- -
- 100%
- +
CHAPTER I
MALICIOUSLY ACCUSED
“Let them think what they like. If I had died I would have been a hero; because I lived I suppose there is nothing in the history of crime that I have not committed.”
Young Captain Code Schofield sprang out of the deep, luxurious chair and began to pace up and down before the fire. He did not cast as much as a glance at the woman near him. His mind was elsewhere. He had heard strange things in this talk with her.
“Well, captain, you know how it is on an island like this. The tiny thing of everyday life becomes a subject for a day’s discussion. That affair of six months ago was like dropping a tombstone in a mud-puddle–everything is profoundly stirred, but no one gets spattered except the one who dropped it. In this case yourself.”
Schofield stopped in his tracks and regarded his hostess with a look that was mingled surprise and uneasiness. She lay back in a chaise-longue, her hands clasped behind her head, smiling up at the young man. The great square room was dark except for the firelight, and her yellow dress, gleaming fitfully in it, showed the curving lissomeness of her young body.
“Mrs. Mallaby,” he said, “when you say clever things like that I don’t know what to do. I’m not used to it.” He laughed as though half-ashamed of the confession.
“Appreciate them,” she directed shortly with a fleeting glance from her great dark eyes.
“Do you demand all my time?” he asked and flushed. The well-turned compliment caught her unawares and she admitted to herself that perhaps she had underrated this briny youth who was again beginning to interest her extremely.
But with the sally he seemed to have forgotten it and recommenced pacing the floor, his hands in his pockets and his brows knit. His mind had gone off again to this other vastly important thing.
She noticed it with a twinge of vexation. She vastly preferred the personal.
“What was it old Jed Martin said to you this afternoon?” he asked.
“That if the opinions of old sailors were of any account Nat Burns could get up a pretty good case against you for the loss of the May Schofield.”
“I suppose he meant his own opinion. He’s an old sailor now, but if he lives to be a hundred and fifty he’ll never be a good one. I could beat his vessel if I was on a two-by-four with a pillow-case for a mains’l. I can’t understand why he has turned against me.”
“It isn’t only he, it’s–”
“I know it!” he burst out passionately. “It’s the whole island of Grande Mignon from Freekirk Head to Southern Cross. Not a man nor woman but has turned against me since that awful day.
“Great God! what do they think? That I wrecked the poor old May for the fun of the thing? That I enjoyed fighting for my life in that sea and seeing the others drown with my very eyes? Don’t they suppose I will carry the remembrance of that all my life? My Heaven, Elsa, that was six months ago and I have just begun to sleep nights without the nightmare of it riding me!”
“Poor boy!”
Her voice calmed him like a touch on a restive horse, and yet he unconsciously resented the fact that it did. “I haven’t been blind, Code, and I have heard and seen this thing growing. It is hard for a fisherman to lose his ship and not suffer for it afterward at the hands of inferior sailors. I’ve known you all my life, Code, and I believe in you now just as I did that day in school you took the whipping I should have got for passing you a note.
“You haven’t heard the last of the May Schofield, and you won’t until you lay the ghost that has come out of its grave. But whatever you do or wherever you are, I want you to remember that I stand ready to help you in every way I can. All this”–she swept her arm about the richly furnished room–“is worthless to me now that Jim is gone, unless I can do some good for those I like. Please, Code, will you feel free to call on me if you need help?”
The flush that had receded returned with a flood of color that made his face beneath its fair hair appear very dark.
“Really, Elsa,” he stammered, “that’s awfully handsome of you, but I hope things won’t go so far as that. I can never forget what you have said.”
Elsa Mallaby had always been like that to him. Even when she married “Hard-Luck” Jim Mallaby she had always seemed to regard Code Schofield as the one man in Freekirk Head. But Jim, being too busy with his strange affairs, had not noticed.
Jim it was who, after twenty years of horrible poverty and ill-luck, had caught the largest halibut ever taken off the Banks and made thousands of dollars exhibiting it alive. And it was this same Jim who, for the remaining ten years of his life, turned to gold everything he touched.
Mallaby House was his real monument, for here, on the great green hill that overlooked the harbor, he had erected a mansion that made his name famous up and down the Bay of Fundy. And here, seven years ago, he had brought Elsa Fuller as his bride–Elsa Fuller who was the belle of Freekirk Head, and had been to Boston to boarding-school.
It was to Mallaby House that Code Schofield had come to dinner this night. He had not wanted to come and had only agreed when she bribed him with a promise of something very important she might reveal.
The revelation was hardly a pleasure. Nothing had been a pleasure to him since that day six months ago when his old schooner, dismasted and leaking in a gale, had foundered near the Wolves, two sharp-toothed islands near Grande Mignon. Four islanders had been lost that day, and he alone had lived through the surf.
“What else did old Jed Martin say, Elsa?” he asked suddenly.
She knitted her brows and stared into the fire. Why would he always go back to that?
“He said that the May Schofield should have been able to live out that gale easily if she had been handled right, old as she was. She was pretty old, wasn’t she?”
“Fifty years. She was twenty when dad got her–he sailed her twenty-eight and I had her for two.”
“You got a good deal of insurance out of her, didn’t you, Code?”
“Ten thousand dollars–her full value.”
“And you bought the Charming Lass with that, didn’t you?”
“Yes–that and two thousand that dad had saved. Why?”
“Old Jed Martin said something about that, too.”
Schofield’s face paled slightly and his mouth closed tightly, exhibiting the salience of his jaw.
“So that’s it, eh? Thinks I ran her under for the insurance–the old barnacle. Is that around the island, too?”
“I guess it must be, or I shouldn’t have heard about it. You didn’t, of course, did you, Code?”
“I hardly expected you would ask that, Elsa. Why, I loved that old schooner like I love–well, my mother.”
“I believe you, Code; you don’t need to ask that. I just wanted to hear you deny it. But you know there were some queer things about her sinking just then, when she was supposed to be in good condition. Nat Burns–”
“Ha! So he is in it, too. What does he say?”
“He says that her insurance policy was just about to run out. Is that so?”
“Yes.”
There was a tone of defiance in his answer that caused her to look up at him quickly. His blue eyes were narrowed and his face hard.
“And it wasn’t such a hard gale, was it?”
“No. I’ve weathered lots worse with the May. I can’t explain why she sank.”
“And Michael Burns, who was aboard of her, was the insurance inspector, wasn’t he?”
“Yes.” The reply was more a groan than a spoken word. He laughed harshly.
“I can see Nat Burns’s hand in all this,” he cried. “Why didn’t I think of it before? He will dog me till I die because his father lost his life aboard my schooner. Oh, I had no idea it was as bad as this!”
He sank down into the chair again and stared gloomily into the fire.
“I’m glad I came to-night,” he said at last. “I didn’t know all these things. How long has this talk been going round?”
“Not long, Code.” Her voice was all sympathy. “It is simply the result of brooding among our people who have so little in their lives. I’m sorry. What will you do? Go away somewhere else?”
He looked at her quickly–scorn written upon his face.
“Go away,” he repeated, “and admit my own guilt? Well, hardly. I’ll stay here and see this thing through if I have to do it in the face of all of them.”
“Splendid, Code!” she cried, clapping her hands. “Just what I knew you would say. And, remember, I will help you all I can and whenever you need me.”
He looked at her gratefully and she thrilled with triumph. At last there was something more in his glance than the purely impersonal; he had awakened at last, she thought, to what she might mean to him.
There followed one of those pauses that often occur when two people are thinking intensely on different subjects. For perhaps five minutes the cheerful fire crackled on uninterrupted. Then, suddenly recollecting himself, Code sprang to his feet and held out his hand.
“Half-past ten,” he said, glancing at the mahogany chime-clock on the mantelpiece. “I must really go. It has been kind of you to have me up to-night and tell me all these–”
“Inner secrets of your own life that you never suspected before?” she laughed.
“Exactly. You have done me a service like the good old friend you always were.”
She took his hand, and he noticed that hers was a trifle cold. They started toward the hallway.
From the broad veranda of Mallaby House the view extended a dozen miles to sea. Beneath the hill on which the mansion stood the village of Freekirk Head nestled against the green. Now the dim, yellow lights of its many lamps glowed in the darkness and edged the crescent of stony beach where washed the cold waters of Flag’s Cove.
To the left at one tip of the crescent the flash of Swallowtail Light glowed and died like the fire in a gigantic cigarette. To the right, at the other, could be seen the faint lamps of Castalia, three miles away.
For a minute they stood drinking in the superb beauty of it all. Then Elsa left him with a conventional word, and Schofield heard the great front door close softly behind her.
Silently he descended the steps, when suddenly from the town below came the hideous, raucous shriek of a steam-whistle.
He stood for a minute, astonished, for the whistle was that of the steamer Grande Mignon, that daily plied between the island and the mainland. Now the vessel lay at her dock and Code, as well as all the island, knew that her wild signaling at such an hour foreboded some dire calamity.
Swiftly buttoning his coat, he started on a run down the winding, rocky path that led from Mallaby House. He cast one more glance toward the roofs of the village before he plunged among the pine and tamarack, and in that instant caught a red glow from the general direction of the fish wharfs.
CHAPTER II
THE RED PERIL
Five minutes of plunging and slipping brought him down to the main road that gleamed a dim gray in the blackness. A quarter of a mile east lay the wharfs, the general store, and some of the best dwellings in Freekirk Head.
Ahead of him in the road he could see lanterns bobbing, and the illuminated legs of the men who carried them running. Behind he heard the muffled pound of boots in thick dust, and the hoarse panting of others racing toward the scene of the trouble. The frantic screeching of the steamer’s whistle (that was not yet silent) had done its work well. Freekirk Head was up in arms.
Instinctively and naturally Code Schofield ran, just as he had run from his father’s house since he was ten years old. His long, easy stride carried him quickly over the ground, and he passed two or three of those ahead with lanterns. They shouted at him.
“Hey, what’s the trouble?” panted one. “Know anything about it?”
“No, but it might be the wharfs,” he replied, without stopping. He veered out to the edge of the road so as to avoid any more queries. He looked with suspicion now on all these men.
Who of them, he wondered, was not, in his heart, convicting him of those things Elsa Mallaby had mentioned? His straightforward nature revolted against the hypocrisy in men that bade them treat him as they had done all his life, and yet think of him only as a criminal.
Suddenly the dull red that had glowed dimly against the sky burst into rosy bloom. A great tongue of fire leaped up and licked the heavens, while floating down the brisk breeze came the distant mingling of men’s shouts. As he passed a white wooden gate he heard a woman on the porch crying, and a child’s voice in impatient question.
Then for the first time he lost sight of his own distress and thought of the misery of his whole people. It was August, and the Indians should soon be coming from the mainland to spear porpoises.
The dulce-pickers on the back of the island reported a good yield from the rocks at low tide, but outside of these few there was wretchedness from Anthony’s Nose to Southern Cross.
The fish had failed.
A hundred years and more had the Grande Mignon fishermen gone out with net and handline and trawl; and for that length of time the millions in the sea had fed, clothed, and housed the thousand on the island. When prices had been good there were even luxuries, and history tells of men who, in one haul from a weir, have made their twenty-five thousand dollars in an hour.
This was all gone now. The fish had failed.
Day after day since early spring the men had put to sea in their sloops and motor-dories, trawling and hand-lining from twenty miles out in the Atlantic to four and a half fathoms off Dutch Edge. The result was the same. The fish were poor and few. Even at Bulkhead Rip, where the sixty-pounders played among the racing tides, there was scarcely a bite.
A fisherman lives on luck, so for a month there was no remark upon the suddenly changed condition. But after that, as the days passed and not a full dory raced up to Bill Boughton’s fish stand, muttered whispers and old tales went up and down the island.
It was recalled that the fish left a certain Norwegian coast once for a period of fifty years, and that the whole occupation of the people of that coast was changed. Was that to be the fate of Grande Mignon? If so, what could they do? Extensive farming on the rocky island was impossible, and not one ship had ever been built there for the trade. Where would things end?
So it had gone until now, in the middle of August, the people of Freekirk Head, Seal Cove, and Great Harbor, the main villages along the front or Atlantic side of the island, were face to face with the question of actual life or death.
So far the season’s catch was barely up to that of a good month in normal times; credit was low, and salting and drying were almost useless, for the people ate most of their own catch. Things were at a standstill.
And now the fire on top of all!
Captain Code Schofield thought of all these things as he ran along the King’s Road toward the fire. Now he was almost upon it, and could see that the fish stand and wharf of the two wealthiest men in the village were burning furiously. The roar of the flames came to him.
A hundred yards back from the water stood Bill Boughton’s general store, and next it, in a row, dwellings; typical white fishermen’s cottages with green blinds and a flower-filled dory in the front yard.
The King’s Road divided at Bill Boughton’s store, the branch leading down to the wharfs, while the main road went on to Swallowtail Light. Schofield plunged down the branch into the full glare of the fire, where a crowd of men had already gathered.
As good luck would have it there was not a vessel tied up to the stand, the whole fleet being made fast to its moorings in the bay. Code’s first duty when he started running had been to make sure that his Laughing Lass was riding safely at her anchorage.
The burning wharfs faced south. The brisk breeze was southeast and bore a promise of possible rain. The steamer Grande Mignon, after giving the first warning, had steamed away from her perilous dockage to a point half a mile nearer the entrance to the bay, and now lay there shrieking until the frowning cliffs and abrupt hills echoed with the hideous noise.
“How’d it happen?” asked Schofield of the first man he met.
“Dunno exactly. Cal’late some tanks in the oilroom caught first. Can’t do much with them wharfs, I guess.”
“Who’s in charge of things here?”
“The squire.”
Schofield hurried away in search of Squire Hardy, head man of the village, and local justice of the peace. He found him working like a Trojan, his white whiskers ruffled into a circle about his face.
“Lend us a hand here, Code,” yelled the squire, who with three other men was attempting to get a great circular horse-trough under a huge pump with a handle long enough for three men to lay hold of. Schofield fell to with a will and helped move the trough into place. The squire set the three men to the task of filling it and then went to Code.
“Any chance to save those wharfs, d’ye think?”
“No, squire. Better leave them and the fish-houses and work on Boughton’s store and the cottages. They’re right in the path of the wind. It’ll be tough on Nailor and Thomas to lose their stand and houses, but you know what will happen if the fire gets into the dwellings.”
“I thought so all along–curse me if I didn’t!” yelled the judge, and then, turning toward a crowd of men who were looking apprehensively here and there, he shouted:
“All hands with the buckets now, lively!”
Suddenly the basement doors of Boughton’s store were thrown open and a huge, black-bearded man with a great voice appeared there.
“Buckets this way!” he bellowed, in a tone that rose clearly above the roar and crackle of the fire. As the men reached him he handed out the implements from great stacks at his feet–rubber buckets, wooden buckets, tin and iron buckets, new, old, rusty and galvanized. It was Pete Ellinwood, the fire marshal of the village and custodian of the apparatus.
Because in the hundred or more years of its existence there has never been water pressure in Grande Mignon, the fighting of a fire there with primitive means has become an exact and beautiful science.
A few bold spirits had disputed the wisdom of Squire Hardy’s orders to let the wharf and fish-house burn, and had attempted to give them a dousing. In less than five minutes they had retreated, singed and hairless, due to a sudden explosion of a drum of oil.
“Play on Bill Boughton’s store!” came the order.
Already an iron ladder reached to the eaves of the building. Two men galloped up its length, dragging behind them another ladder with a pair of huge hooks at the end.
Clinging like monkeys, they worked this up over their heads and up the shingles until the hooks caught squarely across the ridge-pole of the house. Then, on hands and feet, they trotted up this and sat astride the ridge-pole. One of these was Code Schofield.
Other men now swarmed up the ladders, until there was one on every rung from the ground to the top of the house.
Below, a line of men extended from the foot of the ladder to the great circular horse-trough. Another line extended from the opposite side of the store also to the horse-trough, where three men worked the great pump.
Back twenty yards, along the King’s Road, a white-faced row of women and children stood, ready to rush home and move their furniture into the fields.
Code, looking down, made out his mother and returned her friendly wave. Their house was across the road not a hundred feet away.
With a muffled roar another drum on the pier exploded. A great wave of molten fire shot out in the breeze, and the shingles on Bill Boughton’s store, parched with the drought of a month, burst into quick flame.
The squire ran back to the water-trough.
“Dip!” he yelled. Big Pete Ellinwood, with the piles of buckets beside him, seized one and twitched it full.
“Pass!” screamed the squire as it came up dripping. Ellinwood’s great arm swung forward to meet the arm of the man a yard away. The bucket changed hands and went forward without losing a drop.
Up it went swiftly from one to another, to the eaves, to the two men at the top.
Now the fire sent branches out from the burning wharf along the low frames where some of the season’s miserable catch was drying in the open air after salting. The fish curled and blackened in the fierce heat.
Only two men were not in the bucket brigade. They were Nailor and Thomas, who stood watching the destruction of their whole property. They knew the squire had done well in saving the village rather than their own buildings. It was the tacit understanding in Freekirk Head that a few should lose rather than the many.
Code Schofield, from his perch on the Boughton roof-tree, looked down again to where he had last seen his mother. Once more he distinguished the tall figure with its white face looking anxiously up at him, and he waved his hand reassuringly. Then his eye was caught by two other figures that lurked in the first shadows farther up the King’s Road. A moment later he made sure of their identity.
They were Nellie Tanner and Nat Burns.
For years there had been a dislike between the Burnses and the Schofields. Old Jasper Schofield, Code’s father, and Michael Burns had become enemies over the same girl a quarter of a century before, and the breach had never been healed. Old Captain Jasper had won, but he had never forgotten, and Michael had never forgiven.
Quite unconsciously the feud had been passed on to the children of both (for Michael had married within a few years), and from school-days Code and Nat had been the leaders of rival gangs.
When they became young men they matched their season’s catches and raced their father’s schooners. They were the two natural leaders of the Freekirk Head young bloods, but they were never on the same side of an argument.
Schofield wondered why Nat Burns was not at the fire, as usual attempting to make himself leader of the battle without doing much of the work, and now the reason was apparent. He preferred to pursue his courting under the eyes of the village rather than to obey the unwritten law of service. And he was with Nellie Tanner!
Unlike most youths, there had never been a time in Code’s life when he had passed the favor of his affections around. Since the time they were both five Nellie Tanner had supplied in full all the feminine requirements he had ever desired. And she did at this moment. But Nat Burns had seen a great deal of her in the last three months, he remembered, taking advantage of Code’s desperate search for fish.
Once in this train his thoughts bore him on and on. Memories, speculations, and desires crowded his mind, and he forgot that beneath him the roof of Boughton’s store was burning more and more briskly.
Suddenly the man beside him on the ridge-pole shook his arm.
“Say, Code!” he cried. “What’s that burnin’ over there? I didn’t know the fire had gone across the street.”
Schofield looked up quickly and followed the direction of the other’s arm that pointed through the trees to the opposite side of King’s Road and a little to westward.
“Good Lord!” he cried excitedly; “it’s my own place, and my mother is all alone down there. Quick! Send somebody up here! I’m going!”
CHAPTER III
THE TEST
The man behind him climbed to the ridge-pole and Code began the descent, necessarily slow and careful because the ladders were loaded with men passing buckets. When he reached the ground he started for home on the run.
Opposite Boughton’s general store was another shop that made a specialty of fishermen’s “oilers,” boots, and overalls. Two houses to the westward of that was the old Schofield place, a low, white house surrounded by a rickety fence and covered with ivy.
Once he reached the middle of the road Code saw that he had been mistaken in the location of the fire, for his mother’s place was intact. The flame was coming, however, from the house next but one–Bijonah Tanner’s place.
A crowd was gathering in the yard that was overgrown with dusty wire-grass, and the squire was pushing his way through to take charge. Code knew that only two days before Captain Bijonah and his wife had sailed in the Rosan to St. John’s for lumber, leaving Nellie alone in charge of the three small Tanners. He wondered where they all were now.