Masters of the Wheat-Lands Part 12

In the evening, Mrs. Hastings, with whom he was evidently a favorite, happened to speak of Wyllard, and the efforts he was making in the steerage, and Agatha asked a question.

"Does he often undertake this kind of thing?"

"No," Mrs. Hastings answered with a smile. "Any way, not on so large a scale. He's very far from setting up as a professional philanthropist, my dear. I don't remember his offering to point out duty to other folks, and I don't think he goes about in search of an opportunity of benefiting humanity. Still, when an individual case thrusts itself beneath his nose, he generally does what he can."

"I've heard people say that the individual method only perpetuates the trouble," remarked Agatha.

Mrs Hastings shook her head. "That," she said, "is a subject I'm not well posted on, but it seems to me that if other folks only adopted Harry Wyllard's simple plan, there would be considerably less need for organized charity."

CHAPTER IX

THE FOG

During the next two days before a moderate gale the _Scarrowmania_ shouldered her way westwards through the big, white-topped combers that rolled down upon her under a lowering sky. There were no luxurious, steam-propelled hotels in the Canadian trade at this time, and loaded deep with railway metal as she was, the vessel slopped in the green seas everywhere, and rolled her streaming sides out almost to her bilge. She shivered and rattled horribly when her single screw swung clear and the tri-compound engines ran away.

Wyllard went down to the steerage every now and then, and Agatha, who contrived to keep on her feet, not infrequently accompanied him. She was glad of his society, for Mrs. Hastings was seldom in evidence, and no efforts could get Miss Rawlinson out of her berth. The gale blew itself out at length, and the evening after it moderated Agatha was sitting near the head of one fiddle-guarded table in the saloon waiting for dinner, which the stewards had still some difficulty in bringing in.

Wyllard's place was next to hers, but he had not appeared, nor had the skipper, who, however, did not invariably dine with the pa.s.sengers. One of the two doors which led from the foot of the branching companion stairway into either side of the saloon stood open, and presently she saw Wyllard standing just outside it.

He beckoned to the doctor, who sat at the foot of her table, and the physician merely raised his brows a trifle. He was a rather consequential person, and it was evident to the girl that he resented being summoned by a gesture. She did not think anybody else had noticed Wyllard, and she waited with some curiosity to see what he would do. He made a sign with a lifted hand, and she felt that the doctor would obey it, as, in fact, he did, though his manner was very far from conciliatory. By dint of listening closely, she could hear their conversation.

"I'm sorry to trouble you just now," apologized Wyllard, "and I didn't come in because that would have set everybody wondering what you were wanted for; but one of those boys forward has been thrown down the ladder, and has cut his head."

"Ah!" said the doctor. "I'll see to him--after dinner."

"It's a nasty cut," declared Wyllard. "He's losing a good deal of blood."

"Then I would suggest that you apply to my a.s.sistant."

"As I don't know where he is, I have come to you."

The doctor made a sign of impatience. "Well," he said "you have told me, which I think is as far as your concern in the matter goes. I may add that I'm not accustomed to dictation on behalf of a steerage pa.s.senger."

Agatha saw Wyllard slip between the doctor and the entrance to the saloon, but she saw also the skipper appear a few paces behind them, and glance at them sharply. He was usually a silent man, at home in the ice and the clammy fog, but not a great acquisition in the saloon.

"Something wrong down forward, Mr. Wyllard? They were making a great row a little while ago," the skipper said.

"Nothing very serious," Wyllard answered. "One of the boys has cut his head."

The skipper turned towards the doctor and Agatha guessed that he had overheard part of the conversation. "Don't you think you had better go--at once?" suggested the skipper.

The doctor evidently did, for he disappeared; and Wyllard, who entered the saloon with the skipper, sat down at Agatha's side.

"How do you do it?" she asked.

"What?" returned Wyllard, beginning his dinner.

"We'll say persuade other folks to see things as you do."

"You evidently mean the skipper, and I suppose you heard something of what was going on. In this case, I'm indebted to his prejudices. He's one of the old type--a seaman first of all--and what we call bluff, and you call bounce, has only one effect upon men of his kind. It gets their backs up."

Agatha thought that he did not like it, either, but she changed the subject.

"There really was a row forward," she said. "What was the trouble over?

You were, no doubt, somewhere near the scene of it."

Wyllard laughed. "I sat upon the steerage ladder, and am afraid I cheered the combatants on. It was really a glorious row. They hammered each other with tin plates, and some of them tried to use hoop-iron knives, which fortunately doubled up. They broke quite a few of the benches, and wrecked the mess table, but so far as I noticed the only one seriously hurt was a little chap who was quietly looking on."

"And you encouraged them?"

"I certainly did. It was a protest against dirt, disorder, and the slothfulness that's a plague to the community. Isn't physical force warranted when there's no other remedy?"

A gray-haired Canadian looked up. "Yes," he agreed, "I guess it is. The first man who pulled his gun in British Columbia was hanged right away, and they've scarcely had to make an example of another since then, though it was quite a while ago."

He paused, and smiled approvingly. "A mess of any kind worries us, and we don't take long to straighten it out. Same feeling's in the Germans and Scandinavians. I'll say that for them, any way. Your friends swept up the steerage?"

"They took the Slavs and Jews, and pitched them down the second hatch on to the orlop deck. Things will go smoothly now our crowd is on top."

"Your crowd?" said Agatha.

The Canadian nodded. "That's what he meant," he said. "There are two kinds of folks you and the rest of them are dumping into Canada. One's the kind that will get up and hustle, break land, and build new homes--log at first, frame and stone afterwards. They go on from a quarter-section and a team of oxen to the biggest farm they can handle, and every fresh furrow they cut enriches all of us. The other kind want to sit down in the dirt and take life easily, as they've always done.

The dirt worries everybody else, and we've no use for them. By and by our Legislature will have to wake up and stop them from getting in."

He went on with his dinner, but his observations left Agatha thoughtful.

She was beginning to understand one side of Wyllard's character. He, it seemed, stood for practical efficiency. There was a driving force in him that made for progress and order. It was apparently his mission to straighten things out. Some persons of his kind, she reflected, now and then made a good deal of avoidable trouble; but there was in this man, at least, a half-whimsical toleration, which rendered that an unlikely thing in his particular case. Besides, she had already recognized that she was in some respects fortunate in having such a man for her companion.

Her deck chair was always set out in the most sheltered and comfortable place. If there was anything to be seen he almost invariably appeared with a pair of powerful gla.s.ses. She was watched over, her wishes were antic.i.p.ated, and the man was seldom obtrusively present when she felt disposed to talk to somebody else. It struck her that she had thought a great deal about him during the last few days, and rather less than usual about Gregory, which was partly the reason she did not walk up and down the deck with him, as usual, after dinner that evening.

Three or four days later, the _Scarrowmania_ ran into the Bank fog, and burrowed through it with whistle hooting dolefully at regular intervals.

Now and then an answering ringing of bells came out of the clammy vapor, and the half-seen shape of an anch.o.r.ed schooner loomed up, rolling wildly on gray slopes of sea. Once, too, a tiny dory, half filled with lines and buoys, slid by plunging on the wash flung off by the _Scarrowmania's_ bows, and Agatha understood that the men in her had escaped death by a hairsbreadth. They were cod fishers, Wyllard told her, and he added that there was a host of them at work somewhere in the sliding haze. She imagined, now and then, that the fog had a depressing effect on him, and that when the dory lay beneath the rail there had been an unusual look in his face.

A breeze came out of the northwest, with the sting of the ice in it, but the fog did not lift, and the _Scarrowmania_ plunged on through it with spray-wet decks and the gray seas smashing about her bows. It was bitterly cold and the raw wind pierced to the bone, but the voyage was rapidly shortening.

One evening Agatha paced the deck with Wyllard. The girl was in a strangely unsettled mood. Perhaps it was merely the gloom of the sea and sky reacting upon her that caused her to look forward to the landing with a certain half-conscious shrinking. They stopped by the rails presently, looking out upon the tumbling seas that, tipped with livid froth, rolled out of the sliding haze, and the dreariness of the surroundings intensified the girl's depression. There was something unpleasantly suggestive in the sight of the fog that hid everything, for Agatha had been troubled with a half-apprehensive longing to see what lay before her. She noticed the lookout, a lonely, shapeless figure, standing amid the spray that whirled about the plunging bows. By and by she saw him turn and wave an arm toward the bridge behind her, and she heard a hoa.r.s.e cry. What it meant she could not tell, but in another moment the _Scarrowmania's_ whistle shrieked.

A gray shape burst out of the vapor and grew with astonishing swiftness into dim tiers of slanted sailcloth swaying above a strip of hull that moved amid a broad white smear of foam. It was a brig under fore-course and topsails, and as the girl watched the vessel it sank to the tilted bowsprit, and a big gray and white sea foamed about the bows.

"Aren't we dreadfully near?" she asked.

Wyllard did not answer. He was gazing up at the bridge, and once more the whistle gave a warning blast. It seemed that the two vessels could hardly pa.s.s clear of each other.

Wyllard laid a hand upon Agatha's shoulder.

"The skipper's starboarding. We'll go around to the stern," he said.