on her bow planks.
"That's her other dory, all right," said Shorty. "But they still have
the vessel under them." Nobody said anything to that.
Next we picked up a hatch-cover. And the hatch-cover, when we got it
aboard, had a star carved on it.
"Yes, the main hatch-cover o' the _Henriette_ had a star carved on it,"
said Shorty. "But there's plenty o' chances for her yet."
What looked like a watermelon came drifting up.
Shorty looked to see better. "If it's a watermelon, I give up--she's
gone," said Shorty. "They's nobody heaves a watermelon overboard to
lighten a vessel."
It was a watermelon; and we all gave up. Everybody knew that the
_Henriette's_ cook was a great fellow to ship a watermelon and keep it
down among the ice for the passage home. As Shorty said, there was no
reason ever for a watermelon being hove overboard. And it couldn't
have floated out of her hold unless the vessel had broken up. The
mast, the gasolene-barrel, the dory, the hatch-cover, and now the melon.
Shorty made a flying leap into the yellow dory towing astern, and,
leaning far enough out to lay the dory over on her side, he spread wide
his arms and the melon floated right in over the gunnel and into his
arms, and he took it to his bosom.
Big Bill hurried to take the melon when Shorty passed it up over the
rail. "Poor little _Henriette_ an' the good fellers in yer--where are
yer now, I wonder?" said Bill, looking down on the melon. And then he
tested it for soundness. "Only one soft spot where she bumped into
somethin'," announced Bill. He called for a knife and cut it up, and
tasted a piece.
"Not a touch o' salt," he said, and passed slices of it around.
A good-tasting melon, everybody said; and eating it on the _Esther's_
quarter we said all the good things we knew of the Henriette and her
skipper and crew.
Two days later the _Esther_ put into Newport. We came past Point
Judith in a night of black vapor--a bad night for Big Bill. He saw
steamer lights all sides of him, and never went to sleep at all.
We stood up Narragansett Bay in the dawn, and the cook of the _Esther_,
smoking his pipe on the deck, was the boy could tell all about the big
summer houses on the bluffs. There is that about cooks--they always
seem to hold more gossip than anybody else aboard a vessel. Names of
who owned the cottages, how many millions--and how they made the
millions--was what the cook could tell us, with a few bits of flaming
gossip added on.
Some big schooner-yachts from New York were anchored in Newport Harbor.
One of them, as large again as any fresh halibutter that ever was
launched--a great black-enamelled cruising schooner with a high
free-board, perhaps fifteen times the tonnage of the _Henriette_--held
the eyes of all. "If we'd only had her out there the other day!" was
what most of us were thinking.
"She'd be the girl to walk us out o' shoal water in that breeze!" put
in Shorty. "We'd had her 'nd we'd 'a' washed her face for her!"
"And mebbe a few o' them fancy skylights and brass rails off her deck,
too," said Big Bill.
"Maybe. But I'd like to had her tried out, just the same."
Tied up to the other side of Long Wharf when we got in was Tom
O'Brien's vessel. Big Bill, like a good gossip, waddled over to get
the news, and soon came galloping back.
"She's gone!" he called out, and showed us a Boston paper with the
report of how four men's bodies with a life-preserver marked
_Henriette_ had been picked up off Nantucket the day before. There was
also the story in a New York paper of how a big ocean liner had been in
the storm. She was six hundred foot long and bound for New York.
There was a bishop aboard, and when it got too rough for the
passengers, some of them wrote notes to the bishop asking him to hold a
prayer-meeting in the saloon. He started to hold the prayer-meeting
but it grew too rough. They had to quit.
"And they in good deep water where they were! I wonder what they'd 'a'
thought if they'd been in this little one and where she was?" said Tom
Haile.
"Maybe they'd held the prayer-meetin' anyway, then," said Shorty.
We had come away from the _Henriette_ in only our oilskins and trousers
and undershirts. Tom Haile and Tom O'Brien and a couple of fish-buyers
on Long Wharf started a collection to get us some clothes. We took the
money up Thames Street to some clothing dealer who was a brother
Moccasin to Tom Haile and O'Brien. But belonging to the same order
didn't make any difference. The clothing dealer wouldn't take a cent
off.
"Not even for shipwrecked seamen?" asked O'Brien.
"Being shipwrecked seamen don't make the clothes cost any less to me,"
said the dealer.
"A hell of a fine brother Moccasin you are!" said O'Brien.
"A fine brother Moccasin yourself!" said the clothing dealer, "wantin'
me to lose money on a sale."
So we went to another place, and he happened to be a Jew and not a
Moccasin. Not that he wouldn't like to be a member of that noble
order; which made O'Brien and Haile warm up to him, so that they forgot
to argue about the price at all.
They had to saw a foot off Shorty's new pants to make them fit, and the
coat came pretty low down on him; but no harm in that Bill and Oliver
and I said. We got pretty good fits.
They bought tickets for us and we took the train to Gloucester, and
then I went down to Tony Webber's to get a shave, and there was a young
fellow in the chair next to me said to Tony: "Yer sh'd have been out in
the breeze!"
"What vessel?" I asked.
"The _Thunderbolt_," he says.
"And what shape is she in?"
"Go down to the halibut company's wharf and see," he says.
I did go down later. She'd lost both masts to near her deck, and her
bowsprit was broken off short at the knightheads--not a thing left on
her except her last coat of paint and a few twisted yarns of her lower
shrouds. But, thank the Lord, no men lost. They had all stayed aboard.
"They were luckier than the _Hiawatha_. Heard about the _Hiawatha_?"
asked a man in the chair.
"No; what about her?"
"I had a brother on her," said this man. "She was hove down and her
whole crew washed over--hove flat down and the whole crew of eight men
in the water at once. Six of 'em got back--first one and then another,
the first of those back aboard heavin' lines to the others still
overboard. Two men never came back, though--pretty rough it was."
On his own vessel, the _Thunderbolt_, it was pretty rough sailing, and
in the middle of it there was one of the crew--he'd never been
off-shore fishing in his life before this--he came on deck with a
life-preserver around him. "Seas to our masthead," said the man off
the _Thunderbolt_, "and he comes on deck with a life-preserver. He
must 'a' thought he was bein' wrecked in some swimmin'-pool in some
Turkish bath 'stead of old South Shoal in a gale. If ever he'd got two
feet from the deck of that vessel, he'd lasted 'bout two seconds--him
and his life-preserver!"
Tony, the barber, was so interested in the man with the life-preserver
that he gave me a fine cut on my right cheek.
John and the skipper and Steve and the cook were buried that same day
in Gloucester, and we all went to the funeral; and coming away from the
funeral: "You goin' back fishin'?" said Shorty to me.
"No more fishin' for me," I said. And Shorty and Oliver, they both
said never again for them, either.
That was day before yesterday. This morning the master of the
_Antoinette_ came along with Shorty and Oliver and asked me didn't I
want to make just one more swordfishing trip while the season was on.
I looked at Shorty. He was wearing a smile and had a rose on his coat
some girl had given him. "I thought you said you were through fishing,
Shorty?"
"So I did," said Shorty, "but a man says a lot o' things in his
careless hours. I've had a couple o' good nights' sleep since."
"And you, Oliver?" I said.
"Me? Well, there's a wife and an old mother up to my house, and I
never read anywhere the gover'ment was paying out money to the families
of fishermen who didn't want to fish any more, did you?" said Oliver.
So I said all right I'd go along, too. "What's the use--we're
sea-birds," I said. "It's our home and our living--where else should
we go but to sea, at the last? But have you seen Big Bill?"
Yes, Shorty had seen Big Bill. He had hopes to get a job at the
car-barn. "He's had two warnings, he says," said Shorty, "and not to
wait for a third would be foolish. He's up on Main Street right now
with people buying drinks for him, while he tells 'em how he managed to
save himself off the _Henriette_."
Well, Big Bill's all right; but he's alive to-day because a better
man--the same being John--shoved him into a dory when he might have
gone himself instead. And Big Bill thinks of John only as an
irresponsible young fellow who liked to play jokes with blueberry
dumplings.
The best men don't always come back from sea. Four good men stayed
aboard the _Henriette_, and two of them--the skipper and John--were
certainly quicker and braver than any of the others of us. The skipper
could have come away first, but he didn't.
Nor John. Six years I was shipmates with John and he was one good
shipmate. Good shipmates--they make a long cruise short, a rough sea
smooth. Good shipmates! You don't mind going with good shipmates
alongside.
And the _Antoinette_, she's a sister ship to the _Henriette_--thirteen
tons net and thirty tons of ice in the hold. And that same dock lumper
who never left a vessel leave Duncan's without he sees her off--he says
she's down by the head, too.
A fine joy-killer, that lad.
We're putting out in an hour. So fair wind, boy--I'm off.