Theodore Goodridge Roberts - The Harbor Master
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Theodore Goodridge Roberts >> The Harbor Master
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14 THE HARBOR MASTER
BY
THEODORE GOODRIDGE ROBERTS
AUTHOR OF
"Rayton: A Backwoods Mystery," "A Captain of Raleigh's,"
"A Cavalier of Virginia," "Captain Love," "Brothers of Peril"
and "Hemming, the Adventurer."
MADE IN U.S.A.
M.A. DONOHUE & COMPANY
CHICAGO NEW YORK
_Copyright, 1911_
BY STREET & SMITH
_Copyright, 1913_
By L.C. Page & Company
(INCORPORATED)
_All rights reserved_
First Impression, January, 1913
Second Impression, February, 1913
The English edition of this book is entitled "The Toll of the
Tides," but the American publishers have preferred to retain
the author's original title, "The Harbor Master."
CONTENTS PAGE
I. BLACK DENNIS NOLAN 1
II. NOLAN SHOWS HIS APTITUDE FOR COMMAND 19
III. FOXEY JACK QUINN SLIPS AWAY 36
IV. DEAD MAN'S DIAMONDS 54
V. FATHER MCQUEEN VISITS HIS FLOCK 64
VI. THE GIRL FROM THE CROSS-TREES 86
VII. THE GOLD OF THE "ROYAL WILLIAM" 101
VIII. THE SKIPPER STRUGGLES AGAINST SUPERSTITION 115
IX. SOME EARLY VISITS 135
X. MARY KAVANAGH 147
XI. THE SKIPPER CARRIES A LETTER 164
XII. DICK LYNCH GOES ON THE WAR-PATH 181
XIII. BILL BRENNEN PREACHES LOYALTY 194
XIV. DICK LYNCH MEETS MR. DARLING 210
XV. MR. DARLING SETS OUT ON A JOURNEY 225
XVI. MR. DARLING ARRIVES IN CHANCE ALONG 235
XVII. MARY KAVANAGH USES HER WITS 250
XVIII. MOTHER NOLAN DOES SOME SPYING 265
XIX. MARY AT WORK AGAIN 279
XX. FATHER MCQUEEN'S RETURN 292
THE HARBOR MASTER
CHAPTER I
BLACK DENNIS NOLAN
At the back of a deep cleft in the formidable cliffs, somewhere between
Cape Race to the southward and St. John's to the northward, hides the
little hamlet of Chance Along. As to its geographical position, this is
sufficient. In the green sea in front of the cleft, and almost closing
the mouth of it, lie a number of great boulders, as if the breech in the
solid cliff had been made by some giant force that had broken and
dragged forth the primeval rock, only to leave the refuse of its toil to
lie forever in the edge of the tide, to fret the gnawing currents. At
low tide a narrow strip of black shingle shows between the nearer of
these titanic fragments and the face of the cliff. The force has been
at work at other points of the coast as well. A mile or so to the north
it has broken down and scattered seaward a great section of the cliff,
scarring the water with a hundred jagged menaces to navigation, and
leaving behind it a torn sea front and a wide, uneven beach. About three
miles to the south of the little, hidden village it has wrought similar
havoc, long forgotten ages ago.
Along this coast, for many miles, treacherous currents race and shift
continually, swinging in from the open sea, creeping along from the
north, slanting in from the southeast and snarling up (but their
snarling is hidden far below the surface) from the tide-vexed,
storm-worn prow of old Cape Race. The pull and drift of many of these
currents are felt far out from land, and they cannot be charted because
of their shiftings, and their shiftings cannot be calculated with any
degree of accuracy, because they seem to be without system or law. These
are dangerous waters even now; and before the safeguard of a strong
light on the cape, in the days when ships were helplessly dragged by the
sea when there was no wind to drive them--in the days before a
"lee-shore" had ceased to be an actual peril to become a picturesque
phrase in nautical parlance--they constituted one of the most notorious
disaster-zones of the North Atlantic.
We are told, as were our fathers before us, that one man's poison may be
another man's meat, and that it is an ill wind indeed that does not blow
an advantage to somebody. The fundamental truths of these ancient saws
were fully realized by the people of Chance Along. Ships went down in
battered fragments to their clashing sea-graves, which was bad, Heaven
knows, for the crews and the owners--but ashore, stalwart and gratified
folk who had noted the storms and the tides ate well and drank deep and
went warmly clad, who might otherwise have felt the gnawing of hunger
and the nip of the wind.
The people of Chance Along, with but a few exceptions, were Nolans,
Lynches, Learys and Brennens. Their forebears had settled at the back of
the cleft in the cliff a hundred years or more before the time of this
history. They had been at the beginning, and still were, ignorant and
primitive folk. Fishing in the treacherous sea beyond their sheltered
retreat had been their occupation for several generations, brightened
and diversified occasionally by a gathering of the fruits of storm. It
was not until Black Dennis Nolan's time, however, that the community
discovered that the offerings of the sea were sufficient--aye, more than
sufficient--for their needs. This discovery might easily have been made
by others than Black Dennis Nolan; but it required this man's daring
ingenuity and powers of command to make it possible to profit by the
discovery.
Black Dennis Nolan was but little more than a lad when he commenced the
formidable task of converting a poverty-stricken community of
cod-fishers into a band of daring, cunning, unscrupulous _wreckers_. He
possessed a dominating character, even in those days, and his father had
left him a small fore-and-aft schooner, a store well-stocked with
hand-lines, provisions and gear, and a record chalked up on the inside
of the door which showed, by signs and formulae unintelligible to the
stranger, every man in the harbor to be in his debt for flour, tea,
molasses, tobacco and several other necessities of life. So Black Dennis
Nolan was in a position, from the very first, to force the other men of
the place to conform to his plans and obey his orders--more or less.
For a time there were doubters and grumblers, old men who wagged their
heads, and young men who sneered covertly or jeered openly; and later,
as the rule of Dennis became absolute and somewhat tyrannical and the
hand of Dennis heavy upon men of independent ways of thought, there were
insurrections and mutinies. But Black Dennis Nolan was equal to every
difficulty, even from the beginning. Doubters were convinced that he saw
clearer than they, grumblers were satisfied, young men who jeered openly
were beaten into submission with whatever weapon came most conveniently
to hand. Dennis was big, agile, and absolutely fearless, and when he
dealt a blow with an oar, a skiff's thwart, or a pole from a
drying-stage, a second effort was seldom required against the same
jeerer. Once or twice, of course, he had to hit many times and was
compelled to accept some painful strokes in return. One or two of these
encounters are worthy of treatment in detail, if only to show something
of the natures of Black Dennis Nolan and his companions.
Immediately after his father's untimely death (the poor man was carried
out to sea on a small pan of ice, while engaged in killing seals off the
mouth of the harbor, in the spring of the year), Black Dennis was
addressed by the title of "Skipper." The title and position became his,
without question, along with his unfortunate father's schooner, store,
and list of bad debts. The new skipper's first move towards realizing
his dreams of affluence and power was to build a small hut of stones,
poles, and sods both at the place of the broken cliff a mile to the
north of Chance Along, and at the place of similar physical character
three miles to the southward. It was winter at the time--a fine season
for wrecks, but an uncomfortable season for spending one's nights in an
ill-made hut, and one's days on the brink of a cliff, without
companionship, gazing seaward through a heavy telescope for some vessel
in distress. But the skipper had made his plans and did not care a snap
of his finger for discomforts for himself or his friends. He knew that
out of every ten wrecks that took place on the coast within twenty miles
of Chance Along, not more than one profited the people of his harbor.
They never went afield in search of the gifts of the treacherous sea.
They took what they could clutch of what was thrown at their very doors,
even then letting much escape them, owing to lack of science and
organization. The new skipper meant to alter this condition of
things--and he knew that the waters in the immediate vicinity of Chance
Along were neither the most dangerous on the coast, nor the most
convenient for the salving of wreckage and fast-drowning cargoes. So he
established stations at Squid Beach to the northward, and at Nolan's
Cove to the southward, and ordered Nick Leary and Foxey Jack Quinn to
take up their abode in the new huts; Nick at Squid Beach, and Foxey Jack
at the Cove, had to keep a sharp look-out for ships during bad weather
and at night. Should either of them remark any signs of a vessel in
distress he was to return to Chance Along at top speed, and report the
same. Nick Leary and Foxey Jack Quinn were older men than the skipper by
a few years, and the fathers of families--of half-starved families. Nick
was a mild lad; but Foxey Jack had a temper as hot as his hair.
"What bes yer idee, skipper?" asked Nick.
Dennis explained it briefly, having outlined his plans several times
before.
"An' how long does we have to stop away?" asked Nick.
"Five days. Yer watch'll be five days, an' then I'll be sendin' out two
more lads," replied the skipper.
Foxey Jack Quinn stood, without a word, his vicious face twisted with a
scowling sneer. Both men departed, one for the beach to the north and
the other for the Cove to the south, each carrying a kettle and bag of
provisions, a blanket and tarnished spy-glass. Black Dennis Nolan turned
to other work connected with the great scheme of transferring the
activities of Chance Along from the catching of fish to the catching of
maimed and broken ships. He set some of the old men and women to
splicing ropes, stronger and more active folk to drilling a hole in the
face of the cliff, near to the top of it and just to the right of the
entrance to the narrow harbor. Others, led by the skipper himself, set
to work at drilling holes in several of the great rocks that lay in the
green tide beyond the mouth of the harbor, their heavy crowns lifting
only a yard or two above the surface of the twisting currents. All this
was but the beginning of a task that would require weeks, perhaps
months, of labor to complete. It was Black Dennis Nolan's intention to
construct, by means of great iron rings, bolts and staples,
chain-cables, hawsers and life-lines, a solid net by the help of which
his people could extend their efforts at salving the valuables from a
fast-breaking vessel to the outermost rock of that dangerous
archipelago, even at the height of a storm--with luck. In the past, even
in his own time, several ships bound from Northern Europe for Quebec had
been driven and dragged from their course, shattered upon those rocks,
sucked off into deep water, and lost forever, without having contributed
so much as a bale of sail-cloth to the people of Chance Along. He was
determined that cases of this kind should not happen in the future. The
net was to be so arranged that the greater part of it could be removed,
and the balance submerged, with but slight effort, and later all
returned to its working condition as easily; for it would not be well to
draw the attention of outsiders to the contrivance. Wrecking, in those
days, meant more than the salvage of cargoes, perhaps. The skipper
hoped, in time (should the experiment prove successful at the mouth of
the harbor), to rig the dangerous and productive archipelago off Squid
Beach and Nolan's Cove with similar contrivances. There was not another
man in Chance Along capable of conceiving such ideas; but Dennis was
ambitious (in his crude way), imaginative, daring, unscrupulous and
full of resources and energy.
All day the skipper and his men worked strenuously, and at break of dawn
on the morrow they returned to their toils. By noon a gigantic iron
hook, forged by the skipper himself, with a shank as thick as a strong
man's arm and fully four feet long, had been set firmly in the face of
the cliff. The skipper and five or six of his men stood at the edge of
the barren, above the cliff and the harbor, wiping the sweat from their
faces. Snow lay in patches over the bleak and sodden barren, a raw wind
beat in from the east, and a gray and white sea snarled below.
"Boys," said the young skipper, "I's able to see ahead to the day whin
there'll be no want in Chance Along, but the want we pretends to fool
the world wid. Aye, ye may take Dennis Nolan's word for it! We'll eat
an' drink full, lads, an' sleep warm as any marchant i' St. John's."
"What damn foolery has ye all bin at now?" inquired a sneering voice.
All turned and beheld Foxey Jack Quinn standing near at hand, a leer on
his wide mouth and in his pale eyes, and his nunney-bag on his
shoulder. His skinnywoppers (high-legged moccasins of sealskin,
hair-side inward) were glistening with moisture of melted snow, and his
face was red from the rasp of raw wind. He looked as if he had slept in
his clothes--which was, undoubtedly, the case. He glared straight at the
skipper with a dancing flame of devilment in his eyes.
"What ye bin all a-doin' now for to make extry work for yerselves?" he
asked.
There followed a brief silence, and then Black Dennis Nolan spoke
quietly.
"Why bain't ye over to Squid Beach, standin' yer trick at look-out?" he
inquired.
Foxey Jack's answer was a harsh, jeering laugh, and words to the effect
that life was too short to spend five days of it lonely and starving
with cold, in a hut not fit for a pig.
"Ye kin do what ye likes, yerself--ye an' them as be fools like yerself;
but Jack Quinn bain't a-goin' to lend a hand a yer foolishness, Denny
Nolan," he concluded.
"Turn round an' git back to yer post wid ye," said the skipper.
"Who be ye, an' what be ye, to give that word to me?"
"Ye knows who I be. Turn round an' git!"
"To hell wid ye! I turns round for no man!"
"Then ye'd best drop yer nunney-bag, ye foxey-headed fool, for I bes
a-comin' at ye to larn ye who bes skipper here."
Quinn let his nunney-bag fall to the snow behind him--and in the same
instant of time the skipper's right fist landed on his nose, knocking
him backward over the bag, clear off his feet, and staining his red
whiskers to a deeper and brighter red. But the big fellow came up to his
feet again as nimbly as a cat. For a moment the two clinched and swayed
in each other's straining arms, like drunken men. The awed spectators
formed a line between the two and the edge of the cliff. Foxey Jack
broke the hold, leaped back and struck a furious, but ill-judged blow
which glanced off the other's jaw. Next instant he was down on the snow
again, with one eye shut, but up again as quickly.
Again they clinched and swayed, breast to breast, knee to knee. Both
were large men; but Foxey Jack was heavier, having come to his full
weight. This time it was the skipper who tried to break the hold,
realizing that his advantage lay in his fists, and Quinn's in the
greater weight of body and greater strength of back and leg. So the
skipper twisted and pulled; but Quinn held tight, and slowly but surely
forced the younger man towards the edge of the cliff. Suddenly the
skipper drew his head back and brought it forward and downward again,
with all the force of his neck and shoulders, fair upon the bridge of
his antagonist's nose. Quinn staggered and for a second his muscles
relaxed; and in that second the skipper wrenched away from his grasp and
knocked him senseless to the ground.
"Lay there, ye scum!" cried Black Dennis Nolan, breathing heavily, and
wiping blood from his chin with the back of his hand. "Lay there an' be
damned to ye, if ye t'ink ye kin say 'nay' when Dennis Nolan says 'aye.'
If it didn't be for the childern ye bes father of, an' yer poor, dacent
woman, I'd t'row ye over the cliff."
Foxey Jack Quinn was in no condition to reply to the skipper's address.
In fact, he did not hear a word of it. Two of the men picked him up and
carried him down a steep and twisting path to his cabin at the back of
the harbor, above the green water and the gray drying-stages, and
beneath the edge of the vast and empty barren. He opened one eye as
they laid him on the bed in the one room of the cabin. He glared up at
the two men and then around at his horrified wife and children.
"Folks," said he, "I'll be sure the death o' Black Dennis Nolan. Aye, so
help me Saint Peter. I'll send 'im to hell, all suddent un' unready, for
the black deed he done this day!"
That was the first time the skipper showed the weight of his fist. His
followers were impressed by the exhibition. The work went steadily on
among the rocks in front of Chance Along for ten days, and then came
twenty-four hours of furious wind and driving snow out of the northwest.
This was followed by a brief lull, a biting nip of frost that registered
thirty degrees below zero, and then fog and wind out of the east. After
the snowy gale, during the day of still, bitter cold, relief parties
went to Squid Beach and Nolan's Cove and brought in the half-frozen
watchers. For a day the look-out stations were deserted, the people
finding it all they could do to keep from freezing in their sheltered
cabins in Chance Along; but with the coming of the east wind and the
fog, the huts of sods were again occupied.
The fog rolled in about an hour before noon; and shortly after midnight
the man from Nolan's Cove groped his way along the edge of the cliff,
down the twisty path to the cluster of cabins, and to Black Dennis
Nolan's door. He pounded and kicked the door until the whole building
trembled.
"What bes ye a-wantin' now?" bawled the skipper, from within.
"I seed a blue flare an' heared a gun a-firing to the sou'east o' the
cove," bawled the visitor, in reply.
The skipper opened the door.
"Come in, lad! Come in!" he cried.
He lit a candle and set to work swiftly pulling on his outer clothes and
sea-boots.
"There bes rum an' a mug, Pat. Help yerself an' then rouse the men," he
said. "Tell Nick Terry an' Bill Brennen to get the gear together. Step
lively! Rouse 'em out!"
Pat Lynch slopped rum into a tin mug, gulped it greedily, and stumbled
from the candle-light out again to the choking fog. He would have liked
to remain inside long enough to swallow another drain and fill and light
his pipe; but with Black Dennis Nolan roaring at him like a walrus, he
had not ventured to delay. He groped his way from cabin to cabin,
kicking on doors and bellowing the skipper's orders.
An hour and a half later, twenty men of Chance Along were clustered at
the edge of the broken cliff overlooking the beach of Nolan's Cove and
the rock-scarred sea beyond. But they could see nothing of beach or
tide. The fog clung around them like black and sodden curtains. Here and
there a lantern made an orange blur against the black. Some of the men
held coils of rope with light grappling-irons spliced to the free ends.
Others had home-made boat-hooks, the poles of which were fully ten feet
long.
They heard the dull boom of a gun to seaward.
"She bes closer in!" exclaimed Pat Lynch. "Aye, closer in nor when I
first heared her. She bain't so far to the south'ard, neither."
"Sure, then, the tide bes a-pullin' on her an' will drag her in, lads,"
remarked an old man, with a white beard that reached half-way down his
breast.
"What d'ye make o' her, Barney Keen?" asked the skipper of the old man.
"Well, skipper, I'll tell 'e what I makes o' her. 'Twas afore yer day,
lad--aye, as much as t'irty year ago--arter just sich weather as this,
an' this time o' year, a grand big ship altogether went all abroad on
these here rocks. Aye, skipper, a grand ship. Nought come ashore but a
junk o' her hull an' a cask o' brandy, an' one o' her boats wid the name
on all complete. The _Manchester City_ she was, from Liverpool. We
figgered as how she was heading for the gulf--for Quebec, like as not.
So I makes it, skipper, as how this here vessel may be bound for Quebec,
too."
Black Dennis Nolan took a lantern from another man, and led the way down
the broken slope to the beach. The gear was passed down and piled at the
edge of the tide. Dry wood--the fragments of ships long since broken on
the outer rocks--was gathered from where it had been stranded high by
many spring tides, and heaped on a wide, flat rock half-way up the
slope. Another heap of splintered planks and wave-worn timbers was
constructed on the level of the beach, close to the water--all this by
the skipper's orders. The sea hammered and sobbed among the rocks, and
splintered the new ice along the land-wash.
"If she comes ashore we'll be needin' more nor candle-light to work
wid," remarked the skipper.
Again the dull boom of a gun drifted in through the fog.
"Aye, lads, she bes a-drawin' in to us," said old Barney Keen, with a
note of intense satisfaction in his rusty voice.
CHAPTER II
NOLAN SHOWS HIS APTITUDE FOR COMMAND
The big ship was hopelessly astray in the fog and in the grip of a
black, unseen current that dragged at her keel and bulging beam, pulling
her inexorably landward towards the hidden rocks. Her commander felt
danger lurking in the fog, but was at a loss to know on which side to
look for it, at what point to guard against it. He was a brave man and a
master of seamanship in all the minute knacks and tricks of seamanship
of that day; but this was only his third voyage between London and the
St. Lawrence, and the previous trips had been made in clear weather. The
gale had blown him many miles out of his course, and lost him his
main-top-ga'ntsail yards and half of his mizzen-mast; the cold snap had
weighted ship and rigging with ice, and now the fog and the uncharted
deep-sea river had confused his reckoning utterly. But even so, he
might have been able to work his vessel out of the danger-zone had any
signal been made from the coast in reply to his guns and flares. Even if
after the arrival of the men from Chance Along on the beach at Nolan's
Cove, the heaps of driftwood had been fired, he might have had time to
pull his ship around to the north, drag out of the current that was
speeding towards the hidden rocks, and so win away to safety. There was
wind enough for handling the ship, he knew all the tricks of cheating a
lee-shore of its anticipated spoils, and the seas were not running
dangerously high. But his guns and flares went unanswered. All around
hung the black, blind curtains of the fog, cruelly silent, cruelly
unbroken by any blink of flame.
Black Dennis Nolan and his men stood by the frozen land-wash, along
which the currents snarled, and rolling seas, freighted with splinters
of black sea-ice, clattered and sloshed, waiting patiently for their
harvest from the vast and treacherous fields beyond. A grim harvest!
Grim fields to garner from, wherein he who sows peradventure shall not
reap, and wherein Death is the farmer! Aye, and grim gleaners those who
stand under the broken cliff of Nolan's Cove, waiting and listening in
the dark!
A dull, crashing, grinding sound set the black fog vibrating. Then a
brief clamor of panic-stricken voices rang in to the shore. Silence
followed that--a silence that was suddenly broken by the thumping report
of a cannon. The light flared dimly in the fog.
"Quiet, lads!" commanded the skipper. "Let the wood be till I gives ye
the word. She bes fast on the rocks, but she bain't busted yet."
"An' she'll not bust inside a week, i' this sea," said one of the men.
"Sure, skipper, the crew'll be comin' ashore i' their boats afore long.
An' they have their muskets an' cutlasses wid them, ye kin lay to that.
None but fools would come ashore on this coast, from a wreck, widout
their weepons."
"Aye, an' they'll be carryin' their gold an' sich, too," said the
skipper. "Lads, we'll do our best--an' that bain't fightin' an' killin',
i' this case, but the usin' o' our wits. Bill Brennen, tell off ten men
an' take 'em along the path to the south'ard wid ye. Lay down i' the
spruce-tuck alongside the path, about t'ree miles along, an' wait till
these folks from the ship comes up to ye, wid four or five o' our own
lads a-leadin' the way wid lanterns. They'll be totin' a power o'
val'able gear along wid them, ye kin lay to that! Lep out onto 'em,
widout a word, snatch the gear an' run fair south along the track,
yellin' like hell. Then stow the noise all of a suddent, get clear o'
the track an' work back to this Chance Along wid the gear. Don't bat any
o' the ship's crew over the head if ye bain't forced to it. The gear bes
the t'ing we wants, lads."
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