Chapter IV: Youth Solves It (3)

Deems was pleased that she was speaking. He hoped that in conversing she would find respite from her thoughts.

"No, Martha," he said, "that wasn't Jim took Dorothy and Joseph. You know there's a God that gives and takes. Their years were run. Can't you see, Martha?"

"It was Jim who took. He couldn't see them living. When he lived he couldn't see them growing up to be themselves. He took them like he took me from you. D' you remember, Deems, how he came and in no time I was his? He owned me completely."

Deems was silent. There was no arguing. Even now there was vividly alive in his mind, and, he knew, in the minds of the other villagers, the recollection of that sense of possession which went with Jim Sloan. He recalled that William Carrol had hanged himself when he could not pay Jim Sloan the debt he owed him. It was true that Jim Sloan had owned his children as if they were pieces of property. The whole village had learned to know this fact soon after these children had grown up. Deems, recalling his feelings for Martha Sloan, remembered now the amazement, the astonishment, with which he had viewed the change that came over Martha immediately after her marriage to Jim Sloan.

She had been light-hearted and joyful as if overflowing with the vitality natural to the country about the village. There had been gladness in her laugh. Immediately after her marriage all this had changed.

Martha had been wont to run lightly about her father's house. Her movements had become suddenly freighted with a seriousness that was not natural to her. Her laughter quieted to a restrained smile which in turn gave way to a uniform seriousness. The whole village noted and remarked the change. "He is older than she," they said, "and is making her see things as he does."

When they reached the house, Martha, without a word, left Deems and hurried in. Deems turned away, looking back and shaking his head, the while he mumbled to himself, "There's no good in this. There's no good for Martha."

He was struck motionless when suddenly he beheld Martha by the window. He had thought her slightly composed when she had left him, for her manner was more quiet than it had been. Now he was startled. Out of the window she leaned, her eyes fastened on the distant gravestone--white, large, and dominating--a shaft that rose upright like a gigantic spear on the crest of the hill. He watched her face and head and saw that her movements were frightened. As she moved her head--it seemed she was following something with her eyes which, look as closely as he could, he failed to make out--there was a jerkiness of movement that showed her alert and startled.

From the musty, dark parlor Martha looked out on the cemetery. There, clear in the evening light, stood the large white stone--a terrible symbol that held her. To her nervous mind, alive with the creations of her fear, it seemed she could read the lines,

JAMES SLOAN BORN SEPT. 14, 1857 DIED NOV. 12, 1915

and below it, stamped clearly and illumined by her fright,

HIS FAITHFUL WIFE MARTHA SLOAN BORN AUG. 9, 1871. DIED----

At the thought of the word "Died," followed by the dash, she recoiled. The dash reaching out to her--reaching to her--swept into her mind all the graspingness of James which had squeezed the sweetness out of life--all the hardness which had marked his possession of her. Was it her mind, prodded by terror, that visualized it? There, seeming to advance from the hill, from the cemetery, from the very gravestone which was beginning to blot and blurr in her vision, she saw a hand--his hand! It was coming--coming to her, to crush what of life was left in her.

Even in her own mind, it was a miracle that she had survived Jim's tenacity. When Jim had died, she began suddenly to recover her former manner of life. She began to win back to herself. It was as if, the siege of Winter having lifted, the breath and warmth of Spring might now again prevail.

Then had come the horrors of uncontrollable dreams followed by the death by fire of Dorothy. That had shaken her completely.

She recalled their rescuing Dorothy, how they had dragged her out of the fire, her clothes all burned off. They had sought to nurse her back to health, and in the week before her daughter died she had learned something of what had happened the night of the fire. In her sleep Dorothy had heard herself called and she thought it was her father's voice. She had arisen when she seemed to see beside her her father as he had looked in life.

She had followed him to the barn and suddenly he had told her that he had come back to take her with him as he had promised to before his death. In her struggle to escape him she had flung the lantern. In the parlor they had laid out Dorothy--a blackened, burnt frame.

All her care and love and solicitude she concentrated on Joseph. She thought that perhaps by an intenser, all embracing love for Joseph she would be enabled to defeat the spell that she felt hanging over her life. Then, when it seemed that life would begin anew to take on a definite meaning--Joseph, grown up, was giving purpose to it--she remembered that some one had knocked timidly on the door and had announced in a frightened voice: "Mrs. Sloan! There's been a terrible accident, the bridge fell----?" She remembered that she had screamed, "My Joseph! My boy!" and then had found herself in the parlor, the body laid out on the couch.

She remembered suddenly that the parlor had seemed to contain the presence of Jim. She had looked up to see dimly what seemed the figure and face of her dead husband. In the eyes that seemed to be laughing she read the threat, "I took him, but now there's you."

As these recollections flooded and flowed through her mind, a frightened nervousness seized upon Martha, standing by the window. Somehow she was being held by a fear to move. Something seemed to have robbed her of the strength and resolution to turn from the window.

There came to her the impression that there was some one in the room with her. The feeling grew subtly upon her and added to her fear of turning around. So she kept her eyes looking out of the window up at where the shaft of the gravestone stood. But, more clearly now than before, she sensed something that seemed to reach out from the gravestone and carry to her, and at the same time there grew the feeling that the presence in the room was approaching her.

She was held in fright. All her nervous impulses impelled her to flight. Like a whip that was descending over her head, came the mirage from the gravestone until, in a mad, wild attempt to evade it, she flung about in the room as if to dash across and away from the window. Suddenly she was halted in her passage by the presence of Jim. The dim parlor was somehow filled with a sense of his being there, and in the dusk near the mantelpiece and at the head of the couch, there stood in shadowy outline her husband, come back.

"Jim!" she uttered, in a frightened gasp, and threw her hands outward to protect herself from his purpose. But she saw clearly the shadowy face and eyes that said unmistakably, "I have come for you."

She was terror-bound. There was no advance, for moving forward meant coming closer to that presence, meant walking into his very grasp.

She was about to speak, to plead for herself, to beg, "Jim, leave me."

In her terror and dread of his approach, she turned hastily to the window and leaped down. Wildly she scrambled up, bruised and shaken, and screaming hoarsely, while in unthinking terror she moved her hands, as if beating off unwelcome hands, she ran pantingly up the road which led to Deems's house.

The silence and the air of happy quietness that filled the house of her friends seemed to lay a spell upon Martha. Caring for her as if she were of the household, Deems and his wife were gratified by the change that apparently was coming over their charge.

In their room, after Martha had bid them good night, Deems questioned his wife.

"And how is Martha behavin', now?"

"You couldn't tell she's the same woman. Remember how she was when we found her at the door that night--all mumbling and frightened so she couldn't talk? Well, now she's calm and happy like. What she needed was being with some one."

The quietness of her surroundings had had its effect on Martha. They showed in the calm self-possession with which she walked about, persisting in her efforts to help Mrs. Lennon in her household work. The atmosphere of bustling activity--Deems's coming and going from the village, from the cemetery, whither he went with his trowel and spade to keep in repairs the many graves and plots on the hillside--all this seemed to have drawn on some reservoir of unsuspected vitality and composure within Martha.

These were the visible effects. In fact, however, there had grown in Martha's mind a plan--a desire to cut herself forever free of Jim's sinister possession--and this plan she fed from a reservoir of nervous power that was fear and terror converted into cunning and despair. She went about the house not as if relieved of fear of Jim, but cautiously, as if somewhere in back of her mind was a way out, a way out, to win which required care and watchfulness.

In this spirit she observed Deems's movements about the house until she learned where he left his lantern and the box where he put away his trowel and mallet and chisel. Now that the plan was clear in her own mind, there was nothing to do but carry it out. She would cut the dreadful tie that held her to Jim--the tie, the potency of which gave to the dead man the power of holding her so completely. Reckoning thus, she became wary of her companions as if fearing that they might in some way interfere with her plans if they got wind of them. She knew that her every move was watched, for she found that Mrs. Lennon had constituted herself her guardian. Since her coming to the house, she had never left its shelter, finding at first that companionship and reassurance which gave her courage and resolution against Jim and the power to survive the terror of thought of him, and finding finally that, with the formation of her plan, she would have to conceal it from Deems and his wife. She came to this conclusion in this wise.

One day, in the kitchen she came upon a newly sharpened cleaver, its edge invisibly thin and its broad, flat side gleaming in the sun. Mrs. Lennon was by the window and from without came the sounds of Deems chopping wood.

Her mind was filled with a sudden clearness of thought and, swinging the cleaver in the air, she said to Mrs. Lennon:

"You know--here's how I can break away from Jim. When he reaches out--reaches out for me, I can just cut off his hand."

Mrs. Lennon stood motionless, startled by the unexpected words. She had thought Martha's mind free of all fears of Jim. She was brought up sharply by this sudden speech and gesture. "Deems," she called, "Deems, come here."

Deems had taken the cleaver hastily from Martha's hands, and that night told his wife that Martha would have to be watched closely. He feared that Martha was becoming deranged.

Martha had discovered that she was watched when one night she left her room. She heard the door open and instantly she felt the hands of Mrs. Lennon on her arm and heard a gentle, persuasive voice asking her to return to bed.

It was the next day, in the dusk of a turn in the hallway, that Martha once more felt the presence of Jim. If her life in the peaceful household of her friends had brought an outward calm, a mantle of repose and quiet, this was instantly torn up by the vision that formed before her eyes in the half dim hallway. Instantly she was the old Martha, held in the grasp of terror. Her face was drawn in tense, white lines, her lips were deformed, and with trembling gaunt hands she thrust back the apparition. Her screams, "Jim, let me be, let me be," brought Mrs. Lennon running and called Deems from his work in the wood-shed.

They found her in a faint on the floor. They carried her to her room and put her to bed, Mrs. Lennon speaking to her, soothing and trying to bring her back to her former calm.

There followed a few days of rain which seemed in some way to make Martha less uneasy and restless. Deems and his wife, seeing her silent and apparently resting, felt that slowly the terror she had been suffering was being washed out. Martha's attitude encouraged this feeling. She rested in silence, attentive to the dropping of the rain and learning once more to wear her old-time composure.

When Deems returned toward nightfall one day, it was with the news that the incessant rains had done serious damage in the cemetery. Dripping from the drenching he had received in his tour of inspection, his boots muddy, and his hands dirty from holding to the precarious bushes, he shook with cold as he reported on what he had found. In his narrative he had quite forgotten the presence of Martha who sat by, silent and waxen-faced.

"And you ought to see," he said, turning to his wife, "how the rain has run down those graves. You know, it's loosened Jim Sloan's stone so, I'm afraid it'll fall against the first heavy blow."

Martha's exclamation "Oh!" recalled to him her presence. He stopped talking for a while, then hoping to blot out the effects of his statement he began a lively story of the number of trees that had fallen across the road, and how he had been told that over at Rampaco the post-office had been struck by lightning.

He did not know it, but Martha was deaf to his reports. She had her own thoughts. She felt herself curiously strong of will, and there raced in her blood the high determination to act that very night. Not for nothing had she spent the rain drenched days in terrified silence in her room. All of her energies that were still capable of being mustered to her resolve, she had converted in the crucible of her will, and huddled in terror, she had forged the determination to go out when the time came and to cut herself free of the fiendish power that was searing her mind and slowly crushing her. She remembered that in her faint, when she lay limp and inert, a thing of dread, she had felt herself crumple up at the touch of Jim--Jim reaching out to her. Now she would cut herself free of him at the very source of his power over her. She would go that very night.

She cast a glance toward the closet where Deems kept his trowel and chisel. She would have need of them, she knew. She said "Good night" rather more loudly and vehemently than she had intended, for she was feeling nervous.

She was awakened by a feeling of cold. As she sat up she saw that the door was open. What was it drew her eyes through the hallway and out into the open and brought her up suddenly? There came upon her an eeriness that startled and chilled her, and suddenly, as if it were coming at her through the open door, fingers out-thrust, there appeared the hand.

She was out of bed on the instant. Somehow in her throat she repressed the upstartled cry, "Jim," by an effort that strained all her nerves and made her face bloodless white. She could not, however, repress completely the instinctive movement of her hands to ward off the menacing hand. Suddenly a panic seized her and in terrified haste she moved to the closet and, feeling a moment, took what she knew was Deems's chisel.

Do what she could, she could not stem the flow of panic, and suddenly as she began to pant and breathe heavily with the strain of terror, she began also to gasp her pleadings to Jim.

"Don't, Jim. Don't take me," and, as if not at all of her own volition, but at that of a guiding power, she moved out of the house, ghastly in the night, mumbling and shivering.

She was still atremble--she was now chilled by the dampness of ground and air--when she stood by Jim Sloan's gravestone. White it gleamed against the sky, and now Martha's trembling and murmuring turned into a furious industry as she raised the chisel to the stone.

"Jim--you'll let me be, won't you? You'll let me be? I want 'a live yet." She began a frenzied hacking at the gravestone, seeing nothing but the play of her chisel, and the white, fearful stone towering over her, hearing nothing but the rasp of the chisel--not even hearing the rattle of the loosened gravel as it slid from under the stone.

Deems Lennon and his wife were awakened by a heavy crash. "What can it be?" he asked his wife, and then left the bed and ran up to Martha's room. She was gone. Instantly they were both fully awake.

"It's Jim's grave she's gone to," ventured Deems. "Remember the way she said 'Oh!' that time I told how the rain loosened the stone? Come on, we'll go see."

In the dark when they were near the spot where the stone used to stand, they heard a moaning. They approached and found Martha caught under the stone, her body crushed, her dying breath coming slowly and heavily, carrying her words, "Let me go! Jim, let me go!"

TO THE BITTER END[13]

[Note 13: Copyright, 1919, by The Curtis Publishing Company. Copyright, 1920, by Richard Matthews Hallet.]

BY RICHARD MATTHEWS HALLET

From _The Saturday Evening Post_

The feud between Hat Tyler and Mrs. Elmer Higgins sprang out of a chance laugh of Elmer's when he was making his first trip as cadet. Hat Tyler was a sea captain, and of a formidable type. She was master of the _Susie P. Oliver_, and her husband, Tyler, was mate. They were bound for New York with a load of paving stones when they collided with the coasting steamer _Alfred de Vigny_, in which Elmer was serving his apprenticeship as a cadet officer.

The old cadet had just come up on the bridge from taking a sounding--he even had a specimen of the bottom in his hand, he said later, sand with black specks and broken shell--when something queer attracted his attention half a point on the starboard bow. It was a thick foggy night, ships bellowing all round, and a weird-looking tow coming up astern with a string of lights one over another like a lot of Chinese lanterns. It was probably these lights that had drawn the mate's attention away from the ship's bows.

At all events he was standing with a megaphone to his ear hearkening for noises on the port hand when Elmer took him by the elbow and called out: "What in the name of Sam Hill would you call that great contraption mouching across our bows? My sorrows, Fred, it's a schooner!"

The mate went cold along his spine, and the vertebrae distributed there jostled together like knucklebones on the back of a girl's hand, and he yelled "Port helm!"

"I told Fred," Elmer said in discussing this circumstance later with his cronies of the Tall Stove Club--he had got back safe and sound to Winter Harbor by that time--"I says to him, 'Fred, we're going to bump into that ship jest as sure as taxes!' There he stood, swearing a blue streak. I never knew a man to be so downright profane over the little things of life as he was. And I was right when it come to that too. There was that long Spanish ghost of a schooner dead in our path, with her port light shining out there as red as an apple. They wanted me to say later--I know the skipper come to me personally and says, 'Elmer, now you know you didn't see no light.' 'Captain Tin,' I says to him, 'I have got the greatest respect for you as a man, and I would favor you in all ways possible if 'twas so 'st I could; but if I was to testify the way you want me to I would go against conscience. I wouldn't feel that I could go on paying my pew tax. These people here want to know the truth and I am going to give it to them.' Yes, sir, I saw the light as plain as plain, and I pointed it out to Fred, but the devil and Tom Walker couldn't have prevented them ships from walking right up and into each other, situated as they was then.

"My conscience, warn't there works when those two come together! 'Fred,' I says--I was down on my knees; throwed there, you understand--'we're hit!' 'Tell me something I don't know, will you?' he says. He always was comical, jest as comical as he could be. 'Get down there and look at her snout,' he said to me. 'Find out which of us is going to sink.' That was Fred all over--one of these fellows, all bluster, where it's a bucket of wind against a thimbleful of go-ahead."

"I know him," interposed another member of the Tall Stove Club. "I knew the whole family. He never amounted to nothing till he got to going to sea."

"Well, I down off the bridge," went on Elmer, "and I up on the fo'c'stle head, and there I see the schooner leaning over sort of faintish, jest the way a man will when he's sick to his stomach, and I says to myself, 'That ship's going the way of the wicked.' I sung out to Fred to keep the _Alfred_ going slow ahead, so as to give the crew a chance to come aboard, and it warn't no time before they was swarming up into our chains like so many ants out of a hill that has been knocked galley-west. I see we was all wrinkled up forward ourselves--the _Alfred_ was a tin ship--and it warn't to be wondered at when you come to consider that the _Susie Oliver_ was jest as full as she could hold of paving stones.

"And the next thing I knew there was Jed Tyler, right out of the blue sky, standing side of me in his shirt sleeves, and looking down, mournful enough. 'Where's Hat?' I sung out to him. 'Drowned,' he says. 'Drowned, am I?' Hat sung out. 'I guess that's just another case of the thought being father to the wish, that's what I guess!'

"So I leaned down, and my stars, there was Hat Tyler! She'd come up jest as she was--there she was sitting on the fluke of the starboard anchor. And warn't she immense! I down over the ship's side with a rope, and s' I, 'Heave and away, my girl!' and I got a grip of her, and away she come over the rail, mad as a wet hen, and jest as wet, too, with her hair stringing down, and her dander up, if ever I see a woman with her dander up."

"I hear she leads Tyler a life," said a member.

"Well, I laughed; I couldn't help it," continued Elmer, moving his ears at the recollection of it.

"'Hat,' I says, 'you never was caught out this way before in all your born days,' I says. She was fit to be tied. 'Laugh!' she says. 'You great booby!' 'Hat,' I says, 'I shall give up, I know I shall.' 'It's jest your ignorance,' she says. 'I know it,' I says, 'but I couldn't help it no more than if you had slid a knife into me.' And I out with another. 'Come down into my cabin,' I says, 'and I will give you a little something in a glass.' And down she come, past all them sailors, in the face and eyes of everybody."

"She didn't lose nothing by what I hear," said Zinie Shadd. "They tell me the underwriters had just as good as told her that they wouldn't let the schooner go to sea again."

And now by your leave a word from Hat herself. There are two sides to every story. She told her tale just across the street from the ship chandler's, where the Tall Stove Club held its meetings. In Mrs. Kidder's bake-shop were gathered the henchmen of Hat Tyler.

"Well, I never see your equal for falling on your feet," Lena Kidder said admiringly. "If I've told my husband once I've told him twenty times I'd rather have Hat Tyler's luck than a license to steal."

"Everybody has got a right to their own opinion on that point," said Hat Tyler heavily, sinking her jaws toward the mug of milk which Mrs. Kidder had set before her.

Hat Tyler was certainly a handful. Her shoulders were wide, as she often said herself, her cheeks were brick-red, her voice was as deep as the fattest gold pipe on the church organ, and the palm of her hand rasped when she took hold of a body. There wasn't a hornier-handed woman in the county. She wore tarred rope round her girth for a belt, knotted at the ends with star knots. She was what Margaret Fuller had in mind when she said to Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Let them be sea captains if they will."

"Where was you when she hit, Hat?" asked Mrs. Kidder.

"Asleep," said Mrs. Tyler. "I come up out of my bunk all standing, and went out on deck just as I was. And lo and behold, I had just time to get a grip on that anchor when the _Oliver_ give a lurch and over she went. She didn't shilly-shally, I can tell you, with that load of paving stones in her belly. Let me have another quart of milk, Lena. Talking's thirsty business. Well, I thought I'd get my never-get-over, waiting for those men to get a rig ready for me. And then who should I see but that fool Elmer Higgins looking down at me. 'Hang on, Hat,' he said, 'while I think what to do,' 'Think what to do!' I says. 'If you're any part of a man you'll fling me a rope.' 'Jest half a second,' he says. 'Rome wasn't built in a day.' 'It was burned up in a night, though,' I says quick as a flash, and I guess that floored him. 'Can't you lift me up, man?' 'Much as ever I can,' he says. 'And you call yourself an able seaman,' I said to him. 'I would sell out if I was you.'"

"He's going round with a different version, Hat," said Lena Kidder. "Didn't he laugh as he says he did?"

"Laugh? I would like to see the man that would laugh," said Hat in her great hardy voice. Her fist closed round the mug of milk. "I'll have him laughing on the wrong side of his face."

"He says he give a bellow fit to wake the dead."

"That man? He stood there like a brazen image, and I had to say to him: 'Are you going to let me stand here in this perishing cold without so much as lifting a hand? Just you stir your stumps and hotfoot a slug of square-faced gin into me if you know what's for your own best good.'

"That man? Why, I taught him all he knows. I was sailing my own ships when he was a deckhand."

The truth was--and Pearl Higgins, his wife, could never quite forget it or forgive it--Elmer had once shipped before the mast on Hat Tyler's ships; and Hat was not likely to forget it either. Rumor had it that Hat and Elmer had been as thick as thieves at one time, and that it was You-tickle-me-and-I'll-kiss-you between them then. But if such was the case they had later had a falling out, and Elmer had gone one way and Hat another.

"As a matter of fact I was more glad than sorry at what took place," Hat now continued. "That cargo of paving stones up and shifted and started her in a new place. She was leaking like a sieve. That little rat of an underwriter said to me: 'If I were you, as soon as I got out of sight of land I would turn round and kick the stern off her with a tap of my foot.' 'Maybe I will, for all you know,' I said. I'd like to see them bamboozle me!"

"Trust you, Hat!" said Lena Kidder in a voice of admiration.

"And so Elmer Higgins has the cast-iron nerve to say that he laughed at me to my face, does he?" continued Mrs. Tyler. "Well, he lies when he says it."

So the lie was passed, and hostilities began; for before night word came to Pearl Higgins that Hat Tyler was back in town running down her husband for his part in the rescue. Elmer's wife, a dark thin-featured woman, had felt all along that Elmer had never been able to shake off vestiges of that time when he and Hat had been so kind of hand-in-glove; and she had privately determined to put the woman at a safe distance once and for all.

"The long and short of it is," she said grimly when Elmer had come home and spread his navigation books on the kitchen table "she's round town calling you a liar; and now I suppose you'll be just meek enough to put up with it."

Elmer took off his spectacles and rubbed his brow thoughtfully.

"I shouldn't wonder if it was a case of necessity, mamma," he said musingly. "If I know one thing better than another it is that I would want to go in training for a spell before crossing that woman. I know when I was before the mast with her--"

Pearl Higgins burst into tears promptly. "I think you might spare me an account of that," she sobbed. "I'm sure I don't want to hear about your goings-on with anyone so ignorant as Hat Tyler. Yes, she is; she's ignorant, and comes of ignorant people. What does she amount to, I'd like to know? There's nothing to her at all. And now," she blazed forth in fierier tones, "you're half in sympathy with the woman this blessed minute! I suppose you think just because you rescued her from a watery grave you're in duty bound to side in with her and take her part against your own wife. I don't know how it is, but everything seems to fall out in that woman's favor."

"Well, ain't it so!" said Elmer, not as a question but as if the full force of the proposition had just struck him. "Now you mention it, I don't know that I ever knew Hat Tyler to come off second best in a transaction. I was talking to a party only the other day, and he said the same thing himself. He says, 'Hat's a smart woman, Elmer.'"

"Why didn't you have her then, when you might have had her?"

"Always said I wouldn't marry a woman that had the heft of me," said Elmer sagely with a fond twinkle at his Pearl. "I know that night when I saw her arm on the fluke of that anchor I said to myself, 'I done just right to steer clear of you, my lady.' There 't was, bare to the shoulder, freckled all the way up, and jest that pretty size!"

"It's as big as a stovepipe!" shrieked Pearl.

"'T was smooth as a smelt," Elmer averred dreamily, "and jest of a bigness to work, and work well, in a pinch. A woman like that would be some protection to a man, Pearl. I wish you could have seen how she clim up into those anchor chains. But I said to myself, 'That woman has got too much iron in her blood to go with my constitution!'

"But she's smart; Hat is smart. All is, a man never knows how to take her. But she's smart as a steel trap."

"Well, I wish she'd shut it then," said Pearl Higgins grimly.

Silence reigned; and in that silence could be heard the steeple clock ticking on the mantel and the sound of waves lapping under the house. They were living in Pearl's father's house. Pearl's father had been a seaman and wharf owner, and in his declining years had established a sea grill on one of his wharves, and lived up over it. To get to the Higgins home you ascended an outside staircase.

The subject of Hat Tyler had a fatal fascination for Pearl Higgins.

"Do you know what I heard downtown this morning?" she resumed. "They say Jim Rackby's going to make her skipper of the new schooner. After she's just lost one by not keeping her eyes open too! The luck of some women! I don't pretend to know how she does it. A great coarse thing like her----"

"Still there's a different kind of a send-off to her, I was going to say," said Elmer. "Hat's a seaman, I'll say that for her."

"I guess there ain't much you won't say for her," Pearl retorted.

"Then again, when the _Alfred_ run her down she had the right of way."

"I guess her weight give her that," countered his wife.

Elmer got up and stared across the harbor at the new schooner which Hat was to command. The _Minnie Williams_ sat on the ways resplendent, her masts of yellow Oregon pine tapering into a blue sky. A mellow clack of calking hammers rang across the water.

"Those ways are pitched pretty steep, it seems to me," he said. "When she goes she'll go with a flourish."

Among those who swore by Elmer for a man of wisdom was Jim Rackby, the owner of the schooner. Next day the two men met in her shadow. The ship had just been pumped full of water, and now the calking gang were going round staring up with open mouths to see where the water came out. Taking advantage of their absorption Jim Rackby asked Elmer in low tones whether he considered Hat Tyler a fit person to be intrusted with a ship.

"I don't know a better," Elmer answered in the same low tone.

"How about her losing this last ship?"

"I wouldn't say this to my wife, it would only aggravate her," said Elmer, grinding up a piece off his plug, "but the loss of that ship is only another example of what that woman can do in the way of pure calculation when she sets out to. There she had that good-for-nothing schooner on her hands. Why, she had to come in here on these very flats and squat and squirt mud up into her seams, trip after trip, as I've seen with my own eyes, to keep the cargo from falling out as much as anything, let alone water coming in; and as soon as the mud had washed out it was all hands on the pumps, boys, for dear life.

"Well, as I say, she took that ship out there in a fog, like a cat in a bag you might say, and filled up with paving stones to boot, and she planted her right there where the _Alfred_ could come slap up against her and give the owners a chance to say 'Good morning' to the underwriters. And she owner of a good fourth at the time. Why, she's got dollars laid away now where you and I have got buttons. And, mind you, the underwriters had as good as told her that that would be her last trip. The insurance was going to fall in as soon as she made port. Now ain't that what you would call a smart woman, laying all joking aside? But I wouldn't want my wife to hear this, Jim. There's a little jealousy mixed in there, between you and me and the bedpost."

"Well," said Rackby, satisfied, "I had always understood that she was one of these kind that if they was let out they would always find their way home somehow."

"Yes, sir!" said Elmer heartily. "Why, I was over here the day they was stepping the mainmast, and Hat was going to slip a five-dollar gold piece under the mast for luck, the way the last man did, but she thought better of it. I see her change her mind at the last minute and reach in and take out a bright penny and creep that under quick, thinking the Lord would never notice the difference. I never knew a woman that was more downright fore-handed. Yes, sir, she's a dabster!"

How true it is that we never know our friends in this world so largely made up of conjecture! Could Hat have known how powerfully Elmer had pleaded her cause, and at a time when it was half lost, would she have moved heaven and earth, as she was moving them, to bring him into disrepute? Would she have looked at him when they met with a dagger in either eye and one between her teeth? Would she have tugged that rope girdle tighter about her hips and passed him, as she did, with only a resolute quiver of her person?

Elmer was in hopes that she would come round in time. "She's not much of a hand to hold a thing up against a body, Hat isn't," he tried to tell himself. And yet a vague presentiment, something like trouble in the wind, oppressed him.

Affairs were in this posture when launching day dawned fair. The _Minnie Williams_ stood ready on the ways, dressed in her international code flags, which flew from all trucks. Sails of stiff new duck were bent to the booms, anchor chains had been roused up and laid on the windlass wildcat, a fire was kindled in the galley and a collation laid in the saloon. The owner was aboard.

Hat Tyler was very much in evidence, fore and aft, giving orders to the crew as to what was to be done as soon as the ship left the ways.

"I want that starboard hook dropped the minute we get the red buoy abeam. Understand? Jake Hawkins, you stand by the windlass. Take care when you snub her not to break that friction band. And stand by to let go the other hook in case we need it. This harbor ain't much bigger than a ten-quart can, when all is said."

Hat was dressed in a splendid traveling suit of heavy brocaded stuff. She wore an enormous green-and-purple hat and carried a green bottle with red, white and blue streamers tied round its neck. Being skipper and a lady at one and the same time, she had chosen to christen the ship herself.

"What's in the bottle, Hat?" sang out one of her admirers.

"Wouldn't you like to know?" Hat retorted wittily. She was in high spirits.

"Ain't it a waste of good stuff!" shouted another. "I guess it ain't everybody that can be trusted to christian a ship these hard times."

"It ain't the last drink she will get either," a more remote voice floated up to her. "I hear she's taking rum to France from Porto Rico."

Hat Tyler took a firmer grip of the bottle under its streamers, for this was the voice of Pearl Higgins.

Time pressed. Already the shore gang were splitting out the keel blocks. The whole town stood at gaze. The children had been let out of school. A group of the larger ones were gathered on the after deck, ready to sing America when the ship took the water. It was a gala day. Hat felt that all eyes were centered on her, and her commands rolled along the decks like so many red-hot solid shot.

The strokes of the men under her keel rang faster and faster yet. When the last block was split out from under that oaken keel it was expected that the ship would settle on the ways, that two smooth tallowed surfaces would come together, that the ship and all her five hundred tons would move the fraction of an inch, would slip, would slide, would speed stern foremost into what is called her native element. But ships are notional, and these expectations are sometimes dashed.

And now Elmer and his wife, who were stationed ankle deep in that yellow sea of chips under her prow, could see the brows of the shore gang beaded with sweat, and a look of desperate hurry in the eyes of the youngster coming with the paint pot and painting the bottom of the keel as the blocks fell one by one. Well he might hurry; for sometimes the ship trips the last dozen blocks or so, and thus stepped on with all that tonnage they snap and crackle, and splinters fly in every direction.

Nothing now held the ship but a single iron dog which bound the two tallowed surfaces together. One stroke of the maul knocked this away. Still the ship hung fire.

"Run back and forth thwartships, you there; all you good people!" cried Hat hoarsely. "See if we can't start her that way."

So the ship's launching company ran back and forth, and fore and aft, until their tongues were hanging out. Elmer nudged his wife and asked her if she remembered that night when they had danced up and down themselves at a moonlight launching. Pearl replied with a trace of acid that she had good cause to remember it. It was then that Elmer had screwed his courage to the speaking point.

In vain, all in vain Hat Tyler roared her orders. The _Minnie Williams_ budged not, nor felt a thrill of life along her keel. The crowd beside the ways scarcely drew breath; the suspense was racking.

At length the ship's company stopped for lack of breath; and in a moment of hush a voice cried: "You better get out of that traveling suit, Hat Tyler. You won't travel to-day."

It was Pearl Higgins. She followed up her witty saying by a peal of jeering laughter, which punctured the tense mood of that great throng of friends and neighbors; and such a roar of laughter went up at Hat's expense that the _Minnie Williams_--and Hat no less--quivered from stem to stern.

The sea captain burst frankly into tears.

"No, sir," Elmer said to a member of the Tall Stove Club who had missed the launching, "I never see Hat go all to pieces the way she did then. She was all broken up over it. Well, she might have mistrusted that Pearl had a bone to pick with her. Pearl had been between a sweat and a shiver to get in a word, and she see her chance and let her have it slap. 'T was just what the doctor ordered. It come in so kind of comical too. There was Hat, all twittered up in that great poison-green hat of hers with the little heap of crab apples over one eye--and she stood there and couldn't say ay, yes or no. And then it was boo-hoo, you know, same as women will when a thing ain't jest according to their liking. Hat's a smart woman, all right enough, but she don't show to her best advantage when she blubbers. I stood there looking at her and I couldn't think of nothing but that old adage that runs: 'Hell is nothing to put alongside of a woman that has been laughed at.' 'Pearl,' I says, 'you've done it now. You can't tell me you haven't made an enemy of that woman.' And Pearl says to me, 'That great baby! I guess she'll survive.' 'Well,' I says, 'the fat's in the fire.' And Pearl says to me, ''T won't hurt her if she does lose a little flesh over it.' I don't know why it is these women can't live together in peace without kicking up such a touse all the time over trifles."

Elmer was not free on the occasion itself to spend himself in narrative, however. His wife kept him close by her after her triumph. In grim silence she preceded him up the outside staircase, threw open the door to the house of Higgins and marched in. She commanded him to fetch a hod of coal. She rattled her irons, touched her finger to the bottom of a hot one--tszt--and brought it down on the ironing board with a masterful jounce. And then she glared out of the window at the massive stern of the _Minnie Williams_.

"I guess she'll know better another time," she said grimly.

"Ain't you two women been at swords' points long enough?" pleaded Elmer.

"If she thinks she can walk all over me she'll find she's mightily mistaken."

"All is, I mistrust she won't leave a stone unturned," Elmer said, scratching his ear. He was deep in the study of navigation again. "Hat's contrary; yes, she is; she's mulish when she's crossed. And I don't know when I've seen her get her back up the way she did to-day."

He spoke as briefly as possible on the subject, however. Good navigation began at home; and there were shallows there that would put to shame the terrors of Pollock Rip Slue. As he was going to bed near the hour of midnight he did just say that he would rather not have Hat Tyler for an enemy.

"There's no telling when she may bob up and put a spoke in your wheel," he said, taking off his necktie.

"You see to it that you put on a clean collar in the morning," said Pearl Higgins from the bed. "The one you've got on's filthy dirty."

"I wish you could see it in a little different light Pearl," said her spouse. "It ain't as if Hat Tyler was the fiend incarnate. But she'll naturally hanker to get back at you; and with me away and all----"

"I can take care of myself, thank you," said Pearl.

"Still and all, I don't like to leave you with things this way."

"A precious lot you care how you leave things--going off at your age and getting into this awful war when there ain't a particle of need of it."

"Ain't we had that all out once?"

"And then you stand up there and defend that woman."

"Now, Pearl----"

"Yes, you are! You're defending her, and I shouldn't wonder if you didn't think as much of her as ever you did in your heart of hearts. Oh, if you only knew how it wrings me to think of you and she together!"

"There, there! Why, in those days I hadn't so much as--I didn't so much as know you were on earth."

"We can't ever forget our first loves," said Pearl. "It's no use your standing up there and letting on. I know what I know. Put out the light and get into bed. Your feet are getting cold standing there that way."

Her mouth turned into the pillow, she went on: "I remember just as well as if it was yesterday when her father lay dying--you know how much he thought of that horse of his, and how it always had red tassels hung on its ears the first day of spring, and the brass on the harness was enough to put your eyes out, he worked over it so. He thought the world of that horse, and when he see he was going to go, he got up and said, 'Hat, shoot the horse. I won't be quiet in my grave for thinking what kind of treatment it may be getting.' And what does she do but out into the barn and shoot the gun into the air, and come back and let on like the horse is gone. And her poor father lying there at his last gasp."

"Still and all," said Elmer, "wouldn't it have been kind of too bad to put a young horse like that out of its misery? It warn't a day over ten years old."

"And now what?" continued Pearl. "I heard only to-day that she's been to the first selectman about having our place here condemned on the ground that it's unsafe. And the next thing I know I'll be turned out of house and home and won't know which way to turn nor where to lay my head. After I've slaved like a dog all my life and worse--and what thanks do I get for it? Why, my husband--walks away--and leaves me--in the lurch. That's how much he--thinks of me. Ain't you _never_ coming to bed?"

Elmer, who had stood listening, now in fact had his lips ready puffed to blow out the light.

But he did not blow.

Instead he said, "My soul and body, what was that?"

A fearful sound smote upon their ears. Something had shouldered the house. The stovepipe in the kitchen fell down, there followed the sound as of some scaly creature dragging its body across the linoleum. Then there came a fall of plaster, and the kitchen stove itself appeared stealthily through the bedroom wall.

"My conscience!" said Elmer Higgins at the height of his mystification.

But we anticipate. It will be well at this point to look in on the affairs of Hat Tyler for a moment. When it became apparent that the _Minnie Williams_ would not leave the ways until softer weather had loosened up the launching grease the crowd drifted away from her. The cook banked his fires and the crew went ashore for a carouse.

Then it was that Hat had it out with Tyler. Jed said himself afterward that it was a regular old-fashioned session, but further than that he would not commit himself, beyond saying that of course Hat was sensitive--awful sensitive--and just as thin-skinned as she could be, and it was only natural she should get up on her high horse when once she had him alone. It was not till near midnight that, red of eye and with her hair stringing down any old how, she put her head out of the companionway and looked vengefully at the Higgins place across the way.

"If looks could kill," Tyler said, thrusting his jaw out with hers, "there wouldn't be a grease spot left of that shack, would there, Hat?"

Hat made no answer. She had felt an indefinable sensation at the soles of her feet.

"We're away, Tyler, we're away!" she gasped.

It was even so. Swift as a swallow on the wing and noiseless as a thief in the night the _Minnie Williams_ left the smoking ways, with that deep and graceful bow always so thrilling to beholders when there are beholders; the first and most beautiful motion of the ship.

"You christian her, Hat!" cried Tyler. "I'll drop the hook."

Hat broke the bottle over her stern works at the very moment that a roar of chain going out at the hawse pipe forward set the sleeping gulls flapping seaward. The _Minnie Williams_ floated there lightly as a feather drifted from the wings of sleep, soundless save for the chain rattling out of her lockers. She had chosen that whimsical hour of the night to take her first bath, and who should say the lady nay?

Now by insensible degrees the near shore receded and the far shore drew near. Still slack chain rattled out of the hawse pipe.

Hat strode forward.

"For the Lord's sake, ain't you going to snub this ship!" she cried in a voice hoarse with fury.

Jed Tyler thrust a ghastly dewy face out of the windlass room.

"I can't do it, Hat!" he gasped.

"You can't! Don't tell me you can't! Everything's been done that's been tried. You drop that hook or I'll know the reason why!"

"The friction band's broke square in two."

"Oh, damn it all, if I must say so--there!" said Hat bitterly, for she was not captain in name only. "If there's any such thing as break it's break at a time like this. Let go that port anchor."

"Both wildcats will turn idle the way things are here."

"You do as I say! The weight of the chain may check her in some."

Tyler dropped his other hook.

"How much chain have we got on that starboard anchor? Do you know?"

"About one hundred and seventy-five fathoms."