Part 12

It was amazing, insulting, and, under the circumstances as Mayo knew them, an unjust query. The master of the Olenia did not reply. He was not prepared to deliver any long-distance explanation. Furthermore, the yacht demanded all his attention just then. He gave his orders and she forged ahead to round the whistler.

“Nor'west by west, half west, Billy. And cut it fine!”

The fog had fairly leaped upon them from the sea. The land-breeze had been holding back the wall of vapor, damming it in a dun bank to southward. The breeze had let go. The fog had seized its opportunity.

“Saturday Cove for us to-night, Mr. McGaw,” said the master. “Keep your eye over Billy's shoulder.”

Then the secretary appeared again on the ladder. This time he did not bring any “compliments.”

“Mr. Marston wants you to report aft at once,” he announced, brusquely.

Mayo hesitated a moment. They were driving into blankness which had shut down with that smothering density which mariners call “a dungeon fog.” Saturday Cove's entrance was a distant and a small target. In spite of steersman and mate, his was the sole responsibility.

“Will you please explain to Mr. Marston that I cannot leave the bridge?”

“You have straight orders from him, captain! You'd better stop the boat and report.”

The skipper of the Olenia was having his first taste of the unreasoning whim of the autocrat who was entitled to break into shipboard discipline, even in a critical moment. Mayo felt exasperation surging in him, but he was willing to explain.

The whistler and Razee Reef had been blotted out by the fog.

“If this vessel is stopped five minutes in this tide-drift we shall lose our bearings, sir. I cannot leave this bridge for the present.”

“I'm thinking you'll leave it for good!” blurted the secretary. “You're the first hired man who ever told Julius Marston to go bite his own thumb.”

“I may be a hired man,” retorted Mayo. “But I am also a licensed shipmaster. I must ask you to step down off the bridge.”

“Does that go for all the rest of the--passengers?” asked the secretary, angry in his turn. He dwelt on his last word. “It does--in a time like this!”

“Very well, I'll give them that word aft.”

Captain Mayo caught a side glance from Mate McGaw after a time.

“I have often wondered,” remarked the mate to nobody in particular, “how it is that so many damn fools get rich on shore.”

Captain Mayo did not express any opinion on the subject. He clutched the bridge rail and stared into the fog, and seemed to be having a lot of trouble in choking back some kind of emotion.

III ~ THE TAVERN OF THE SEAS

Now, Mister Macliver, you knows him quite well, He comes upon deck and he cuts a great swell; It's damn your eyes there and it's damn your eyes here, And straight to the gangway he takes a broad sheer. --La Pique “Come-all-ye.”

Into Saturday Cove, all during that late afternoon, they came surging--spars and tackle limned against the on-sweeping pall of the gray fog--those wayfarers of the open main.

First to roll in past the ledgy portals of the haven were the venerable sea-wagons--the coasters known as the “Apple-treers.” Their weatherwise skippers, old sea-dogs who could smell weather as bloodhounds sniff trails, had their noses in the air in good season that day, and knew that they must depend on a thinning wind to cuff them into port. One after the other, barnacled anchors splashed from catheads, dragging rusty chains from hawse-holes, and old, patched sails came sprawling down with chuckle of sheaves and lisp of running rigging.

A 'long-coast shanty explains the nickname, “Apple-treers”:

O, what's the use of compass or a quadrant or a log? Keep her loafin' on her mudhook in a norther or a fog. But as soon's the chance is better, then well ratch her off once more, Keepin' clost enough for bearings from the apple-trees ashore.

Therefore, the topsail schooners, the fore-and-afters, the Bluenose blunt-prows, came in early before the fog smooched out the loom of the trees and before it became necessary to guess at what the old card compasses had to reveal on the subject of courses.

And so, along with the rest of the coastwise ragtag, which was seeking harbor and holding-ground, came the ancient schooner Polly. Fog-masked by those illusory mists, she was a shadow ship like the others; but, more than the others, she seemed to be a ghost ship, for her lines and her rig informed any well-posted mariner that she must be a centenarian; with her grotesqueness accentuated by the fog pall, she seemed unreal--a picture from the past.

She had an out-thrust of snub bow and an upcock of square stern, and sag of waist--all of which accurately revealed ripe antiquity, just as a bell-crowned beaver and a swallow-tail coat with brass buttons would identify an old man in the ruck of newer fashions. She had seams like the wrinkles in the parchment skin of extreme old age. She carried a wooden figurehead under her bowsprit, the face and bust of a woman on whom an ancient woodcarver had bestowed his notion of a beatific smile; the result was an idiotic simper. The glorious gilding had been worn off, the wood was gray and cracked. The Polly's galley was entirely hidden under a deckload of shingles and laths in bunches; the after-house was broad and loomed high above the rail in contrast to the mere cubbies which were provided for the other fore-and-afters in the flotilla which came ratching in toward Saturday Cove.