The Foaming Fore Shore - Samuel Alexander White

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floating ice and overlaid with the mother-of-pearl of a rising moon. Southeastward, between him and Belle Isle Island, wrapped ghost-like in Atlantic fog, yawed the freighter Hughie Hay had sighted, not an ocean-going cargo steamer but a sixty-ton schooner carrying Labrador stationers to their Summer fishing-stations.

      Too poor to own their own schooners, the stationers were freighted down the coast to their rooms every Spring and herded up again like cattle in the Autumn on vessels belonging to the firm with which they dealt.

      "Yonder she is!" the captain pointed out to Reverend Lance. "And a fine little plague-ship for your ministering, Lance!"

      "What ship is it?" demanded Lance, peering short-sighted over the shimmering sea.

      "The Auk, over from Bay of Islands on Newfoundland," Taylor told him. "Belongs to old Peter Laval and doing business from Château to Chidley."

      "H'm. H'm. Laval, eh? One of my best church supporters," commented Lance.

      "Sanctimonious old whelp," corrected Taylor. "Good heavens, his old wagon will ruin my eight-hundred-dollar cod trap! Where's the French fishery cruiser? Where's Admiral Pellier and his Groix?"

      "Yaonder off'n York Point, Cap'n!" spoke Hughie Hay.

      He pointed where, almost invisible behind a jumble of low icebergs deep azure in the shadows, the long black hulk of the Fishery Protection Service cruiser lay at anchor together with the admiral's private yacht Esperance, which he used as an auxiliary vessel for shore work 'round the harbors.

      "Then why isn't he on his job?" demanded Taylor who had run foul of Pellier several times on his Newfoundland voyages and who had at last been definitely warned off the French Shore. "If I happen to dry a seine taut in the sun he's after me for the size of my mesh, but Laval's blundering Auk here can—by the tall Pole Star, look, there's no one at her wheel! We've got to board her!"

      Swiftly he sprang to take his own wheel, beckoning the regular wheelsman, Brown, to his side, and at the same time calling orders to his men who, swift as he, ran up the big mainsail and backed over the jib.

      "No time for dories, boys," he warned. "Have to jump her rail as we go by. Brown, grab this wheel when I say! And you, Bolero, fall to and handle the sheets for Brown when he comes about on the other tack!"

      Under Taylor's guidance the Graywing caught her stride, headsails ballooning, fore and main booms crashing across as she leaped toward the yawing Auk not three cable-lengths away. The freighter swung drunkenly to starboard. Taylor veered a point or two in his course, and as swiftly, as silently and as smoothly as a knife skirts a pot of grease he skirted her rail and barked to Brown at his elbow.

      Brown's hands fell upon the spokes Taylor's hands left, and Taylor with a running jump vaulted the rails of the Graywing and Auk as a double hurdle. Hughie Hay, Irish Kerrigan, Boston Jim, Patterson, Scotty McCaig and Tom Halifax were over the hurdle with him. With him they landed upon the cluttered deck of the Auk, and as they heaved themselves up out of the amazing muddle of things that burdened the freighter they found to their surprise the Reverend Lance in their midst.

      "You here too, Lance?" grinned Taylor. "Haven't lost your college legs yet, eh? Well, maybe you'll need your college fists as well. Looks like a free-for-all fight and lots of unsavory facts—but steady, boys o' mine, steady, we have to handle the schooner, you see, before we handle her crew. Lower the heavy canvas—yes, both of them, fore and main."

      He himself grasped the freighter's kicking wheel and quickly brought her to under jumbo alone.

      Then with a rush he and his men jumped away from the canvas-billowed booms and dived down among the struggling mass that glutted the Auk below decks.

      THE FLOWER OF THE COAST

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      "A FINE little floating plague-ship, eh, Lance?" was Taylor's war-cry as he went smiting right and left into the packed rabble that would have made a full passenger list for a five-hundred-ton coasting steamer.

      Being of only sixty tons, the Auk had no space below to boast of, and what space she had was crammed to the last inch, so that Taylor and his crew could get no footing at first but rode upon the hips and backs and shoulders of men in their effort to smash an opening in the jam.

      According to the custom of freighters, the Auk's hold was first spread with a layer of unbreakable cargo. A second layer of traps, nets and seines overspread this. While upon the bed of twine rested the bunks of the stationers with their gear in bags, boxes and barrels sheering in pyramids to the deck overhead.

      Here they herded, eating and sleeping in cramped unsanitary quarters, carrying on a travesty of cooking by turns at the tiny galley or bolting their food raw. Nothing but make-shift sailcloth partitions screened the women's bunks from the men's. In the mêlée these partitions had been torn away and shrieking women and girls in various stages of dishabille were maelstromed in the swaying horde that trampled their bunks under foot and sent the tiers of boxes and barrels toppling on their heads.

      Under the showering ruin they huddled in the dancing light of the smoky lanterns, raising hopeful eyes at the coming of the Graywing's crew, and one young girl, crouching for shelter at the foot of the mast, flung out her arms in appeal to Taylor in the lead.

      "Ah, mon Américain—mon Américain!" she cried.

      White as a lily she gleamed in the unwashed horde, her delicate, beautifully-chiseled, oval face terror-bleached till it seemed carved from ivory. Over the tapered curves of her half-bare shoulders where her enfolding cloak lay low on her neck, over her forehead patricianly high, her hair was tossed in a tangle like silken floss, and through the golden net her great eyes flashed out, eyes violet-blue as the tint of Labrador ice in shadow, as the water-heart of a lonely cliff-walled Labrador fiord—such eyes as a man may see but once in a thousand miles of Labrador coast.

      "Ah, mon Américain—vite!" she appealed in a voice like the silver lapping of the Summer waves. "Mon Américain—vite!"

      "Great heavens!" exclaimed Taylor involuntarily as he struggled toward her. "Who in the name of the mermaids is she?"

      "Marie Laval—the flower of the coast, they call her!" spoke the voice of Lance at his shoulder. "You know old Peter. He's her father."

      "But—but how is it I've never seen her before?" panted Taylor, knocking men this way and that in his effort to reach her.

      "She's been schooling at St. John's. I guess she's through this Summer. I remember now old Peter told me he was going to take her on the stations. Yonder's old Peter behind her—and her mother, old Anne. Both too fond of their smuggled brandy, Taylor, if I do say it with a clerical tongue. Can't you smell it in the air? A perfect reek, and I shouldn't be at all surprised at this bedlam! I know Peter's brandy has been the cause."

      "And that's their daughter!" marveled Taylor. "The flower of the coast! Yes—a flower in the slime! Quick, boys o' mine, get the women up on deck!"

      Drunkenly clinging to the mast behind Marie, he had full glimpse of her parents in his rush, old Anne, brown-faced, brown-eyed as a gipsy, fat, ungainly, in slovenly galoshes, tubbed-up skirt and greasy head-shawl covering her oiled black hair from which gold ear-rings peeped; old Peter in worn hip boots and oilskins, his yellow toothless face lighted by cold, colorless, icicle-like eyes and, by strange anomaly, shaven bare except for a narrow snow-white fringe of whisker that rimmed it from ear to ear under his drooping southwester.

      He glimpsed them, unconsciously noting every characteristic, every detail, but his thought was only of Marie, and, jamming swaying bodies apart with his shoulders and knees, he forced an opening and gathered her pliant body into his arms.

      "Merci, mon Américain—merci, mon Viking!" she half-laughed, half-sobbed in impetuous gratitude. "I had the fear of death under those

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