The Deep Sea's Toll. James B. Connolly

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СКАЧАТЬ but did ever y’ see annything scoot like her—hardly a breath and she goin’ along like she is. It’s not right, Jerry—hardly a ripple in her wake.”

      “Oh, you’ve been so long in the old Maggie, Skipper——”

      “The old Maggie, is it? She’s not too old—ten year.”

      “I know. Ten year is nothing in a good vessel, but they been improving them so fast. Last fall, the trip you didn’t wait for me, you know, I went in the Jennie and Katie. Y’oughter seen her skipper. Handle? Like a little naphtha launch to pick up dories. And sail? Man, but she could sail!”

      “That so? And how’d she behave in heavy weather?”

      “Well, we didn’t have any heavy weather that trip.”

      “No breeze at all?”

      “Well, one day it did breeze up. We had her under a balanced reef mains’l. She did slap around a bit. ’Twas the devil and all to stay in your bunk, but she did pretty well. But you mustn’t get ’em out of trim. The first two doryloads of fish that came aboard that trip was pitched into her after-pens and, man, she reared right up in the air—right straight up on her hind legs and began to claw out with her fore feet like she was trying to climb up a wall——”

      “You’d think ’twas a horse you were talkin’ about, Jerry. But she could sail, you say?”

      “Sail? Like a plank on edge—and greased.”

      “Well, this one can sail, too. Look at her. Not a blessed hop out of her—just smoochin’ along like a girl slidin’ on ice ashore, isn’t she?”

      Off the lightship they found the Bonita. “There he is,” announced Coleman, “with his rings in his ears. Keep her as she is till the pair of us come together. Trip afore last he sailed a couple of rings around the Maggie by way of amusin’ himself, but I’ll amuse him now or I’ll tear the sail off this one.”

      In a freshening breeze and both vessels soon swinging all they had, it was a good chance for a try-out. Four hours of that and the victory went to the handsome Celestine, for off Cape Cod, after a run of fifty miles, Coleman had the Bonita two miles to leeward.

      For an hour after that Coleman could hardly be coaxed down to eat. Standing on the Celestine’s quarter, he chuckled, and chuckled, and chuckled. Even after taking his place at the table, he had to climb up the companionway to have one more look at the beaten Bonita. “A good vessel for rip-fishin’ the Portugee’s got—she drifts well,” he said, “and maybe ’tis me won’t tell him next time we meet.”

      And yet in the middle of the meal he suddenly set down his mug of coffee and leaned across the table. “Don’t it strike you, Jerry, that for a vessel of her model this one is the divil for stiffness?”

      “We were saying among ourselves a little while ago, Skipper, that we never before saw a vessel that barely wet her scuppers in a breeze like this.”

      “That’s it—I don’t know what it is. But she’s a queer divil altogether. Sometimes when she luffs she fetches up in a way to shake every tooth in your head. And there was what one of the men that was in her last trip said of her.”

      “And what did he say, Skipper?”

      “He said—but come to think, he didn’t say anything, and that’s the divil of it. One or two little outs in a vessel, if you know what they are, aren’t always a great harm. But when you don’t know how to take her!”

      The crew agreed with their Skipper that there was something queer about this new vessel of theirs, but no illuminating discussion came of it until next morning when, having cleared the north shoal of Georges, it became necessary to head southward.

      Heading to the east’ard in a southerly breeze, she had been on the starboard tack up to that time. Now her helmsman shot her head across the wind, her sails shook, shivered, her booms began to swing, and over on the port tack went the Celestine. Everybody looked to see her roll down some, but in that breeze—they hadn’t even taken their stays’l in—nobody looked to see her do what she did. Least of all her Skipper, who, standing carelessly by the starboard rail, would have gone overboard and been lost probably, but for Jerry Connors.

      “Wheel down! wheel down!” roared Jerry, and hauled the Skipper back aboard.

      “Down it is!”

      “Cripes!” said the Skipper when he found his breath—“cripes, but she’s left-handed.”

      “Left-handed?”

      “Yes, and double left-handed, the cross-eyed whelp! Just barely put her scuppers under on one tack and down to her hatches on the other. Man alive, but if we have to put her on the wrong tack makin’ a passage, what’ll we ever do with her? Put her back, put her back—back on the other tack with her and keep her there till we get some sail off her. Man, man, but when we have to put a vessel under her four lowers in a little breeze like this——”

      They kept her so until next morning, when they hove her to—they had to heave her to—with Georges north shoal bearing twenty-three miles west by north and a howling gale in prospect. With the glass showing a scant 29 and the sea coming to them in a long swell, they all foresaw a good lay-off with a chance to catch up on sleep or read up, or overhaul their gear.

      The storm hit in hard that night. A northeaster it was, with a thick snow in its wake and a whistle that made a bunk feel most comfortable. The snow passed, and after two days the worst of the breeze also; but after it came the tremendous seas that make such a terrible place of the northerly edge of Georges shoals in the wrong kind of winter weather.

      Nobody aboard the Celestine worried particularly. They had been having that sort of thing all their lives. After a while it would pass. Only when it lasted for too long a time it did make slow fishing. They put her under jumbo and riding sail and let go their chain anchor. Next day they took sail off her altogether and made ready their hawser and big anchor. Under both anchors, if it came to that, she certainly would be safe.

      This gale was some time in passing. And now it was coming on evening of the fourth day—two days of a heavy breeze and two days of the great seas. All the men, excepting the watch, were below, about half for’ard and half aft, those for’ard mugging-up or overhauling trawls, those aft listening to Jerry Connors, a great reader, who was now reeling off a most interesting story with dramatic emphasis. It was the “Cloister and the Hearth,” and Gerald was up in the tree with the bear after him—the Celestine dancing like a lead-ballasted cork figure all the while. In the middle of it all the watch hailed something from deck. The Skipper, trying to keep from sliding off the locker and, at the same time, above the howling of the wind get what Jerry was reading, grew wrathy at the interruption.

      “What’s that ballyhooin’ on deck—whose watch?”

      One had risen, and now from the companion steps, his head above the slide, passed on the word. “It’s John’s.”

      “Oh, John is it? Don’t mind John—the least thing worries John. But what was he sayin’?”

      “He says there’s some big seas coming, and getting bigger all the time; and true enough, they are.”

      “Big СКАЧАТЬ