full three month or more 'fore he went aboard of her ag'in. He let it be
known about that he wanted to sell her, but he couldn't git an offer even;
nobody seemed to want to take hold of her. Winter set in early and the ice
blocked her in, and there she lay, the lonesomest thing in sight. You never
see no child'n climbin' 'round on her, and there was a story that queer
noises like moanin' and clankin' of chains come out of her on windy nights;
but it might 'a' been the ice, crowdin' as she careened over and back with
the risin' and fallin' tide. But when spring opened, folks used to see the
old cap'n hangin' round the ship-yard and lookin' her over at low tide,
where the ice had cut the barnacles off of her.
“One night in the store he figgered up how much lumber she'd carry from
Bangor, and 'twan't long 'fore he had a gang o' men at work on her. It
seemed's though he was kind of infatuated with her. He was 'fraid of her,
but he couldn't let her alone. And she was a mighty well-built craft.
Floridy pine and live-oak and mahogany from the Mosquito coast; built in
Cadiz, most likely. Look at her now--she don't look to home here, does
she? She never did. She's as much like our harbor craft as one o' them
big, yallow-eyed, bare-necked buzzards is to one o' these here little
sand-peeps. But she was a handsome vessel. Them live-oak ribs'll outlast
your time, if you was to live to be old.”
The two faces looked up at the hulk of the Alcázar,--the blanched,
wave-worn messenger sent by the tropic seas into the far North with a tale
that the living had never dared to tell, and that had perished on the lips
of the dead. Its shadow, spreading broad upon the beach, made the gathering
twilight deeper. Out on the harbor the pale saffron light lingered, long
after the red had faded. How many tides had ebbed and flowed since the old
ship, chained at the foot of the cliff, had warmed in the waters of the
Gulf her bare, corrugated sides, warped by the frosts, stabbed by the ice
of pitiless Northern winters! Where were the sallow, dark-bearded faces
that had watched from her high poop the brief twilights die on that
“unshadowed main,” which a century ago was the scene of some of the wildest
romances and blackest crimes in maritime history--the bright, restless
bosom that warmed into life a thousand serpents whose trail could be
traced through the hot, flower-scented Southern plazas and courts into the
peaceful white villages of the North!
“Sho! I'd no idee 'twas a-gittin' on so late,” said Captain John. “There
ain't anybody watchin' out for me. I kin put my family under my hat, but I
don' know what your folks'll think's come o' you.
“Wal, the rest on 'twon't take long to tell. The old man had her fitted up
in good shape by the time the ice was out of the river, and run her up to
Bangor in ballast, and loaded her there for New York. He had an ugly trip
down the coast: lost his deck load and three men overboard in a southeaster
off Nantucket Shoals. It made the whole ship's company feel pretty solemn,
but the old man took it the hardest of any of 'em, and from that time seems
as if he lost his grip; the old scare settled back on him blacker 'n ever.
There wan't a man aboard of her that liked her. They all knew her story,
that she was the Alcázar from nobody knows where, instead of the Stranger
from Newburyport. The cap'n had Newburyport put on to her because he was a
Newburyport man and all his vessels was built there. But she hadn't more 'n
touched the dock in New York before every one on 'em left her, even to the
cook. 'I'm leery o' this 'ere ship,' says one big Cornishman. 'No better
than a floatin' coffin, anyway,' was what they all said of her; and I guess
the cap'n would 'a' left her right there himself if it hadn't been for the
money he'd put into her. I expect he was a little too fond of money, may
be; but I've knowed others just as sharp's the old cap'n that didn't seem
to have his luck. The mate saw him two or three times while he was a-lyin'
in New York, and noticed he was drinkin' more 'n usual. He come home
light and anchored off the bar, just as a southeaster was a-comin' on. It
wouldn't 'a' been no trouble for him to have laid there, if he'd had good
ground-gear; but there 'twas ag'in, he'd been a leetle too savin'. He'd
used the old cables he found in her. The new mate didn't know nothin' about
her, and he put out one anchor. The cap'n had taken a kag o' New England
rum aboard and been drawin' on it pretty reg'lar all the way up, and as
the gale come on he got kind o' wild and went at it harder 'n ever. About
midnight the cable parted. They let go the other anchor, but it didn't snub
her for a minute, and she swung, broadside to, on to the bar. The men clum
into the riggin' before she struck, but the old cap'n was staggerin' 'round
decks, kind o' dazed and dumb-like, not tryin' to do anythin' to save
himself. The mate tried to git him into the riggin', seein' he wan't in no
condition to look out for himself; but the old man struck loose from his
holt and cried out to him through the noise:--
“'Let me alone! I've got to go with her. I tell ye I've got to go with
her!'
“The mate just had time to swing himself back into the mizzen-shrouds
before the sea broke over her and left the decks bare. The old ship pounded
over the bar in an hour or so, and drifted up here on to the beach where
she is now. Every man on board was saved except the cap'n. He 'went with
her,' sure enough.
“There was talk enough about that thing before they got done with it to 'a'
made the old man roll in his grave. They raked up all the stories about his
cruisin' on the Spanish main when he was a young man. They wan't stories
_he_'d ever told; he wan't much of a hand to talk about what he'd seen and
done on his v'yages. They never let him rest till 'twas pretty much the
gen'ral belief, and is to this day, that he knew more about that slaver
from the first than he ever owned to.
“I never had much to say about it, but 'twas plain enough to me. I had my
suspicions the mornin' he towed her in. He looked terrible shattered. It
'peared to me he wan't ever the same man afterwards.
“'I've got to go with her!' Them was his last words. He knew that ship
and him belonged together, same as a man and his sins. He knew she'd been
a-huntin' him up and down the western ocean for twenty year, with them dead
o' his'n in her hold,--and she'd hunted him down at last.”
Captain John paused with this peroration: he dug a hole in the wet sand
with the toe of his boot, and watched it slowly fill.
“'Twas a bait most any one would 'a' smelt of, a six-hundred-ton ship and
every timber in her sound; but you'd 'a' thought he'd been more cautious,
knowin' what he did of her. She was bound to have him, though.”
“Captain John,” said the boy, a little hoarse from his long silence, “what
do you suppose it _was_ he did? Anything except just leave them--the
negroes, I mean?”
“Lord! Wan't that _enough_? To steal 'em, and then leave 'em
there--battened down like rats in the hold! However, I expect there ain't
anybody that can tell you the whole of that story. It's one of them
mysteries that rests with the dead.
“The new mate--the young fellow he brought on from New York--he married the
cap'n's daughter. None o' the Harbor boys ever seemed to jibe in with her.
I always had a notion that she was a touch above most of 'em, but she and
her mother was as good as a providence to them shipwrecked men when they
was throwed ashore, strangers in the place and no money; and it ended in
Rachel's takin' up with the mate and the whole family's leavin' the place.
It was long after all the talk died away that the widow come back and lived
here in the same quiet way she always had, till she was laid alongside the
old cap'n. There wan't a better woman ever walked this earth than Mary
Green, that was Mary Spofford.”
Captain John rose from the bowsprit and rubbed his cramped knees before
climbing the hill. He parted with his young listener at the top and took
a lonely path across the shore-pasture to a little cabin, where no light
shone, built like the nest of a sea-bird on the edge of high-water mark.
On the gray beach below, a small, dingy yawl, with one sail loosely bundled
over the thwarts, leaned toward the door-latch as if listening for its
click. It had an almost human expression of patient though wistful waiting.
It was the poorest boat in the Harbor; it had no name painted on its stern,
but Captain John, in the solitude of his watery wanderings among the
islands and channels of the bay, always called her the Mary Spofford. The
boy from the main went home slowly along the village street toward the
many-windowed house in which his mother and sisters were boarding. There
were voices, calling and singing abroad on the night air, reflected
from the motionless, glimmering sheet of dark water below as from a
sounding-board. Cow-bells tinkled away among the winding paths along the
low, dim shores. The night-call of the heron from the muddy flats struck
sharply across the stillness, and from the outer bay came the murmur of the
old ground-swell, which never rests, even in the calmest weather.
A CLOUD ON THE MOUNTAIN.
Ruth Mary stood on the high river bank, looking along the beach below to
see if her small brother Tommy was lurking anywhere under the willows with
his fishing-pole. He had been sent half an hour before to the earth cellar
for potatoes, and Ruth Mary's father, Mr. Tully, was waiting for his
dinner.
She did not see Tommy; but while she lingered, looking at the river
hurrying down the shoot between the hills and curling up over the pebbles
of the bar, she saw a team of bay horses and a red-wheeled wagon come
rattling down the stony slope of the opposite shore. In the wagon she
counted four men. Three of them wore white, helmet-shaped hats that made
brilliant spots of light against the bank. The horses were driven half
their length into the stream and allowed to drink, as well as they could
for the swiftness of the current, while the men seemed to consult together,
the two on the front seat turning back to speak with the two behind, and
pointing across the river.
Ruth Mary watched them with much interest, for travelers such as these
seemed to be seldom came as far up Bear River valley as the Tullys' cattle
range. The visitors who came to them were mostly cow-boys looking up stray
cattle, or miners on their way to the “Banner district,” or packers with
mule trains going over the mountains, to return in three weeks, or three
months, as their journey prospered. Fishermen and hunters came up into
the hills in the season of trout and deer, but they came as a rule on
horseback, and at a distance were hardly to be distinguished from the
cow-boys and the miners.
The men in the wagon were evidently strangers to that locality. They had
seen Ruth Mary watching them from the hill, and now one of them rose up in
the wagon and shouted across to her, pointing to the river.
She could not hear his words for the noise of the ripple and of the wind
which blew freshly down-stream, but she understood that he was inquiring
about the ford. She motioned up the river and called to him, though she
knew her words could not reach him, to keep on the edge of the ripple.
Her gestures, however, aided by the driver's knowledge of fords, were
sufficient; he turned his horses up-stream and they took water at the place
she had tried to indicate. The wagon sank to the wheel-hubs; the horses
kept their feet well, though the current was strong; the sun shone brightly
on the white hats and laughing faces of the men, on the guns in their
hands, on the red paint of the wagon and the warm backs of the horses
breasting the stream. When they were halfway across, one of the men tossed
a small, reluctant black dog over the wheel into the river, and all the
company, with the exception of the driver, who was giving his attention to
his horses, broke into hilarious shouts of encouragement to the swimmer
in his struggle with the current. It was carrying him down and would have
landed him, without effort of his own, on a strip of white sand beach under
the willows above the bend; but now the unhappy little object, merely a
black nose and two blinking anxious eyes above the water, had drifted into
an eddy, from which he cast forlorn glances toward his faithless friends in
the wagon. The dog was in no real peril, but Ruth Mary did not know this,
and her heart swelled with indignant pity. Only shyness kept her from
wading to his rescue. Now one of the laughing young men, thinking the joke
had gone far enough perhaps, and reckless of a wetting, leaped out into the
water, and, plunging along in his high boots, soon had the terrier by the
scruff of his neck, and waded ashore with his sleek, quivering little body
nestled in the bosom of his flannel hunting shirt.
A deep cut in the bank, through which the wagon was dragged, was screened
by willows. When the fording party had arrived at the top, Ruth Mary was
nowhere to be seen. “Where's that girl got to all of a sudden?” one of the
men demanded. They had intended to ask her several questions; but she was
gone, and the road before them plainly led to the low-roofed cabin, and
loosely built barn with straw and daylight showing through its cracks, the
newly planted poplar-trees above the thatched earth cellar, and all the
signs of a tentative home in this solitude of the hills.
They drove on slowly, the young man who had waded ashore, whom his comrades
addressed as Kirkwood or Kirk, walking behind the wagon with the dog in
his arms, responding to his whimpering claims for attention with teasing
caresses. The dog, it seemed, was the butt as well as the pet of the party.
As they approached the house he scrambled out of Kirkwood's arms and
lingered to take a roll in the sandy path, coming up a moment afterward
to be received with blighting sarcasms upon his appearance. After his
ignominious wetting he was quite unable to bear up under them, and slunk to
the rear with deprecatory blinks and waggings of his tail whenever one of
the men looked back.
Ruth Mary had run home quickly to tell her father, who was sitting in the
sun by the wood-pile, of the arrival of strangers from across the river.
Mr. Tully rose up deliberately and went to meet his guests, keeping between
his teeth the sliver of pine he had been chewing while waiting for his
dinner. It helped to bear him out in that appearance of indifference
he thought it well to assume, as if such arrivals were an every-day
occurrence.
“Hasn't Tommy got back yet, mother?” Ruth Mary asked as she entered the
house. Mrs. Tully was a stout, low-browed woman, with grayish yellow hair
of that dry and lifeless texture which shows declining health or want of
care. Her blue eyes looked faded in the setting of her tanned complexion.
She sat in a low chair, her knees wide apart, defined by her limp calico
draperies, rocking a child of two years, a fat little girl with flushed
cheeks and flaxen hair braided into tight knots on her forehead, who was
asleep in the large cushioned rocking-chair in the middle of the room. The
room was somewhat bare, for the shed-room outside was evidently the more
used part of the house. The cook stove was there in the inclosed corner,
and beside it a table and shelf with a tin hand-basin hanging beneath,
while the crannies of the logs on each side of the doorway were utilized
as shelves for all the household articles in frequent requisition that
were not hanging from nails driven into the logs, or from the projecting
roof-poles against the light.
Tommy had not returned, and Mrs. Tully suggested as a reason for his delay
that he had stopped somewhere to catch grasshoppers for bait.
“I should think he had enough of 'em in that bottle of his,” Ruth Mary
said, “to last him till the 'hoppers come again. Some strange men forded
the river just now. Father's gone to speak to them. I guess he'll ask 'em
to stop to dinner.”
Mrs. Tully got up heavily and went to the door. “Here, Angy,”--she
addressed a girl of eight or ten years who sat on the flat boulder that
was the cabin doorstep;--“you go get them taters; that's a good girl,” she
added coaxingly, as Angy did not stir. “If your foot hurts you, you can
walk on your heel.”
Angy, who was complaining of a stone-bruise, got up and limped away,
upsetting from her lap as she rose two kittens of tender years, who tumbled
over each other before getting their legs under them, and staggered off,
steering themselves jerkily with their tails.
“Oh, Angy!” Ruth Mary remonstrated, but she could not stay to comfort the
kittens. She ran up the short, crooked stairs leading to the garret bedroom
which she shared with Angy, hastily to put on her shoes and stockings and
brace her pretty figure, under the blue calico waist she wore, with her
first pair of stays, an important purchase made on her last visit to the
town in the valley, and to be worn now, if ever. It was hot at noon in the
bedroom under the roof, and by the time Ruth Mary had fortified herself
to meet the eyes of strangers she was uncomfortably flushed, and short of
breath besides from the pressure of the new stays. She went slowly down the
uneven stairs, wishing that she could walk as softly in her shoes as she
could barefoot.
Her father was talking to the strangers in the shed-room. They seemed tall
and formidable, under the low roof, against the flat glare of the sun on
the hard-swept ground in front of the shed. She waited inside until her
mother reminded her of the dinner half cooked on the stove; then she went
out shyly, the light falling on her downcast face and full white eyelids,
on her yellow hair, sun-faded and meekly parted over her forehead, which
was low like her mother's, but smooth as one of the white stones of the
river beach. Her fair skin was burned to a clear, light red tint, and her
blonde eyebrows and lashes showed silvery against it, but her chin was very
white underneath, and there was a white space behind each of her little
ears where her hair was knotted tightly away from her neck.
“This is my daughter,” Mr. Tully said briefly; and then he gave some
hospitable orders about dinner which the strangers interrupted, saying that
they had brought a lunch with them and would not trouble the family until
supper-time.
They gathered up their hunting gear, and lifting their hats to Ruth Mary,
followed Mr. Tully, who had offered to show them the best fishing on that
part of the river.
Mr. Tully explained to his wife and daughter, as the latter placed the
dinner on the table, that three of the strangers were the engineers from
the railroad camp at Moor's Bridge, and the fourth was a packer and
teamster from the same camp; that they were all going up the river to look
at timber, and wanted a little sport by the way. They had expected to keep
on the other side of the river, but seeing the ranch on the opposite shore,
with wheel-tracks going down to the water, they had concluded to try the
ford and the fishing and ask for a night's accommodation.
“They don't want we should put ourselves out any. They're used to roughin'
it, they say. If you can git together somethin' to feed 'em on, mother,
they say they'd as soon sleep on the straw in the barn as anywheres else.”
“There's plenty to eat, such as it is, but Ruth Mary'll have it all to do.
I can't be on my feet.” Mrs. Tully spoke in a depressed tone, but to her
no less than to her husband was this little break welcome in the monotony
of their life in the hills, even though it brought with it a more vivid
consciousness of the family circumstances, and a review of them in the
light of former standards of comfort and gentility: for Mrs. Tully had been
a woman of some social pretensions, in the small Eastern village where she
was born. To all that to her guests made the unique charm of her present
home she had grown callous, if she had ever felt it at all, while dwelling
with an incurable regret upon the neatly painted houses and fenced
door-yards, the gatherings of women in their best clothes in primly
furnished parlors on summer afternoons, the church-going, the passing in
the street, and, more than all, the housekeeping conveniences she had been
used to, accumulated through many years' occupancy of the same house.
“Seems as though I hadn't any ambition left,” she often complained to her
daughter. “There's nothin' here to do with, and nobody to do for. The most
of the folks we ever see wouldn't know sour-dough bread from salt-risin',
and as for dressin' up, I might keep the same clothes on from Fourth July
till Christmas--your father'd never know.”
But Ruth Mary was haunted by no fleshpots of the past. As she dressed the
chickens and mixed the biscuit for supper, she paused often in her work
and looked towards the high pastures with the pale brown lights and purple
shadows on them, rolling away and rising towards the great timbered ridges,
and these lifting here and there along their profiles a treeless peak or
bare divide into the regions above vegetation. She had no misgivings about
her home. Fences would not have improved her father's vast lawn, to her
mind, or white paint the low-browed front of his dwelling; nor did she feel
the want of a stair-carpet and a parlor-organ. She was sure that they,
the strangers, had never seen anything more lovely than her beloved river
dancing down between the hills, tripping over rapids, wrinkling over
sand-bars of its own spreading, and letting out its speed down the long
reaches where the channel was deep.
About four o'clock she found leisure to stroll along the shore with Tommy,
whose competitive energies as a fisherman had been stimulated by the advent
of strange craftsmen with scientific-looking tackle. Tommy must forthwith
show what native skill could do with a willow pole and grasshoppers for
bait. But Ruth Mary's sense of propriety would by no means tolerate Tommy's
intruding his company upon the strangers, and to frustrate any rash,
gregarious impulses on his part she judged it best to keep him in sight.
Tommy knew of a deep pool under the willows which he could whip, unseen,
in the shady hours of the afternoon. Thither he led Ruth Mary, leaving her
seated upon the bank above him lest she should be tempted to talk, and so
interfere with his sport. The moments went by in silence, broken only by
the river; Ruth Mary happy on the high bank in the sun, Tommy happy by
the shady pool below, and now and then slapping a lively trout upon the
stones. Across the river two Chinamen were washing gravel in a rude miner's
cradle, paddling about on the river's brink, and anon staggering down from
the gravel bank above, with large square kerosene cans filled with pay
dirt balanced on either end of a pole across their meagre shoulders.
Bare-headed, in their loose garments, with their pottering movements and
wrinkled faces shining with heat, they looked like two weird, unrevered old
women working out some dismal penance. High up in the sky the great black
buzzards sailed and sailed on slanting wing; the wood doves coo-oo-ed from
the willow thickets that gathered the sunlight close to the water's edge.
A few horses and cattle moved like specks upon the sides of the hills,
cropping the bunchgrass, but the greater herds had been driven up into the
high pastures where the snow falls early; and all these lower hills were
bare of life, unless one might fancy that the far-off processions of pines
against the sky, marching up the northern sides of the divides, had a
solemn personality, going up like priests to a sacrifice, or that the
restless river, flowing through the midst of all and bearing the light of
the white noonday sky deep into the bosom of the darkest hills, had a soul
as well as a voice. In its sparkle and ever-changing motion it was like a
child among its elders at play. The hills seemed to watch it, and the great
cloud-heads as they looked down between the parting summits, and the three
tall pines, standing about a young bird's flight from each other by the
shore and mingling their fitful crooning with the river's babble.