The Grain Ship Part 10

"I do not know," she said weariedly. "Something, maybe, that will help.

You are educated. You might write for the Boston papers, or the magazines. Or you might find a pulpit somewhere else, and send me some money once in a while."

"What, and leave you alone, mother? Not for the world would I desert you. You are my mother, and have cared for me. But I have thought of writing. I have been thinking for years of a literary career, only I have not been able to decide which branch of literature I am best fitted for."

"Well, Sammy," said the mother, as she bent over her tub, "I cannot decide for you; but something must be done."

"And I will do it, mother," he shouted loudly--so loudly that neither heard the opening of the front door, nor the sound of heavy footsteps coming toward the kitchen.

Then a big, dark-faced man, with hair as gray as her own, seized her around the waist, lifted her into his arms, and rained kisses on her face and lips while she screamed, then, as she recognized him, fainted away. Still holding her, he lifted his foot, exerted a slight effort of strength, and pushed the tubful of suds and clothes off its base, upsetting it squarely over the head of the Reverend Samuel Simpson, who nearly choked before getting himself clear.

"I've been hearing things about you down at the store," said Quinbey, "and I'll 'tend to your case directly."

Then he carried the limp little woman into the bedroom, stripped off her wet garments, and covered her warmly, while he kissed her back to consciousness.

"Oh, John," she said, when she could speak, "I knew you'd come back, but, oh, the long waiting! I've been punished, John, punished bitterly."

"There'll be no more of it, Minnie," he said. "I've come home rich--that is, rich for this town. Your work is ended. They told me at the store about your son loafing on you all these years while you took in washing. But how about the money in the bank? Couldn't you get it?"

"Oh, yes, John," she answered simply. "But Sammy took it to Boston to deposit, and was robbed of it."

"Um-hum-m-m," grunted Quinbey. "The savings of twenty years at sea!"

Briefly she recounted Sammy's story of the wrong done him; but he made no comment beyond saying that he would look into it.

"He's got to go to work," he added grimly. "I don't know what he can do except preach, and perhaps he can't do that. I'll write to Andover and get his record. But how about the house? It's cold. Out of coal?"

"We've got very little, John. We couldn't afford two fires."

Quinbey left her, and found his stepson in his room, changing his wet clothing for dry.

"Take this money," he said, handing him a bill, "and go down to the coal dock. Order a ton up here at once."

"I will, sir," answered Sammy, with dignity, "when I've recovered somewhat from your extremely brutal treatment of me. I must be dry before I go out on this cold day."

But he went out, shirtless and coatless, at the end of Quinbey's arm; and, as it really was cold, he hurried on his errand, and returned.

Before long the base-burner was roaring, and Quinbey was recounting his adventures to his happy-faced wife; while Sammy, in the kitchen, finished up the wash. Later on he delivered it; but no more washing of other folks' clothing was ever done in that house.

Quinbey wrote to Andover, and in a few days received a reply, which he read to his wife. It was a true account of Sammy's mishap in Boston; and, while Quinbey grinned--he could not smile--the mother wept silently, but asked no forgiveness for her wayward son. And when he rummaged a bureau, and brought forth an old jeweler's catalogue, asking her to choose a watch for Sammy, she felt that it was granted; but she did not yet know Quinbey.

Sammy wore the watch proudly; and for the rest of the cold weather the three sat about the base-burner, while the color came back to the little woman's face, and self-confidence to the shaken mind of Sammy.

He actually began to like his rough stepfather; and only an outsider might have guessed, by the somber light in Quinbey's dark eyes when they rested upon him, that he did not like his stepson.

In the spring, as soon as the frost and snow were gone, Quinbey employed laborers to flatten the ground near his house to the extent of a hundred feet by ten; then, with stakes, he laid out the plan of a ship's deck. Next he contracted with spar makers, ship carpenters, and ship chandlers for material and labor; and before June three masts were erected, each with topmast, top-gallant, and royal mast, the standing rigging of which was set up to strong posts driven into the ground; then followed yards, canvas, and running gear, and soon a complete ship of small dimensions, but without a hull, adorned the crest of the hill.

As Quinbey explained to the questioning villagers, he would go to sea no more, but, having spent his life at sea, wanted a reminder--something to look at--a plaything.

Sammy was an interested spectator of the work, and Quinbey was kind to him, answering his questions, and even betraying some solicitude that he should understand the rig of a ship, the names of the ropes and sails, and the manner of handling them. He even went so far as to hire a couple of sailors to climb aloft, to loose and furl canvas, again and again, until Sammy understood.

Then the cold weather came on, and the base-burner was lit; and with the cold weather came the snow, and the icy sleet, and the hurricane gales from Greenland, striking the crest of that hill with a force that threatened to tear the dummy ship from the ground. And on particularly stormy nights, the villagers, snug in their warm beds, would waken for a moment at a sound louder than the gale--the sound of Quinbey's voice, which, in a calm, would carry a mile. And the voice would cry:

"All hands on deck to make sail. Out wi' you, you blasted lubber, and lay aloft. Up wi' you, and loose that mainsail, and, when you've got it loose, furl it. I'll show you how I earned that money. Up wi' you, 'fore I give you a rope's end."

And sometimes, in the lulls, they could hear Sammy's shrieks of pain, and the thwack of the rope's end.

THE ROCK

"I tell ye I saw it--wi' these eyes I saw it!"

"You think you seen it."

"Now I quit. Ye talk like every mate or skipper or Consul I've told this to. Just the same, I never git to the end o' the third day out, either way,--I'm in a six-day boat, ye know--but what the nervousness gits me, an' I'm no good for twelve hours, until I know we're past the spot."

"A rock, you say, in the middle o' the Atlantic? Why isn't it known and charted?"

"Because it's awash an' visible only at the fall o' the spring tides."

"How is it that no one else saw it but you?"

"I was the only man aloft. She was a hemp-rigged old ballyhoo out o'

Quebec, an' gear was chafin' through all the time. I was pa.s.sin' a new seizin' on the collar o' the foretopmast stay, when I squinted ahead through the fog, and there it was black an' shiny, an' murderous, about forty feet long, I should judge, and five feet or so out o' water, right dead under the bow. I could see the lift o' the water where the current pushed ag'in' it, and the swirl on t'other side, showin' it was no derelict, bottom up. No, it was a rock. 'Starboard!' I yells to the felly at the wheel. 'Starboard! Hard up!' Well, the skipper was below, an' the second mate, who had the deck, was mixin' paint under the fo'c'sle; so the wheel went up an' the old wagon payed off 'fore the wind. Then I lost it myself in the fog, an', as I couldn't point out anything to the skipper when he come up, I was called down an' d.a.m.ned for a fool. But I saw it, just the same, a big rock halfway across, and squarely between the lane routes!"

"How do you know that?"

"The skipper wasn't above givin' me the ship's position--forty-seven north; thirty-seven twenty west. That's between the lanes, an' I'll bet the _Narconic_ is at the base o' that rock, to say nothin' o' the _Pacific_, the _President_, and t'others."

The wabbly little West Street horse car had reached the White Star dock by this and the two men stepped off. Steamship sailors, I knew. I had never seen them before, and have never seen them since; but their conversation produced a marked impression upon me, and I could not shake off a feeling--not of itself a remembrance, however--that I had heard something of the kind before. A submerged rock in mid-Atlantic.

But it was incredible, and at last I put it from my mind as a "galley yarn."

But next morning it was back, in company with another galley yarn, one I barely remembered as having heard ten years before from an old Confederate man-o'-war'sman who had sailed with Semmes in the _Alabama_. The yarn pertained to the pursuit of a Northern merchant ship, and I give only the conclusion.

"We were gaining fast," he had said, "and hoped to bring her to before breakfast; for at daylight she was but three miles or so ahead, every sail drawing and every detail of spar, canvas, and hull showing clear in the morning light. And then, while we looked at her, she quickly settled under, not head first or stern first, as is usual, but on an even keel. They had no time to start a brace or a halyard; there was not time for her to answer to her wheel, if it had been shifted. She just went down as though something had hooked onto her keel and dragged her under. I never learned her name; but she must have been bound out of New York or Boston, for some French port in the Channel. We picked up one of her men, a Dago who couldn't tell her name, and only this much as to what happened. A ripping, crashing sound began forward and worked its way aft, ending at the stern, and we could only surmise that something--a submerged derelict, perhaps--had sc.r.a.ped the bottom out of her."

Memory is treacherous. In a few days I had forgotten this yarn with the other, and might never have recalled it had I not ascended to an upper floor in the lofty Flatiron Building, and looked out of a window at the loftier, but unfinished, tower of the Metropolitan Building across the park. It was a damp, dismal day of fog; but at my elevation I could see clear of it. I was above it, looking over an undulating sea of cloud bank from which the tower rose, ma.s.sive and mighty, apparently floating on end, like an immense spar buoy at the turn of the tide. The rest of New York lay hidden beneath that silent gray ocean of fog.

Interesting as it was of itself, it was not the spectacle before me that gripped and held me, but an a.s.sociated idea. As it was the first time I had ever seen a skysc.r.a.per lift itself above the clouds, so it naturally reminded me of the first time I had seen a mountaintop above the clouds. This was Krakatoa Island, a conical mountain rising from the sea in the Straits of Sunda, but since submerged in the Java earthquake.

With this mental picture before me, my thoughts touched upon other happenings of that boyhood voyage--the long, tedious beat through the straits against light head winds and a continuous head tide; the man-killing log windla.s.s, round which we hove, and lightened, chain of an eight-inch link; the natives, with their welcome fruit in exchange for trinkets; and, lastly, the white-haired old pilot, who came forward to visit me one evening on anchor watch.

And then, like an inspired flash, there surged into my mind, not only the two galley yarns, but the story told by the pilot--a story of such burning power and horror that, though forgotten for a generation, it spelled itself out, word for word, as I stared into the fog from the window, exactly as the old man had told it.

He had heard from the skipper that I was from the same part of New York State as himself, and he had come forward for news of home. I could give him little. I knew no one that he knew; the small town that give him birth was not far from my own, but was only a name to me. Still he remained to talk. My up-State accent pleased him, he said, and reminded him of home, which he had not seen for forty years, and which he hardly hoped to see. He was sixty-five; two shocks had come, and the third would finish him.

"But I'm an old, experienced man, my boy," he said, "and I can give you my life's wisdom in three short rules, easy to remember and easy to follow. Stick to your skipper; leave liquor alone; and never, under any provocation, engage in mutiny. I broke every one of these, and here I've been, for half a lifetime, an exile, afraid to go home."

Not realizing how sorely I needed this wisdom, but keenly interested in mutiny, piracy, and such fancies of boyhood, I asked for light, and he gave it to me.