There was nothing for it. For a thousand dollars a month I could not
stay ashore. Somebody or other would give me a chance to go seining,
some good skipper I knew; and if none of the killers would give me a
chance, then I'd try some old pod of a skipper. My mother would just
have to let me go. It was only summer fishing after all--seining
wasn't like winter trawling--and in the end she would see it as I
did.
I walked along, and as the last man in my mind was Maurice Blake, of
course he was the first I had to run into. He was not looking well; I
mean he was not looking as he should have looked. There was a reckless
manner about him that no more belonged to him than a regularly quiet
manner belonged to his friend Tommie Clancy. And I guessed why--he had
been drinking. I had heard it already. Generally when a man starts to
drink for the first time everybody talks about it. I was surprised,
and I wished he hadn't. But we are always finding out new things about
men. In my heart I was not blaming Maurice so much maybe as I should.
I'd always been taught that drinking in excess was an awful habit, but
some otherwise fine men I knew drank at times, and I wasn't going to
blame Maurice till I knew more about it.
And we can forgive a lot, too, in those we like. Maurice had no family
to think of, and it must have been a blow to him not to get so fine a
vessel as the Fred Withrow after he had been promised and had set his
heart on it. And then to see her go to a man like Sam Hollis! and with
the prospect of not getting another until a man like Withrow felt like
saying you could. Everybody in Gloucester seemed to know that Withrow
was doing all he could to keep Maurice from getting a vessel, and as
the owners had banded together just before this for protection, as
they called it, "against outside interference," and as Withrow was one
of the largest owners and a man of influence beyond his vessel
holdings, he was quite a power at this time.
Maurice Blake was far from being drunk, however, when I met him this
day. Indeed, I do not believe that in his most reckless hour up to
this time he had ever lost control of himself so far as not to know
pretty nearly what he was doing all the time; but certainly he had
been drinking this day, and the drinking manner did not set well on
him.
Maurice was standing on the front steps of Mrs. Arkell's boarding-house
when I saw him. It was Mrs. Arkell's granddaughter Minnie that married
the wealthy Mr. Miner--a rather loud sort of man, who had been reported
as saying that he would give her a good time and show her life. He may
have given her a good time--I don't know--but he was dead in two
years. He was supposed to be very rich--three or four millions--but on
settling up there was less than half a million. Of course that wasn't
bad--enough for Minnie to buy a big house next her grandmother's for
a summer home, and enough to go off travelling whenever she pleased.
When she came back to Gloucester she was still a very handsome girl,
spoken of as the "Miner widow" among people who had known her only
since her marriage, but still called Minnie Arkell by most of those
who had known her when she was a child. In Gloucester she bought the
first house just around the corner from her grandmother's. A handy
passage between their two back yards allowed her to visit her
grandmother whenever she pleased. She wanted to be near her own
people, she said, and was more in her grandmother's house than her
own.
Maurice came down the steps of Mrs. Arkell's boarding-house as I came
along, and joined me on the sidewalk. He asked me the first thing if
I wouldn't have a drink, and I said no.
"Oh, I forgot," he said, "you don't drink. Have a cigar," and he
pulled one out of his pocket, and I took and lit it. Generally I
smoked a pipe, but I liked good cigars, though I couldn't afford them
myself. This was not a good one--more like the kind they hand out in
bar-rooms when men get tired of drinking and say they guess they'll
have a smoke.
"How does it happen, Joe, you're not at the store? I always thought
Withrow held his men pretty close to hours."
"Well, so he does, but I'm not working for him now." And then I told
him that I had had an argument with Withrow, been discharged, and was
thinking of going fishing. I didn't tell him at first how it all came
about, but I think he guessed it, for all at once, after a searching
look, he reached out and shook hands with me.
"If ever I get a vessel again, Joe, and you still want to go fishing
and care for a chance with me, you can have it--if you can't go with a
better man, I mean. I'll take you and be glad to have you."
That meant a good berth, of course, for Maurice was a killer.
I looked at Maurice when he wasn't watching me, and felt sorry for
him. He was a man that anybody would like the looks of. It wasn't
that he was a handsome man--I never could get to like pretty men
myself--but there was something about him that made you feel you could
trust him. The heavy tan of his face and the grip of his jaw would
spoil almost anybody for a beauty man, I suppose, but he had fine eyes
and his mouth was all right, and he had a head that you'd like to
stand off one side and look at, with hair that seemed to lift and wave
with every breath of wind, and when he smiled you felt somehow that
he'd saved that particular smile for you. He was no better built than
a hundred other men I knew who were going fishing, and he was no
bigger than a thousand others sailing out of Gloucester, and not near
so big as a lot of others--five feet ten or eleven, maybe, he was,
with level shoulders, and very light on his feet--but looking at him
you knew he was all there.
After smoking a while and watching him between puffs, it flashed on me
all at once that I was pretty thick. A word or two my cousin Nell had
let slip--not so much what she said as the way she said it--gave me a
hint of a whole lot of things. Looking at Maurice now I asked him if
he had seen my cousin or Miss Foster lately.
He flushed up as he looked at me, and I saw that whatever he was
thinking of it had not been far away from what I had been thinking
of. "No, I haven't seen them"--slowly. "How is your cousin?"
"Oh, she seems to be all right. They were both in to the store this
morning."
"What doing?" I thought he was beginning to worry, but I tried not to
let on that I noticed it. I was beginning to feel like a sleuth, or a
detective, or a diplomat, or something.
"Well, I don't know. Nell said they came in to see me, but all that
happened that I had any hand in was to weigh her. She gained another
pound last week, and it's worrying her. The more exercise she takes
the heavier she gets, she says. She's a hundred and thirty-one now. Of
course, while they're there Withrow had to help out and make himself
agreeable, especially to Miss Foster, but I can't see that she warms
up to him."
"Ha? No? You don't think so?"
"Not much, but maybe it's her way. She's pretty frosty generally
anyway, different from my cousin--she's something like."
"Yes, your cousin is all right," said Maurice.
"You bet," I said. "She don't stand around and chill the air."
"Why--does Miss Foster always? Is that her way? I--don't--know--much
about her."
"Well, I don't know so very much myself--mostly what my cousin tells
me. Still, I guess she's all right; but she strikes me as one of the
kind that might make an awful lot of a man and never let on until she
was dead sure of him."
"H-m--That means she could think a whole lot of Withrow and not let
on, Joe?"
I tried to look at Maurice like my oldest brother used to look at me
sometimes when he tried to make me feel that I was a very green kid
indeed, and said, "Well, if she's the kind to care for a man like
Withrow, all I've got to say is that she'll deserve all she'll get.
He's no good."
"That may be, but how's she to know? I know, you know, and half the
men in Gloucester know that he's rotten; but take a woman who only
sees him at his best and when he's watching out--how's she to know?"
"I don't know, but being a woman she ought to," was all I could say to
that. It came into my mind just then that when I next saw my cousin
Nell I'd tell her what I really knew, and more than that--what I
really thought of my old employer. Perhaps she'd carry it to Miss
Foster. If it was to be Maurice or Withrow, I knew on which side I was
going to be.
Both of us were quiet then, neither of us quite knowing what to say
perhaps. Then together we started to walk to the corner of the side
street. We were past the side-door of the boarding-house when a voice
called out, "Oh, Maurice," and then, maybe noticing me, I suppose,
"Oh, Captain Blake," and Maurice turned. Minnie Arkell--Mrs. Miner
rather--was there at the kitchen window. I didn't know she was in town
at all--thought she hadn't got back from Florida, or North Carolina,
or wherever it was she had been for the winter.
"Won't you come in a minute, Captain, and your friend? He doesn't
remember me--do you, Joe?--and yet we were playmates once," which was
true. I was often taken to Mrs. Arkell's when a little fellow by
skippers who were friends of my father's. They used to tell me about
him, and I liked to listen.
"I thought I'd run over and see granny," she went on. "I'm back to the
old house for a while. Won't you come in?"
My mind had long been set against Minnie Arkell. I knew about her
throwing over a fine young fellow, a promising skipper, to marry
Miner. I may have been too young at the time to judge anybody, but
after that I had small use for her. My ideas in the matter were of
course pretty much what older men had put into me.
I had listened to them--skippers and others--and yet now, when she
held out her hand to me and smiled, I didn't feel nearly so set
against her. She certainly was a handsome girl, and yet I hoped that
Maurice wouldn't fall in love with her, as most everybody did that
came to the Arkell house.
I said that I did not have time to come in, and started to make off.
Maurice asked me where I was bound. I told him that I thought of
taking a look in at Crow's Nest and getting the news.
"Yes, you'll get it there, sure enough. When they can't tell you
anything else up there they can tell you what everybody's doing." He
smiled at that, turned slowly toward the side-door, as if he would
rather go with me to Crow's Nest, and I went off.
Just outside the gate I saw Sam Hollis, a man I never did like. Tommie
Clancy, the man that could size up a person quicker than anybody I'd
ever met, used to say that deep down, if you could get at Hollis,
you'd find a quitter, but that nobody had ever got into him. I'd been
meeting Hollis after every trip in for two years in Withrow's store.
He was a successful fisherman, and a sharp, keen man ashore, but he
was a man I never quite took to. One of his ambitions, I felt
satisfied, was to be reckoned a devil of a fellow. He'd have given a
year's earnings, I knew, to have people point him out on the street
and say, "There's Sam Hollis--there's the boy to carry sail--nobody
ever made him take his mains'l in," the same as they used to say of a
half dozen or so that really would carry sail--that would drive a
vessel under before they would be the first to reef. But the people
didn't do that, although, let him tell it, he did wonderful things out
to sea, and he had such a way of telling it, too, that he'd almost
make you believe him. But as Clancy used to say, after he'd left you,
and you had time to think it over, you'd see where here and there his
story wasn't well-calked. My own idea was that he wanted a reputation
so that he could pose as a devil of a fellow with certain people
ashore. It is easy enough to see that even a more careful man than Sam
Hollis might take a chance for a smile from a woman like Minnie
Arkell.
Anyhow, I never felt at home with Hollis, and so was willing to take
Clancy's judgment straight. Hollis was a man about forty, and had been
one of Minnie Arkell's admirers ever since I could remember--ever
since she was old enough to have any, I mean, and she wasn't any late
bloomer, as Clancy used to say.
Hollis went into the Arkell house by the door that had only just
closed behind Maurice and Minnie Arkell. I didn't like that very much,
and was thinking of turning back and going in, too; but on second
thought it occurred to me that perhaps only Maurice would have a
welcome for me. So I didn't enter, but kept on to Crow's Nest
instead.