I leaps to my feet. "Pirates--to me? To these men? Simple honest
fishermen who know only toil? Who toils harder than they? Pirates--to
them! Why, if they were anything but the simplest and honestest set of
men, they would have taken that vessel out of my hands and sold
her--sold her in the States--and what could you or I or anybody have
done about it? But did they--or I? No, sir. As soon as we had finished
our Christmas dinner we brought her back."
"But the wine?" shrieks Miller.
"What wine?"
"The wine--the wine--her cargo of wine."
"Wine? Cargo of wine--what's he talking about?" I looks at my crowd,
and they all says: "Wine? Cargo of wine?--he's crazy."
I turns impatiently to the governor and French captain. "Gentlemen, this
is a serious accusation, but easily settled. If there was wine in that
vessel, surely her papers will say something of it. It will be on her
manifest, that is certain."
Now these two, the governor and the French naval officer, were honest
men. "That is so," they said. "He is quite right--quite right," and
looked at Miller, and Miller, with his eyes like door-knobs, looks at
me. And I gives him a wink with my wind'ard eye and he near blew up.
But he begins to see a thing or two, so he goes off with the French
officials, but before we had finished smoking our after-breakfast
pipeful he comes back--alone now--and says: "What do you propose?" And I
said: "Within a thousand miles of here is a friend of mine with a lot of
wine--as good a lot as the _Aurora_ had in her hold yesterday--maybe a
couple of dozen quarts shy--you know, a Christmas dinner, and so on--and
only last night my friend was figuring it up, and he thought there was
twenty thousand dollars' worth in this lot of his, and that without
figuring in the duty--but he don't care for wine much--but he does love
a good Vessel, and he was looking the _Aurora_ over and he said he'd be
willing to exchange all that wine for the _Aurora_. I told him that the
_Aurora_ only cost you twenty-five hundred, but he said, 'No matter, I
have a weakness for the _Aurora_,' this friend of mine. Of course
there'll be a few little extra expenses you'll have to pay for, like the
hawser and the big anchor cut away and the keep of a crew for a week
over in Newfoundland, and so on, but that won't be much--five hundred
dollars ought to cover it all."
And Miller gave back the _Aurora_ and paid over the five hundred, and I
gave him an order on John Rose for the wine. And then I took the little
baby's brooch out of my pocket and handed it back to him.
And then I sailed over to Placentia Bay in the _Aurora_ and took
twenty-one hundred barrels of herring off John Rose and put out, and,
getting the first of a stiff easterly, the _Aurora_ carried it all the
way to Gloucester. And I was home to the wife and baby by New Year's.
And the baby got a good brooch. I could afford it. From the profits of
twenty-one hundred barrels of fine fat herring I could well afford it.
I haven't seen Miller since, but they say he's shyer than he used to be
of simple American fishermen.
>Light-Ship 67
Perrault was the good old Frenchman who kept the general store just
across from the Navy Yard gate, and Baldwin was the chief boson's mate,
U.S.N., who commanded the _Whist_, the little tug which was used as a
general utility boat by the Navy Yard people.
Old Perrault was born in Paris, and, in God's goodness, hoped yet to die
there. And Baldwin had been in Paris, more than once in his cruising
youth, and could converse of Paris; and to converse of Paris, in such
loving language, was it not to win one's heart?
Old Perrault had never dissembled his regard for the sailor. A pity he
viewed life so carelessly, the brave-hearted Baldwin. So excellent in
many respects, if he had but a little ambition for himself! If he but
hearkened a little for the world's opinion. But such a man! Sometimes
old Perrault wished that his motherless Claire would disregard all his
wordly homilies, fall in love with the rugged Baldwin, and marry him.
Baldwin himself maintained no such exalted hopes. A fine husband he'd
make after his riotous years! But he had a friend, recently detailed to
the yard, and warmly recommended by the boson's mate, this friend Harty,
chief wireless operator, soon came to be the most regular of all the
Saturday night attendants at old Perrault's store. It was on Saturday
nights that the unmarried foreman on the breakwater job came up to see
old Perrault. If you stood well with the old fellow, like as not he
would ask you to the house of a Sunday afternoon, and then you could sit
around and rest your eyes on the lovely Claire while she played the
piano.
One might think that old Perrault, who so casually picked his company,
was a careless sort of parent; but not so, as witness his questioning of
Baldwin, when it began to dawn on him that this wireless operator was
becoming a distinguished member of the Sunday afternoon parties; and the
boson's mate, who revered old Perrault, but who also thought a lot of
his friend Harty, spoke judiciously.
"He's all right," he replied to old Perrault, "all right. Yes, I know he
used to drink an' was generally wild once; but he's over that. Oh, sure,
all over that now."
It was beginning to look like Harty for Perrault's son-in-law, when
Bowen came along. Bowen was the expert who came to overhaul the wireless
plant in the yard. An easy-going, but wide-awake sort, Bowen, who
seemed to have been everywhere and who could talk of where he had been,
talk without end, and always with the intimate little touches which you
never found in the guidebooks. He captured old Perrault at the first
assault. Old Perrault from behind his counter happening to catch a stray
word, listened, looked up, and, noting the animated features, hastily
signalled the new-comer to come out of the crowd. One minute later he
had put the vital question: Had Mr. Bowen ever been to Paris?
To Paris! Bowen started to touch the end of a finger for every time he
had been to Paris. Old Perrault could not wait for him to finish. "And
the Champs Élysées, Mister Bowen, you have been there?"
"The Champs Élysées? If I had a dollar, M'sieu Perrault--"
"Eh?" The old man wanted to hear him say that "M'sieu" in just that way
again--"if you had one dollar, Mister Bowen?"
Bowen understood. "Yes, if I had a dollar, M'sieu, for every time I sat
on one of those chairs inside the sidewalk--in under the trees, you
know, M'sieu--and watched the autos go by! Talk about autos!--there's
the place for autos, coming down from that big Napoleon Arch. Some arch,
that, isn't it? Yes, sir--down from there to the Place de la Concorde
and back again, around the Arch and on to the Bois. And there's a sight
for a man, too! To sit out on the Bois sidewalk, M'sieu, your chair
almost under the bushes, and watch those cabs and autos in the late
afternoon, coming on dark. Count them? No more than you could count
fire-flies of an evening in the West Indies--like one string of light."
"Mon Dieu! Come to the inner room, if you please, sir, and tell me more.
What a good angel which has sent you here! Twenty-five years since I
have seen my Paris. And the Tuileries, my friend, is it yet the same?"
"Just the same, M'sieu, a million bare-legged children with short white
socks running wild, and another half a million nurses with white caps
running wild after them. And the Eiffel Tower! But that's since your
time, M'sieu Perrault?"
"Ah--h, but have I not heard? Continue, continue, if you please, sir.
You bring a strange joy to my heart. The Louvre, for example--you have
been there, yes?"
"Been there? Yes, and 'most googoo-eyed from looking at the pictures
there--miles of 'em, aren't there?"
"Oh-h! and Mona Lisa--yes!"
"That dark one with the queer kind of a smile? She must have had green
eyes, that one--green eyes with lights in them. And she kept them all
guessing, I'll bet a hat, when she was alive--" and Bowen ran on till
every blessed breakwater man silently stole away. Bowen and old Perrault
had a three o'clock session that first night; and within the year he had
married Claire.