Sheila of Big Wreck Cove Part 15

Howsomever, buying a schooner is like buying a race horse. You want to know _his_ pedigree. They said the _Seamew_ had been brought up from the Gulf to sell. And maybe she was. But she is Yankee built, every timber and rope of her. She warn't built down South none."

"Shouldn't that make the bargain all the more satisfactory?"

queried the girl, smiling.

"Ordinarily, yes, ma'am. But it looks like they was hidin'

something. It looks like, too, she was built for sailing and fishing, not to be a cargo boat."

"I think she is beautiful."

"She is sightly, I grant ye," said Horace. "But there's something to be considered 'sides looks when a man is putting his money into a craft. As I say, her pedigree oughter be looked up. What was the schooner before they changed the slant of them masts, painted her over, and put a new name under her stern?"

"I don't understand you at all, Mr. Newbegin," said the girl, staring at him with a strange look dawning in her own countenance.

He bent toward her, after casting a knowing glance aloft. His weather-bitten face was preternaturally solemn.

"Ye can't help havin' your suspicions 'bout ships or folks that are sailin' under cover. There's got to be some reason for a man changing his name and trying to get by on one that ain't his'n. Same with a schooner like this."

"Oh!"

"There is such things as hoodooed ships, Miss Bostwick, just like there is hoodooed folks," he said hoa.r.s.ely, without seeming to notice her shrinking from him and her changed countenance.

"Oh! Is there?" she inquired faintly.

"Surest thing you know," acclaimed the old seaman with his most impressive manner. "There was a hoodooed schooner sailed out o'

Salem some years back, the _Marlin B._ She had the same tug to sta'bo'd that I feel when I'm steerin' of this here schooner."

The girl was recovering from her momentary excitement. She saw that Newbegin had no ulterior meaning in his speech. He shook his head and cast a wary glance toward the companionway to see that the skipper was not appearing from below.

"Listen here, Miss Bostwick," he said hoa.r.s.ely. "It's a mighty curious thing. I had just come back from a v'y'ge to New Guinea, and I thinks I'd like a trip to the Banks, not having been fishin' since I was a boy. I went to Sutro Brothers in Salem and got me a berth on the _Marlin B._ I marked that every man aboard her, skipper and all, warn't Salem men, nor yet from Gloucester nor Marblehead. But I didn't suspicion nothing.

"Tell you, Miss Bostwick, them that goes down to the sea in ships runs against more than natur's wonders. There's mysteries that ain't to be explained, scurce to be spoke of. I dunno why we shouldn't believe in spirits and ghosts and dead men come alive. The Bible's full of such, ain't it?

"Well, then! And what I tell you is as sure, as sure. I took the _Marlin B._ out of that harbor, being at the wheel. It was February, and a nasty snow squall come up and smothered us complete and proper. That schooner was a hummer; she sailed just so pretty as this one. She did for a fact. But I felt that tug to sta'bo'd. Do you know, Miss Bostwick, as I was tellin' Cap'n Tunis, there ain't never two craft just alike, no more than there is two men."

"Is that so?" she said.

"Ships is almost human. I never did see two so much alike as this _Seamew_ and the _Marlin B._ Well, to continue, as the feller said, we was smothered in that snow squall for 'bout ten minutes. At the wheel there I heard off to windward the rushing sound of another craft. She was a tall ship, too, and she had as much canvas spread as we had. She came down on us like a shot.

"I shouted to the mate, but he had heard it too. He yelled for all hands on deck. We both knowed the _Marlin B._ was due to be run under unless a miracle intervened. It was a moment I ain't likely to forget, for we stood there, the whole ship's company, hanging on by backstay and rail, peering out into the smother of the snow, while the amazing rush of that unknown craft deafened us.

"Then out of her upper works--I swear I could see the tangle of ropes and slatting canvas--came a voice that rang in my ears for many a day, no matter how the others heard it. It shouted:

"We're the spirits of them ye run under! We're the spirits of them ye run under!"

"My soul and body, Miss Bostwick, but I was scairt!" confessed the old salt. "That rushing sound and the voices crashed on through our rigging and went down wind in a most amazing style. It was a ghost warning like nothing I'd ever heard before or since. And it struck the whole crew the same way. We begun to question what the _Marlin B._ was. She was a new schooner and had made but one trip to the Banks previous to this one we was on. We began to ask why her original crew had not stayed with her.

"You can't fool sailormen, Miss Bostwick," continued the old man, shaking his head with great solemnity. "They sees too much and they knows too much. Sutro Brothers had got rid of the _Marlin B.'s_ first crew and picked up strangers, but murder will out. The story come to us through the night and in the snow squall. We couldn't stand for no murder ship. We made the skipper put back."

"Why, wasn't that mutiny?" gasped the girl.

"He was glad enough to turn back hisself. Even if he lost his ticket he would have turned back. Then we learned what it meant. On her first trip for fish, returning to Salem, the _Marlin B._ run under a smaller fishing craft and every soul aboard of her was lost. And it stands to reason that every time that murder schooner went out of the harbor and came to the spot where she'd run the other craft down, those uneasy souls would rise up and denounce the _Marlin B._"

"Oh!" gasped the girl, startled, for Tunis Latham and Orion stood behind her.

"Your tongue's hung in the middle and wags both ends, Horry,"

growled the young skipper. "You trying to scare Miss Bostwick out of her wits? What you poor, weak-minded, misguided fellows heard that time in the snow squall was a flock of black gulls coming down with the wind. And somebody aboard of the _Marlin B._ was a ventriloquist. Your whole crew weren't ignorant of the accident that happened on her first trip. Somebody had it in for Sutro Brothers, and made much of little, same as usual."

"Oh, they _did_?" muttered Horry.

"Anyway," said Captain Latham, "that's neither here nor there. We aren't sailing the _Marlin B._, for she's in Chilean waters, owned by a South American millionaire. You can stow that kind of talk, Horry--anyway, while Miss Bostwick is aboard."

They were until late in the evening beating into Paulmouth Harbor, but the heavens were starlit and the air as soft as spring. The tolling of the bell buoy over Bitter Reef was mellow and soothing; they heard it for a long time before the _Seamew_ made the short leg of the final tack and went rushing in past the danger mark under the urge of a sudden puff of the fitful breeze.

"The old bell is welcoming us, Ida May," Captain Latham said to the girl who reclined in a canvas chair which the cook had raked out of the lazaret for her use. "I've beat my way in here when it hasn't sounded so cheerful."

"I am wondering what sort of welcome I shall receive when we get to--Wreckers' Head, do you call it?" she asked softly.

"That'll be all right, too," he told her with confidence. "Just wait and see."

They dropped anchor near the Main Street dock in order that they should be able to warp the schooner in to unload her cargo in the morning. Tunis allowed sh.o.r.e leave, late as the hour was. But he sat beside the pa.s.senger on the _Seamew's_ deck, and they talked. It was surprising how much those two found to talk about! Perhaps a good deal of their inconsequential chatter was to hide the anxiety each felt in secret as to the future.

However, that talk was a memorable one for both Tunis Latham and the girl posing as Ida May Bostwick. Two young people can tell a great deal to each other under certain circ.u.mstances in the mid-watch of a starlit night. The lap, lap of the wavelets whispering against the schooner's hull, the drone of the surf on a distant bar, and the sounds of insect life from the sh.o.r.e were accompaniments to their long talk.

Orion Latham, tumbling over the forward rail from a waterside dinghy, whispered hoa.r.s.ely in Johnny Lark's ear:

"What do you know about that? There they are, billin' and cooin', just where we left 'em when we went ash.o.r.e. Wouldn't it sicken you?"

But Johnny only grinned and chuckled, shaking the tiny gold rings in his ears till they sparkled in the faint light. He had a girl himself in Portygee Town, at Big Wreck Cove.

The creaking of the hawsers and the "heave hos" of the crew as they warped the _Seamew_ in to the wharf awoke the girl pa.s.senger in the cabin. There was little fancy about the schooner's after house, but it was comfortable.

There was a tarry smell about the place that rather pleased the girl. The lamp over the round table vibrated in its gimbals, but did not swing. There were several prints upon the walls of the cabin, prints which showed the rather exceptional taste of the _Seamew's_ master, for they had been tacked up since she had come into Tunis Latham's possession.

There was, too, a somewhat faded photograph on a background of purple velvet, boxed in with gla.s.s, screwed to the forward stanchion. It was the photograph of an overhealthy-looking young woman, with scallops of hair pasted to her forehead undoubtedly with quince-seed pomatum, her basque wrinkled across her bust because of the high-shouldered cut of it. But it had been in the extreme mode when it was made and worn, in the eighties.

The brooch which fastened the lace collar had been painted yellow by the "artist photographer" of that day, and even the earrings she wore had been touched up, or perhaps painted on with the air brush.

This was Tunis Latham's mother, the girl who had seemed so promising an addition to the family in the opinion of Medway Latham, the builder of "Latham's Folly." The rather blowzy prettiness of Captain Randall Latham's young wife had been translated into real beauty in her son; for Tunis had got his physique and open, bold physiognomy from his mother.

The girl lying in an upper berth, a close cap tied over her neatly braided hair, parted the cretonne curtains to look at these ornaments hung about the cabin. She realized that the photograph, so strangely contrasting with the prints of some of the world's masterpieces, was a sort of shrine to Tunis Latham. He revered the mother whom he had told the girl he could not remember of ever having seen. His love and admiration for that unknown mother had helped make the captain of the _Seamew_ what he was.

He was a good man, a safe man for any girl to trust. And yet he was lending himself to a species of masquerade which, if ever it became known, would bring upon his head both derision and scorn. He risked this contumely cheerfully and with a reckless disregard for what might arise through the plans they had made while sitting beside each other on that bench on Boston Common.

He would not admit the point of his own risk. He would not consider it when they had talked, only the night before, on the deck of the schooner. He scouted every possibility of any harm coming to him through their attempt to replace the girl in a firm niche in society and give the Cap'n Ira b.a.l.l.s what they needed of companionship and care.

The girl sat up in the berth and let her bare legs dangle a moment before dropping to the rug. In her bare feet she padded to the photograph of Captain Randall Latham's young wife.

The girl stood before the old photograph, her hands clasped, her gaze raised to the pictured face, as a votary might stand before the Madonna. There were tears in the girl's violet eyes. At that moment she was uplifted, carried out of herself by the wealth of feeling in her heart. Her lips moved.