The foaming fore shore/Chapter 8
CHAPTER VIII
UNLAWFUL MESH
AND what a cruise and what a holiday it was! And what a respite for Marie—the clean deck of the trim Graywing under her feet in place of the slimy stage, the savory sea breeze in her nostrils in lieu of the reek of disemboweled cod, the laughing voice of this great Viking of a sea captain in her ears instead of the snarling admonitions of her parental slave-masters, old Peter and old Anne!
Care-free, buoyant, joyful-mooded as the sparkling sea itself, they poked the schooner's bowsprit into all the inner harbors of Château Bay, into Henley, into Antelope Tickle, into Pitt's Arm; they climbed the Devil's Dining Table to glimpse the sail-dotted panorama of the strait; and finally brought up at evening in crimson-cliffed Red Bay twenty miles to the westward.
Truly, a day of comradeship, of confidences exchanged, of romance exotically blossoming forth upon a romantic shore, a shore steeped in lore and legend and storied in love and feud. Here in the beginning the Eskimos and Montagnais wooed and warred, to be followed in peace and conflict by the English and French and, later the northward-voyaging Americans, and blood of these ancient coastwise adventurers ran in the veins of both Taylor and Marie.
Yonder ruin of Fort Pitt, in Pitt's Arm, almost obliterated by the willow shrubbery—well, Taylor's father was one of the officers of the American privateer Minerva which besieged it in 1778. That old tumble-down fortress, Fort Greville, to the northward of Henley Island over there—voilà, few knew anything about it, but Marie could tell. Her granduncle on her mother's side, old Greville the planter, had built it to keep the warlike Eskimos away from his Breton colons.
Such bonds and grounds of intimacy they discovered by the score throughout the day. The day had been a blazing jewel, topaz-clear and diamond-bright, but at evening a sulfur-colored mist came in from the Atlantic and the wind began to rise.
"A dirty squall comin', Cap'n," prophesied Tom Halifax.
"You're right, Tom," agreed Taylor, "and we'd better haul our trap and get in to the shelter of Château before it blows any worse."
Accordingly, the slim Boston Jim as lookout, the battered sealer Halifax relieving Brown at the wheel, they bore away through the yellowish mist for their trap-berth near York Point.
"Sight the buoys, Boston?" demanded Taylor as the schooner, fleet as the wind itself, flitted ghostlike from fog bank to fog bank.
"Aye, Captain, I reckon I have their range this minute," Boston Jim sang out. "Aye, in an open patch I have them. But there's a schooner lyin' off it! Aye, and a dory underrunnin' the floats! Luks like somebody helpin' themselves to our fish."
While he sang out Boston Jim lost sight of the trap berth, but plunging through a fog bank half a mile wide, the Graywing soared once more into a clear water space not two cable-lengths from the trap. Riding the clear space, her topsails wreathed in the scud that blew high overhead like smoke, Taylor recognized the Esperance, Admiral Pellier's auxiliary vessel, with her skipper Codroy John in charge. In the lowered dory that was underrunning his floats he saw Jacques Beauport and Admiral Pellier himself, not hauling as Boston Jim had suspected but evidently inspecting the mesh of the net.
With a growl in his throat Taylor barked tart orders to his men, and, folding her wings like a gull alight, his schooner lay to alongside the Esperance.
"What in blazes does this mean, Pellier?" he roared at the dory in a mighty wrath. "Who gave you authority to touch that net?"
"The law, Capitaine Taylor," Pellier sent back. "Jacques Beauport brought word to the Groix in the harbor that you were using two-and-one-half-inch mesh, and I came out to seize your trap."
"Then Jacques Beauport is a cursed liar and you are a plagued fool to believe any tale he brings!" Taylor raged. "I hauled that trap just this morning. The mesh was the lawful three-inch then, and it hasn't shrunk since!"
TAYLOR wheeled in his fury to grasp the boat tackles and slam a dory overside.
"I'll put Pellier and Beauport back on the deck where they belong in one blazing minute," he promised Marie.
"But let me go, too," she begged, and dropped into the dory with him as the boat rose upon the swell. "I'm going too. There was a net seized in Château Harbor this morning, Antoine Lefevre's, so my father said—oui, and a two-and-one-half-inch mesh, if you please! Could it be substitution, Capitaine! That Jacques is a dark one when he has a grudge. Maybe he has taken up your own, set Lefevre's to catch you and brought the admiral to see."
"By heavens, if he has I'll brain him!" vowed Taylor.
With a surge he drove the dory along the line of floats toward the other craft, rowing so viciously that Beauport held up a warning hand.
"It's no use making such a pretty fuss, Capitaine," he warned. "We have the size of your mesh. Oui, ask Codroy John, there, whom any man well knows does not lie. Two and one-half, is it not, Codroy John?"
"Aye, it be two and one-half," boomed Codroy John from the deck of the Esperance. "I'd like to die if it do measure a twine-breadth more."
Taylor seized the floats and hauled in a few feet of the net.
"It's not my trap," he vehemently declared. "It's not the trap I hauled in this spot this morning. My own has been lifted and this one dropped in its place."
"Mon Dieu, a fine fairy-story," chortled Pellier. "Buoyed by your buoys but not your net, eh? Ho! Ho! That is a new plea for law-breakers."
"No, it's not my net," gritted Taylor. "My buoys, but not my trap!"
"Then whose is it, pray?" scoffed Pellier.
"Antoine Lefevre's, most likely," flashed Marie. "And Capitaine Taylor's is most likely stored away where it will not be found. Ask Jacques Beauport, there. He was the man who seized it this morning and—and used it again!"
Pellier's eyes turned inquiringly on Jacques.
"Ciel!" exploded Jacques, the fire flaming in his eyes. "Do you and your Yankee Capitaine insinuate that I—that I"
"Yes," cut in Taylor, "you exchanged them either on your own or some one else's bidding."
Beauport choked, his swarthy face reddish-purple in his rage.
"Canaille—canaille! Fils du diable!" he anathematized. "Nomme de"
Taylor's swinging oar stopped short his epithets. Pellier and Jacques had just time to duck low before the swishing spruce blade scarred their dory gunwale. And before they could raise their heads anew or seize a weapon, Taylor, bringing his bludgeon 'round in its arc again, stove their whole bow with a terrific blow.
Pellier and Beauport floundered in the water, yelling for help from the Esperance, and Taylor looked up to find the schooner footing forward under sail. At the first sign of altercation Codroy John had slipped her in between the schooner Graywing and the two dories at the trap. Taylor and Marie were cut off from their vessel, and it seemed for a moment that the Esperance's crew might seize him in the name of the law along with his trap.
But his own crew on the Graywing were likewise watchful. They moved when Codroy John moved, cracking on full sail in the howling squall so that the schooner leaped across the foamy wave-crests, out-pointed the Esperance and drew a length clear.
Then swinging on her heel, the Graywing came about on the other tack, threatening to shave the Esperance's bows as she crossed the auxiliary vessel's course.
Tom Halifax was yelling Codroy John warning to alter his course, but Codroy refused to shift a point. His aim was to blanket the dory, seize its two occupants, pick up the pair of floundering men and drive on before the Graywing could give Taylor any aid.
"All right, then, I'll bump your old wagon!" bellowed Tom.
He cut fairly across the Esperance's bows. There was the high-pitched whine of taut, chafing sheets, the sullen grind of timbers, a medley of cries and a volley of oaths in French, and the next moment the Graywing's bowsprit crashed out the Esperance's foremast in a trailing jumble of wreckage.
The big foresail, sagging overside, held her like a sea-anchor, while the Graywing swept clear and apparently unharmed, luffed up in the gale of wind.
Taylor, heaving his dory alongside with his one undamaged oar, rose on the crest of a wave. Kerrigan and Patterson, waiting tackles in hand, hooked on and brought him, Marie, dory and all on deck with a run.
"We've lost our trap, and we'll lose our schooner too, if we don't get to shelter!" Taylor shouted the moment he struck the deck. "Crack on all you've got and run into Château!"
EVEN as he spoke Tom Halifax's cry rose above the howl of the wind.
"’Ware the mainmast! Yon rough work must 'a' cracked her! Look out, she's foulin' the fore boom!"
Taylor wheeled to see the main boom poised weirdly in air, with the mainmast sagging on to the foremast and adding its windage in a terrific strain.
"Axes, boys o' mine!" he yelled. "Jump lively there!"
But as the swinging blades of half a dozen of the crew hit into the tangle, the added windage told. The foremast gave suddenly with an explosive snap, and both masts and both booms with their ballooning sails crashed over the starboard rail.
The Graywing heeled till the rail went under. It seemed for a second that she would never rise out of the trough of the seas, but Taylor, with a warning word to Marie to hold tight, rushed away from her with an ax snatched from the hand of one of his men. He sprang upon the slanting stump of the foremast, at the same time yelling orders in the tumult of the breaking seas.
"Cut her clear, boys o' mine!" he clarioned, his bright blade cleaving in a circle of light about his head.
It was wild work in a wall of spray for a moment, and Marie caught her breath, her eyes on Taylor like a true Viking in storm or boarding clinging to the stump of the foremast, his fair head steel-haloed by his ax, hurling the wreckage adrift while the wind rose, bringing with it the menace of floe-ice hurtling down. The Esperance, in as bad a plight as they, threatened every moment to drift down on them. Her crew had hauled Pellier and Beauport aboard and were cutting their own wreckage free when the Graywing slowly righted and Marie drew her breath again.
"Mon Dieu, that was dangerous," she gasped.
"All over now!" cried Taylor.
Laughing like the Viking he was, he sprang back to her side as the foremast stump assumed a vertical position again and slid him back on to the deck.
"Rig a couple of trysails on those stumps," he ordered, a wary eye on the Esperance all clear and hard abeam.
Like magic the emergency sails fluttered on and drew, the stumps of fore and main like two dwarfed jury masts, and craftily, swept continually by the baffled sea, the Graywing crept from the menace of wave and wind and floe into the quiet of Château harbor. Hard in her wake the Esperance snailed in under similar rig, and for an instant the two vessels rode rail to rail before rounding to their anchorage off Peter Laval's long jetty.
"Well, Pellier," shouted Taylor, "this is what comes of Beauport's trickery. A nice mess it's made of two fine schooners! You'd better look to the whereabouts of your men after this!"
Pellier, staring at Taylor with his far-focused brown eyes as the Gloucester captain lowered a dory and prepared to row Marie ashore answered not a word, but when the dory touched old Peter's wharf the admiral beckoned Jacques Beauport to him and closeted himself with him in the Esperance's cabin.