Captains Courageous

To
James Conland, M.D.,
Brattleboro, Vermont

I ploughed the land with horses,
But my heart was ill at ease,
For the old sea-faring men
Came to me now and then,
With their sagas of the seas.

Longfellow

I

The weather door of the smoking-room had been left open to the North Atlantic fog, as the big liner rolled and lifted, whistling to warn the fishing-fleet.

“That Cheyne boy’s the biggest nuisance aboard,” said a man in a frieze overcoat, shutting the door with a bang. “He isn’t wanted here. He’s too fresh.”

A white-haired German reached for a sandwich, and grunted between bites: “I know der breed. Ameriga is full of dot kind. I dell you you should imbort ropes’ ends free under your dariff.”

“Pshaw! There isn’t any real harm to him. He’s more to be pitied than anything,” a man from New York drawled, as he lay at full length along the cushions under the wet skylight. “They’ve dragged him around from hotel to hotel ever since he was a kid. I was talking to his mother this morning. She’s a lovely lady, but she don’t pretend to manage him. He’s going to Europe to finish his education.”

“Education isn’t begun yet.” This was a Philadelphian, curled up in a corner. “That boy gets two hundred a month pocket-money, he told me. He isn’t sixteen either.”

“Railroads, his father, aind’t it?” said the German.

“Yep. That and mines and lumber and shipping. Built one place at San Diego, the old man has; another at Los Angeles; owns half a dozen railroads, half the lumber on the Pacific slope, and lets his wife spend the money,” the Philadelphian went on lazily. “The West don’t suit her, she says. She just tracks around with the boy and her nerves, trying to find out what’ll amuse him, I guess. Florida, Adirondacks, Lakewood, Hot Springs, New York, and round again. He isn’t much more than a secondhand hotel clerk now. When he’s finished in Europe he’ll be a holy terror.”

“What’s the matter with the old man attending to him personally?” said a voice from the frieze ulster.

“Old man’s piling up the rocks. Don’t want to be disturbed, I guess. He’ll find out his error a few years from now. Pity, because there’s a heap of good in the boy if you could get at it.”

“Mit a rope’s end; mit a rope’s end!” growled the German.

Once more the door banged, and a slight, slim-built boy perhaps fifteen years old, a half-smoked cigarette hanging from one corner of his mouth, leaned in over the high footway. His pasty yellow complexion did not show well on a person of his years, and his look was a mixture of irresolution, bravado, and very cheap smartness. He was dressed in a cherry-coloured blazer, knickerbockers, red stockings, and bicycle shoes, with a red flannel cap at the back of the head. After whistling between his teeth, as he eyed the company, he said in a loud, high voice: “Say, it’s thick outside. You can hear the fish-boats squawking all around us. Say, wouldn’t it be great if we ran down one?”

“Shut the door, Harvey,” said the New Yorker. “Shut the door and stay outside. You’re not wanted here.”

“Who’ll stop me?” he answered, deliberately. “Did you pay for my passage, Mister Martin? Guess I’ve as good right here as the next man.”

He picked up some dice from a checkerboard and began throwing, right hand against left.

“Say, gen’elmen, this is deader’n mud. Can’t we make a game of poker between us?”

There was no answer, and he puffed his cigarette, swung his legs, and drummed on the table with rather dirty fingers. Then he pulled out a roll of bills as if to count them.

“How’s your mamma this afternoon?” a man said. “I didn’t see her at lunch.”

“In her stateroom, I guess. She’s ’most always sick on the ocean. I’m going to give the stewardess fifteen dollars for looking after her. I don’t go down more ’n I can avoid. It makes me feel mysterious to pass that butler’s-pantry place. Say, this is the first time I’ve been on the ocean.”

“Oh, don’t apologize, Harvey.”

“Who’s apologizing? This is the first time I’ve crossed the ocean, gen’elmen, and, except the first day, I haven’t been sick one little bit. No, sir!” He brought down his fist with a triumphant bang, wetted his finger, and went on counting the bills.

“Oh, you’re a high-grade machine, with the writing in plain sight,” the Philadelphian yawned. “You’ll blossom into a credit to your country if you don’t take care.”

“I know it. I’m an Americann first, last, and all the time. I’ll show ’em that when I strike Europe. Piff! My cig’s out. I can’t smoke the truck the steward sells. Any gen’elman got a real Turkish cig on him?”

The chief engineer entered for a moment, red, smiling, and wet. “Say, Mac,” cried Harvey cheerfully, “how are we hitting it?”

“Vara much in the ordinary way,” was the grave reply. “The young are as polite as ever to their elders, an’ their elders are e’en tryin’ to appreciate it.”

A low chuckle came from a corner. The German opened his cigar-case and handed a skinny black cigar to Harvey.

“Dot is der broper apparatus to smoke, my young friendt,” he said. “You vill dry it? Yes? Den you vill be efer so happy.”

Harvey lit the unlovely thing with a flourish: he felt that he was getting on in grown-up society.

“It would take more ’n this to keel me over,” he said, ignorant that he was lighting that terrible article, a Wheeling “stogie.”

“Dot we shall bresently see,” said the German. “Where are we now, Mr. Mactonal’?”

“Just there or thereabouts, Mr. Schaefer,” said the engineer. “We’ll be on the Grand Bank tonight; but in a general way o’ speakin’, we’re all among the fishing-fleet now. We’ve shaved three dories an’ near scalped the boom off a Frenchman since noon, an’ that’s close sailin’, ye may say.”

“You like my cigar, eh?” the German asked, for Harvey’s eyes were full of tears.

“Fine, full flavor,” he answered through shut teeth. “Guess we’ve slowed down a little, haven’t we? I’ll skip out and see what the log says.”

“I might if I vhas you,” said the German.

Harvey staggered over the wet decks to the nearest rail. He was very unhappy; but he saw the deck-steward lashing chairs together, and, since he had boasted before the man that he was never seasick, his pride made him go aft to the second-saloon deck at the stern, which was finished in a turtle-back. The deck was deserted, and he crawled to the extreme end of it, near the flagpole. There he doubled up in limp agony, for the Wheeling “stogie” joined with the surge and jar of the screw to sieve out his soul. His head swelled; sparks of fire danced before his eyes; his body seemed to lose weight, while his heels wavered in the breeze. He was fainting from seasickness, and a roll of the ship tilted him over the rail on to the smooth lip of the turtle-back. Then a low, gray mother-wave swung out of the fog, tucked Harvey under one arm, so to speak, and pulled him off and away to leeward; the great green closed over him, and he went quietly to sleep.

He was roused by the sound of a dinner-horn such as they used to blow at a summer-school he had once attended in the Adirondacks. Slowly he remembered that he was Harvey Cheyne, drowned and dead in mid-ocean, but was too weak to fit things together. A new smell filled his nostrils; wet and clammy chills ran down his back, and he was helplessly full of salt water. When he opened his eyes, he perceived that he was still on the top of the sea, for it was running round him in silver-coloured hills, and he was lying on a pile of half-dead fish, looking at a broad human back clothed in a blue jersey.

“It’s no good,” thought the boy. “I’m dead, sure enough, and this thing is in charge.”

He groaned, and the figure turned its head, showing a pair of little gold rings half hidden in curly black hair.

“Aha! You feel some pretty well now?” it said. “Lie still so: we trim better.”

With a swift jerk he sculled the flickering boat-head on to a foamless sea that lifted her twenty full feet, only to slide her into a glassy pit beyond. But this mountain-climbing did not interrupt blue-jersey’s talk. “Fine good job, I say, that I catch you. Eh, wha‑at? Better good job, I say, your boat not catch me. How you come to fall out?”

“I was sick,” said Harvey; “sick, and couldn’t help it.”

“Just in time I blow my horn, and your boat she yaw a little. Then I see you come all down. Eh, wha‑at? I think you are cut into baits by the screw, but you dreeft—dreeft to me, and I make a big fish of you. So you shall not die this time.”

“Where am I?” said Harvey, who could not see that life was particularly safe where he lay.

“You are with me in the dory—Manuel my name, and I come from schooner We’re Here of Gloucester. I live to Gloucester. By-and-by we get supper. Eh, wha‑at?”

He seemed to have two pairs of hands and a head of cast-iron, for, not content with blowing through a big conch-shell, he must needs stand up to it, swaying with the sway of the flat-bottomed dory, and send a grinding, thuttering shriek through the fog. How long this entertainment lasted, Harvey could not remember, for he lay back terrified at the sight of the smoking swells. He fancied he heard a gun and a horn and shouting. Something bigger than the dory, but quite as lively, loomed alongside. Several voices talked at once; he was dropped into a dark, heaving hole, where men in oilskins gave him a hot drink and took off his clothes, and he fell asleep.

When he waked he listened for the first breakfast-bell on the steamer, wondering why his stateroom had grown so small. Turning, he looked into a narrow, triangular cave, lit by a lamp hung against a huge square beam. A three-cornered table within arm’s reach ran from the angle of the bows to the foremast. At the after end, behind a well-used Plymouth stove, sat a boy about his own age, with a flat red face and a pair of twinkling gray eyes. He was dressed in a blue jersey and high rubber boots. Several pairs of the same sort of footwear, an old cap, and some worn-out woollen socks lay on the floor, and black and yellow oilskins swayed to and fro beside the bunks. The place was packed as full of smells as a bale is of cotton. The oilskins had a peculiarly thick flavor of their own which made a sort of background to the smells of fried fish, burnt grease, paint, pepper, and stale tobacco; but these, again, were all hooped together by one encircling smell of ship and salt water. Harvey saw with disgust that there were no sheets on his bed-place. He was lying on a piece of dingy ticking full of lumps and nubbles. Then, too, the boat’s motion was not that of a steamer. She was neither sliding nor rolling, but rather wriggling herself about in a silly, aimless way, like a colt at the end of a halter. Water-noises ran by close to his ear, and beams creaked and whined about him. All these things made him grunt despairingly and think of his mother.

“Feelin’ better?” said the boy, with a grin. “Hev some coffee?” He brought a tin cup full and sweetened it with molasses.

“Isn’t there milk?” said Harvey, looking round the dark double tier of bunks as if he expected to find a cow there.

“Well, no,” said the boy. “Ner there ain’t likely to be till ’baout mid-September. ’Tain’t bad coffee. I made it.”

Harvey drank in silence, and the boy handed him a plate full of pieces of crisp fried pork, which he ate ravenously.

“I’ve dried your clothes. Guess they’ve shrunk some,” said the boy. “They ain’t our style much—none of ’em. Twist round an’ see if you’re hurt any.”

Harvey stretched himself in every direction, but could not report any injuries.

“That’s good,” the boy said heartily. “Fix yerself an’ go on deck. Dad wants to see you. I’m his son—Dan, they call me—an’ I’m cook’s helper an’ everything else aboard that’s too dirty for the men. There ain’t no boy here ’cep’ me sence Otto went overboard—an’ he was only a Dutchy, an’ twenty year old at that. How’d you come to fall off in a dead flat ca’am?”

“ ’Twasn’t a calm,” said Harvey, sulkily. “It was a gale, and I was seasick. Guess I must have rolled over the rail.”

“There was a little common swell yes’day an’ last night,” said the boy. “But ef thet’s your notion of a gale—” He whistled. “You’ll know more ’fore you’re through. Hurry! Dad’s waitin’.”

Like many other unfortunate young people, Harvey had never in all his life received a direct order—never, at least, without long, and sometimes tearful, explanations of the advantages of obedience and the reasons for the request. Mrs. Cheyne lived in fear of breaking his spirit, which, perhaps, was the reason that she herself walked on the edge of nervous prostration. He could not see why he should be expected to hurry for any man’s pleasure, and said so. “Your dad can come down here if he’s so anxious to talk to me. I want him to take me to New York right away. It’ll pay him.”

Dan opened his eyes as the size and beauty of this joke dawned on him. “Say, Dad!” he shouted up the foc’sle hatch, “he says you kin slip down an’ see him ef you’re anxious that way. ’Hear, Dad?”

The answer came back in the deepest voice Harvey had ever heard from a human chest: “Quit foolin’, Dan, and send him to me.”

Dan sniggered, and threw Harvey his warped bicycle shoes. There was something in the tones on the deck that made the boy dissemble his extreme rage and console himself with the thought of gradually unfolding the tale of his own and his father’s wealth on the voyage home. This rescue would certainly make him a hero among his friends for life. He hoisted himself on deck up a perpendicular ladder, and stumbled aft, over a score of obstructions, to where a small, thickset, clean-shaven man with gray eyebrows sat on a step that led up to the quarterdeck. The swell had passed in the night, leaving a long, oily sea, dotted round the horizon with the sails of a dozen fishing-boats. Between them lay little black specks, showing where the dories were out fishing. The schooner, with a triangular riding-sail on the mainmast, played easily at anchor, and except for the man by the cabin-roof—“house” they call it—she was deserted.

“Mornin’—Good afternoon, I should say. You’ve nigh slep’ the clock round, young feller,” was the greeting.

“Mornin’,” said Harvey. He did not like being called “young feller”; and, as one rescued from drowning, expected sympathy. His mother suffered agonies whenever he got his feet wet; but this mariner did not seem excited.

“Naow let’s hear all abaout it. It’s quite providential, first an’ last, fer all concerned. What might be your name? Where from (we mistrust it’s Noo York), an’ where baound (we mistrust it’s Europe)?”

Harvey gave his name, the name of the steamer, and a short history of the accident, winding up with a demand to be taken back immediately to New York, where his father would pay anything anyone chose to name.

“H’m,” said the shaven man, quite unmoved by the end of Harvey’s speech. “I can’t say we think special of any man, or boy even, that falls overboard from that kind o’ packet in a flat ca’am. Least of all when his excuse is that he’s seasick.”

“Excuse!” cried Harvey. “D’you suppose I’d fall overboard into your dirty little boat for fun?”

“Not knowin’ what your notions o’ fun may be, I can’t rightly say, young feller. But if I was you, I wouldn’t call the boat which, under Providence, was the means o’ savin’ ye, names. In the first place, it’s blame irreligious. In the second, it’s annoyin’ to my feelin’s—an’ I’m Disko Troop o’ the We’re Here o’ Gloucester, which you don’t seem rightly to know.”

“I don’t know and I don’t care,” said Harvey. “I’m grateful enough for being saved and all that, of course! but I want you to understand that the sooner you take me back to New York the better it’ll pay you.”

“Meanin’—haow?” Troop raised one shaggy eyebrow over a suspiciously mild blue eye.

“Dollars and cents,” said Harvey, delighted to think that he was making an impression. “Cold dollars and cents.” He thrust a hand into a pocket, and threw out his stomach a little, which was his way of being grand. “You’ve done the best day’s work you ever did in your life when you pulled me in. I’m all the son Harvey Cheyne has.”

“He’s bin favoured,” said Disko, dryly.

“And if you don’t know who Harvey Cheyne is, you don’t know much—that’s all. Now turn her around and let’s hurry.”

Harvey had a notion that the greater part of America was filled with people discussing and envying his father’s dollars.

“Mebbe I do, an’ mebbe I don’t. Take a reef in your stummick, young feller. It’s full o’ my vittles.”

Harvey heard a chuckle from Dan, who was pretending to be busy by the stump-foremast, and blood rushed to his face. “We’ll pay for that too,” he said. “When do you suppose we shall get to New York?”

“I don’t use Noo York any. Ner Boston. We may see Eastern Point about September; an’ your pa—I’m real sorry I hain’t heerd tell of him—may give me ten dollars efter all your talk. Then o’ course he mayn’t.”

“Ten dollars! Why, see here, I—” Harvey dived into his pocket for the wad of bills. All he brought up was a soggy packet of cigarettes.

“Not lawful currency; an’ bad for the lungs. Heave ’em overboard, young feller, and try agin.”

“It’s been stolen!” cried Harvey, hotly.

“You’ll hev to wait till you see your pa to reward me, then?”

“A hundred and thirty-four dollars—all stolen,” said Harvey, hunting wildly through his pockets. “Give them back.”

A curious change flitted across old Troop’s hard face. “What might you have been doin’ at your time o’ life with one hundred an’ thirty-four dollars, young feller?”

“It was part of my pocket-money—for a month.” This Harvey thought would be a knockdown blow, and it was—indirectly.

“Oh! One hundred and thirty-four dollars is only part of his pocket-money—for one month only! You don’t remember hittin’ anything when you fell over, do you? Crack agin a stanchion, le’s say. Old man Hasken o’ the East Wind”—Troop seemed to be talking to himself—“he tripped on a hatch an’ butted the mainmast with his head—hardish. ’Baout three weeks afterwards, old man Hasken he would hev it that the East Wind was a commerce-destroyin’ man-o’-war, an’ so he declared war on Sable Island because it was Bridish, an’ the shoals run aout too far. They sewed him up in a bed-bag, his head an’ feet appearin’, fer the rest o’ the trip, an’ now he’s to home in Essex playin’ with little rag dolls.”

Harvey choked with rage, but Troop went on consolingly: “We’re sorry fer you. We’re very sorry fer you—an’ so young. We won’t say no more abaout the money, I guess.”

“ ’Course you won’t. You stole it.”

“Suit yourself. We stole it ef it’s any comfort to you. Naow, abaout goin’ back. Allowin’ we could do it, which we can’t, you ain’t in no fit state to go back to your home, an’ we’ve jest come on to the Banks, workin’ fer our bread. We don’t see the ha’af of a hundred dollars a month, let alone pocket-money; an’ with good luck we’ll be ashore again somewheres abaout the first weeks o’ September.”

“But—but it’s May now, and I can’t stay here doin’ nothing just because you want to fish. I can’t, I tell you!”

“Right an’ jest; jest an’ right. No one asks you to do nothin’. There’s a heap as you can do, for Otto he went overboard on Le Have. I mistrust he lost his grip in a gale we f’und there. Anyways, he never come back to deny it. You’ve turned up, plain, plumb providential for all concerned. I mistrust, though, there’s ruther few things you kin do. Ain’t thet so?”

“I can make it lively for you and your crowd when we get ashore,” said Harvey, with a vicious nod, murmuring vague threats about “piracy,” at which Troop almost—not quite—smiled.

“Excep’ talk. I’d forgot that. You ain’t asked to talk more’n you’ve a mind to aboard the We’re Here. Keep your eyes open, an’ help Dan to do ez he’s bid, an’ sechlike, an’ I’ll give you—you ain’t wuth it, but I’ll give—ten an’ a ha’af a month; say thirty-five at the end o’ the trip. A little work will ease up your head, and you kin tell us all abaout your dad an’ your ma an’ your money afterwards.”

“She’s on the steamer,” said Harvey, his eyes filling with tears. “Take me to New York at once.”

“Poor woman—poor woman! When she has you back she’ll forgit it all, though. There’s eight of us on the We’re Here, an’ ef we went back naow—it’s more’n a thousand mile—we’d lose the season. The men they wouldn’t hev it, allowin’ I was agreeable.”

“But my father would make it all right.”

“He’d try. I don’t doubt he’d try,” said Troop; “but a whole season’s catch is eight men’s bread; an’ you’ll be better in your health when you see him in the fall. Go forward an’ help Dan. It’s ten an’ a ha’af a month, ez I said, an’ o’ course, all f’und, same ez the rest o’ us.”

“Do you mean I’m to clean pots and pans and things?” said Harvey.

“An’ other things. You’ve no call to shout, young feller.”

“I won’t! My father will give you enough to buy this dirty little fish-kettle”—Harvey stamped on the deck—“ten times over, if you take me to New York safe; and—and—you’re in a hundred and thirty by me, anyhow.”

“Haow?” said Troop, the iron face darkening.

“How? You know how, well enough. On top of all that, you want me to do menial work”—Harvey was very proud of that adjective—“till the Fall. I tell you I will not. You hear?”

Troop regarded the top of the mainmast with deep interest for a while, as Harvey harangued fiercely all around him.

“Hsh!” he said at last. “I’m figurin’ out my responsibilities in my own mind. It’s a matter o’ jedgment.”

Dan stole up and plucked Harvey by the elbow. “Don’t go to tamperin’ with Dad any more,” he pleaded. “You’ve called him a thief two or three times over, an’ he don’t take that from any livin’ bein’.”

“I won’t!” Harvey almost shrieked, disregarding the advice, and still Troop meditated.

“Seems kinder unneighbourly,” he said at last, his eye travelling down to Harvey. “I—don’t blame you, not a mite, young feeler, nor you won’t blame me when the bile’s out o’ your systim. Be sure you sense what I say? Ten an’ a ha’af fer second boy on the schooner—an’ all found—fer to teach you an’ fer the sake o’ your health. Yes or no?”

“No!” said Harvey. “Take me back to New York or I’ll see you—”

He did not exactly remember what followed. He was lying in the scuppers, holding on to a nose that bled while Troop looked down on him serenely.

“Dan,” he said to his son, “I was sot agin this young feeler when I first saw him on account o’ hasty jedgments. Never you be led astray by hasty jedgments, Dan. Naow I’m sorry for him, because he’s clear distracted in his upper works. He ain’t responsible fer the names he’s give me, nor fer his other statements—nor fer jumpin’ overboard, which I’m abaout ha’af convinced he did. You be gentle with him, Dan, ’r I’ll give you twice what I’ve give him. Them hemmeridges clears the head. Let him sluice it off!”

Troop went down solemnly into the cabin, where he and the older men bunked, leaving Dan to comfort the luckless heir to thirty millions.