In Which Ham Mayberry Reveals His Suspicions
Mr. Downes continued to bluster and Paul hung sullenly about the drawing room. I had got through with both of them, however. Whether the butler—and the other servants—backed me up, or not, I believed that I had the whip-hand.
Marie helped me bear my mother to her room. It troubled me greatly to see her pretty face so pale and deathlike, and her eyes closed. I hurried to the telephone and called up Dr. Eldridge, who was an old friend of our family as well as our physician. I felt better when I heard his voice over the wire and knew that he would soon be at the house.
Then I turned to get my hat and coat. I looked into the drawing room to give Mr. Downes one more chance. He had been talking to his son in a low voice, but with emphasis; and I could see by Paul’s countenance that the “calling down” he had received from his father was a serious one.
“I warn you for the last time, Mr. Downes, that I am going to Justice of the Peace Ringold just as soon as the doctor gets here to attend my mother,” I said.
“You don’t dare do any such thing, you young scoundrel!” roared Mr. Chester Downes, and he actually sprang across the room at me. He was a tall and bony man and I knew very well that I should fare ill in his hands. I dodged back, found the imperturbable James in my way and as I sidestepped him, too, Mr. Downes came face to face with the impassive butler in the doorway.
“Beg pardon, sir,” James said, quietly. “Hamilton has the horses harnessed and awaits your pleasure, sir.”
“You—you—” stammered Mr. Downes, evidently as much surprised that the butler had obeyed me as I could possibly be!
“The carriage is waiting, sir,” explained James, just as though the occasion was an ordinary one. “Shall I bring down your bags, sir?”
“No! I don’t want our bags brought down!” cried Mr. Downes. “This is an outrage. And let me tell you, you dunderhead,” he added to James, “this will cost you your position.”
The butler’s voice did not change in the least. “Shall I bring down your bags, sir?” he asked once more.
“Yes!” cried Mr. Downes, changing his mind very suddenly. “We will go up and pack them. But this is a sorry day for this house when we leave it in such a way,” he said, his threat hissing through his clenched teeth as his glowing eyes sought my face in the hall. “And it is a sorry day for you, you young villain! Remember this.”
“You threaten a good deal like your son, Mr. Downes,” I said, unable to resist a mild “gloat.” “But he couldn’t carry out his threat; I wonder if you will be better able to compass your revenge?”
He said nothing further, but dashed up stairs. Paul lagged behind him and James, without a word to me, and with the attitude and manner of the well-trained servant, followed sedately and stood outside of their rooms waiting for the bags.
I stepped out upon the side porch and saw Ham Mayberry, our coachman (he had driven my father in his little chaise the two years that he had practised in Bolderhead) sitting upon the box of the closed carriage. Of all the people who worked for mother about the Bolderhead cottage, I knew that Ham would take my part against the Downeses. Ham and I were old cronies.
And I believed that I could thank Ham for the butler’s espousal of my cause on this present occasion. Ham had a deal of influence with the other servants, having been with us before mother was willed the great Darringford property.
Ham turned his head when I called to him in a low voice.
“Watch what they do and where they go, Ham,” I told him. “I want to see you when you come back.”
“Aye, aye, sir!” he returned in his sailorlike way; for in Bolderhead if you ask your direction of a man on the street he’ll lay a course for you as though you were at sea. Ham Mayberry, like most of the other male inhabitants of the old town, had been a deep-sea sailor.
I heard the quick, angry step of Mr. Downes descending the stairs then, and I slipped out of the way. I didn’t want any more words with him, if I could help. They were leaving the house—and I meant it should be for good. That satisfied me.
I heard Paul follow him out upon the porch, and then James came with the baggage. The carriage rolled briskly away just as Dr. Eldridge’s little electric wagon steamed up to the other door. The doctor—who was a plump, bald, pink-faced man—trotted up the steps and I let him into the house myself.
“Well, well, Clint Webb!” he demanded. “What have you been doing to that little mother of yours now?”
But he said it in a friendly way. Dr. Eldridge knew well enough that I never intended to cause mother a moment’s anxiety. And I believed that I could take him into my confidence—to an extent, at least. I did not tell him how Paul had tried to knife me in the Wavecrest; but I repeated what had really caused my mother’s becoming so suddenly ill.
“Ha!” he jerked out, as he got himself out of his tight, light overcoat and picked up his case again from the hall settee. “The least said about that time before her the better. Tut, tut! the least said the better.”
And so saying he marched up stairs to her room, leaving me more eager than ever to learn the particulars regarding my father’s death. Now, I had lived some sixteen years up to this very evening and had never heard anything but the simplest and plainest story of my father’s unfortunate death. But even the doctor spurred my awakened curiosity now.
What did it mean? I had been told by my mother, by Ham, and by other people as I grew up, that Dr. Webb had rowed out in a dory to fish off White Rock, a particularly good local fishing ground for blackfish. Some hours later a passing fishing party discovered the empty dory, bobbing up and down at the end of its kedge cable. The fishing lines were out. My father’s hat was in the boat, and his watch lay upon a seat as though he had taken it out and put it beside him so as not to forget when to row back to attend to his patients. It was a fine timepiece, had belonged to his father, and I wear it myself now on “state and date” occasions.
But the fishermen saw no other sign of the doctor. It was plain he had fallen overboard. With the current as it is about White Rock it was no wonder that the body was never recovered.
The story seemed plain enough. There was nothing that could be added to it. That there was any mystery about my father’s death I could not believe. And the suggestion that Paul Downes had made I utterly scoffed at!
Yet I wanted to see Ham Mayberry before I went to sleep that night.
Dr. Eldridge came down after a long time, and his pink, fat face was very serious. “How is she?” I asked him, eagerly.
“She’s all right—for the night,” he replied. But his gravity did not leave him—which was strange. The doctor was a most sanguine practitioner and usually brought a spirit of cheerfulness with him into any home where there was illness. “Clint,” he said, “you want to be careful of that little mother of yours.”
“My goodness, Doctor!” I exclaimed. “You don’t suppose that I had anything to do with this business tonight? That I brought it about?”
“If you have another row with your cousin—or words with his father—have it all outside the house. She is in a very nervous state. She must not be worried. Friction in the household is bad for her. And—well, I’ll drop in again and see her tomorrow.”
What he said frightened me. When he had gone I went up and tapped on the door. But Marie would not let me in the room.
“She is resting now, Master Clin-tone,” said the French woman, and then shut the door in my face.
I couldn’t have slept then had I gone to bed. Beside, I was determined to talk with Ham when he came back. I wandered down stairs again and James, the butler, beckoned me into the dining room. At one end of the table he had laid a cloth and he made me sit down and eat a very tasty supper that had been prepared for me in the kitchen. This was an attention I had not expected. It served to bolster up my belief that I had some influence in my mother’s house, after all!
By and by I heard Ham drive in and I went out to the stables. We kept no footman, Ham doing all the stablework. I helped him unharness Bob and Betty, while he told me where he had taken the Downeses. There was a small hotel in the old part of the town, and my uncle and Paul had gone there for the night.
“They’ll probably attack the fortifications on the morrow, Master Clint—or, them’s my prognostications,” remarked Ham, in conclusion.
“Meaning they’ll come over here and try to see mother?” I asked.
“I reckon.”
“Then they’re not to be let in, Ham. I want them kept out. Dr. Eldridge says she should not be disturbed. I mean to see that his orders are obeyed.”
“And I’m glad to see ye take the bit in your teeth, sir,” exclaimed the coachman, with emphasis. “It’s time ye did so.”
“What do you mean, Ham?” I demanded, curiously.
The old man—he was past sixty, but hale and hearty still—came out of Bob’s stall and put his grizzled face close to mine while he stared into my eyes in the dim light of the stable lantern.
“List ye, Master Clint,” he said. “’Tis my suspicion that that same scaley Chester Downes has it in his mind to get rid of you—to put ye away from your mother altogether—to make her believe ye air a bad egg, in fact. ’Tis time he and that precious b’y of his was put off the place. Ye’ve done right this night, Clint Webb, if ye never done so before.”
In Which I See the Day Dawn Upon a Deserted Ocean
I don’t claim to possess an atom more courage than the next fellow. I was heartily scared the instant I realized that the Wavecrest was adrift and I was fastened into her cabin. But I was not made helpless by my terror.
I tried my best to open that cabin door; but the big nails had been driven home. The ports were too small for my body to pass through, although I did open one and was tempted to shriek for help. But that would have been a ridiculous thing to do—and useless, as well. Had anybody heard and understood my need, I was beyond assistance from land, and there was nobody out in the harbor but myself, I felt sure.
The Wavecrest had got well out into the harbor now. She rolled very little and therefore I knew that, unguided as she was, her head was right and wind and tide were sweeping her on. She might be piled up on either shore at the mouth of the inlet; but from the start I believed she would be shot through the outlet of the harbor into the open sea.
In the cuddy up forward, with my provisions, there were a saw and hammer, and other tools. I could no more get at them than I could get out of the cabin. And although I might be able to do nothing to help myself or my boat if I was free from my prison, I would have felt a whole lot safer just then to have been upon her deck!
The door being nailed so fast, and the deck-hatch bolted tight, it was plain that I would have to smash something in order to get out of the cabin. Had I had anything to use as a battering ram, I would have begun on the door. But there seemed nothing to hand that would help me in that way. I examined the crack where the top of the door and the deck-hatch came together. Had I something to pry with I might tear the bolts holding the hatch out of the wood.
Such a thing as a bar was out of the question. But after a few minutes’ cogitation, I remembered that my bunks on either side of the cabin could be turned up against the bulkhead, and at each end of the bunks was a flat piece of steel fifteen or eighteen inches long which held the berth-bench when it was let down. Two screws at each end held these steel straps in place.
I had no screw driver; but I had the knife that I had taken away from my cousin when he attacked me the evening before. I thrust the point of its heavy blade into a crack and snapped the steel square off. It made a fairly usable screw-driver, and I quickly had one of the steel straps out of its fastenings.
The piece of steel was stiff and made as good a bar for prying as I could have found. With some difficulty I thrust one end up between the top of the cabin door and the edge of the hatch, close to one side. I slipped the closed knife up between the bar and the door for a block against which to prize, caught the end of the bar with both hands, and threw all my force against it. The hatch squeaked; there was a splintering sound of wood. I was badly marring the top of the door, but the bolt which held the hatch at that side was giving.
I repeated the process at the other side of the hatch, and gradually, by working first at one side, and then the other, I splintered the woodwork around the bolts, and bent the bolts themselves, so that the hatch began to shove back. As soon as possible I shoved it back far enough for my body to pass through the aperture.
The rain beat down upon my face as I worked my way out of the cabin in my oilskins; I left my hat behind. The Wavecrest was pitching and yawing pretty badly now and before I cast a single glance around I was sure that she was already going through the inlet.
Yes! there was the beacon at the extreme point of Bolderhead Neck—it was just abreast of me as I stood at last upon the sloop’s unsteady deck. I leaped down into the cockpit and quickly lowered the centerboard. Almost at once the Wavecrest began to ride more evenly. I could see little but the beacon, the night was so black; but I ran to the tiller and found that the sloop was under good steerage way and answered her helm nicely.
Like all sloops, the Wavecrest was very broad of beam for her depth of keel, and the standing-room, or cockpit, was roomy. She was well rigged, too, having a staysail and gafftopsail. Really, to sail her properly there should have been a crew of two aboard; but under the present circumstances I felt that one person aboard the Wavecrest was one too many! With a rising gale behind her the craft was being driven to sea at express speed, and it was utterly impossible to retard her course.
For an hour I sat there in the driving rain, hatless and shivering, hanging to the tiller and letting the sloop drive. Letting her drive! why, there wasn’t a thing I could do to change her course. She was rushing on through the foaming seas like a projectile shot from some huge gun, and every moment the howling wind seemed to increase!
The beacon on the Neck was behind me now. There was nothing ahead of the sloop’s fixed bowsprit. We were driving into a curtain of blackness that had been let down from the sky to the sea. It is seldom that there is not some little light playing over the surface of the water. This night a palpable cloud had settled upon the face of the waters and I could not even see the foam on the crests of the waves, save where they ran past the sloop’s freeboard.
I had left the broken slide open, however, and the rain was beating down into the cabin. This began to worry me and finally I lashed the tiller—fastening it in the bights of two ropes prepared for that purpose, and crept back into the cabin again. It was little use to remain outside, save that if the sloop was flung upon a rock, I might have a little better chance to escape.
At the speed she was traveling, however, I knew very well that we were already beyond the reefs and little islets that mask the entrance to Bolderhead Harbor. It was a veritable hurricane behind us. The wind was actually blowing so hard that the waves were scarcely of medium height. I had seen a mere afternoon squall kick up a heavier sea.
It was awkward getting in and out of the cabin by way of the hatch; but I did not take the time then to open the door. I fixed the hatch so that it would slide back and forth properly, however. Then I lit my spirit lamp and made some coffee. I was pretty well chilled through, for the rain and wind seemed to penetrate to the very marrow of my bones.
I was sure that this was the beginning of the equinoctial gale. It might be a week before the storm would break. And where would the Wavecrest be in a week’s time?
Not that I really believed the sloop would hold together, or still be on top of the sea, when this gale blew itself out. She was a mere speck on the agitated surface of the sea. My only hope then was that I might be rescued by some larger vessel—and how I should get from the Wavecrest craft to another was beyond the power of my imaginings.
I could not be content to remain below—nor was that unnatural. Aside from the fear I had of the sloop’s yawing and possibly turning turtle, and so imprisoning me in the cabin with no hope of escape therefrom, I felt that I should be more on the alert to seize any opportunity for escape were I at the tiller. So I carried a Mexican poncho which I wound to the stern, draped it about me over the oilskins, and with the sou’wester tied under my chin I could defy the rain, nor did the keen wind search my vitals.
But thus bundled up I would have stood little show had the sloop capsized. Afterward I realized that I might as well have remained in the cabin.
However, to sleep in either place, was impossible. Sometimes the rain beat down upon the decked over portion of the boat with the sound of a drumstick beaten upon taut calfskin. Again the wind blew in such sharp gusts that the rain seemed to be swept over the face of the sea and then, if I chanced to glance over my shoulder, the drops stung like hail.
Altogether I have never passed a more uncomfortable night—perhaps never one during which I was in greater peril. The wind was shifting bit by bit, too. My compass told me that the Wavecrest was now being driven straight out to sea, instead of running parallel with the Massachusetts coast as had been at first the fact.
How fast I was traveling I could not guess. There was a patent log aboard; but I did not rig it. Indeed, it was much safer to remain in the stern of the sloop than to move about at all. I knew we were traveling much faster than I had ever traveled by water before and I had something beside the speed of my involuntary voyage to think about.
It had not crossed my mind at the time, but when I had slipped out to the Wavecrest that evening, giving my mother and the servants the impression that I had gone to my room as usual, I had done a very foolish—if not wrong—thing. The sloop might not be the only craft in Bolderhead Harbor to break away from moorings and go on an involuntary cruise. Other wandering craft might not escape the rocks about the beach, as the Wavecrest had. It might be supposed that my sloop was among the wreckage that would be cast ashore along our rocky coast, and my absence might not be connected with the disappearance of the sloop.
My mother and friends would not suspect the reason or cause for my absence. If I had taken a soul into my confidence, in the morning my mother would be informed immediately of my accident. Perhaps, after all, it was not a bad thing that some uncertainty must of necessity attach itself to my disappearance.
For although I had every reason to believe that Paul Downes had either nailed me into the cabin, or caused me to be nailed in, well knowing that I had gone aboard the sloop to sleep, I was equally confident that he would not tell of what he had done, or allow his companions to tell of the trick, either.
These, and similar hazy thoughts regarding my condition, shuttled back and forth through my brain during the long and anxious hours of that never-to-be-forgotten night. Sometimes, I presume, I lost myself and slept for a few minutes; but the hours dragged on so dismally, and I was so uncomfortable and anxious, that I am sure I could not have slept much of the time. And it did seem as though the east would never lighten for dawn.
At last it came, however; and then I liked the prospect less than the no prospect of the black night! All that it revealed to my aching eyes was a vast, vast expanse of empty, heaving drab sea, across which the gale hurried sheets of cold and biting rain—not a sign of land behind me—not a sail against the equally drab horizon. My sloop, under her bare, writhing pole, was scudding across this deserted ocean with no haven in sight and I was without hope of rescue.
In Which Tom Anderly Relates A Story That Arouses My Interest
Captain Rogers was not a harsh man, but he was a stern disciplinarian. That he could not change the course of his ship to land me in some port, or to put me aboard a homeward bound vessel, is not to be wondered at. He had both his owners and his crew to think of. I was thankful, when I saw the week’s weather that followed my boarding the Scarboro, that I had been saved from further battling with the elements in the sloop.
Ben Gibson advised me to write fully of my situation and prospects and have the letter, or letters, ready to put aboard any mail-carrying ship we might meet. A steamship bound for the Cape of Good Hope, even, would get a letter to Bolderhead, via London, before I could get back myself from any South American port that the Scarboro might be obliged to touch at.
I knew, however, that the whaling bark was not likely to touch at any port unless she suffered seriously from the gales. Whaling skippers are not likely to trust their crews in port, for the possible three year term of shipment stretches out into an unendurable vista in the mind of the imprisoned sailor.
For that is what a sailor is—a prisoner. As the great Samuel Johnson declared, a sailor is worse off than a man in jail, for the sailor is not only a prisoner, but he is in danger all of the time! However, the prospect of the danger and hardship of the seafarer’s life had never troubled me. I must admit that I was delighted to turn to with the captain’s watch (that was Ben Gibson’s watch) and take up the duties of a foremast hand upon the Scarboro. I wrote the letters as I was advised. I wrote to my mother, of course, to Ham Mayberry, and last of all, and more particularly, to Lawyer Hounsditch.
To the latter gentleman I explained all I feared regarding Mr. Chester Downes and his machinations. To Ham I told the particulars of my having been swept out to sea and instructed him to find my mooring rope and save it, with its cut end for evidence; and if possible to learn who had helped Paul Downes, my cousin, cut me adrift and nail me in the cabin of the Wavecrest. To my mother I wrote cheerfully and asked her to have money sent me at Buenos Ayres, as that might be a port the Scarboro would touch at, or a port I could reach if I left the whaleship.
I cannot say that I was continually worried by my state aboard the whaler. What boy would not have delighted in being thus thrust into the midst of the very life and work he had so longed to follow? I could not but feel that it was meant for me to be a sailor, after all.
The Webbs had been seafaring folk, time out of mind. My father’s father had tried to keep his own son off the water by giving him a college education and making a doctor of him. But the moment my father was sure of his sheepskin, he had looked about for a chance to go as surgeon on a deep water ship, and had gone voyage after voyage until his marriage.
Inside of a fortnight Captain Rogers had complimented me on my work and manner, and Mr. Robbins, the mate, said I was worth my salt-horse and hardbread. Of course while on duty Ben Gibson, the young second mate, and I must of necessity hold to “quarterdeck etiquette;” he was “Mr. Gibson” and I was “Webb.” We were punctilious indeed about these niceties of address. Off duty, however, we were two boys together, and rather inclined to sky-lark.
The other close friend that I made aboard the Scarboro during the first few days of the voyage, was old Tom Anderly. He was the bewhiskered old barnacle who had welcomed the possibility of getting oil in the bark’s tanks from the dead whale, when I had first come aboard.
Anderly was a boat-steerer, an old sea dog who had sailed oft and again with the skipper, and who had lanced more whales than any other half dozen men aboard. Being in old Tom’s watch I grew soon familiar with him; and from the beginning I saw that the old seaman took more than a common interest in me.
The old man was full of stories of whale fishing and other experiences at sea. But it was not his fund of information, or his tales, that first of all interested me in Tom Anderly. I had told nobody—not even Ben Gibson—about the actual event of my being swept out to sea from Bolderhead, nor had I said a word about my father. The fact that he had been a sea-going physician would not help me hold my own with the crew of the Scarboro. At sea, according to the homely old saw, “every tub must stand on its own bottom.”
“So you come from Bolderhead, do you?” quoth Tom to me, one day when we were lounging together forward of the capstan, and he was mending his pipe.
“That’s where we live in the summer,” I admitted.
“Jest summer visitors, are ye?”
“Well, my mother has a house there.”
“Yes. Ye ain’t a native, though, eh?” and before I could reply to this, he continued: “I been studying about Bolderhead ever since you come aboard. There was something curious happened at Bolderhead—or just off the inlet—and it’s all come back to me now.”
“What was it?” I asked, idly.
“Well, it’s quite a yarn,” he said, wagging his head. “I was running in the old hooker, Sally Smith, from Portland to New York. She carted stone. There warn’t but five of us aboard, includin’ the cap’n and the cook. But our freight warn’t perishable,” and he chuckled, “so speed didn’t enter into our calculations. One day there come up a smother of fog as we was just off Bolderhead Neck. We’d run some in-shore. It fell a dead calm—one o’ them still, creepy times when you can hear sheep bells and dinner horns for miles and miles.
“Well, sir! we lay there in this smother of fog and all of a suddent we heard somebody hootin’. Cap he halloaed back. ‘Blow yer scare!’ sings out the same faint voice. ‘Keep it blowin’.’
“‘There’s somebody out yon tryin’ to make the Sally,’ says the Cap’n. I stepped on the tread of the siren and kept her blattin’ now and then and, after some minutes, we heard a splashin’ alongside and there was a man swimming in the sea.”
“He had swum out from shore?” I asked, just to keep the conversation going. I wasn’t really interested.
“No. His boat had begun leaking badly. It was too heavy to turn over, and before it sank he slipped into the sea and made for us. He had seen us before the fog shut down, and knew that we were becalmed. He’d just tied his shoes about his neck by the lacings and swum out with every rag of clothes on him—’cept his hat.”
“And why did he swim for your craft instead of to shore?”
“Said he was nearer the Sally when his boat took in so much water. And the tide was running out, no doubt. But it always did seem queer to me,” continued Tom.
“What was queer?” I asked the question without the slightest eagerness—indeed, I really was not interested much in what the old sailor was saying.
“Queer that such a smart-appearin’, intelligent gent should have got himself in such a fix.”
“As how?”
“To set sail in such a leaky old tub.”
“Oh!”
“And then, when he found she was sinking under him not to make for the shore.”
“What became of him?” I asked.
“He went to New York with us. There he stepped ashore and I ain’t never seen him since—and only heard of him once, an’ that was ten years or so afterward——”
“Hullo!” I cried, suddenly waking up. “When did all this happen, Tom?”
“When did what happen?”
“This man swimming aboard your schooner?”
“Why, nigh as I can remember, it must be fourteen or fifteen years ago—come next spring. It was in April, after the weather was right smart warm. Otherwise he wouldn’t have swum so far, I bet ye!”