A SCHOONER, A SKIPPER, AND A SKULL
It was a few days later, when a goodly number of the late Uncle Tom's
easily negotiable securities had been converted into cash, and the cash
deposited in the bank, that Cleggett bought the Jasper B.
He discovered her near the town of Fairport, Long Island, one
afternoon. The vessel lay in one of the canals which reach inward from
the Great South Bay. She looked as if she might have been there for
some time. Evidently, at one period, the Jasper B. had played a part
in some catch-coin scheme of summer entertainment; a scheme that had
failed. Little trace of it remained except a rotting wooden platform,
roofless and built close to the canal, and a gangway arrangement from
this platform to the deck of the vessel.
The Jasper B. had seen better days; even a landsman could tell that.
But from the blunt bows to the weather-scarred stern, on which the name
was faintly discernible, the hulk had an air about it, the air of
something that has lived; it was eloquent of a varied and interesting
past.
And, to complete the picture, there sat on her deck a gnarled and brown
old man. He smoked a short pipe which was partially hidden in a tangle
of beard that had once been yellowish red but was now streaked with
dirty white; he fished earnestly without apparent result, and from time
to time he spat into the water. Cleggett's nimble fancy at once put
rings into his ears and dowered him with a history.
Cleggett noticed, as he walked aboard the vessel, that she seemed to be
jammed not merely against, but into the bank of the canal. She was
nearer the shore than he had ever seen a vessel of any sort. Some
weeds grew in soil that had lodged upon the deck; in a couple of places
they sprang as high as the rail. Weeds grew on shore; in fact, it
would have taken a better nautical authority than Cleggett to tell
offhand just exactly where the land ended and the Jasper B. began. She
seemed to be possessed of an odd stability; although the tide was
receding the Jasper B. was not perceptibly agitated by the motion of
the water. Of anchor, or mooring chains or cables of any sort, there
was no sign.
The brown old man--he was brown not only as to the portions of his skin
visible through his hair and whiskers, but also as to coat and trousers
and worn boots and cap and pipe and flannel shirt--turned around as
Cleggett stepped aboard, and stared at the invader with a shaggy-browed
intensity that was embarrassing.
It occurred to Cleggett that the old man might own the vessel and make
a home of her.
"I beg your pardon if I am intruding," ventured Cleggett, politely,
"but do you live here?"
The brown old man made an indeterminate motion of his head, without
otherwise replying at once. Then he took a cake of dark, hard-looking
tobacco from the starboard pocket of his trousers and a clasp knife
from the port side. He shaved off a fresh pipeful, rolled it in his
palms, knocked the old ash from his pipe, refilled and relighted it,
all with the utmost deliberation. Then he cut another small piece of
tobacco from the "plug" and popped it into his mouth. Cleggett
perceived with surprise that he smoked and chewed tobacco at the same
time. As he thus refreshed himself he glanced from time to time at
Cleggett as if unfavorably impressed. Finally he closed his knife with
a click and suddenly piped out in a high, shrill voice:
"No! Do you?"
"I--er--do I what?" It had taken the old man so long to answer that
Cleggett had forgotten his own question, and the shrill fierceness of
the voice was disconcerting.
He regarded Cleggett contemptuously, spat on the deck, and then
demanded truculently:
"D'ye want to buy any seed potatoes?"
"Why--er, no," said Cleggett.
"Humph!" said the brown one, with the air of meaning that it was only
to be expected of an idiot like Cleggett that he would NOT want to buy
any seed potatoes. But after a further embarrassing silence he
relented enough to give Cleggett another chance.
"You want some seed corn!" he announced rather than asked.
"No. I------"
"Tomato plants!" shrilled the brown one, as if daring him to deny it.
"No."
He turned his back on Cleggett, as if he had lost interest, and began
to wind up his fishing line on a squeaky reel.
"Who owns this boat?" Cleggett touched him on the elbow.
"Thinkin' of buyin' her?"
"Perhaps. Who owns her?"
"What would you do with her?"
"I might fix her up and sail her. Who owns her?"
"She'll take a sight o' fixin'."
"No doubt. Who did you say owned her?"
The old man, who had finished with the rusty reel, deigned to look at
Cleggett again.
"Dunno as I said."
"But who DOES own her?"
"She's stuck fast in the mud and her rudder's gone."
"I see you know a lot about ships," said Cleggett, deferentially,
giving up the attempt to find out who owned her. "I picked you out for
an old sailor the minute I saw you." He thought he detected a kindlier
gleam in the old man's eye as that person listened to these words.
"The' ain't a stick in her," said the ancient fisherman. "She's got no
wheel and she's got no nothin'. She used to be used as a kind of a
barroom and dancin' platform till the fellow that used her for such
went out o' business."
He paused, and then added:
"What might your name be?"
"Cleggett."
He appeared to reflect on the name. But he said:
"If you was to ask me, I'd say her timbers is sound."
"Tell me," said Cleggett, "was she a deep-water ship? Could a ship
like her sail around the world, for instance? I can tell that you know
all about ships."
Something like a grin of gratified vanity began to show on the brown
one's features. He leaned back against the rail and looked at Cleggett
with the dawn of approval in his eyes.
"My name's Abernethy," he suddenly volunteered. "Isaiah Abernethy.
The fellow that owns her is Goldberg. Abraham Goldberg. Real estate
man."
"Cleggett began to get an insight into Mr. Abernethy's peculiar ideas
concerning conversation. A native spirit of independence prevented Mr.
Abernethy from dealing with an interlocutor's remarks in the sequence
that seemed to be desired by the interlocutor. He took a selection of
utterances into his mind, rolled them over together, and replied in
accordance with some esoteric system of his own.
"Where is Mr. Goldberg's office?" asked Cleggett.
"You've come to the proper party to get set right about ships," said
Mr. Abernethy, complacently. "Either you was sent to me by someone that
knows I'm the proper party to set you right about ships, or else you
got an eye in your own head that can recognize a man that comes of a
seafarin' fambly."
"You ARE an old sailor, then? Maybe you are an old skipper? Perhaps
you're one of the retired Long Island sea captains we're always hearing
so much about?"
"So fur as sailin' her around the world is concerned," said Mr.
Abernethy, glancing over the hulk, "if she was fixed up she could be
sailed anywheres--anywheres!"
"What would you call her--a schooner?"
"This here Goldberg," said Mr. Abernethy, "has his office over town
right accost from the railroad depot."
And with that he put his fishing pole over his shoulder and prepared to
leave--a tall, strong-looking old man with long legs and knotty wrists,
who moved across the deck with surprising spryness. At the gangplank he
sang out without turning his head:
"As far as my bein' a skipper's concerned, they's no law agin' callin'
me Cap'n Abernethy if you want to. I come of a seafarin' fambly."
He crossed the platform; when he had gone thirty yards further he
stopped, turned around, and shouted:
"Is she a schooner, hey? You want to know is she a schooner? If you
was askin' me, she ain't NOTHIN' now. But if you was to ask me again I
might say she COULD be schooner-rigged. Lots of boats IS
schooner-rigged."
There are affinities between atom and atom, between man and woman,
between man and man. There are also affinities between men and
things-if you choose to call a ship, which has a spirit of its own,
merely a thing. There must have been this affinity between Cleggett
and the Jasper B. Only an unusual person would have thought of buying
her. But Cleggett loved her at first sight.
Within an hour after he had first seen her he was in Mr. Abraham
Goldberg's office.
As he was concluding his purchase--Mr. Goldberg having phoned
Cleggett's bankers--he was surprised to discover that he was buying
about half an acre of Long Island real estate along with her. For that
matter he had thought it a little odd in the first place when he had
been directed to a real estate agent as the owner of the craft. But as
he knew very little about business, and nothing at all about ships, he
assumed that perhaps it was quite the usual thing for real estate
dealers to buy and sell ships abutting on the coast of Long Island.
"I had only intended to buy the vessel," said Cleggett. "I don't know
that I'll be able to use the land."
Mr. Goldberg looked at Cleggett with a slight start, as if he were not
sure that he had heard aright, and opened his mouth as if to say
something. But nothing came of it--not just then, at least. When the
last signature had been written, and Clegget's check had been folded by
Mr. Goldberg's plump, bejeweled fingers and put into Mr. Goldberg's
pocketbook, Mr. Goldberg remarked:
"You say you can't use the ship?"
"No; the land. I'm surprised to find that the land goes with the ship."
"Why, it doesn't," said Mr. Goldberg. "It's the ship that goes with
the land. She was on the land when I bought the plot, and I just left
her there. Nobody's paid any attention to her for years."
The words "on the land" grated on Cleggett.
"You mean on the water, don't you?"
"In the mud, then," suggested Mr. Goldberg.
"But she'll sail all right," said Cleggett.
"I suppose if she was decorated up with sails and things she'd sail.
Figuring on sailing her anywhere in particular?"
Subtly irritated, Cleggett answered: "Oh, no, no! Not anywhere in
particular!"
"Going to live on her this summer?--Outdoor sleeping room, and all
that?"
"I'm thinking of it."
"You could turn her into a house boat easy enough. I had a friend who
turned an old barge like that into a house boat and had a lot of fun
with her."
"Barge?" Cleggett rose and buttoned his coat; the conversation was
somehow growing more and more distasteful to him. "You wouldn't call
the Jasper B. a BARGE, would you?"
"Well, you wouldn't call her a YACHT, would you?" said Mr. Goldberg.
"Perhaps not," admitted Cleggett, "perhaps not. She's more like a bark
than a yacht."
"A bark? I dunno. Always thought a bark was bigger. A scow's more
her size, ain't it?"
"Scow?" Cleggett frowned. The Jasper B. a scow! "You mean a
schooner, don't you?"
"Schooner?" Mr. Goldberg grinned good-naturedly at his departing
customer. "A kind of a schooner-scow, huh?"
"No, sir, a schooner!" said Cleggett, reddening, and turning in the
doorway. "Understand me, Mr. Goldberg, a schooner, sir! A schooner!"
And standing with a frown on his face until every vestige of the smile
had died from Mr. Goldberg's lips, Cleggett repeated once more: "A
schooner, Mr. Goldberg!"
"Yes, sir--there's no doubt of it--a schooner, Mr. Cleggett," said Mr.
Goldberg, turning pale and backing away from the door.
The ordinary man inspects a house or a horse first and buys it, or
fails to buy it, afterward; but genius scorns conventions; Cleggett was
not an ordinary man; he often moved straight towards his object by
inspiration; great poets and great adventurers share this faculty;
Cleggett paid for the Jasper B. first and went back to inspect his
purchase later.
The vessel lay about two miles from the center of Fairport. He could
get within half a mile of it by trolley. Nevertheless, when he reached
the Jasper B. again after leaving Mr. Goldberg it was getting along
towards dusk.
He first entered the cabin. It was of a good size and divided into
several compartments. But it was in a state of dilapidation and
littered with a jumble of odds and ends which looked like the ruins of
a barroom. As he turned to ascend to the deck again, after possibly
five minutes, intending to take a look at the forecastle next, he heard
the sound of a motor.
Looking out of the cabin he saw a taxicab approaching the boat from the
direction of Fairport. It was a large machine, but it was overloaded
with seven or eight men. It stopped within twenty yards of the vessel,
and two men got out, one of them evidently a person who imposed some
sort of leadership on the rest of the party. This was a tall fellow,
with a slouching gait and round shoulders. And yet, to judge from his
movements, he was both quick and powerful. The other was a short,
stout man with a commonplace, broad red face and flaxen hair. The two
stood for a moment in colloquy in the road that led from Fairport
proper to the bayside, passing near the Jasper B., and Cleggett heard
the shorter of the two men say:
"I'm sure I saw somebody aboard of her."
"How long ago, Heinrich?" asked the tall man.
"An hour or so," said Heinrich.
"It was old man Abernethy; he's harmless," said the tall fellow. "He's
the only person that's been aboard her in years."
"There was someone else," persisted Heinrich. "Someone who was talking
to Abernethy."
The tall man mumbled something about having been a fool not to buy her
before this; Cleggett did not catch all of the remark. Then the tall
fellow said:
"We'll go aboard, Heinrich, and take a look around."
With that they advanced towards the vessel. Cleggett stepped on deck
from the cabin companionway, and both men stopped short at the sight of
him, Heinrich obviously a trifle confused, but the other one in no wise
abashed. He made no attempt, this tall fellow, to give the situation a
casual turn. What he did was to stand and stare at Cleggett, candidly,
and with more than a touch of insolence, as if trying to beat down
Cleggett's gaze.
Cleggett, staring in his turn, perceived that the tall man, ungainly as
he was, affected a bizarre individualism in the matter of dress. His
clothing cried out, rather than suggested, that it was expensive. His
feet were cased in button shoes with fancy tops; his waistcoat, cut in
the extreme of style, revealed that little strip of white which falsely
advertises a second waistcoat beneath, but in his case the strip was
too broad. There were diamonds on the fingers of both powerful hands.
But the thing that grated particularly upon Cleggett was the character
of the man's scarfpin. It was by far the largest ornament of the sort
that Cleggett had ever seen; he was near enough to the fellow to make
out that it had been carved from a piece of solid ivory in the likeness
of a skull. In the eyeholes of the skull two opals flamed with an evil
levin. The man suggested to Cleggett, at first glance, a bartender who
had come into money, or a drayman who had been promoted to an important
office in a labor union and was spending the most of a considerable
salary on his person. And yet his face, more closely observed, somehow
gave the lie to his clothes, for it was not lacking in the signs of
intelligence. In spite of his taste, or rather lack of taste, there
was no hint of weakness in his physiognomy. His features were harsh,
bold, predatory; a slightly yellowish tinge about the temples and cheek
bones, suggestive of the ivory ornament, proclaimed a bilious
temperament.
Cleggett, both puzzled and nettled by the man's persistent gaze,
advanced towards him across the deck of the Jasper B. and down the
gangplank, hand on hip, and called out sharply:
"Well, my friend, you will know me the next time you see me!"
The tall man turned without a word and walked back to the taxicab, the
occupants of which had watched this singular duel of looks in silence.
In the act of getting into the machine he face about again and said,
with a lift of the lip that showed two long, protruding canine teeth of
an almost saffron hue:
"I WILL know you again."
He spoke with a kind of cold hostility that gave his words all the
effect of a threat. Cleggett felt the blood leap faster through his
veins; he tingled with a fierce, illogical desire to strike the fellow
on the mouth; his soul stirred with a premonition of conflict, and the
desire for it. And yet, on the surface of things at least, the man had
been nothing more than rude; as Cleggett watched the machine make off
towards an isolated road house on the bayside he wondered at the quick
intensity of his own antipathy. Unconsciously he flexed his wrist in
his characteristic gesture. Scarcely knowing that he spoke, he
murmured:
"That man gets on my nerves."
That man was destined to do something more than get on Cleggett's
nerves before the adventures of the Jasper B. were ended.