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Page 39
A little laugh went round at Salters's expense.
Disko held his tongue, and wrought over the log-book that he kept
in a hatchet-faced, square hand; this was the kind of thing that ran
on, page after soiled page:
"July 17. This day thick fog and few fish. Made berth to
northward. So ends this day.
"July 18. This day comes in with thick fog. Caught a few fish.
"July 19. This day comes in with light breeze from N.E. and fine
weather. Made a berth to eastward. Caught plenty fish.
"July 20. This, the Sabbath, comes in with fog and light winds. So
ends this day. Total fish caught this week, 3,478."
They never worked on Sundays, but shaved, and washed
themselves if it were fine, and Pennsylvania sang hymns. Once or
twice he suggested that, if ft was not an impertinence, he thought
he could preach a little. Uncle Salters nearly jumped down his
throat at the mere notion, reminding him that he was not a
preacher and mustn't think of such things. "We'd hev him
rememberin' Johns-town next," Salters explained, "an' what would
happen then?" so they compromised on his reading aloud from a
book called "Josephus." It was an old leather-bound volume,
smelling of a hundred voyages, very solid and very like the Bible,
but enlivened with accounts of battles and sieges; and they read it
nearly from cover to cover. Otherwise Penn was a silent little
body. He would not utter a word for three days on end sometimes,
though he played checkers, listened to the songs, and laughed at
the stories. When they tried to stir him up, he would answer: "I
don't wish to seem unneighbourly, but it is because I have nothing
to say. My head feels quite empty. I've almost forgotten my name."
He would turn to Uncle Salters with an expectant smile.
"Why, Pennsylvania Pratt," Salters would shout "You'll fergit me
next!"
"No--never," Penn would say, shutting his lips firmly.
"Pennsylvania Pratt, of course," he would repeat over and over.
Sometimes it was Uncle Salters who forgot, and told him he was
Haskins or Rich or McVitty; but Penn was equally content--till next
time.
He was always very tender with Harvey, whom he pitied both as a
lost child and as a lunatic; and when Salters saw that Penn liked
the boy, he relaxed, too. Salters was not an amiable person (He
esteemed it his business to keep the boys in order); and the first
time Harvey, in fear and trembling, on a still day, managed to shin
up to the main-truck (Dan was behind him ready to help), he
esteemed it his duty to hang Salters's big sea-boots up there--a sight
of shame and derision to the nearest schooner. With Disko, Harvey
took no liberties; not even when the old man dropped direct
orders, and treated him, like the rest of the crew, to "Don't you
want to do so and so?" and "Guess you'd better," and so forth.
There was something about the clean-shaven lips and the puckered
corners of the eyes that was mightily sobering to young blood.
Disko showed him the meaning of the thumbed and pricked chart,
which, he said, laid over any government publication whatsoever;
led him, pencil in hand, from berth to berth over the whole string
of banks--Le Have, Western, Banquereau, St. Pierre, Green, and
Grand--talking "cod" meantime. Taught him, too, the principle on
which the "hog-yoke" was worked.
In this Harvey excelled Dan, for he had inherited a head for
figures, and the notion of stealing information from one glimpse of
the sullen Bank sun appealed to all his keen wits. For other
sea-matters his age handicapped him. As Disko said, he should
have begun when he was ten. Dan could bait up trawl or lay his
hand on any rope in the dark; and at a pinch, when Uncle Salters
had a gurry-score on his palm, could dress down by sense of touch.
He could steer in anything short of half a gale from the feel of the
wind on his face, humouring the 'We're Here' just when she needed
it. These things he did as automatically as he skipped about the
rigging, or made his dory a part of his own will and body. But he
could not communicate his knowledge to Harvey.
Still there was a good deal of general information flying about the
schooner on stormy days, when they lay up in the foc'sle or sat on
the cabin lockers, while spare eye-bolts, leads, and rings rolled and
rattled in the pauses of the talk. Disko spoke of whaling voyages in
the Fifties; of great she-whales slain beside their young; of death
agonies on the black tossing seas, and blood that spurted forty feet
in the air; of boats smashed to splinters; of patent rockets that went
off wrong-end-first and bombarded the trembling crews; of
cutting-in and boiling-down, and that terrible "nip" of '71, when
twelve hundred men were made homeless on the ice in three
days--wonderful tales, all true. But more wonderful still were his
stories of the cod, and how they argued and reasoned on their
private businesses deep down below the keel.
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