She was only a big gulf yawl, which a man and a boy could manage at a
pinch, with old-fashioned high bulwarks, but lying clean in the water.
She had a tolerable record for speed, and for other things so important
that they were now and again considered by the Government at Quebec. She
was called the Ninety-Nine. With a sense of humour the cure had called
her so, after an interview with her owner and captain, Tarboe the
smuggler. When he said to Tarboe at Angel Point that he had come to
seek the one sheep that was lost, leaving behind him the other
ninety-and-nine within the fold at Isle of Days, Tarboe had replied that
it was a mistake--he was the ninety-nine, for he needed no repentance,
and immediately offered the cure some old brown brandy of fine flavour.
They both had a whimsical turn, and the cure did not ask Tarboe how he
came by such perfect liquor. Many high in authority, it was said, had
been soothed even to the winking of an eye when they ought to have sent
a Nordenfeldt against the Ninety-Nine.
The day after the cure left Angel Point he spoke of Tarboe and his craft
as the Ninety-and-Nine; and Tarboe hearing of this--for somehow he heard
everything--immediately painted out the old name, and called her the
Ninety-Nine, saying that she had been so blessed by the cure. Afterwards
the Ninety-Nine had an increasing reputation for exploit and daring. In
brief, Tarboe and his craft were smugglers, and to have trusted gossip
would have been to say that the boat was as guilty as the man.
Their names were much more notorious than sweet; and yet in Quebec men
laughed as they shrugged their shoulders at them; for as many jovial
things as evil were told of Tarboe. When it became known that a
dignitary of the Church had been given a case of splendid wine, which
had come in a roundabout way to him, men waked in the night and laughed,
to the annoyance of their wives; for the same dignitary had preached a
powerful sermon against smugglers and the receivers of stolen goods. It
was a sad thing for monsignor to be called a Ninety-Niner, as were all
good friends of Tarboe, high and low. But when he came to know, after
the wine had been leisurely drunk and becomingly praised, he brought his
influence to bear in civic places, so that there was nothing left to do
but to corner Tarboe at last.
It was in the height of summer, when there was little to think of in the
old fortressed city, and a dart after a brigand appealed to the romantic
natures of the idle French folk, common and gentle.
Through clouds of rank tobacco smoke, and in the wash of their bean
soup, the habitants discussed the fate of “Black Tarboe,” and officers
of the garrison and idle ladies gossiped at the Citadel and at Murray
Bay of the freebooting gentlemen, whose Ninety-Nine had furnished forth
many a table in the great walled city. But Black Tarboe himself was down
at Anticosti, waiting for a certain merchantman. Passing vessels saw the
Ninety-Nine anchored in an open bay, flying its flag flippantly before
the world--a rag of black sheepskin, with the wool on, in profane
keeping with its name.
There was no attempt at hiding, no skulking behind a point, or scurrying
from observation, but an indolent and insolent waiting--for something.
“Black Tarboe’s getting reckless,” said one captain coming in, and
another, going out, grinned as he remembered the talk at Quebec, and
thought of the sport provided for the Ninety-Nine when she should come
up stream; as she must in due time, for Tarboe’s home was on the Isle of
Days, and was he not fond and proud of his daughter Joan to a point of
folly? He was not alone in his admiration of Joan, for the cure at Isle
of Days said high things of her.
Perhaps this was because she was unlike most other girls, and women too,
in that she had a sense of humour, got from having mixed with choice
spirits who visited her father and carried out at Angel Point a kind of
freemasonry, which had few rites and many charges and countercharges.
She had that almost impossible gift in a woman--the power of telling
a tale whimsically. It was said that once, when Orvay Lafarge, a new
Inspector of Customs, came to spy out the land, she kept him so amused
by her quaint wit, that he sat in the doorway gossiping with her, while
Tarboe and two others unloaded and safely hid away a cargo of liquors
from the Ninety-Nine. And one of the men, as cheerful as Joan herself,
undertook to carry a little keg of brandy into the house, under the very
nose of the young inspector, who had sought to mark his appointment
by the detection and arrest of Tarboe single-handed. He had never met
Tarboe or Tarboe’s daughter when he made his boast. If his superiors had
known that Loco Bissonnette, Tarboe’s jovial lieutenant, had carried
the keg of brandy into the house in a water-pail, not fifteen feet from
where Lafarge sat with Joan, they might have asked for his resignation.
True, the thing was cleverly done, for Bissonnette made the water spill
quite naturally against his leg, and when he turned to Joan and said
in a crusty way that he didn’t care if he spilled all the water in the
pail, he looked so like an unwilling water-carrier that Joan for one
little moment did not guess. When she understood, she laughed till the
tears came to her eyes, and presently, because Lafarge seemed hurt, gave
him to understand that he was upon his honour if she told him what it
was. He consenting, she, still laughing, asked him into the house, and
then drew the keg from the pail, before his eyes, and, tapping it,
gave him some liquor, which he accepted without churlishness. He found
nothing in this to lessen her in his eyes, for he knew that women
have no civic virtues. He drank to their better acquaintance with few
compunctions; a matter not scandalous, for there is nothing like a witty
woman to turn a man’s head, and there was not so much at stake after
all. Tarboe had gone on for many a year till his trade seemed like the
romance of law rather than its breach. It is safe to say that Lafarge
was a less sincere if not a less blameless customs officer from this
time forth. For humour on a woman’s lips is a potent thing, as any man
knows that has kissed it off in laughter.
As we said, Tarboe lay rocking in a bight at Anticosti, with an empty
hold and a scanty larder. Still, he was in no ill-humour, for he smoked
much and talked more than common. Perhaps that was because Joan was with
him--an unusual thing. She was as good a sailor as her father, but
she did not care, nor did he, to have her mixed up with him in
his smuggling. So far as she knew, she had never been on board the
Ninety-Nine when it carried a smuggled cargo. She had not broken the
letter of the law. Her father, on asking her to come on this cruise, had
said that it was a pleasure trip to meet a vessel in the gulf.
The pleasure had not been remarkable, though there had been no bad
weather. The coast of Anticosti is cheerless, and it is possible even
to tire of sun and water. True, Bissonnette played the concertina with
passing sweetness, and sang as little like a wicked smuggler as one
might think. But there were boundaries even to that, as there were to
his love-making, which was, however, so interwoven with laughter that it
was impossible to think the matter serious. Sometimes of an evening Joan
danced on deck to the music of the concertina--dances which had their
origin largely with herself fantastic, touched off with some unexpected
sleight of foot--almost uncanny at times to Bissonnette, whose
temperament could hardly go her distance when her mood was as this.
Tarboe looked on with a keener eye and understanding, for was she not
bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh? Who was he that he should fail
to know her? He saw the moonlight play on her face and hair, and he
waved his head with the swaying of her body, and smacked his lips in
thought of the fortune which, smuggling days over, would carry them
up to St. Louis Street, Quebec, there to dwell as in a garden of good
things.
After many days had passed, Joan tired of the concertina, of her own
dancing, of her father’s tales, and became inquisitive. So at last she
said:
“Father, what’s all this for?”
Tarboe did not answer her at once, but, turning to Bissonnette, asked
him to play “The Demoiselle with the Scarlet Hose.” It was a gay little
demoiselle according to Bissonnette, and through the creaking, windy
gaiety Tarboe and his daughter could talk without being heard by the
musician. Tarboe lit another cigar--that badge of greatness in the eyes
of his fellow-habitants, and said:
“What’s all this for, Joan? Why, we’re here for our health.” His teeth
bit on the cigar with enjoyable emphasis.
“If you don’t tell me what’s in the wind, you’ll be sorry. Come, where’s
the good? I’ve got as much head as you have, father, and--”
“Mon Dieu! Much more. That’s not the question. It was to be a surprise
to you.”
“Pshaw! You can only have one minute of surprise, and you can have
months of fun looking out for a thing. I don’t want surprises; I want
what you’ve got--the thing that’s kept you good-tempered while we lie
here like snails on the rocks.”
“Well, my cricket, if that’s the way you feel, here you are. It is a
long story, but I will make it short. Once there was a pirate called
Brigond, and he brought into a bay on the coast of Labrador a fortune in
some kegs--gold, gold! He hid it in a cave, wrapping around it the dead
bodies of two men. It is thought that one can never find it so. He hid
it, and sailed away. He was captured, and sent to prison in France for
twenty years. Then he come back with a crew and another ship, and sailed
into the bay, but his ship went down within sight of the place. And so
the end of him and all. But wait. There was one man, the mate on the
first voyage. He had been put in prison also. He did not get away as
soon as Brigond. When he was free, he come to the captain of a ship that
I know, the Free-and-Easy, that sails to Havre, and told him the story,
asking for passage to Quebec. The captain--Gobal--did not believe it,
but said he would bring him over on the next voyage. Gobal come to me
and told me all there was to tell. I said that it was a true story, for
Pretty Pierre told me once he saw Brigond’s ship go down in the bay; but
he would not say how, or why, or where. Pierre would not lie in a thing
like that, and--”
“Why didn’t he get the gold himself?”
“What is money to him? He is as a gipsy. To him the money is cursed. He
said so. Eh bien! some wise men are fools, one way or another. Well,
I told Gobal I would give the man the Ninety-Nine for the cruise and
search, and that we should divide the gold between us, if it was found,
taking out first enough to make a dot for you and a fine handful for
Bissonnette. But no, shake not your head like that. It shall be so. Away
went Gobal four months ago, and I get a letter from him weeks past, just
after Pentecost, to say he would be here some time in the first of July,
with the man.
“Well, it is a great game. The man is a pirate, but it does not
matter--he has paid for that. I thought you would be glad of a fine
adventure like that, so I said to you, Come.”
“But, father--”
“If you do not like you can go on with Gobal in the Free-and-Easy, and
you shall be landed at the Isle of Days. That’s all. We’re waiting here
for Gobal. He promised to stop just outside this bay and land our man on
us. Then, blood of my heart, away we go after the treasure!”
Joan’s eyes flashed. Adventure was in her as deep as life itself. She
had been cradled in it, reared in it, lived with it, and here was no
law-breaking. Whose money was it? No one’s: for who should say what
ship it was, or what people were robbed by Brigond and those others?
Gold--that was a better game than wine and brandy, and for once her
father would be on a cruise which would not be, as it were, sailing in
forbidden waters.
“When do you expect Gobal?” she asked eagerly. “He ought to have been
here a week ago. Maybe he has had a bad voyage, or something.”
“He’s sure to come?”
“Of course. I found out about that. She’s got a big consignment to
people in Quebec. Something has gone wrong, but she’ll be here--yes.”
“What will you do if you get the money?” she asked. Tarboe laughed
heartily. “My faith! Come play up those scarlet hose, Bissonnette! My
faith, I’ll go into Parliament at Quebec. Thunder! I will have sport
with them. I’ll reform the customs. There shan’t be any more smuggling.
The people of Quebec shall drink no more good wine--no one except Black
Tarboe, the member for Isle of Days.”
Again he laughed, and his eyes spilt fire like revolving wheels. For a
moment Joan was quiet; her face was shining like the sun on a river. She
saw more than her father, for she saw release. A woman may stand by a
man who breaks the law, but in her heart she always has bitterness, for
that the world shall speak well of herself and what she loves is the
secret desire of every woman. In her heart she never can defy the world
as does a man.
She had carried off the situation as became the daughter of a daring
adventurer, who in more stirring times might have been a Du Lhut or a
Rob Roy, but she was sometimes tired of the fighting, sometimes wishful
that she could hold her position easier. Suppose the present good cure
should die and another less considerate arrive, how hard might her
position become! Then, she had a spirit above her station, as have most
people who know the world and have seen something of its forbidden side;
for it is notable that wisdom comes not alone from loving good things,
but from having seen evil as well as good. Besides Joan was not a woman
to go singly to her life’s end.
There was scarcely a man on Isle of Days and in the parish of Ste.
Eunice, on the mainland, but would gladly have taken to wife the
daughter of Tarboe the smuggler, and it is likely that the cure of
either parish would not have advised against it.
Joan had had the taste of the lawless, and now she knew, as she sat and
listened to Bissonnette’s music, that she also could dance for joy,
in the hope of a taste of the lawful. With this money, if it were got,
there could be another life--in Quebec. She could not forbear laughing
now as she remembered that first day she had seen Orvay Lafarge, and
she said to Bissonnette: “Loce, do you mind the keg in the water-pail?”
Bissonnette paused on an out-pull, and threw back his head with a
soundless laugh, then played the concertina into contortions.
“That Lafarge! H’m! He is very polite; but pshaw, it is no use that, in
whisky-running! To beat a great man, a man must be great. Tarboe Noir
can lead M’sieu’ Lafarge all like that!”
It seemed as if he were pulling the nose of the concertina. Tarboe began
tracing a kind of maze with his fingers on the deck, his eyes rolling
outward like an endless puzzle. But presently he turned sharp on Joan.
“How many times have you met him?” he asked. “Oh, six or seven--eight or
nine, perhaps.”
Her father stared. “Eight or nine? By the holy! Is it like that? Where
have you seen him?”
“Twice at our home, as you know; two or three times at dances at the
Belle Chatelaine, and the rest when we were at Quebec in May. He is
amusing, M’sieu’ Lafarge.”
“Yes, two of a kind,” remarked Tarboe drily; and then he told his
schemes to Joan, letting Bissonnette hang up the “The Demoiselle with
the Scarlet Hose,” and begin “The Coming of the Gay Cavalier.” She
entered into his plans with spirit, and together they speculated what
bay it might be, of the many on the coast of Labrador.
They spent two days longer waiting, and then at dawn a merchantman
came sauntering up to anchor. She signalled to the Ninety-Nine. In
five minutes Tarboe was climbing up the side of the Free-and-Easy, and
presently was in Gobal’s cabin, with a glass of wine in his hand.
“What kept you, Gobal?” he asked. “You’re ten days late, at least.”
“Storm and sickness--broken mainmast and smallpox.” Gobal was not
cheerful.
Tarboe caught at something. “You’ve got our man?” Gobal drank off his
wine slowly. “Yes,” he said. “Well?--Why don’t you fetch him?”
“You can see him below.”
“The man has legs, let him walk here. Hello, my Gobal, what’s the
matter? If he’s here bring him up. We’ve no time to lose.”
“Tarboe, the fool got smallpox, and died three hours ago--the tenth man
since we started. We’re going to give him to the fishes. They’re putting
him in his linen now.”
Tarboe’s face hardened. Disaster did not dismay him, it either made him
ugly or humourous, and one phase was as dangerous as the other.
“D’ye mean to say,” he groaned, “that the game is up? Is it all
finished? Sweat o’ my soul, my skin crawls like hot glass! Is it the
end, eh? The beast, to die!”
Gobal’s eyes glistened. He had sent up the mercury, he would now bring
it down.
“Not such a beast as you think. Alive pirate, a convict, as comrade in
adventure, is not sugar in the teeth. This one was no better than the
worst. Well, he died. That was awkward. But he gave me the chart of the
bay before he died--and that was damn square.”
Tarboe held out his hand eagerly, the big fingers bending claw-like.
“Give it me, Gobal,” he said.
“Wait. There’s no hurry. Come along, there’s the bell: they’re going to
drop him.”
He coolly motioned, and passed out from the cabin to the ship’s side.
Tarboe kept his tongue from blasphemy, and his hand from the captain’s
shoulder, for he knew only too well that Gobal held the game in his
hands. They leaned over and saw two sailors with something on a plank.
“We therefore commit his body to the deep, in the knowledge of the
Judgment Day--let her go!” grunted Gobal; and a long straight canvas
bundle shot with a swishing sound beneath the water. “It was rough
on him too,” he continued. “He waited twenty years to have his chance
again. Damn me, if I didn’t feel as if I’d hit him in the eye, somehow,
when he begged me to keep him alive long enough to have a look at the
rhino. But it wasn’t no use. He had to go, and I told him so.
“Then he did the fine thing: he give me the chart. But he made me swear
on a book of the Mass that if we got the gold we’d send one-half his
share to a woman in Paris, and the rest to his brother, a priest at
Nancy. I’ll keep my word--but yes! Eh, Tarboe?”
“You can keep your word for me! What, you think, Gobal, there is no
honour in Black Tarboe, and you’ve known me ten years! Haven’t I always
kept my word like a clock?”
Gobal stretched out his hand. “Like the sun-sure. That’s enough. We’ll
stand by my oath. You shall see the chart.”
Going again inside the cabin, Gobal took out a map grimed with ceaseless
fingering, and showed it to Tarboe, putting his finger on the spot where
the treasure lay.
“The Bay of Belle Amour!” cried Tarboe, his eyes flashing. “Ah, I know
it! That’s where Gaspard the pilot lived. It’s only forty leagues or so
from here.” His fingers ran here and there on the map. “Yes, yes,” he
continued, “it’s so, but he hasn’t placed the reef right. Ah, here is
how Brigond’s ship went down! There’s a needle of rock in the bay. It
isn’t here.”
Gobal handed the chart over. “I can’t go with you, but I take your word;
I can say no more. If you cheat me I’ll kill you; that’s all.”
“Let me give a bond,” said Tarboe quickly. “If I saw much gold perhaps
I couldn’t trust myself, but there’s someone to be trusted, who’ll swear
for me. If my daughter Joan give her word--”
“Is she with you?”
“Yes, in the Ninety-Nine, now. I’ll send Bissonnette for her. Yes, yes,
I’ll send, for gold is worse than bad whisky when it gets into a man’s
head. Joan will speak for me.”
Ten minutes later Joan was in Gobal’s cabin, guaranteeing for her father
the fulfilment of his bond. An hour afterwards the Free-and-Easy was
moving up stream with her splintered mast and ragged sails, and the
Ninety-Nine was looking up and over towards the Bay of Belle Amour. She
reached it in the late afternoon of the next day. Bissonnette did not
know the object of the expedition, but he had caught the spirit of the
affair, and his eyes were like spots of steel as he held the sheet or
took his turn at the tiller. Joan’s eyes were now on the sky, now on
the sail, and now on the land, weighing as wisely as her father the
advantage of the wind, yet dwelling on that cave where skeletons kept
ward over the spoils of a pirate ship.
They arrived, and Tarboe took the Ninety-Nine warily in on a little wind
off the land. He came near sharing the fate of Brigond, for the yawl
grazed the needle of the rock that, hiding away in the water, with
a nose out for destruction, awaits its victims. They reached safe
anchorage, but by the time they landed it was night, with, however, a
good moon showing.
All night they searched, three silent, eager figures, drawing step by
step nearer the place where the ancient enemy of man was barracked about
by men’s bodies. It was Joan who, at last, as dawn drew up, discovered
the hollow between two great rocks where the treasure lay. A few
minutes’ fierce digging, and the kegs of gold were disclosed, showing
through the ribs of two skeletons. Joan shrank back, but the two men
tossed aside the rattling bones, and presently the kegs were standing
between them on the open shore. Bissonnette’s eyes were hungry--he knew
now the wherefore of the quest. He laughed outright, a silly, loud,
hysterical laugh. Tarboe’s eyes shifted from the sky to the river, from
the river to the kegs, from the kegs to Bissonnette. On him they stayed
a moment. Bissonnette shrank back. Tarboe was feeling for the first time
in his life the deadly suspicion which comes with ill-gotten wealth.
This passed as his eyes and Joan’s met, for she had caught the
melodrama, the overstrain; Bissonnette’s laugh had pointed the
situation; and her sense of humour had prevailed. “La, la,” she said,
with a whimsical quirk of the head, and no apparent relevancy:
“Lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away home,
Your house is on fire, and your children all gone.”
The remedy was good. Tarboe’s eyes came again to their natural
liveliness, and Bissonnette said:
“My throat’s like a piece of sand-paper.”
Tarboe handed over a brandy flask, after taking a pull himself, and then
sitting down on one of the kegs, he said: “It is as you see, and now
Angel Point very quick. To get it there safe, that’s the thing!” Then,
scanning the sky closely: “It’s for a handsome day, and the wind goes
to bear us up fine. Good! Well, for you, Bissonnette, there shall be a
thousand dollars, you shall have the Belle Chatelaine Inn and the little
lady at Point Pierrot. For the rest, you shall keep a quiet tongue, eh?
If not, my Bissonnette, we shall be the best of strangers, and you shall
not be happy. Hein?”
Bissonnette’s eyes flashed. “The Belle Chatelaine? Good! That is enough.
My tongue is tied; I cannot speak; it is fastened with a thousand pegs.”
“Very good, a thousand gold pegs, and you shall never pull them. The
little lady will have you with them, not without; and unless you stand
by me, no one shall have you at any price--by God!”
He stood up, but Joan put out her hand. “You have been speaking, now it
is my turn. Don’t cry cook till you have the venison home. What is
more, I gave my word to Gobal, and I will keep it. I will be captain.
No talking! When you’ve got the kegs in the cellar at Angel Point, good!
But now--come, my comrades, I am your captain!”
She was making the thing a cheerful adventure, and the men now swung
the kegs on their shoulders and carried them to the boat. In another
half-hour they were under way in the gaudy light of an orange sunrise, a
simmering wind from the sea lifting them up the river, and the grey-red
coast of Labrador shrinking sullenly back.
About this time, also, a Government cutter was putting out from under
the mountain-wall at Quebec, its officer in command having got renewed
orders from the Minister to bring in Tarboe the smuggler. And when Mr.
Martin, the inspector in command of the expedition, was ordered to take
with him Mr. Orvay Lafarge and five men, “effectively armed,” it was
supposed by the romantic Minister that the matter was as good as done.
What Mr. Orvay Lafarge did when he got the word, was to go straight to
his hat-peg, then leave the office, walk to the little club where he
spent leisure hours, called office hours by people who wished to be
precise as well as suggestive,--sit down, and raise a glass to his lips.
After which he threw himself back in his chair and said: “Well, I’m
particularly damned!” A few hours later they were away on their doubtful
exploit.