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Page 58
The hesitating sails flapped and lurched in the close air as the deep
smoothed out, blue and oily, round them. When they whistled for a
wind only the rain came in spiky rods, bubbling and drumming,
and behind the rain the thunder and the lightning of mid-August.
They lay on the deck with bare feet and arms, telling one another
what they would order at their first meal ashore; for now the land
was in plain sight. A Gloucester swordfish-boat drifted alongside,
a man in the little pulpit on the bowsprit flourished his harpoon,
his bare head plastered down with the wet. "And all's well!" he
sang cheerily, as though he were watch on a big liner.
"Wouverman's waiting fer you, Disko. What's the news o' the
Fleet?"
Disko shouted it and passed on, while the wild summer storm
pounded overhead and the lightning flickered along the capes from
four different quarters at once. It gave the low circle of hills round
Gloucester Harbor, Ten Pound Island, the fish-sheds, with the
broken line of house-roofs, and each spar and buoy on the water, in
blinding photographs that came and went a dozen times to the
minute as the 'We're Here' crawled in on half-flood, and the
whistling-buoy moaned and mourned behind her. Then the storm
died out in long, separated, vicious dags of blue-white flame,
followed by a single roar like the roar of a mortar-battery, and the
shaken air tingled under the stars as it got back to silence.
"The flag, the flag!" said Disko, suddenly, pointing upward.
"What is ut?" said Long Jack.
"Otto! Ha'af mast. They can see us frum shore now."
"I'd clean forgot He's no folk to Gloucester, has he?"
"Girl he was goin' to be married to this fall."
"Mary pity her!" said Long Jack, and lowered the little flag
half-mast for the sake of Otto, swept overboard in a gale off Le
Have three months before.
Disko wiped the wet from his eyes and led the 'We're Here' to
Wouverman's wharf, giving his orders in whispers, while she
swung round moored tugs and night-watchmen hailed her from the
ends of inky-black piers. Over and above the darkness and the
mystery of the procession, Harvey could feel the land close round
him once more, with all its thousands of people asleep, and the
smell of earth after rain, and the familiar noise of a switching-engine
coughing to herself in a freight-yard; and all those things made his
heart beat and his throat dry up as he stood by the foresheet. They
heard the anchor-watch snoring on a lighthouse-tug, nosed into a
pocket of darkness where a lantern glimmered on either side;
somebody waked with a grunt, threw them a rope, and they made
fast to a silent wharf flanked with great iron-roofed sheds fall of
warm emptiness, and lay there without a sound.
Then Harvey sat down by the wheel, and sobbed and sobbed as
though his heart would break, and a tall woman who had been
sitting on a weigh-scale dropped down into the schooner and
kissed Dan once on the cheek; for she was his mother, and she had
seen the 'We're Here' by the lightning flashes. She took no notice
of Harvey till he had recovered himself a little and Disko had told
her his story. Then they went to Disko's house together as the dawn
was breaking; and until the telegraph office was open and he could
wire his folk, Harvey Cheyne was perhaps the loneliest boy in all
America. But the curious thing was that Disko and Dan seemed to
think none the worse of him for crying.
Wouverman was not ready for Disko's prices till Disko, sure that
the 'We're Here' was at least a week ahead of any other Gloucester
boat, had given him a few days to swallow them; so all hands
played about the streets, and Long Jack stopped the Rocky Neck
trolley, on principle, as be said, till the conductor let him ride free.
But Dan went about with his freckled nose in the air, bung-full of
mystery and most haughty to his family.
"Dan, I'll hev to lay inter you ef you act this way," said Troop,
pensively. "Sence we've come ashore this time you've bin a heap
too fresh."
"I'd lay into him naow ef he was mine," said Uncle Salters, sourly.
He and Penn boarded with the Troops.
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