The foaming fore shore/Chapter 2
CHAPTER II
THE FREIGHTER AUK
TAYLOR was up the ladder and on deck with amazing agility for one of such great frame, and on his heels tumbled Hughie and all the crew with the Reverend Lance hastily ascending in the rear.
From the deck of the Graywing the captain looked out across the heaving Strait of Belle Isle, across the green-blue waters streaked with frozen froth, jeweled with pale-emerald floating ice and overlaid with the mother-of-pearl of a rising moon. Southeastward, between him and Belle Isle Island, wrapped ghost-like in Atlantic fog, yawed the freighter Hughie Hay had sighted, not an ocean-going cargo steamer but a sixty-ton schooner carrying Labrador stationers to their Summer fishing-stations.
Too poor to own their own schooners, the stationers were freighted down the coast to their rooms every Spring and herded up again like cattle in the Autumn on vessels belonging to the firm with which they dealt.
"Yonder she is!" the captain pointed out to Reverend Lance. "And a fine little plague-ship for your ministering, Lance!"
"What ship is it?" demanded Lance, peering short-sighted over the shimmering sea.
"The Auk, over from Bay of Islands on Newfoundland," Taylor told him. "Belongs to old Peter Laval and doing business from Château to Chidley."
"H'm. H'm. Laval, eh? One of my best church supporters," commented Lance.
"Sanctimonious old whelp," corrected Taylor. "Good heavens, his old wagon will ruin my eight-hundred-dollar cod trap! Where's the French fishery cruiser? Where's Admiral Pellier and his Groix?"
"Yaonder off'n York Point, Cap'n!" spoke Hughie Hay.
He pointed where, almost invisible behind a jumble of low icebergs deep azure in the shadows, the long black hulk of the Fishery Protection Service cruiser lay at anchor together with the admiral's private yacht Esperance, which he used as an auxiliary vessel for shore work 'round the harbors.
"Then why isn't he on his job?" demanded Taylor who had run foul of Pellier several times on his Newfoundland voyages and who had at last been definitely warned off the French Shore. "If I happen to dry a seine taut in the sun he's after me for the size of my mesh, but Laval's blundering Auk here can—by the tall Pole Star, look, there's no one at her wheel! We've got to board her!"
Swiftly he sprang to take his own wheel, beckoning the regular wheelsman, Brown, to his side, and at the same time calling orders to his men who, swift as he, ran up the big mainsail and backed over the jib.
"No time for dories, boys," he warned. "Have to jump her rail as we go by. Brown, grab this wheel when I say! And you, Bolero, fall to and handle the sheets for Brown when he comes about on the other tack!"
Under Taylor's guidance the Graywing caught her stride, headsails ballooning, fore and main booms crashing across as she leaped toward the yawing Auk not three cable-lengths away. The freighter swung drunkenly to starboard. Taylor veered a point or two in his course, and as swiftly, as silently and as smoothly as a knife skirts a pot of grease he skirted her rail and barked to Brown at his elbow.
Brown's hands fell upon the spokes Taylor's hands left, and Taylor with a running jump vaulted the rails of the Graywing and Auk as a double hurdle. Hughie Hay, Irish Kerrigan, Boston Jim, Patterson, Scotty McCaig and Tom Halifax were over the hurdle with him. With him they landed upon the cluttered deck of the Auk, and as they heaved themselves up out of the amazing muddle of things that burdened the freighter they found to their surprise the Reverend Lance in their midst.
"You here too, Lance?" grinned Taylor. "Haven't lost your college legs yet, eh? Well, maybe you'll need your college fists as well. Looks like a free-for-all fight and lots of unsavory facts—but steady, boys o' mine, steady, we have to handle the schooner, you see, before we handle her crew. Lower the heavy canvas—yes, both of them, fore and main."
He himself grasped the freighter's kicking wheel and quickly brought her to under jumbo alone.
Then with a rush he and his men jumped away from the canvas-billowed booms and dived down among the struggling mass that glutted the Auk below decks.