They did not get away as soon as the Captain had expected. Before coming
to this anchorage, the oil-casks had been securely stowed against the
homeward voyage; the whaling gear had been taken out of the boats and
cleaned and oiled and sent below. The rigging was set up and tarred
down, and the hull and spars were scraped and painted to suit even Black
Pawl’s exacting eye. With the last stores aboard, the schooner was ready
for sea; but toward mid-afternoon the weather-signs became unfavorable,
and it was decided to lie where they were until whatever weather was
brewing should have blown itself out. The narrow outlet from the bay was
no place in which to be caught by a squall.
When this word of the Captain’s went forward, the men gathered in knots
upon the deck, talking together; and Black Pawl saw his son and mate
speak to one or two. He was not surprised, therefore, when a group of
the men presently came aft and stopped at the break of the deck to speak
to him. With Red Pawl behind him and Dan Darrin at one side, he looked
down on them. The missionary and the girl were aft by the wheel.
“Well, what now?” Black Pawl asked good-humoredly.
“We’m heard you’ll lay here till the wind’s fit, sir,” declared the
spokesman.
“Yes. Object?”
The man grinned. “Not us, sir. But--what about a break ashore? Get the
kinks out of our legs.”
“And get the kinks into your head, eh?” Black Pawl chuckled. “Drown
yourselves in some native rot-gut?”
The man looked sheepish. “The mate were thinking you’d leave us go.”
“The mate were thinking, were he?” Black Pawl mimicked. “Then why come
to me?”
The man shifted uneasily from one foot to the other. Black Pawl looked
toward his son. “What’s the matter, Red?” he asked.
“I told them it was fair they should go,” Red Pawl answered, dourly,
“that there was no reason you should object.”
“What if I object without reason?”
“That’s despotism!”
Black Pawl laughed aloud. “Where did you learn that word?”
“You’ve taught it to me.”
The Captain’s smile upon his son became terrible; but when he turned to
the men, his voice was level and without emotion. “There’s no reason you
should not go,” he said, and they cheered. “Except that I’ll not let
you!” he added grimly. “Get forward, you swipes. And look sharp.”
They hesitated an instant, even then, in stupefaction at the overthrow
of their sudden hopes; then they fell to mumbling among themselves. Dan
Darrin took a step forward to his Captain’s side, as though to support
him; but Black Pawl needed no help to enforce his orders.
“Sharp, I say!” he cried cheerfully, and he leaped among them, his long
arms flailing. He struck with the open hand, but those whom he struck
fell; and others fell in their flurry to escape him. In a matter of
seconds the deck was clear to the try-works, save for the harpooners by
the starboard rail, who laughed at the crew’s discomfiture. Once safely
forward, the men grinned too. Black Pawl had the strange faculty of
commanding a liking even from those over whom he tyrannized. When he
came aft, his eye lighted on his son, and he asked gently:
“Now, was that not unreasonable despotism?”
Red Pawl replied sullenly: “Yes.”
His father’s eyes twinkled. “Louder,” he enjoined, “--so that your
audience, yonder, may hear.” And he asked again: “Was not that brutal
tyranny?”
His son’s eyes blazed morosely now. “Yes, brutal, and be damned to you!”
he bellowed; and his voice carried the length of the schooner.
“So!” said Black Pawl. “You’ve got the effect you were after--my son.
You’re the hero, defending them against my unjust fists. Be satisfied!”
The son gave the father eye for eye. “You’re a brave man--and a damned
rash man,” he said.
“Fiddle!” Black Pawl replied. “If you mean what you seem to mean, and if
you had the sap of a man, you’d strike now. You’ll never make an
omelet, Red, my boy. You’re too squeamish about breaking eggs.”
He turned, with that, and strode toward the missionary and the girl; and
at the same instant Dan Darrin caught Red’s eye, and the two stood for a
moment in a wordless and motionless conflict. In that clash of eyes, Dan
Darrin told the mate that he was the Captain’s man; and Red Pawl
understood, and made no sign, but turned away.
They made out of the bay the third day after, the homeward-bound pennant
flying. The wooded shores slid past them, lush green beneath the sun;
and as dusk came on, they dropped the islands behind them, and the
sudden night of the tropics came down. Overhead, the stars. Darrin and
the girl were on the quarter-deck together. Once in the open sea, Black
Pawl and his son had gone below. Ruth liked Dan Darrin. She liked Black
Pawl. She liked the harpooners--liked every man aft, save perhaps the
Captain’s son. Red Pawl was a hard man to like, on any count. But the
others were her friends.
Darrin, however, already held a place apart. They were within a few
years of the same age; he was an honest, four-square man with a clear
eye, and she was a girl, and beautiful. Perhaps it lay in that. They
looked out across the sea, this night, and up at the stars. The stars in
southern seas are nearer and more intimate than in our northern
latitude. It is as if the veil of our smoky atmosphere were drawn aside;
and they ride the heavens for us clear and unobscured. The eye more
easily penetrates the vast reaches of infinity; and the stars appear in
orderly perspective, less like luminous pin-holes in a deep, blue board.
Dan Darrin spoke of this to the girl; and she replied that she had never
seen them otherwise.
“You mean you were born out here? Never been back home?”
“I was born back home,” she told him. “But I was only a baby when we
came out here,--my mother and I,--you see. So I don’t remember.”
He wanted to ask her more. Where was “back home”? He knew her name; but
what lay behind her name? He was eager to read each chapter and each
page of her Book of Life. But something--perhaps it was her own
reticence--held his tongue.
Another had wondered with him--Red Pawl. The first mate had a hot eye
for a woman, beautiful or not. And this woman was beautiful. He had
watched her sidewise, from the beginning; he had asked herself about
herself. She told him nothing; and he went to the old missionary, who
told him no more than nothing. “She and her mother lived on the island,
near me,” he said. “When her mother died, last spring, she came to me. I
saw she must go back to her kind. So--we are going. That is all.”
“Running away?” Red Pawl suggested maliciously. “Why? What from?”
The missionary looked at him steadily. “From men unfit to look upon
her,” he said; and Red Pawl, in spite of himself, was abashed, and let
the matter lie.
When, on this night, he missed Darrin and the girl, he went on deck and
found them, and the stars. So he gave Darrin a task to do, thinking to
have the girl to himself. But she went below as soon as Darrin left her,
in spite of Red Pawl’s suggestion that she keep the deck with him.
When she was gone, the first mate paced back and forth for a space, then
fell to talking with the man at the wheel. They talked in undertones,
as though afraid of being heard.
Next day they threw the try-works overside, brick by brick. The crew
made it an occasion of rejoicing. It meant the hard and dangerous toil
of the whale-fisheries was over and done with; it meant home, and money
to spend, and a few weeks ashore. They shouted and sang at the business
of dismantling the ovenlike structure where so many flenches of blubber
had been boiled to scrapple for the oil they yielded. The men vied in
hurling the bricks, to see which might throw one farthest out across the
water. They shied half-bricks at the birds that still followed them from
the islands they had left.
When the last brick was gone, the big pots were lowered into the holds
and made secure; the chimney and the firebox were stowed away; and the
broad pan which is always full of water when the pots are going, so that
the deck may not be charred, was scoured and put in its place. Remained
only the littered deck where the try-works had been. This they scrubbed
till the deck-planking was white as a bleached bone. And they sang at
the work, for the day was fine, and the wind was fair, and they were
putting behind them the seas where they had toiled.
Black Pawl shouted at them, jovially abusive; and Dan Darrin lent a hand
when another strong hand was needed now and then; Red Pawl scowled from
the rail, and cursed them when they lagged. The old missionary and the
girl watched all this, as they followed all the life of the schooner,
from the quarter. To be at sea on each days was to the girl bliss and
poetry and joy unspeakable. She told Dan Darrin so when he came aft.
“It’s beautiful,” she cried. “So fine, and big! I don’t think I should
ever tire of the sea.”
Black Pawl heard, and laughed, and called to her: “You’ll have chance
enough to learn. You’ll get your fill of it before the end. We’ll not
touch land from now till we make home harbor, child.”
She nodded, accepting what he said as true. And he meant it so; but as
matters turned out, when Black Pawl said they would not touch land
again, he was wrong.