QUARTERDECK AND FOK’SLE
STORIES OF THE SEA
BY
MOLLY ELLIOT SEAWELL
_Author of Young Heroes of Our Navy, Children of Destiny, Maid Marian,
Throckmorton, etc._
ILLUSTRATED
[Illustration: Publisher crest]
BOSTON AND CHICAGO
W. A. WILDE COMPANY
Copyright, 1895.
By W. A. WILDE & CO.
_All rights reserved._
CONTENTS.
A QUARTERDECK STORY.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. The Capture of the Fort 9
II. Young Brydell’s Chums 21
III. Brydell’s First Failure 33
IV. Brydell’s Second Failure 45
V. Striking Out for Himself 57
VI. A New Life 71
VII. The Summer Cruise 87
VIII. A Question of Honor 100
IX. Grubb’s Honorable Discharge 112
X. In Command of the Squadron 120
XI. A Safe Return 135
XII. Brydell Redeems His Promise 139
A FOK’SLE STORY.
CHAPTER PAGE
I. On Board the Diomede 151
II. A Gallant Rescue 163
III. Dicky’s Patriotism 175
IV. An Important Errand 185
V. An Adventure with the Redcoats 194
VI. Jack Bell’s Secret 205
VII. General Prescott’s Capture 214
VIII. Dicky’s New Song 223
IX. Dicky Enlists 236
X. An Unexpected Encounter 245
XI. The Enemy Outwitted 258
ILLUSTRATIONS.
PAGE
“I was just trying to scare Grubb” (Frontispiece) 14
“Brydell, with Atkins, a very Smart Sailor, was at the Wheel” 95
“Brydell got the thumbed Bible and read to him” 117
“‘Look out, you Young Rebel,’ called out the Sergeant” 197
“The Yankees they have come and stolen Prescott from his Bed” 232
A QUARTERDECK STORY.
CHAPTER I.
THE CAPTURE OF THE FORT.
The friendship between Young Brydell and Grubb the marine came about in
this way.
One morning in May, just after Admiral Beaumont had finished the
beautiful toilet he made at precisely eight o’clock every morning, he
threw wide his bedroom shutters to see if the toilet of the navy yard
grounds had been made too. For the admiral was possessed by a demon of
neatness and order that is apt to develop in a naval officer long used
to the perfect cleanliness and discipline of a man-of-war.
The admiral was the tenderest-hearted old fellow in the world, but the
strictest sort of martial law prevailed in the matter of tidiness in
every part of the navy yard over which he exercised or could claim
jurisdiction.
A perpetual warfare raged between him and the nursemaids at the yard.
The nursemaids _would_ let the babies roll over on the admiral’s dearly
loved grass, and the sight of white dimity sunbonnets, dropped on the
gravel paths, was not wholly unknown.
The admiral was a bachelor of long standing and had a wholesome awe of
babies and their mammas, although he ordered the babies’ papas about
without any awe of them whatever. In vain he tried to negotiate with the
officers’ wives, offering as a basis that the babies be permitted a
promenade around the main walks between two and four every day, the
walks to be immediately rolled afterward. The officers’ wives simply
laughed at him, and the babies continued to kick up the gravel, and the
admiral retired completely discomfited.
As for the small boys at the yard, they harrowed the admiral’s kind soul
to that degree that he gloomily declared he would have the flag
half-masted and make the band play a dirge before the very next house in
which a boy baby was born. Nevertheless he had been known more than once
to have begged small boys off from the avenging birch switch.
To this general antagonism to small boys one exception was made—Young
Brydell. He was called Young Brydell because, young as his father, the
ensign, was, the boy was actually twenty years younger—being nine, and a
beautiful, terrible, lovable imp. Perhaps it was because Young Brydell
had no mother that the admiral and everybody else, except Aunt Emeline,
winked at the mischief in which he reveled. When Young Brydell drew his
first breath his mother had drawn her last—and so from the beginning a
tender atmosphere of love and pity seemed to surround him.
However, the escapade in which young Brydell figured that May morning
had so many elements of atrocity that the admiral at first determined to
punish him just as he would any other malefactor. Grubb was the
admiral’s orderly, and on this particular morning he had just knocked at
the bedroom door with the letter bag, when he heard something between a
roar and a shriek that caused him to dash the door open expecting to
find the admiral rolling on the carpet in an epileptic fit.
“Orderly!” shouted the admiral, turning as red as a turkey cock with
rage, “direct the pick and shovel squad at once to level that
construction, and bring that young gentleman here to me,” pointing out
the window to Young Brydell. Grubb then saw what was up.
In the middle of the great lawn, just in front of the admiral’s house,
was a dirt fort, constructed with no inconsiderable skill. The turf for
about twenty feet square had been ruthlessly torn up to make the glacis,
and over it floated a small American flag about as big as a pocket
handkerchief.
On top of the glacis stood Young Brydell with a miniature rifle pointed
straight at the admiral’s window. Around him lay the bodies of:—
I. Reginald Cunliffe, the captain’s only child and a mother’s darling,
who had been repeatedly told not to play with Young Brydell for fear he
would get hurt. At that moment the mother’s darling was representing a
wounded man and, rolling over in a new jacket was asking in feeble tones
for water.
II. Jack Sawyer, the doctor’s son, who personated a dead man with
intermittent returns to life to see how the thing was going.
III, IV, V. Dick, Rob, and Steve, young gentlemen belonging to the yard
who obeyed Young Brydell implicitly, although at least two years older
than he, and who submitted to pose as Indians slain by his victorious
hand.
VI. Micky O’Toole, the washerwoman’s boy, who, although directed to fall
dead at the first fire, had failed to do so and was crawling forward on
all fours, with a knife between his teeth and a tomahawk in his hand to
assassinate Young Brydell.
Grubb double-quicked it downstairs, but not so fast that the admiral was
not right on his heels. The pick and shovel squad were just passing as
Grubb called out to them:—
“The admiral says as how that there construction is to be leveled at
once”—
“And that young gentleman sent immediately to me!” bawled the admiral
from the doorway.
The squad started toward the middle of the lawn, where the turf had been
slaughtered to make Young Brydell a holiday. The admiral, swelling with
righteous wrath, remained on the steps, and Grubb, laughing in his
sleeve, made a bee line for Young Brydell. Grubb walked as elegantly as
any officer and was a fine, tall, handsome fellow to boot.
As the pick and shovel squad approached, Young Brydell, raising his
miniature rifle, pointed it straight toward them and shrieked out an
expression he had read in a book. “Up, men, and at ’em!”
But the men didn’t “up and at ’em.” They were too much engaged in
watching the coming conflict between Grubb’s brawny arm and Young
Brydell.
The rifle wasn’t much of an affair, but it had been known to kill a cat
twenty feet away. Young Brydell, who had the face of a cherub and the
alertness of a monkey, quickly brought the rifle to his shoulder and
aimed it straight at the approaching Grubb.
“The admiral says,” shouted Grubb in his big baritone, “as how I’m to
bring you immediately to him, and the Lord have mercy on your soul!”
Grubb, in saying this, reached forward to the rickety little flagstaff,
meaning to save the flag. But Young Brydell construed it differently and
thought Grubb meant to insult the national ensign.
“If you touch that flag, you’re a dead man!” shrieked he in his baby
treble; and at the same moment, the toy rifle being at his shoulder, he
called out to his demoralized command:—
“Ready—right—oblique—FIRE!”
And bang went the rifle in Grubb’s face!
Grubb put his hand to his ear, and when he brought it away, blood was
plentiful on it. A queer look came into his eye. “By the jumping Moses,
the monkey’s shot me,” said Grubb, reflectively and scarcely knowing
what he was saying.
The admiral, standing on the porch, gave a sort of gasp when the shot
rang out—and every man in the pick and shovel squad stood stock still
for a moment. The boys, except Micky O’Toole, all ran away immediately.
Grubb was the first to recover himself. Young Brydell had never lost his
composure and was now holding the rifle at parade rest, and the rifle
was exactly as high as he was.
“You come along!” suddenly cried Grubb, seizing the boy and the rifle
too, and forgetting to drop the flag. It hurt Young Brydell’s dignity to
be hauled off so summarily in the presence of the public, and it also
hurt his shoulder, but he said not a word until he stood before Admiral
Beaumont. The admiral was small and lithe and had a pair of light blue
eyes that could look through a man and nail him to the wall—and these
eyes were fixed upon Young Brydell in a way that would have made him
flinch to the marrow of his bones, had he been a man instead of a little
lad.
“BOY!” said the admiral, “I sent for you in order to reprove you for
your outrageous behavior in tearing up the turf and making ruin and
destruction of the government’s lawn. I find you, instead, guilty of a
most terrible act—a thing much more serious than any destruction you
might do to government property. But for God’s Providence you might be
this moment a murderer, boy as you are—for I saw you take deliberate aim
at the orderly and fire in his face!”
“Oh, no, sir!” chirped Young Brydell quite cheerfully; “I didn’t mean to
shoot, you know; I was just trying to scare Grubb!”
At that, Grubb, who had been standing very rigid, with his handkerchief
to his bleeding ear, suddenly smiled broadly and whispered involuntarily
under his breath:—
“Skeer Grubb!”
“You see, sir,” continued Young Brydell in a tone of animated argument,
“it was like this. We got up early this morning and built the fort—there
were seven of us, and it didn’t take half an hour.”
“There were others responsible, then?” asked the admiral, for like
everybody else he had taken it for granted that Young Brydell was bound
to be the ringleader, if not the sole culprit.
Young Brydell thrust his hands into the pockets of his sailor suit,
planted his feet wide apart, and reflected.
“Well, sir,” he said, “there were the others—but I started it. Cunliffe
was afraid; he said he knew his mother would punish him, but I told him
I’d do something worser for him than his mother would if he didn’t obey
orders—because I’m captain of the company; it’s C company, sir, you
know, and orders must be obeyed.”
“Go on, sir!” said the admiral sternly.
“Cunliffe was afraid, and so he did as I told him. The other fellows,
except Micky O’Toole, said they were afraid of _you_—they say you are a
regular Tartar about the grass.”
“They do—do they? Continue, I beg,” replied the admiral with a snort.
“But I told ’em,” cried Young Brydell in a triumphant voice, “that _I’d_
fix _you_. I said: ‘We’ll plant the United States flag on that fort, and
won’t anybody, not even the admiral himself, dare to pull it down!’”
The admiral at this coughed and began to twist his gray mustache.
“When I saw Grubb coming, sir, as I tell you, I just wanted to frighten
him, but before I knew it, just by accident, sir, the rifle went off,
and the first thing I knew the ball had hit Grubb’s ear. But I’m sorry
for it, and when I get my ’lowance next week, I’ll give it to him. I get
a silver half-dollar every Saturday, sir, from papa, but I think, sir,—I
think Grubb deserved what he got for hauling down the flag, and if I’d
have thought of it, I’d have peppered his legs for him, sure enough.”
There was a pause after this. The admiral’s keen old eyes looked into
Young Brydell’s brown ones, and the man’s eyes had a kind of simplicity
in them like a child’s, while the child’s had a determination like a
man’s. Grubb still stood with a broad smile on his face, and the blood
dripped upon the handkerchief he held to his ear.
“Now,” said the admiral, “will you tell me what you think I ought to do
with you and your companions in mischief?”
“I think—I think you oughtn’t to do anything with the other fellows
except me and Micky O’Toole, ’cause we led ’em on. Micky didn’t think
about the fort first, but as soon as it was started, Micky helped me on
and said he didn’t care if he did get a licking.”
“I am not concerned about Micky O’Toole,” said the admiral. “Micky, as I
understand, occupies a subordinate position in your company.”
“He’s first sergeant, sir.”
“Micky, I take it, is merely your tool. Very well, sir, I shall report
this whole thing to your father, and you must take the consequences.
Orderly, make my compliments to Mr. Brydell, and ask him to do me the
favor to come here. But stop—your ear.”
“’Tis no matter, sir,” answered Grubb, touching his cap. “I’ll call by
the dispensary after I’ve done my message.”
The admiral stepped through the open hall door for his cap, and putting
it on as he came out, said to Young Brydell with awful sternness:
“Remain where you are until I return.”
“Yes, sir,” answered Young Brydell very respectfully.