense along with woman's nat'ral goodness and consid'able more self-reliance than a Leghorn pullet. And I used 'em like they had the ordinary rights and privileges of human beings. And they are growed up and a credit to the family. And I haven't got to look back over my record and reflect that I was either a Chinyman or a Turkeyman. No, sir! I have been a father—and my girls can come and sit on my knee to-day and get my advice, and think it's worth something.”

He rose and walked toward his dory.

“But hold on,” called Captain Candage. “You haven't told me what you think.”

“Haven't I? I thought I had, making it mild and pleasant. But if you need a little something more plain and direct, I'll remark—still making it mild and pleasant—that you're a damned old fool! And now I'll go back and be sociable with them fish scraps. I believe they will smell better after this!” He leaped into his dory and rowed away.

Captain Candage offered no rejoinder to that terse and meaty summing up. Naturally, he was as ready with his tongue as Captain Ranse Lougee or any other man alongshore. But in this case the master of the Polly was not sure of his ground. He knew that Captain Lougee had qualified as father of five. In the judgment of a mariner experience counts. And he did not resent the manner of Captain Lougee because that skipper's brutal bluntness was well known by his friends. Captain Candage had asked and he had received. He rested his elbows on his knees and stared after the departing caller and pondered.

“Maybe he is right. He probably is right. But it wouldn't be shipboard discipline if I told her that I have been wrong. I reckon I'll go aft and be pleasant and genteel, hoping that nothing will happen to rile my feelings. Now that my feelings are calm and peaceful, and having taken course and bearings from a father of five, I'll probably say to her, 'You'd better trot along home, sissy, seeing that I have told you how to mind your eye after this.'”

IV ~ OVER THE “POLLY'S” RAIL

O Stormy was a good old man! To my way you storm along! Physog tough as an old tin pan, Ay, ay, ay, Mister Storm-along! —Storm-along Shanty.

Without paying much attention to the disturber, Captain Candage had been a bit nettled during his meditation. A speed boat from one of the yachts kept circling the Polly, carrying a creaming smother of water under its upcocked bow. It was a noisy gnat of a boat and it kicked a contemptuous wake against the rust-streaked old wagon.

When it swept under the counter, after Captain Candage was back on his quarter-deck, he gave it a stare over the rail, and his expression was distinctly unamiable.

“They probably wasted more money on that doostra-bulus than this schooner would sell for in the market today,” he informed Otie.

“They don't care how money goes so long as they didn't have to sweat earning it. Slinging it like they'd sling beans!”

Back on its circling course swished the darting tender. This time the purring motor whined into silence and the boat came drifting alongside.

“On board Polly!” hailed one of the yachtsmen, a man with owner's insignia on his cap.

The master of the old schooner stuck his lowering visage farther over the rail, but he did not reply.

“Isn't this Polly the real one?”

“No, it's only a chromo painting of it.”

“Thank you! You're a gentleman!” snapped the yachtsman.

“Oh, hold on, Paul,” urged one of the men in the tender. “There's a right way to handle these old boys.” He stood up. “We're much interested in this packet, captain.”

“That's why you have been making a holy show of her, playing ring around a rosy, hey?”

“But tell me, isn't this the old shallop that was a privateer in the war of eighteen twelve?”

“Nobody aboard here has ever said she wasn't.”

“Well, sir, may we not come on board and look her over?”

“No sir, you can't.”

“Now, look here, captain—”

“I'm looking!” declared the master of the Polly in ominous tones.

“We don't mean to annoy you, captain.”

“Folks who don't know any better do a lot of things without meaning to.”

Captain Candage regularly entertained a sea-toiler's resentment for men who used the ocean as a mere playground. But more especially, during those later days, his general temper was touchy in regard to dapper young men, for he had faced a problem of the home which had tried his soul. He felt an unreasoning choler rising in him in respect to these chaps, who seemed to have no troubles of their own.

“I am a writer,” explained the other. “If I may be allowed on board I'll take a few pictures and—”

“And make fun of me and my bo't by putting a piece in the paper to tickle city dudes. Fend off!” he commanded, noticing that the tender was drifting toward the schooner's side and that one of the crew had set a boat-hook against the main chain-plate.

“Don't bother with the old crab,” advised the owner, sourly.

But the other persisted, courteously, even humbly. “I am afraid you do not understand me, captain. I would as soon make jest of my mother as of this noble old relic.”

“Go ahead! Call it names!”

“I am taking off my hat to it,” he declared, whipping his cap from his head. “My father's grandfather was in the war of eighteen twelve. I want to honor this old patriot here with the best tribute my pen can pay. If you will allow me to come on board I shall feel as though I were stepping upon a sacred spot, and I can assure you that my friends, here, have just as much respect for this craft as I have.”

But this honest appeal did not soften Captain Candage. He did not understand exactly from what source this general rancor of his flowed. At the same time he was conscious of the chief reason why he did not want to allow these visitors to rummage aboard the schooner. They would meet his daughter, and he was afraid, and he was bitterly ashamed of himself because he was afraid. Dimly he was aware that this everlasting fear on her account constituted an insult to her. The finer impulse to protect her privacy was not actuating him; he knew that, too. He was merely foolishly afraid to trust her in the company of young men, and the combination of his emotions produced the simplest product of mental upheaval—unreasonable wrath.

“Fend off, I say,” he commanded.

“Again I beg you, captain, with all respect, please may we come on board?”

“You get away from here and tend to your own business, if you've got any, or I'll heave a bunch of shingles at you!” roared the skipper.

“Father!” The voice expressed indignant reproof. “Father, I am ashamed of you!”

The girl came to the rail, and the yachtsmen stared at her as if she were Aphrodite risen from the sea instead of a mighty pretty girl emerging from a dark companion-way. She had appeared so suddenly! She was so manifestly incongruous in her surroundings.

“Mother o' mermaids!” muttered the yacht-owner in the ear of the man nearest. “Is the old rat still privateering?”

The men in the tender stood up and removed their caps.

“You have insulted these gentlemen, father!”

Captain Candage knew it, and that fact did not soften his anger in the least. At the same time this appearance of his own daughter to read him a lesson in manners in public was presumption too preposterous to be endured; her daring gave him something tangible for his resentment to attack.

He turned on her. “You go below where you belong.”

“I belong up here just now.”

“Down below with you!”

“I'll not go until you apologize to these gentlemen, father!”

“You ain't ashore now, miss, to tell me when to wipe my feet and not muss the tidies! You're on the high seas, and I'm cap'n of this vessel. Below, I say!”

“These gentlemen know the Polly, and they will find out the name of the man who commands her, and I don't propose to have it said that the Candages are heathens,” she declared, firmly. “If you do not apologize, father, I shall apologize for you.” She tried to crowd past him to the rail, but he clapped his brown hand over her mouth and pushed her back. His natural impulse as commander of his craft dominated his feelings as a father.

“I'll teach ye shipboard discipline, Polly Candage,” he growled, “even if I have to take ye acrost my knee.”

“Hold on there, if you please, captain,” called the spokesman of the yachtsmen.

Captain Candage was hustling his daughter toward the companionway. But there was authority in the tone, and he paused and jutted a challenging chin over his shoulder.

“What have any of you critters got to say about my private business?”

The formality of the man in the tender was a bit exaggerated in his reply. “Only this, sir. We are going away at once before we bring any more trouble upon this young lady, to whom we tender our most respectful compliments. We do not know any other way of helping her. Our protests, being the protests of gentlemen, might not be able to penetrate; it takes a drill to get through the hide of a rhinoceros!”

The skipper of the Polly did not trouble himself about the finer shadings in that little speech, but of one fact he felt sure: he had been called a rhinoceros. He released his daughter, yanked the marlinespike away from Otie, who had been holding himself in the background as a reserve force, and stamped to the rail. He poised his weapon, fanning it to and fro to take sure aim. But the engineer had thrown in his clutch and the speed boat foamed off before the captain got the range, and he was too thrifty to heave a perfectly good marlinespike after a target he could not hit, angry as he was.