Blow The Man Down: A Romance Of The Coast
tried to tell her by his glances, apologetic little starings, that he
was sorry for her in her grief. She met those glances with manifest
embarrassment.
After an absence which was prolonged to suit his own sour will in the
matter, Captain Candage came stamping stormily down the companionway.
He stood between his captives and glowered, first at one and then at the
other.
“Both of ye blaming me, I reckon, for what couldn't be helped.”
“Father, listen to me now, if you have any sense left in you,” cried the
girl, with passion. “Take that horrible thing out of that gentleman's
mouth.”
“It has come to a pretty pass in this world when an honest man can't
carry on his own private business without having to tie up meddlers so
as to have a little peace.” He walked close to Mayo and shook a monitory
finger under the young man's nose. “Now, what did ye come on board here
for, messing into my affairs?”
The indignant captain put forth his best efforts to make suitable
retort, but could only emit a series of “guggles.”
“And now on top of it all I am told by my mate, who never gets around to
do anything that ought to be done till it's two days too late, that
you are one of the Mayos! Why wasn't I informed? I might have made
arrangements to show you some favors. I might have hove to and taken a
chance, considering who you was. And now it's too late. Everybody seems
to be ready to impose on me!”
Again Mayo tried to speak.
“Why don't you shut up that gobbling and talk sense?” shouted the irate
skipper, with maddening disregard of the captive's predicament.
“Father, are you completely crazy? You haven't taken that spike out of
his mouth.”
“Expect a man to remember everything when he is all wrapped in his own
business and everybody trying to meddle with it?” grumbled Candage. He
fumbled in his pocket and produced a knife. He slashed away the rope
yarn which lashed the marlinespike. “If you can talk sense I'll help
you do it! I reckon you can holler all you want to now. Them dudes can't
find their own mouths in a fog, much less this schooner. Now talk up!”
Mayo worked his aching jaws and found his voice. “You know how I
happened to get aboard, Captain Candage. I am skipper of the _Olenia_.
Put back with me if you want to save trouble.”
“Not by a tin hoopus, sir! I ain't going about and tackle them reefs in
this fog. I've got open sea ahead, and I shall keep going!”
Mayo was a sailor who knew that coast, and he admitted to himself that
Candage's stubbornness was justified.
“I ain't responsible for your getting aboard here. I'll land you as soon
as I can--and that covers the law, sir.”
During a prolonged silence the two men stared at each other.
“At any rate, Captain Candage, I trust you will not consider that you
have a right to keep me tied up here any longer.”
“Now that there's a better understanding about who is boss aboard here,
I don't know as I'm afraid to have you at large,” admitted the skipper.
“I only warn you to remember your manners and don't forget that I'm
captain.”
He flourished his clasp-knife and bent and cut the lashings. Then he
strode across the cabin and performed like service for his daughter.
“I reckon I can afford to have _you_ loose, too, now that you can't tell
me my business in front of a lot of skylarkers throwing kisses right and
left!”
“Father! Oh, oh!” She put her hands to her face.
Captain Candage seemed to be having some trouble in keeping up his
rôle of a bucko shipmaster; he shifted his eyes from Mayo's scowl and
surveyed his daughter with uncertainty while he scratched his ear.
“When a man ain't boss on his own schooner he might as well stop going
to sea,” he muttered. “Some folks knows it's the truth, being in a
position to know, and others has to be showed!” He went stamping up the
companionway into the night.
Captain Mayo waited, for some minutes. The girl did not lift her head.
“About that--What he said about--You understand! I know better!” he
faltered.
“Thank you, sir,” she said, gratefully, still hiding her face from him.
“Men sometimes do very foolish things.”
“I didn't know my father could be like this.”
“I was thinking about the men who came and annoyed him. I can understand
how he felt, because I am 'a 'native' myself.”
“I thought you were from outside.”
“My name is Boyd Mayo. I'm from Mayoport.”
She looked up at him with frank interest.
“My folks built this schooner,” he stated, with modest pride.
“I'm Polly Candage--I'm named for it.”
“It's too bad!” he blurted. “I don't mean to say but what the name is
all right,” he explained, awkwardly, “but I don't think that either
of us is particularly proud of this old hooker right at the present
moment.” He went across the cabin and sat down on a transom and, tested
the bump on the back of his head with cautious palm.
She did not reply, and he set his elbows on his knees and proceeded to
nurse his private grouch in silence, quite excluding his companion
from his thoughts. Now that he had been snatched so summarily from his
hateful position on board the _Olenia_, his desire to leave her was not
so keen. After Mayo's declaration to the owner, Marston might readily
conclude that his skipper had deserted. His reputation and his license
as a shipmaster were in jeopardy, and he had already had a bitter taste
of Marston's intolerance of shortcomings. If Marston cared to bother
about breaking such a humble citizen, malice had a handy weapon. But
most of all was Mayo concerned with the view Alma Marston would take of
the situation. She would either believe that he had fallen overboard
in the skirmish with the attacking Polly or had deserted without
warning--and in the case of a lover both suppositions were agonizing.
His distress was so apparent that the girl, from her seat on the
opposite transom, extended sympathy in the glances she dared to give
him.
“How did you tear your coat so badly in the back?” she ventured at last.
“Spikes your excellent father left sticking out of his martingale,” he
said, a sort of boyish resentment in his tones.
“Then it is only right that I should offer to mend it for you.”
She hurried to a locker, as if glad of an excuse to occupy herself. She
produced her little sewing-basket and then came to him and held out her
hand.
“Take it off, please.”
“You needn't trouble,” he expostulated, still gruff.
“I insist. Please let me do a little something to make up for the
_Polly's_ naughtiness.”
“It will be all right until I can get ashore--and perhaps I'll never
have need to wear the coat again, anyway.”
“Won't you allow me to be doing something that will take my mind off my
troubles, sir?” Then she snapped her finger into her palm and there was
a spirit of matronly command in her voice, in spite of her youth. “I
insist, I say! Take off your coat.”
He obeyed, a little grin crinkling at the corners of his mouth--a
flicker of light in his general gloom. After he had placed the coat in
her hands he sat down on the transom and watched her busy fingers.
She worked deftly. She closed in the rents and then darned the raveled
places with bits of the thread pulled from the coat itself.
“You are making it look almost as good as new.”
“A country girl must know how to patch and darn. The folks in the
country haven't as many things to throw away as the city folks have.”
“But that--what you are doing--that's real art.”
“My aunt does dressmaking and I have helped her. And lately I have
been working in a millinery-shop. Any girl ought to know how to use her
needle.”
He remembered what Mr. Speed had said about the reason for her presence
on the _Polly_. He cast a disparaging glance around the bare cabin and
decided in his mind that Mr. Speed had reported truthfully and with full
knowledge of the facts. Surely no girl would choose that sort of thing
for a summer vacation.
She bent her head lower over her work and he was conscious of warmer
sympathy for her; their troubled affairs of the heart were in similar
plight. He felt an impulse to say something to console her and knew that
he would welcome understanding and consolation from her; promptly he was
afraid of his own tongue, and set curb upon all speech.
“A man never knows how far he may go in making fool talk when he gets
started,” he reflected. “Feeling the way I do to-night, I'd better keep
the conversation kedge well hooked.”
Now that her hands were busy, she did not find the silence embarrassing.
Mayo returned to his ugly meditations.
After a time he was obliged to shift himself on the transom. The
schooner was heeling in a manner which showed the thrust of wind. He
glanced up and saw that the rain was smearing broad splashes on the
dingy glass of the windows. The companion hatch was open, and when he
cocked his ear, with mariner's interest in weather, he heard the wind
gasping in the open space with a queer “guffle” in its tone.
Instinctively he began to look about the cabin for a barometer.
Already that day the _Olenia's_ glass had warned him by its downward
tendency. He wondered whether further reading would indicate something
more ominous than fog.
Across the cabin he noted some sort of an instrument swinging from a
hook on a carline. He investigated. It was a makeshift barometer, the
advertising gift of a yeast company. The contents of its tube were
roiled to the height of the mark which was lettered “Tornado.”
“You can't tell nothing from that!” Captain Candage had come down into
the cabin and stood behind his involuntary guest. “It has registered
'Tornado' ever since the glass got cracked. And even at that, it's about
as reliable as any of the rest of them tinkerdiddle things.”
“Haven't you a regular barometer--an aneroid?” inquired Captain Mayo.
“I can smell all the weather I need to without bothering with one of
them contrivances,” declared the master of the schooner, in lordly
manner. He began to pull dirty oilskins out of a locker.
Mayo hurried up the companionway and put out his head. There were both
weight and menace in the wind which hooted past his ears. The fog was
gone, but the night was black, without glimmer of stars. The white
crests of the waves which galloped alongside flaked the darkness with
ominous signalings.
“If you can smell weather, Captain Candage, your nose ought to tell you
that this promises to be something pretty nasty.”
“Oh, it might be called nasty by lubbers on a gingerbread yacht, but
I have sailed the seas in my day and season, and I don't run for an
inshore puddle every time the wind whickers a little.” He was fumbling
with a button under his crisp roll of chin beard and gave the other man
a stare of superiority.
“You don't class me with yacht-lubbers, do you?”
“Well, you was just on a yacht, wasn't you?”
“Look here, Captain Candage, you may just as well understand, now and
here, that I'm one of your kind of sailors. Excuse me for personal
talk, but I want to inform you that from fifteen to twenty I was a
Grand-Banksman. Last season I was captain of the beam trawler _Laura and
Marion_. And I have steamboated in the Sound and have been a first mate
in the hard-pine trade in Southern waters. I have had a chance to find
out more or less about weather.”
“Un-huh!” remarked the skipper, feigning indifference. “What about it?”
“I tell you that you have no business running out into this mess that is
making from east'ard.”
“If you have been so much and so mighty in your time, then you
understand that a captain takes orders from nobody when he's on board
his own vessel.”
“I understand perfectly well, sir. I'm not giving orders. But my own
life is worth something to me and I have a right to tell you that you
are taking foolhardy chances. And you know it, too!”