Bobbie Shafto

I

MARTHA CUSHING, with the two children, joined her husband, Samuel Cushing, the captain of the Susan B. Lamb, when the Susan was upon the eve of leaving Portland for Baltimore.

Martha had put off this reunion for some time in order to allow their daughter to grow as old as possible ashore, but now that this daughter had attained the great age of six weeks, and the Susan B. Lamb was so near at hand and could be reached so inexpensively, it had seemed the appointed time. Charles Cushing, who was something over two years old, had already followed the sea for two years, and so constituted no particular problem, though he was not yet proficient in the use of either sea legs or land legs. He was fair, like Sam, and fat, like neither parent, and could talk quite well. Martha was so delighted to see Sam again that Charles, who had forgotten his father in the three months ashore, was afflicted with jealousy of this stranger; Sam furthermore showed too much pleasure in the pink-and-white idiocy of the daughter he was seeing for the first time. However, in the excitement an awkwardness between father and son went unnoticed.

The family established themselves in the cabin, where nothing had changed. A large box there seemed at. once to strike a chord of memory in Charles; he walked around it uncertainly. The box was four and a half feet long and half as wide, and its sides were about two feet high and slatted in the upper half; inside and out it was smoothly finished; a bed had been neatly prepared on a mattress in the bottom.

‘I think he remembers it,’ said Martha proudly. That box had been Charles’s bedroom and playroom for many months. ‘Where are we going to put the baby?’

‘Well,’ responded Sam with a slight hesitation, ‘I took out that deep drawer from underneath the port bunk, and I thought she could sleep in that all right while she’s so little.’ He laughed. ‘It doesn’t seem very hospitable to have her sleep in a drawer!’ Martha laughed, too, happily.

‘She won’t mind. She’s an awfully good baby, Sam, and I think she’s going to be as bright as Charles.’ Maternal pride could go no further. ‘Doctor Story said he’d never seen a healthier baby.’ The parents beamed at each other. ‘Gracious, I’m tired! Charles was awfully bad on the train and the baby cried all the time and mortified me terribly.’

‘I thought you said she was a good baby,’ objected Sam. ‘Oh, I told the steward we’d want some tea when you got on board. Supper’ll be a little late; they’re going to pull us out of this berth at six, and we’ll anchor out in the stream and sail at daybreak. Have you had anything to eat?’

‘I didn’t have much lunch. Your mother gave me some to eat on the train, but the baby was so exasperating that I did n’t get a chance to eat any. Your mother’s well. I stayed two nights at your father’s. They’re all well. Eli says he wants to sell the Susan — How do you do, steward? We’ve made you a lot of trouble, I’m afraid! Um! Does n’t that look good!’ The tea was ranged on the cabin table — thick white china and cheap silverware, splendid great slices of yellow cake studded with raisins. Charles came sniffing about with his nose raised hopefully toward the yellow mound.

‘Fresh milk in that pitcher,’ volunteered the steward proudly. ‘I got it special. I thought you’d want some for him.’

‘Dowanny milk!’ The steward’s glowing face fell.

‘You’ve got to drink some milk,’ said the skipper firmly.

‘Dowanny milk!’ reiterated Charles rudely. The steward brightened.

‘Don’t want any milk!’ exclaimed his mother. ‘Is n’t that nice! Now the baby can have it all!’ The improbability of this statement was not apparent to Charles, who became suddenly anxious. ‘You know, Sam, the baby cried all the time on the train because she could n’t have any milk. Now she can have a lot!’

‘She can’t have my milk,’ said Charles distinctly, scowling. The steward coughed and withdrew.

‘I don’t think that’s the way to do, Martha,’ commented Sam, contentedly watching his wife. ‘You ought to say, “Do so and so,” and make — insist on obedience. That ’s the proper way — Thank you. What ’s Eli want to sell the Susan for?’

‘He did n’t say what they offered — Oh, you mean why? I think you should be more explicit. Well, he says the Susan is old now, and he thinks it would be better to sell her while he has a chance and buy another. They have a new ship building at the Donnell yard. This cake is pretty good, Sam. Have you a new cook?’

‘Yeah,’ assented Sam. ‘Last voyage. Well, the Susan is getting old, and her gear is in baddish shape. Is he thinking of buying the Donnell ship?’

‘He did n’t say. He’s trying to persuade the owners of the Susan to sell. Eli thinks anyway that the days of the sailing ships are over, you know.’

‘Yes,’ nodded Sam soberly. ‘I ’ll probably be out of a job before Charles is old enough to support me. He can go into steam. Do you want to be a sailor, Charles?’

Charles was deaf.

‘I don’t want him to go to sea,’ protested Martha. ‘What are you going to do when you ’re big, Charles?’

‘Drive horsey,’ answered Charles promptly.

’He does n’t fancy me, does he?’ grinned Sam at his wife. ‘Did you teach him that?’

‘You wrote you had a new second mate.’ Martha took a deep interest in all that concerned the Susan B. Lamb.

‘Everybody’s new but the mate and the carpenter! Got a black crew.’

‘You have! I thought you did n’t like them.’

‘I could n’t get any others in Baltimore last time. I’ve always thought the weather up here was too severe for the black fellows. However, they did very well, though of course the trip was as easy as could be. We ’re going back light, and the old lady will roll all over the Atlantic Ocean, I expect.’

‘I suppose so,’ groaned Martha. ‘ Do you think I’ll be seasick again?’

II

The mild December weather held all the way down the coast and the old Susan did her expected best to roll all over the Atlantic Ocean. Martha had her uneasy moments, but on the whole she fared much better than usual. Charles’s zeal really kept her mind off herself, and besides, the baby was ill.

‘She can’t be seasick,’ said Sam. ‘It’s contrary to all precedent for a little baby.’

‘I don’t care what the precedent is.’ His wife indicated various symptoms of the invalid. ‘If that is n’t seasickness, what would you call it?’

‘Well, anyway, little babies never are seasick,’ insisted Sam, a grin creeping around the corners of his moustache. ‘Mama! Mama!’

Martha and Sam flew to the rescue. Charles, finding the outer door ajar, had made an effort to surmount the high doorsill; he was now balancing there on his fat stomach and turning a desperate face over his shoulder for help; his feet and hands flourished frantically in space. He was a ludicrous spectacle.

His father laughed.

‘That ’s a good position for practising a swimming stroke,’ he remarked heartlessly, assisting Charles to the deck; Charles aimed an ungrateful kick at him and sat down, plump.

‘Mama!’ he appealed, glowering at his father.

‘Someone,’ said that worthy, ‘some viper has certainly poisoned my son against me.’

‘It ’s because you laugh at him,’ responded Martha. ‘That is n’t the way to treat them!’

The cabin of a sailing ship was never designed for the accommodation of babies. By the time they had been four days at sea Martha Cushing was surfeited with children, even bright and pretty ones. She washed innumerable clothes for the baby, who increased that task by being seasick at odd times. She washed clothes for Charles, in whose pretty dresses she had once taken such pride, and on the third day out she decided that Charles should have some dungarees; he would never wear another petticoat after she had gone shopping in Baltimore! She’d get some dark blue stuff, cotton for warm weather and flannel for cold, and that child should burst forth in the glory of pants — yes, long pants that would save his underclothes and the knees of his stockings and his mother’s life; there was, indeed, an old blue wool shirt of Sam’s that she could make into a suit at once if she could get a minute to sew. The children must be bathed. Charles’s bath had to be accompanied by interminable discussion and ingenious schemes — disapproved of by Sam — to keep him from noticing that she was washing his ears; fortunately he had soon such a number of bruises that he could be interested in their color and in punching them gently to see if they hurt any more, but it was tedious. The baby had to be fed so often — and a vigilant eye kept on Charles to prevent his eking out his regular meals with surreptitious morsels from the steward.

Also just to watch over Charles’s activities was wearying and necessary; he might get out on deck and fall overboard; he might really hurt himself in one of his tumbles; he might stagger against the hot, fat stove and burn himself badly. Charles, alas, was a good sailor! Martha, who was not, had an occasional qualm when the old Susan bounded like a rabbit; and moreover, the horrid relish with which Charles ground his foot on big cockroaches was utterly nauseating — though the shock of his fall after one of those feats proved most opportune. Martha whizzed through the days.

Tea in the afternoon is not on the list of a sailing ship’s meals, but Martha and Sam liked it. Martha lighted the little oil stove lashed in the bathroom, and put the kettle on. With the Susan B. Lamb leaping and gamboling, it was necessary to watch the kettle and frequently to hold it in its place; when the ship rolled, the flame heated in turn every portion of the stove except that supporting the teakettle. At critical moments Charles yelled despairingly for his mother, and she lifted the kettle to the floor and rushed away in the greatest anxiety. It really takes time to make tea! Sam was in the habit of bringing the dishes and sugar and condensed milk from the pantry and looking up what the steward had left in the way of cake for these unscheduled repasts; but after a few trials, when it seemed that tea was likely to coincide with supper, he and Martha exchanged rôles and he tended the kettle while Martha fitted the odd jobs in among her other feverish duties. Charles’s life was a round of disasters.

‘I wish these children were grown up and married,’ Martha remarked to Sam in that it’s-all-your-fault tone.

‘ They ’re a d—nuisance.’ She cocked a brown eye at him to sec how he would take that; he laughed.

‘We won’t have any swearing on this ship,’ he said. ‘It ’s all we can stand to have Charles on board without your corrupting us with your language.’ He gave a great roar of laughter at this subtle joke. ‘Oh, good Lord!’ He seized the kettle in the nick of time.

From her drawer there came a long wail from the baby.

‘The devil!’ said Sam irritably. ‘I thought that one was asleep.’ Martha hurried to restore the peace.

Sam entered the cabin with the steaming teapot in one hand and Charles, gripped by the back of his clothes and kicking like a crab, in the other; Charles had mistaken his time for crawling up the companionway stairs. Sam let him down on all fours in a corner and left him to rage.

‘He ’s demoralizing my crew,’chuckled Sam, pouring the tea.

Charles leaned toward socialism, He had no taste for captains, mates, bos’ns, carpenters, or cooks; rarely his heart softened to stewards; chiefly he gave his entire devotion to sailors. Negro sailors in particular he loved. He crawled up the steep companionway stairs, beat on the door with a soft fat fist, called beseechingly; and the man at the wheel was convulsed, and muttered sympathetic words to him if the mate or second mate was not on the poop. The ship fell off her course, and the sails began to flap; at all times of day one might hear an outraged officer demanding from long distance what the fool at the wheel was doing. Everyone knew what he was doing. He was conversing with Charles, or else, steadying the wheel with a foot on a distant spoke, he was helping Charles to his feet after his début on deck; the activity of the Susan and the irresponsible legs of Charles — after one has crept laboriously up to the top step of a steep flight it is not in nature at once to take a sudden biggish step downward — always wrought calamity and precipitated Charles upon his wellrounded stomach. The sailors loved to pick him up, and he patted those extraordinary black faces and chuckled heartily, and when they gurgled enormous glittering red-and-white laughs he cackled more hilariously still. What fun! What funny men!

‘I think when he pounds on that door they let him out, if nobody’s around,’ suspected Martha. ‘It can’t be unlatched all the time.’

‘Well, you don’t need to worry. He has a dozen black slaves,’ replied Sam, puffing at his pipe.

‘It is a comfort to know he can’t get out that door without someone seeing him,’ pursued Martha anxiously. ‘Because I simply can’t watch him all the time, and think up ways to distract his mind from going on deck.’

‘You should n’t have to,’ retorted Sam. ‘You should just forbid it and have him understand that you mean what you say.’

‘Sam! Really! I’m so tired of hearing how it ought to be done! You know perfectly well he does n’t mind you when you speak to him! He does better for me—’ Martha was quite overcome by the baby’s little affairs and the constant accidents befalling Charles; even now her daughter lifted an indignant voice and Martha left her tea hastily. Sam felt guilty.

‘Listen, dear, you know I don’t mean anything,’ he protested contritely, pursuing her and putting his arm about her waist. Charles, too, staggered after them, tripping on the doorstep and falling on Sam’s foot, which he made a gallant attempt to bite. Charles was not reconciled either to the baby or to this man.

‘We ’ll wrap up and all go out on deck for a little fresh air,’ said Sam cheerfully. ‘That’s what we need. You fix Charles, the little reptile, Martha, and I’ll bundle the baby in the big shawl. There’s a good baby. Want to go out with your daddy? Don’t you spit on the captain of this ship, young woman!’ Martha laughed, and Sam’s mind was relieved.

It was good to get outside into the sunshine and wind and color! Martha held the baby on her lap and watched Charles, who immediately attached himself to the man at the wheel. It was Jim, Charles’s favorite, a very black and shining man perhaps forty years old; the bright blue trousers that he wore at sea added to his charm. Just now, when the skipper, the ‘old woman,’ and the second mate were all on the poop, Jim’s trouser legs were all the pleasure Charles could get from his friend, and he clung to them like a bloodsucker. To be sure, after the officers moved off to the main deck to inspect something, Jim grinned and whispered an occasional remark; and then he was apt to have the giggles and, his shoulders shaking, he would turn his face away from the ‘old woman’ in some very unseamanlike direction far round to leeward. Charles stared up, red and rollicking. Officers did n’t bother him any; but he had a better time when that man and those other men were not about, and still better when his mother was below. For then Jim let him turn the wheel, clutching at the whirling lower spokes and getting his head constantly in the way of the next descending one! In the excitement of steering the ship he often wobbled terribly and fell, squash, sticking his hand through one of the holes in the grating; at once Jim gathered him up and petted him, and he smoothed Jim’s beautiful face. After such a catastrophe Jim held him up and allowed him to steer from the top of the wheel, the sailor teetering on one foot and shoving the wheel about with the other. Never was Charles content to turn the wheel a little way — it must turn way, way over.

He learned new words, too.

‘Huddapoht,’ he’d shrill, and struggle to suit the deed to the word; the official helmsman was anxious to please him, yet at the same time exceedingly alert for the second mate.

‘Huddober!’ Charles would scream. ‘Huddastahbud!’ Gracious, it was fun to steer the ship! How grand it was to know the proper routine when another grinning sailor came up the lee side of the house to relieve the wheel!

‘Whatsa course, young sailah?’ said this man to Charles.

‘Nothe-east,’ returned Charles, tipping up his pink face beamingly.

‘Nothe-east it is!’ repeated the new man seriously. The first man usually whispered in the ear of the new man — they were a long way above Charles and he could n’t quite catch what they said, but Jim at one time had given him the idea that it was about what was for supper; it seemed quite likely, for Charles himself took an interest in supper. If the coast was clear they all three laughed in gurgling abandon.

The men adored Charles; they loved his wild yellow hair and big round eyes and red cheeks. How could they not? He admired them so fervently! He essayed such calamitous fat kicks at everybody on board except sailors, his mother, and the steward, who, he had been led to believe, made the cake.

‘He’s a bad influence,’ the skipper chuckled. ‘I think he’s organizing a mutiny. I don’t know but that I ought to put him in irons — but I doubt if we have any the right size.’

‘He keeps trying to get out on the main deck,’ complained his exhausted mother. ‘But so far he has n’t been able to do any more than get balanced on top of the step and scream. He wakes up the mate or the second mate or whoever is below!’ She giggled. ‘He ’s really awfully funny sometimes.’

‘He treats me like dirt,’ said Sam, and his wife laughed suddenly till the tired tears ran down her cheeks.

III

In time they reached Cape Henry and plodded up the Chesapeake, repulsing several tugboats that longed to take them in tow. The Susan had been reported and she was to go under the coal-tip at once; coal was in demand in Maine! All arrangements were quickly made. Stores were hurried on board. Sam tried in vain to find a white crew and was obliged to ship over the same old crew, who were pleased to go with him again; he treated his men well. Martha bought cloth for Charles’s overalls and made them to the accompaniment of the roar of cargo sliding into the hold. The Susan was daily more filthy with black dust; Sam and the mates viewed her with anguish, and one could see the industry in store for the crew once they were again at sea. Charles for his part busied himself making little marks with his fat fingers in the coal dust on the white paint, a great sport that made the washing of hands more pleasure than usual. The baby collected coal dust remarkably well on all her plump exposed surfaces.

‘The old girl’s loaded to the gunnels,’ said Sam to Martha as the tug pulled them out of their berth and set them on their way.

They stood on the poop in the early sunshine of what promised to be a warm December day. Far off on either side the low shores of Maryland moved past; the tug pulled stoutly. A dilapidated crew strove to set sails under the urgent driving of the irritable mates; five of the crew were ‘sleeping it off,’ and three dubious cases that were yet deemed fit for service ambled foolishly about the decks, laid feeble hold on ropes, and hauled limply, incurring all kinds of verbal abuse; there seemed to Martha’s eye to be only two men who were actually sober — old Jim, who was at the wheel, and a man in extraordinary checked trousers, who sped up and down the rigging.

Charles was clinging to Jim’s legs and interfering at the wheel. In a whisper the sailor praised Charles’s new pants; he murmured, too, that he had brought Charles a present which was at the moment in his sea bag. Jim was a peerless friend.

‘Are you going to keep the tug all the way down?’ asked Martha.

‘Uh-huh,’ responded the skipper.

‘If this wind holds it will be a fine fair wind when we get outside.’

‘Oh, of course!’ agreed Martha. ‘I did n’t think of that. We’ll go home quite fast.’

The wind held. At the Cape the tug cast them off with toots of farewell and they set all sail for Portland. In two hours they took in some sail and in another hour they took in more, slowly and painfully with the dilapidated seamen; a few hours later they again shortened sail, and the seas were rolling up heavily behind the ship, and the crew was seedier than ever. Sam hunted up the high board and fitted it into its grooves at the head of the companionway stairs.

‘We’ve got a good strong breeze,’ he told his wife cheerfully as he rummaged in the slop chest. ‘Where’s that slop-chest book? Oh, here it is.’ He measured a pair of thick trousers against his own stalwart frame; they seemed small. ‘Guess these’ll do. Gee, Marth, sailors are the biggest fools. You saw that one in the checked pants? He was sober. He’s come on this trip with those checked pants, mostly cotton, and his dungarees! I wonder where I put those new shirts.’

‘They’re in the bottom drawer of the medicine chest.’

‘Oh! He’s standing at the wheel shivering like a leaf and his teeth chattering. Already, by George.’ He climbed the stairs with the garments on his arm.

The good strong breeze practised and grew stronger. In twelve hours the Susan B. Lamb was pounding along with very few sails on, and the seas were coming tremendously over the stern, hitting with a crash against the rail and the house and the companionway door; dribblings of water dripped down the stairs, and Martha added mopping to her jobs; the little doorsteps penned the water into a shallow lake at the foot of the stairs, and Charles scuffled in it and wet his feet while his mother was busy with the baby. He climbed the wet stairs, too, and beat on the door, calling to be let out, but the door stayed latched better than it had on the trip down. That at least was a relief to Martha as she hustled her son out of his soaking clothes. Occasionally she herself went up the companionway to gaze out at the gray prospect.

‘It’s blowing awfully hard, is n’t it?’ she inquired anxiously of Sam on one of his visits in the cabin.

‘Hard? My girl, this is just a good breeze!’ insisted Sam.

‘Then why do you stay on deck so much?’ she demanded.

Sam grinned; he began to foresee a time when he might not be able to deceive his wife about the weather.

‘Why, the second mate is shorthanded in his watch with all these drunken baboons we’ve got on board. You know that. Well, so long, Charles.’ Charles paid no heed.

Martha had another idea.

‘It ’s blowing awfully hard, is n’t it?’ said she to the mate, who came for a mug of coffee before going on deck. The steward had secured a pot of coffee to the top of the fat stove in the forward cabin.

‘No, ma’am!’ he responded at once, swaying easily in the doorway. Must a good wind to push us along. Hullo, Charles! The carpenter’s making something for you.’ Charles regarded him with slight interest. ‘Well, got to be going.’

Perhaps it was just a good breeze.

‘It’s blowing awfully hard, is n’t it?’ inquired Martha of the second mate, lie poured some scalding coffee on his hand and muttered horribly.

‘Awful,’ he agreed. ‘Terrible sea, and we got the worst crew o’ landlubbers I ever did see.’ He gulped his coffee and went to his room. The second mate, Martha meditated, was naturally gloomy; he had a hideous scar cutting across his forehead and one eyebrow where a block, falling from aloft, had struck him when he was sixteen; he had met with other accidents and his disposition was soured.

Really, was it a good breeze?

Supper was an acrobatic contest in which at intervals everyone laid hold of every liquid within his reach on the table and tipped it the proper way. Charles enjoyed that and grabbed things with the best of them, tipping them wildly any way at all until he had deluged himself and the table in his vicinity. Martha lifted him from his throne of dictionaries and cushions and removed him, bellowing, from this pastime. He continued bitterly resentful, until the rumbling of deep voices in the forward cabin announced a conference at the second table, from which the carpenter, blond and very shy, came presently to the door of the after cabin with a sensational gift.

In consequence the meal at the second table was enlivened by the shouts of Charles and violent blows on the walls; he bestrode a little platform on four stout wooden wheels, the two in front connected to a post that went up through the platform and ended in a crosspiece to which a small boy might cling and thereby, with luck, guide the vehicle. Across the rocking floor sped Charles, shrieking, to stop with a bang against the wall; if he was quick enough to turn around it was nice, but if not he retraced his path backward, thrillingly. An accidental turn of the tiller would cannonade him into a table, against a chair, into his mother, who was appalled and yet amused. Sam, also, watched the sport faintly smiling; but he had been a sea captain longer than he had been a father, and he suffered for the hardwood floor and the polished panels. Charles went to bed that night with the new toy alert at the foot of his box.

During the night the pound of the seas grew more and more frequent, and at dawn they hove the ship to; that good wind was a gale. For four, five, six, many similar days they alternately hove the ship to and let her run before the wind as the gale increased or moderated a trifle.

The slop chest was soon sold out of woolen clothes of every sort; Sam clumped up and down, scolding over the improvidence of sailors. The second mate lacerated a finger between a snapping rope and the rail, and was in such a temper that he could hardly trust himself to speak to anyone but the crew. Sam and the mate, on the contrary, outdid themselves in sprightliness at meals, and when meals could no longer be served on the table, that proved to be a state of things that they enjoyed above everything. Martha suspected them of deceit, or attempted deceit. The baby slept and ate and cried. Charles was happy with another choice present. His black friend Jim had brought it aft under his oilskins to the wheel, entrusting it with bashful smiles to the skipper ‘for the little boy’; it was a little yellow box with a little handle that, when turned, produced a little tune — oh, a delightful thing! When Charles was not careering around the cabin on his rolling steed he sat on the floor and patiently wound the crank of the music box; he played it in the early morning before he was released from his slatted coop, and before he fell asleep at night.

‘That tune is driving me mad,’ said Martha. ‘I hope no one else has any presents for him.’

‘I wish he could read a book.’ Sam had just waked from a brief nap on the lounge and was cross. He thrust his feet into his rubber boots and began to struggle into oilskins.

‘You don’t have to go out again, do you?’

Sam snorted in reply.

‘ Where are we now ? ’ pursued Martha pleasantly, ignoring the snort. ‘We’ve been out a week, have n’t we?’

‘A week and three days yesterday,’ grunted Sam. ‘I don’t know where we are. I have n’t had an observation since we left Cape Henry.’ He swayed steeply back and forth, gradually recovering his good humor. ‘ I don’t know where we are. The mate docs n’t know where we are.’ Martha gave him a quick, guilty glance. ‘The second mate does n’t know where we are. Charles does n’t know where we are — ’

‘I do too,’ contradicted Charles.

‘A life on the ocean wave!’ Sam burst into song, prodding his daughter jovially in her stomach. ‘A home on the rolling deep! Where the stormy waters—’ He mounted the stairs, his coat swish-swishing as he went; Charles followed his progress with round eyes as the stentorian voice boomed in the narrow confines of the companionway, and he smiled. What a lovely loud noise!

Martha pondered. One ought to know where the ship was; Sam had spent time enough over the chart, calculating on bits of paper and measuring here and there, to have found out where she was, even if the sun did n’t shine. There were other ways; what was that thing called dead reckoning?

No matter what Sam and Mr. Webb said, Martha knew that affairs were not going well. The second mate, whose hand troubled him a good deal and who let her bandage and clean it up every little while, often failed to be optimistic in his natural gift for pessimism; from him Martha gleaned a few items about the situation. Because of the cold and the constant work on deck, the getting wet, the lack of hot food and sleep, there were now only about five men still able to keep at work. ‘Housemaids!’ said the second mate passionately. ‘Infernal weather! Only a fool goes to sea!’

Eight bells. Slow, heavy steps approached through the forward cabin. Ha, the mate after something to eat. Dripping a little circle around him from his yellow coat, he smiled in at Martha, cuddling the baby, and at Charles, winding the music box.

‘Getting me a little snack before I turn in,’ he said, with a chunk of bread and butter in his red hand. His eyes were sunken and tired. ‘It ’s cold out.’

‘ Where do you think we are by now? ’ inquired Martha perseveringly.

‘Oh, well,’ replied the mate, ‘it’s hard to tell. Think maybe we ’re a hundred miles or so to the east’d of Cape Cod — somewhere,’ he added vaguely. The hot stove made him drowsy and he yawned. ‘ Get me a little sleep,’ he murmured, and thumped away, his boots squeaking as they rubbed each other.

Charles fell asleep on the floor, rocking over and back with the ship’s motion. Martha idly tried to wish away the water that rippled and deepened at the foot of the stairs; she was tired of mopping it up. How the ship did roll and pitch and toss, creak and groan, and how the waves thundered and hammered at her! The Susan was hove to again. Wearily Martha rose and put the baby in her drawar. With the greatest difficulty she made tea and filled big mugs. Lots of sugar. With them she staggered up the elusive stairs, knocked a warning on the door, opened it cautiously, and thrust a mug into her husband’s hand.

‘ Wait,’ she said, ‘ I ’ve got two more.’

The second mate’s sad face lightened as he took a cup.

‘Another one,’ she added. ‘For Jim.’ Jim’s black face wreathed itself in a dazzling smile; his poor heart must almost have broken at the sight of those steaming mugs. The skipper handed him one and braced the wheel while he drank. Martha, waiting for the empty mugs, wished she had thought before about a hot drink for the man at the wheel; she had never seen anything so cold and wretched-looking as that poor sailor who, Sam had assured her, was the ‘ best of the lot.’ Muttered words of thanks, a radiant black countenance, and three drained dishes rewarded her effort. A mug slipped from her hand and broke in flying splinters as she balanced down the reeling stairs; and Charles, waking, greeted the crash with a shout of satisfaction.

An ugly night stormed by. Sam came and went drippingly; he had no time for dry socks, though there was a new tear in the leg of one boot that inundated him regularly. The mate and second mate passed through the forward cabin all night long, swallowing hasty drinks of the bitter coffee that Martha tried to keep replenished on the stove. The pot was loaded with old grounds, and a stream of liquid hissed on the stove and wasted; but the steward’s device to keep the pot in place was too intricate for Martha’s solving, especially after she had once been flung into an unintentional fond embrace with the stove while studying the contrivance.

Morning at last. Breakfast — cold fried potatoes, cold mush, salt horse, and hot stale coffee. The steward apologized for the state of the food, for, he said, he had had to wait half an hour in order to get across the deck at all with his basket. Sam and Mr. Webb ate in weary silence, standing. Only the second mate came to the second table, and he bolted the cold food, braced in the pantry door and muttering. Martha demanded to see his hand again — the drenched dirty bandages were clammy and the finger angry-red and swollen.

‘You must keep it dry and try not to use it!’ she exclaimed in great annoyance with her patient. The dismal face and hard mouth of the patient looking down at the bent brown curls twitched unexpectedly. Keep it dry! Not use it!

‘Sure!’ he growled. ‘Thanks.’

Martha, alone again, heated some of the cold mush, sweetened it with thick condensed milk, and spooned it into Charles’s gaping pink interior. She pacified the baby, who wept hungrily. The day’s work had begun. She washed clothes and arranged them in a steaming circle on chairs around the stove. This once, she thought, she would not bathe those children! All the dreary morning she mopped up the icy water in the companionway and changed Charles’s stockings and shoes. She erected a wall of pillows about the cabin as a buffer to ease the impact as her son charged back and forth across the floor on his steed, braking desperately at times with his soft legs. Once during the morning she took coffee up to the poop and was surprised to see Jim there! What was he doing at the wheel in the mate’s watch? She asked Sam about it.

‘Oh,’ said Sam casually, ‘he’s the only one that’s got the guts to take the wheel now; they’re all played out. He’s a good able man.’

Dinner was like breakfast, except that there was no mush. Martha felt that it had been years since she had sat at table in dignity with the steward hurrying behind them.

In the afternoon the water flowed in faster, and Charles grew somewhat tired of his careering passages over the deck and lay on a heap of pillows in a corner, playing his music box and dropping off in short naps. During that afternoon Martha noticed a pounding, a very strange noise, neither the waves nor any usual sound.

‘What’s that pounding?’ she demanded of her husband. Sam thought irritably that Martha had a fatal gift for asking questions that he did not want to answer.

‘ That?' His tone expressed surprise that one should not recognize so ordinary a noise. ‘Why, we ’re just knocking out some planking to let the water off the deck! ’

‘But it goes out the scuppers,’ objected his wife, who believed that Sam was trying to make a fool of her.

‘It does n’t when there are a few tons of it on board and more coming every minute,’ retorted Sam dryly. ‘It ’s no bird bath on the main deck!’ Instantly he regretted that disclosure. ‘Hi, Charles!’

‘Hi,’ returned Charles graciously. Sam was immensely flattered and went on deck in a glow, forgetting his annoyance with Martha.

No one came for supper but Sam, and all he took was coffee and an immediate departure with two mugs in his hand; Martha followed him with three thick bread-and-salt-meat sandwiches which she thrust through the crack of the door.

A great deal of water began to come into the cabin. It no longer stayed in the little pool bounded by the doorsteps, but it ran all over the floors; Charles certainly could not sleep in his box nor the baby in her drawer that night. Darkness fell. The ship rolled terrifyingly. The seas were continual and staggering. The water rose to six inches, and deeper still when the Susan lay over, groaning in all her buffeted old frame. Martha donned a great pair of rubber boots from the slop chest. She undressed the children and secured the baby with safety pins to the mattress of the big bed; she pinned Charles, too, to the big bed, close to the board inserted between the mattress and the edge. No one would need that bed that night, she thought, sitting for a moment on the lumpy lounge. She hoped they would go to sleep right off. When Charles lay flat she could n’t see him,but occasionally he lifted his tawny thatch of hair and peeped at her over the board. The baby fell asleep, but Charles continued wakeful; his mother gave him the music box and he wound it peacefully except when Martha left the room, and then he howled despairingly till she returned. For a time Martha hurried about, accomplishing nothing in her uneasiness.

Then the steward arrived — he said the skipper sent him — with a tub, and together they went to work on the water; Martha bailed and bailed and the steward emptied the tub and they started afresh. It was back-breaking, endless.

Near midnight Sam paid them a visit; he fidgeted about indecisively; he looked at the children; he inspected the water in all the rooms; he complained about a smoky lamp chimney, which both Martha and the steward, red and weary from stooping, felt was unreasonable. The steward brought a clean chimney from the pantry, where he had soothed his feelings by a few whispered observations on sea captains. Sam was very odd! At last he poured two portions of coffee; Martha waded after him to the foot of the stairs.

‘I ’ll take the cups back,’ she volunteered.

With one foot on the stairs Sam stopped; the water ran down the companionway in a steady stream, rippling about the great boots his wife wore. Her skirts were turned up and pinned; her brown hair curled in little horns about her flushed face.

‘Martha,’ he said, ‘Martha.’ In a flash she knew that something had happened, something terrible.

‘ Sam! ’ she cried. ‘ Sam! What is the matter? Oh, is it the ship?’ In an awful picture she saw little Charles and her baby in the freezing, snatching sea.

‘Yes,’ he muttered. Perhaps he had a vision, too. ‘I’m afraid the old girl can’t live through the night. The cargo — I’m afraid we may be swamped. I — I—’ he looked away from her, up at the door, earnestly. ‘I — I’ll try to come down if I have time, or give you a chance to come up.’ Swiftly he kissed her white cheek, crushing her hand against his stiff, dripping coat. ‘Oh, Martha!’ he whispered and turned away.

Mechanically Martha toiled after him up the stairs. Peering through the crack into a blackness lighted only by the binnacle lamp, she saw the second mate and faithful Jim at the wheel; Jim’s pale lips were drawn back so that his teeth gleamed in the light, and his skin was a sickish gray; the second mate’s face was set, and his injured hand on the wheel showed bandageless and bare. Sam vanished in the wild darkness and Martha paddled down the lively stairway through the cabin to Charles, who abated his outcries at her coming and fell back on the bed, clutching for his music.

Martha bailed. She bailed fast, carefully. It took her mind off the night, the storm, those grim men on deck, a foundering ship, and — and little children struggling in the sea. Bail and bail and bail. Would bailing do any good? Charles raised his head and peeped at her.

‘Scoopy watta, mama,’ he encouraged her. ‘Scoopy watta.’ The steward

laughed.

At every crash her heart tightened to a little hard knot, but she did not cease her work. Sometime in the night she fed the baby,— it hardly seemed worth while, — who had no fears and went at once to sleep again. What kept Charles awake? The noise? He made faint remarks to himself from time to time. ‘Bang, bang,’ he murmured when the crash of seas shook the house. ‘Bump, bump.’

Toward morning, at the sound of an opening door, Martha’s heart stopped; it was a ghastly face she turned to Sam.

‘It ’s nothing,’ he reassured her hurriedly. ‘Just after some coffee.’ His cheeks and chin were rough with a scrub of beard and he looked old, old, a man of stone.

Four o’clock passed, five o’clock, six o’clock. A mean, thin daylight leaked in. Martha straightened her aching back. Perhaps —

‘Scoopy watta, mama,’ urged Charles, popping his gay head at her. ‘Scoopy watta.’ So obediently she fell to once more.

‘I think it’s moderatin’,’ said the steward, bringing an empty tub. ‘You rest a minute, ma’am; we got her pretty well bailed out right now. I’ll start some fresh coffee and see if I can git to the galley for some breakfas’.’

‘Scoopy watta,’ insisted Charles.

‘You keep still with your “scoopy watta,” young fella,’ retorted the steward cheerily. ‘We ain’t no slaves.’ He disappeared into the pantry, and as if that were a signal Charles, with a small sigh, dropped his box and, leaning his forehead against the board, slept. And Martha fell into a doze in the big chair, the great boots toed-in comically. The night watch was over.

Martha waked with another wrench of dread at heavy steps thumping downstairs, but a glance eased her.

‘All right so far,’ reported Sam. ‘Clouds blowing away a little. Now, if we can just get an observation.’ He sat down with a deep sigh and poured the water out of his boot.

But the morning passed without the sun. The afternoon drifted into gray evening and the ship wallowed on blindly. The barometer began to fall; Martha tapped it just as she had seen Sam do, and it dropped a little. Sam would have been provoked at that bit of acumen on his wife’s part — but Sam was pacing the sea-swept poop with eyes intent on a dodging horizon. Martha regretted consulting the barometer; things were bad enough as they were; it was better not to know, she guessed. Would she have the strength to lift one more dipper of water or give another swish and wring to that heavy mop? She was wondering, when the door opened. Would she ever be able to hear that door open without fear?

‘Got it,’ muttered Sam, with some of the strain gone from his face. ‘Just for a second. We got Portland Head and Monhegan. Hi, Charles!’

‘Hi,’ said Charles, poking up like a Jack-in-the-box, flushed in his pink flannel nightgown, eol’ man.’ Sam did not notice.

He plotted a position on the chart, fixed a course.

‘It’s going to snow,’ he said to Martha. ‘It’s cold. But we’re going in.’

‘Into the harbor? But there’s a bad bar, is n’t there, or something like that? I remember you said —’

‘We’ve got to go in, Martha! We can’t weather another night.’ It was maddening the way Martha remembered every chance word! ‘Of course there’s not a bad bar!’

‘Well, you said —’ But she was alone.

Martha pressed her face to the companionway glass. The snow was fluttering already. The mate and second mate went forward, leaving only Sam — poor tired Sam, cross as two sticks — on the poop and ashy-faced Jim still wrestling with the wheel. A few figures moved on the main deck, the officers among the men; the cook rushed from the galley and laid hands on a rope; the steward’s white apron flapped beside the mate. Sam shouted in a voice that was drowned in the wind, and blew a shrill blast on a whistle; he turned to the helmsman.

‘ Handsomely now, Jim, handsomely! ’ Jim bent to the wheel at the word.

The ship heeled so steeply that Martha gripped the railing on either side. The ship labored about and lunged directly into a whirling whiteness that hid all before her; only the wild Atlantic showed like a mountain above the lee rail. The Susan B. Lamb began a long struggle toward the harsh coast of her birth. The groans of the ship’s foghorn mingled now with the cries of children. Martha descended. Charles was tired of that bed and frightened at his mother’s absence; in a temper he had thrown the music box at the baby. Martha removed one of Charles’s safety pins, turned him over, and spanked him thoroughly; it gave her more pleasure than it did him. She consoled the outraged baby.

She was going to look on that chart; Sam had certainly told her — She pored over the chart. Those stars were lighthouses. That thing must be a buoy. Portland was there. There were all those islands. That lead-pencil dot and circle must be the ship’s position. It was very interesting. If she had more time she could probably puzzle out what all the little numbers and letters and dots and things meant, she thought, but now she had several things to do, whether they ran on a rock or a reef or a sandbar or an island or not. However, she sat down on the haircloth lounge while she considered what to do first, and, after an exchange of hostile glances with Charles, suddenly fell asleep. Her head sagged forward on her breast. She slept and slept.

She woke with a start; her head had swung around in an arc, wrenching her neck; it startled her, though nothing seemed amiss. That is, nothing additional. Nevertheless she hastened up to the window again; outside she saw men in attitudes of concentrated attention; they hardly breathed; they might have been frozen, from their stillness. She gazed astonished at the spectacle. At last a hoarse cry burst the stillness.

‘Ah years it, sir! Ah years it!’

Martha pressed her nose more closely to the cold glass. Sam and Mr. Webb remained immobile, Sam’s hand clenched in the air halfway to his pipe; then both heads turned slightly toward each other. Whatever it was, they too heard it. What could it be?

‘One — two — three — four — five — six—' Martha could read Sam’s lips counting off deliberate seconds. Why?

‘Seven — eight — nine —’ The mate was looking at the skipper entranced.

‘ Ah!’ It was a gasp from the throats of the listening men, a deep sigh. Sam wiped ten years from his tense face with one gesture across his brow.

‘I make it the foghorn off Portland Head,’ he said in a loud, relieved voice. Martha sat weakly down on the top step; you tell foghorns, she thought, by the number of seconds, miserable tiny seconds, between the blasts. But what would they have done if it had been the wrong foghorn? Or what if a foghorn makes a mistake? It would be very easy to, it seemed. She — she’d ask Sam sometime when he was not so tired. Could she ever take the children to sea again? Oh, she was all wet, sitting in the water.

They lurched into a harbor shrouded in snow.

They picked up a pilot and a tug. Heavy-laden, white with snow and coated with ice, they lumbered behind the tug to find an anchorage. They crept through a narrow drawbridge where a thin man, wrapped and bundled, leaned over the guard rail to see the ship pass by; he was almost on a level with the top of the house.

‘What stove all those planks in?’ The thin man dared to hail the lordly pilot standing on the house.

‘Ho!’ roared the pilot dramatically, swelling his chest. ‘The wind and the waves and the storm!’

‘Oh!’ said the inquirer. ‘I just thought maybe you did it to let the water off. Hullo, Sam.’ The skipper was hunched over to light his pipe and hide a grin; he swung about and stared hard at the muffled figure.

‘Why!’ he exclaimed. ‘Hullo, Eli! What you doing up here?’ He leaped to the top of the house and strode across; the two men were not twenty feet apart as the old Susan inched along.

‘Well, your mother was anxious,’ explained his brother. ‘You certainly gave us a scare, Sam. Everybody come through all right?’

‘So-so. I’m sending my second mate up to the Marine Hospital as soon as we get tied up somewhere; he’ll have to lose a finger anyway, poor fella.’

‘I’ll let ’em know he’s coming,’ assented Eli. ‘You must have had a mean trip. Ten days ago I went out and insured the freight when we began to get the weather reports.’

‘You darn miser,’ said Sam. As the ship crept forward he stepped slowly aft till now he stood on the brink of the house. ‘I don’t suppose you spent a cent insuring me’

‘No,’ answered the thin man. ‘What good would that do? You had Martha and the children with you. Well, so long, Sam. See you later.’