OUT TO THE FISHING-GROUNDS
While the boys were thus concerned down in the Thoroughfare, at the foot
of Grand Island, certain events were happening away over across the
Western Bay that might perhaps affect them later.
If a direct line were drawn across the middle of Grand Island, and
extended straight across the Western Bay to the neighbouring mainland, it
would touch that shore in about the locality of the town of Bellport.
This was a little community, dull in winter, and flourishing in summer
with the advent of cottagers and visitors from the little city of
Mayville, some miles up along the shore of the bay, and from the towns
farther north up the river. It was a favourite resort of yachtsmen in a
modest way.
On the afternoon that young Harry Brackett had quietly withdrawn from the
crowd of villagers in the store at Southport, coincident with the
disclosures of Captain Sam regarding his adventure in the squire’s
sailboat, he had not seen fit to return to the shelter of his father’s
roof. Instead, he had taken the night boat over to Mayville, and thence,
the following morning, made his way to Bellport, where he had some bosom
friends after his own heart.
What this meant was that, instead of entering into the healthful sports
that made the place of especial attraction, he and they were more often
to be found loitering about the office of the principal hotel, the
Bellport House, or playing at billiards in a room off the office, or
occupying the veranda chairs, with their feet upon the railing.
Young Brackett had been engaged one afternoon, soon following his
arrival, in a game of billiards with a companion, when he was accosted by
another acquaintance.
“Hello, Brackett,” said the newcomer. “You’re quite a stranger. How are
things over at Southport? Going to stay at home now for awhile?”
This salutation, commonplace as it was, had, it seemed, an effect upon a
tall, light-complexioned man, who was seated in a corner of the room,
where he had been enjoying his cigar and idly watching the game. For he
looked up quickly toward the boy addressed, and, during the continuation
of the game, certainly paid more attention to Harry Brackett than to the
play itself.
At the conclusion of the game, young Brackett’s companions bade him good
day and departed. Thereupon the stranger arose and advanced toward Harry
Brackett, smiling pleasantly. Stroking a heavy blond moustache with the
fingers of his left hand and picking up one of the cues with the other,
he said:
“You play a good game, don’t you? Shall we have another? I’ll be pleased
to pay for it, you know. Glad to have some one that plays as well as you
do for an opponent.”
It being inbred in young Brackett’s nature never to decline to enjoy
himself at another’s expense, he accepted the invitation at once.
Moreover, he was pleased at the compliment—which was, perhaps, more in
the nature of flattery, as he was but indifferently skilful at best.
“Do you come from around this way?” asked the stranger, as they proceeded
to play.
“Yes,” answered young Brackett. “My home is at Southport. Harry Brackett
is my name. I’m Squire Brackett’s son.”
“Indeed!” said the stranger, as though the answer was a matter of
information, whereas he had distinctly heard the boy’s companion refer to
him as coming from Southport. “But you are not an islander. You’ve been
about some, I can see.”
Most persons would have said that it would have been better for the boy
if he had had more of the sturdy qualities of the islanders and less of
those manners to which the stranger referred. But young Brackett took the
remark as a compliment, as it was intended, and answered, “Oh, yes, I’ve
been about a good deal—up Boston way and that sort of thing—Benton and
different cities. But I live at Southport. My father owns a good deal of
the place, you see.”
“Well, I’m glad to know you, Mr. Brackett,” said the stranger, with a
renewed show of cordiality. “My name is Carleton. I come from Boston,
too. I am just living around at any place I take a fancy to for the
summer. Oh, by the way, I came here to look at some boats. Do you know of
a good one over your way that a man might buy?”
“Why, no, I don’t know as I do,” replied young Brackett. “That is, not
what you would want. There’s only one elegant boat, and I guess she is
not for sale. She belongs to some boys. They’d better sell her, though,
if they get the chance. They think they are smart, but they can’t sail
her a little bit.”
“Hm!” ejaculated Mr. Carleton, and made a mental note of the other’s
evident antipathy to the boys he referred to.
“You don’t mean the _Viking_?” he inquired. “Somebody in the town here
was speaking about her the other day.”
“Yes, that’s the one,” replied young Brackett. “But I don’t think you can
buy her.”
“Oh, most any one will sell a thing, if you only offer him enough,” said
Mr. Carleton, carelessly. “Somehow I think she is about the boat I want.
I had a talk with a captain here the other day, and he said she was the
best sailer about here.
“Oh, by the way,” he added, apparently intent upon his game and studying
a shot with great care, “did you ever hear of anything queer about that
yacht—anything queer discovered about her?”
“Why, no!” cried young Brackett, in a tone of surprise. “Is there
anything queer about her? Do you know about her? That is a funny
question.”
If Mr. Carleton, making his shot unmoved, had got exactly the information
he was after, he did not betray the least sign of it. Instead, he laughed
and said:
“No, no. You don’t understand. I mean any ‘out’ about the boat. Has she
any faults, I mean. Does she sail under? Run her counters under? Knock
down in a wind and heavy sea? Carry a bad weather helm—or still worse, a
lee helm? You know what I mean. When a man is buying a boat he wants to
know if she is all right.”
He said it easily, in his deep, full voice, that seemed to emerge from
behind his heavy moustache, without his lips moving.
“Oh, I understand,” said young Brackett. Then he added, mindful of his
anger at the owners of the _Viking_, “I guess the boat is good
enough—better than the crowd that owns her.”
“Well, I want you to do something for me,” continued Mr. Carleton. “I
think I want her. When you return to Southport, I wish you would make
them an offer for me. Do you know what they paid for her?”
“Why, I think she brought only about eight hundred dollars,” said young
Brackett. “She’s worth twice that, I guess. But there wasn’t anybody to
buy her. She went cheap.”
“Tell them you know of a party that will give them fifteen hundred
dollars for the boat,” said Mr. Carleton. “And if you buy her for me for
that price I will give you two hundred dollars. The boat is worth all of
that from what I hear.”
Young Brackett’s eyes opened wide in surprise.
“Oh, I am in earnest,” said the man. “I can afford it. I’m out for a good
time this summer. I’ll be much obliged if you will do the business for
me. Business is business, and I don’t ask you to go to the trouble for
nothing. Here’s something on account.”
He handed young Brackett a ten-dollar bill, which the boy pocketed
promptly. It seemed a queer transaction, but he was satisfied.
“And, say, don’t mention my name,” said Mr. Carleton, carelessly. “You
see, if a man that has any money is known to be looking for a particular
boat, they always put the price up.”
“All right, I won’t,” replied Harry Brackett.
“I hate to tackle that fellow, Harvey,” he thought, as he turned the
matter over in his mind. “But it’s worth trying for two hundred dollars.”
Then, in great elation, he proceeded to beat Mr. Carleton at the game;
though that person’s intimate friends, wherever they might be, would have
laughed at his attempts to make poor shots instead of good ones. It pays
to be a loser sometimes, was his way of looking at it. At least, he and
Harry Brackett parted excellent friends.
The day came in warm and pleasant down in the Thoroughfare, and the boys
were early astir.
“Any more swimming to do to-day, Henry?” inquired George Warren, as the
fires were building in the cabin stoves, preparatory for breakfast.
“Only a plunge for one of us,” answered Henry. “I’ll do that. And that
reminds me; I’d better do it before breakfast, for one doesn’t want to
swim right after eating. Just throw us a line and trip your anchor, and
we will draw you up close astern of the _Surprise_, opposite us.”
The Warren boys did as he requested, and the two boats were soon almost
side by side, astern of the sunken yacht. Then Henry Burns, getting
George Warren to unhook the tackle from the throat of the mainsail of the
_Spray_, did likewise aboard the _Viking_. Taking the two pieces of
tackle in hand, while the boys let the halyards run free, he ducked down
at the stern of the sunken yacht and hooked in the tackle to one of the
stout ropes that had been passed under the boat’s keel.
“That will do till after breakfast,” he said, coming to the surface and
clambering out aboard the _Viking_.
“No, let’s have a pull on the thing now,” exclaimed Harvey. “I’m eager to
see the old _Surprise_ above water—that is, if she is going to float.”
“All right,” said Henry Burns. “Come on, fellows.”
The boys on each yacht caught hold of the halyards with a will, and
hoisted as they would have done to raise the throat of the mainsail. The
tackle, hooked on to the stern of the sunken yacht, was at first as so
much dead weight on their hands. Then, of a sudden, it began to yield
ever so little, and the halyards began to come home.
“She’s coming up, boys!” cried Harvey, gleefully. “Pull now, good and
hard.”
But the next moment something seemed to have given way. The ropes ran
loose in their hands, and the boys that held the ends sprawled over on
the decks.
“Oh, confound it! The rope must have slipped off the stern,” exclaimed
Harvey.
“No, it hasn’t,” cried Henry Burns, joyfully. “There she comes to the
surface. Look! Look! Quick, get in the slack of the ropes and make them
fast.”
The yacht buoyed by the numerous casks and lifted by the tackle, had,
indeed, hung on bottom only for a moment. Then, released by the strain
from the ledge and the seaweeds and slime that had gathered about it, it
had come to the surface with a rush. Loaded with ballast as it was,
however, and with the weight of water still within it, it could not rise
above the surface. Its rail showed just at the top of water, and the
cabin deck slightly above.
“Hooray! that’s great!” cried Harvey, slapping Henry Burns on the
shoulder. “That will do now. Let’s have some breakfast.”
“It’s about time,” said young Joe.
They spent little time at breakfast, however, for they were eager to
resume. With each yacht alongside the _Surprise_, they began bailing that
yacht out with pails tied to ropes, which they slung aboard. When they
had lightened her sufficiently, two of them sprang over into the cockpit
and bailed to better advantage there.
Then, while they took turns at the pump, the others got up a part of the
floors, and began lifting out the pieces of pig-iron ballast, passing
them aboard the other two yachts. Finally they rigged the tackle on to
the mast of the _Surprise_ and, with great care so as not to wrench the
boat, lifted it clear and lowered it into the water alongside.
Now it would be safe to beach the yacht; and this they did at high tide
that afternoon, towing it in on to a beach that made down in a thin strip
between the ledges, and drawing it up as far as it would float, where
they made it fast with a line passed ashore to a small spruce-tree.
It had been a good job, and Henry Burns surveyed it proudly. But he
merely remarked to young Joe, “Well, she’s up, isn’t she?”
The yacht _Surprise_ was at present a sorry-looking sight. The bottom was
very foul, covered with long streamers of slimy grass and encrusted with
barnacles. These had fastened, too, upon the mast and spars; and inside
the yacht was in the same condition. The sails were slime-covered and
rotten. Everything was snarled and tangled, twisted and broken about the
rigging. The bowsprit had been broken off short in the collision of the
fall before. This, with the carrying away of the bobstay, necessitated
the taking out of the mast now. Rust from the iron ballast had stained
much of the woodwork.
“There’s a job,” said Harvey, eying the wreck. “There’s a good week’s
work, and more, in scraping and cleaning her, and cleaning that ballast.
We wanted to get to fishing, too.”
“Well, you go ahead and leave us to begin the work,” said Joe Hinman,
speaking for himself and the crew. “It’s no more than fair that we should
do it, seeing as we are to have the use of the yacht this summer. Just
leave us a little coffee and some cornmeal and some bread and a piece of
pork and one of the frying-pans. We’ll catch fish, and live down here for
a week, till you come for us.”
“Where will you stay?” inquired Harvey. “The other yacht is going back to
Southport, you know.”
“Up in the old shack there,” replied Joe, pointing back to where there
stood a tumble-down shelter that had been used at some time to store a
scant crop of hay that the island produced. “Give us a blanket apiece and
we’ll get along. You’ve got to go back to the harbour before you go
fishing, and you can get ours down at the camp.”
“All right,” said Harvey, “I guess we’ll do it. You can run things, Joe,
and there won’t anybody trouble you.”
So with this prophecy—which might or might not hold good—Harvey proceeded
to install his crew in temporary possession of the yacht _Surprise_, and
of the little island where they had dragged it ashore, which was one of
the chain of narrow islands that lay off Grand Island.
Late that afternoon the two yachts sailed out of the Thoroughfare and
went on to Southport, leaving the crew masters of their island domain and
of the wreck.
The next morning Henry Burns and Jack Harvey were up before the sun, for
Harvey had waked and found a light west wind blowing, and this was a fair
one for the trip down the bay. They roused the campers in the tent on the
point, and soon Tom and Bob, their canoe loaded with blankets and
provisions, were paddling out to the _Viking_. They made two trips, and
then, leaving the canoe up on shore alongside the tent, fastened that
good and snug. Henry Burns took them aboard the _Viking_ in the tender.
The mooring which they had put down for the season was slipped, the sail
hoisted, a parting toot-toot sounded on the great horn in the direction
of the Warren cottage, and the _Viking’s_ voyage in search of work had
begun.
The course the _Viking_ was now shaping was about due south from the
harbour they had just left. Far away to the southward, some twenty-two
miles distant, lay the islands they were seeking, at the seaward entrance
to East Samoset Bay. Some six miles ahead on the course lay a group of
small islands, on one of which was erected a lighthouse. Beyond these, to
the southwest, a few miles away, lay two great islands, North Haven and
South Haven. Off to the eastward from the foot of these, across a bay of
some six miles’ width, lay Loon Island, with little Duck Island close
adjacent.
As the day advanced, the promise of wind did not, however, have
fulfilment. It died away with the burning of the sun, and when they had
come to within about a mile of the first group of islands, it threatened
to die away altogether. It sufficed, however, to waft them into a little
cove making into one of these islands at about two hours before noon.
“Well, we’ve got to Clam Island, anyway,” said Harvey. “We’ll load up our
baskets, and be in time to catch the afternoon’s southerly.”
Clam Island well merited its name. Its shores were long stretches of
mud-flats, corrugated everywhere with thousands of clam-holes. It would
not be high tide until three in the afternoon, and the flats were now
lying bare.
Equipped with baskets and hoes, the boys set to work, with jackets off
and trousers rolled up. In two hours’ time, each one of them had filled a
bushel basket to the brim, for the clams were thrown out by dozens at
every turn of a hoe.
“That’s enough bait for a start,” said Harvey, wiping his forehead. “We
can buy more of the fishermen if we run short.”
“My!” exclaimed Henry Burns, straightening himself up with an effort. “My
back feels as though it had nails driven into it. I don’t wonder so many
of these old fishermen stoop.”
The day was very hot, and the boys went in for a swim. Then, when they
had eaten, they stood out of the little harbour; but the wind had dropped
almost entirely away, and, with the tide against them, they scarce made
headway.
“I’m afraid we won’t make Loon Island to-day,” said Tom.
“Oh, perhaps so,” said Harvey. “See, there’s a line of breeze way down
below.”
A darkening of the water some miles distant showed that a southerly
breeze was coming in. They got the first puffs of it presently, and
trimmed their sails for a long beat down the bay.
The _Viking_ was a good boat on the wind, the seas did not roll up to any
great size, as the wind had come up so late in the day, and it was easy,
pleasant sailing in the bright summer afternoon. Still, the breeze was
too light for any good progress, and they had only reached Hawk Island,
on which the lighthouse stood, and which was fifteen miles from Loon
Island, by two o’clock.
They were going down a long reach of the bay now that rolled some six
miles wide, between North and South Haven on the one hand, to starboard,
and a great island on the other. Back and forth they tacked all the
afternoon, with the tide, turning to ebb just after three o’clock, to
help them.
By six o’clock they were two miles off the southeastern shore of South
Haven, with great Loon Island, its high hills looming up against the sky,
four miles across the bay.
“Well, shall we try for it?” asked Harvey, eagerly scanning the sky.
It looked tempting, for there had come one of those little, deceptive
stirrings of the air that happen at times before sundown when the wind
makes a last dying flurry before quieting for the night. The sun, just
tipping the crests of the far-off western mountains across the bay, had
turned the western sky into flame. Loon Island looked close aboard. So
they kept on.
Then by another hour the glow had faded from the sky and the waters
blackened and the shadows began to die away on the hills of Loon Island,
and all the landscape grew gray and indistinct. They were two miles above
the harbour, when the bluffs that marked it blended into the dark mass of
its surroundings and there was no guide left for them to follow. The wind
had fallen almost to nothing.
“We can’t miss it,” said Harvey, stoutly. “I’ve been in there once
before.”
“No, we’re all right,” said Henry Burns. He went forward and stood
looking off eagerly for some sign of light on shore. The island grew
black in the twilight, and then was only a vague, indefinite object.
They were in great spirits, though,—so they made out,—but it was just a
bit dreary for all that, almost drifting down with the tide, and only a
few puffs of wind now and then, with not even a light in a fisherman’s
cabin showing on that shore.
Then, too, the very calmness of the night made sounds more distinct. And
just a little to seaward, a mile or two below where the harbour should
be, there sounded the heaving of the ground-swell against the reefs that
lay about Loon Island so thickly. And the sound of the shattering of a
wave as it drops down upon a reef in the night, amid strange waters, is
not a cheerful thing to hear.
Perhaps it was this doleful, ominous sound more than anything else that
somehow took the enthusiasm out of them. It was such an uncertain sound,
that subdued crashing upon the reefs. Was it a half-mile away? Was it a
mile? Was it near? It was hard to tell.
Just how uncertain they did feel, and just how anxious they had grown in
the last half-hour of darkness, was best revealed by Henry Burns when,
from his watch forward, he said suddenly, but very quietly, “There are
the lights, Jack. We’re close in.”
It was his manner of expression when he was most deeply affected—a calm,
modulated tone that had a world of meaning in it.
“A-h-h!” exclaimed Harvey. There was no mistaking the relief in his
expression. “I knew they ought to be here, but they were a long time
showing.”
“Well, I don’t mind saying they could have showed before and suited me
better,” said Bob. “Say, those reefs have a creepy, shivery sound in the
night, don’t they? I’d rather be in the harbour.”
There was a twinkling of lights to guide them now, for a little flotilla
of fishing-boats lay snug within, each with its harbour light set; and
the lamps in the fishermen’s houses that were here and there straggling
along the shores of the large and small island facing the harbour gleamed
out from many a kitchen window.
They drifted slowly in under the shadow of the hills of Loon Island and
entered the little thoroughfare that ran between the two islands, at a
quarter to nine o’clock.
“We are in luck at the finish, at any rate,” said Henry Burns, presently,
picking up the boat-hook. “Jack, there’s a vacant buoy to make fast to.”
The buoy, a circular object painted white, showed a little way off the
windward bow, and Jack Harvey luffed up to it. Henry Burns caught the
mooring; Tom and Bob had the mainsail on the run in a twinkling; and a
moment more they were lying safe and snug at their voyage’s end.
Fifteen minutes later, the sound of heavy sweeps, labouring and grinding
in rowlocks, told them that another boat was coming into the harbour from
outside with the aid of an “ash breeze,” the wind having died wholly
away. The boat came in close to where they were lying. From their cabin,
as they sat eating supper, they could hear a man’s voice, rough and
heavy, complaining apparently of the bad luck he had had in getting
caught outside, deserted by the breeze.
The next moment the young yachtsmen got a rude surprise. The dishes they
had set out on the upturned leaves of the centreboard table rattled, and
the yacht shook with the shock caused by the other boat clumsily bumping
into them astern. Then the rough voice sounded in their ears:
“Git away from that mooring! Don’t yer know I have the right ter that?
What are yer lyin’ here for?”
The yachtsmen rushed out on deck. The boat they saw just astern was a
dingy, odd-shaped little sailboat, about twenty-five feet long, sharp at
both ends, with the stern queerly perked up into a point like the tail of
a duck. A thickly bearded, swarthy man stood at her tiller, where he had
been directing, roughly, the efforts of two youths, who had worked the
boat in with the sweeps.
“What’s the matter with you?” cried Harvey, angrily. “What do you mean by
bumping into us? We’ve got our lights up.”
“You git off from that mooring, I tell you!” cried the man, fiercely.
“Ain’t I had it all summer? What right have you got interfering?”
The man’s manner was so threatening and his voice so full of the fury
that told of a temper easily aroused, that a less aggressive youth than
Harvey might have been daunted. But Harvey had got his bearings and knew
where he was.
“No, you don’t!” he replied, sharply. “You can’t bully us, so it won’t do
you any good to try. This is a government buoy, and the first boat up to
it has the right to use it unless the revenue men complain. You can push
your old tub out of the way.”
“Better tell him we will give him a line astern if he wants it,”
suggested Henry Burns. “That won’t do any harm.”
“I won’t,” exclaimed Harvey. “He’s taken enough paint off the _Viking_
already, I dare say. But”—he added—“you can if you want to. I don’t
care.”
So Henry Burns made the offer.
The answer the man made was to order the two youths to work the “pinkey,”
as the fishermen call his style of craft, up to the buoy, where he could
cut the yachtsmen adrift.
Harvey sprang to the bow of the _Viking_, drew her up close to the buoy
by taking in on the slack of the rope, and held her there by a few turns.
Then he snatched up the boat hook. Henry Burns and Tom and Bob likewise
armed themselves with the sweeps of the _Viking_ and a piece of spar.
They stood ready to repel an attack.
It looked serious. But at this point the two youths aboard the strange
boat failed to obey orders. There arose, thereupon, a furious dispute
aboard the other craft, the youths remonstrating in what seemed to be a
broken English, and the man railing at them fiercely in English that was
plain, but still had not just the Yankee accent; in the course of which
the man at the tiller rushed upon one of them, and would have struck him
had not the other youth interfered.
It ended in the wrathful stranger taking his craft ahead, quite a
distance up the harbour, ignoring Henry Burns’s offer to moor astern of
the _Viking_.
“Just as well he didn’t stay,” commented Henry Burns. “I don’t think he
would improve on longer acquaintance, do you, Jack?”
“Well, hardly,” said Harvey. “I guess he must be one of those chaps
Captain Sam spoke of.”
“I wonder if he will make us any more trouble to-night,” remarked Bob.
“No, he’ll have to fight it out with his own crew first,” said Harvey.
“But I’ll just keep an eye out for a little while. You fellows can turn
in.”
And Harvey kept vigil till eleven o’clock, muffled in a greatcoat,
outside, until he nearly fell over asleep in the cockpit. Then he rolled
in below, and was sound asleep before he could get his boots off.
The _Viking_ was not molested through the night, though so wearied were
the yachtsmen with their day’s sailing that a man might have come aboard
blowing a fog-horn and not have aroused them from their deep slumber.