There was nothing for it. For a thousand dollars a month I could not stay ashore. Somebody or other would give me a chance to go seining, some good skipper I knew; and if none of the killers would give me a chance, then I’d try some old pod of a skipper. My mother would just have to let me go. It was only summer fishing after all––seining wasn’t like winter trawling––and in the end she would see it as I did.

I walked along, and as the last man in my mind was Maurice Blake, of course he was the first I had to run into. He was not looking well; I mean he was not looking as he should have looked. There was a reckless manner about him that no more belonged to him than a regularly quiet manner belonged to his friend Tommie Clancy. And I guessed why––he had been drinking. I had heard it already. Generally when a man starts to drink for the first time everybody talks about it. I was surprised, and I wished he hadn’t. But we are always finding out new things about men. In 17 my heart I was not blaming Maurice so much maybe as I should. I’d always been taught that drinking in excess was an awful habit, but some otherwise fine men I knew drank at times, and I wasn’t going to blame Maurice till I knew more about it.

And we can forgive a lot, too, in those we like. Maurice had no family to think of, and it must have been a blow to him not to get so fine a vessel as the Fred Withrow after he had been promised and had set his heart on it. And then to see her go to a man like Sam Hollis! and with the prospect of not getting another until a man like Withrow felt like saying you could. Everybody in Gloucester seemed to know that Withrow was doing all he could to keep Maurice from getting a vessel, and as the owners had banded together just before this for protection, as they called it, “against outside interference,” and as Withrow was one of the largest owners and a man of influence beyond his vessel holdings, he was quite a power at this time.

Maurice Blake was far from being drunk, however, when I met him this day. Indeed, I do not believe that in his most reckless hour up to this time he had ever lost control of himself so far as not to know pretty nearly what he was doing all the time; but certainly he had been drinking this day, and the drinking manner did not set well on him.

Maurice was standing on the front steps of Mrs. Arkell’s boarding-house when I saw him. It was Mrs. Arkell’s granddaughter Minnie that married the wealthy Mr. Miner––a rather loud sort of man, who had been reported as saying that he would give her a good time and show her life. He may have given her a good time––I don’t know––but he was dead in two years. He was supposed to be very rich––three or four millions––but on settling up there was less than half a million. Of course that wasn’t bad––enough for Minnie to buy a big house next her grandmother’s for a summer home, and enough to go off travelling whenever she pleased.

When she came back to Gloucester she was still a very handsome girl, spoken of as the “Miner widow” among people who had known her only since her marriage, but still called Minnie Arkell by most of those who had known her when she was a child. In Gloucester she bought the first house just around the corner from her grandmother’s. A handy passage between their two back yards allowed her to visit her grandmother whenever she pleased. She wanted to be near her own people, she said, and was more in her grandmother’s house than her own.

Maurice came down the steps of Mrs. Arkell’s boarding-house as I came along, and joined me on 19 the sidewalk. He asked me the first thing if I wouldn’t have a drink, and I said no.

“Oh, I forgot,” he said, “you don’t drink. Have a cigar,” and he pulled one out of his pocket, and I took and lit it. Generally I smoked a pipe, but I liked good cigars, though I couldn’t afford them myself. This was not a good one––more like the kind they hand out in bar-rooms when men get tired of drinking and say they guess they’ll have a smoke.

“How does it happen, Joe, you’re not at the store? I always thought Withrow held his men pretty close to hours.”

“Well, so he does, but I’m not working for him now.” And then I told him that I had had an argument with Withrow, been discharged, and was thinking of going fishing. I didn’t tell him at first how it all came about, but I think he guessed it, for all at once, after a searching look, he reached out and shook hands with me.

“If ever I get a vessel again, Joe, and you still want to go fishing and care for a chance with me, you can have it––if you can’t go with a better man, I mean. I’ll take you and be glad to have you.”

That meant a good berth, of course, for Maurice was a killer.

I looked at Maurice when he wasn’t watching me, and felt sorry for him. He was a man that 20 anybody would like the looks of. It wasn’t that he was a handsome man––I never could get to like pretty men myself––but there was something about him that made you feel you could trust him. The heavy tan of his face and the grip of his jaw would spoil almost anybody for a beauty man, I suppose, but he had fine eyes and his mouth was all right, and he had a head that you’d like to stand off one side and look at, with hair that seemed to lift and wave with every breath of wind, and when he smiled you felt somehow that he’d saved that particular smile for you. He was no better built than a hundred other men I knew who were going fishing, and he was no bigger than a thousand others sailing out of Gloucester, and not near so big as a lot of others––five feet ten or eleven, maybe, he was, with level shoulders, and very light on his feet––but looking at him you knew he was all there.

After smoking a while and watching him between puffs, it flashed on me all at once that I was pretty thick. A word or two my cousin Nell had let slip––not so much what she said as the way she said it––gave me a hint of a whole lot of things. Looking at Maurice now I asked him if he had seen my cousin or Miss Foster lately.

He flushed up as he looked at me, and I saw that whatever he was thinking of it had not been 21 far away from what I had been thinking of. “No, I haven’t seen them”––slowly. “How is your cousin?”

“Oh, she seems to be all right. They were both in to the store this morning.”

“What doing?” I thought he was beginning to worry, but I tried not to let on that I noticed it. I was beginning to feel like a sleuth, or a detective, or a diplomat, or something.

“Well, I don’t know. Nell said they came in to see me, but all that happened that I had any hand in was to weigh her. She gained another pound last week, and it’s worrying her. The more exercise she takes the heavier she gets, she says. She’s a hundred and thirty-one now. Of course, while they’re there Withrow had to help out and make himself agreeable, especially to Miss Foster, but I can’t see that she warms up to him.”

“Ha? No? You don’t think so?”

“Not much, but maybe it’s her way. She’s pretty frosty generally anyway, different from my cousin––she’s something like.”

“Yes, your cousin is all right,” said Maurice.

“You bet,” I said. “She don’t stand around and chill the air.”

“Why––does Miss Foster always? Is that her way? I––don’t––know––much about her.”

“Well, I don’t know so very much myself––mostly what my cousin tells me. Still, I guess she’s all right; but she strikes me as one of the kind that might make an awful lot of a man and never let on until she was dead sure of him.”

“H-m––That means she could think a whole lot of Withrow and not let on, Joe?”

I tried to look at Maurice like my oldest brother used to look at me sometimes when he tried to make me feel that I was a very green kid indeed, and said, “Well, if she’s the kind to care for a man like Withrow, all I’ve got to say is that she’ll deserve all she’ll get. He’s no good.”

“That may be, but how’s she to know? I know, you know, and half the men in Gloucester know that he’s rotten; but take a woman who only sees him at his best and when he’s watching out––how’s she to know?”

“I don’t know, but being a woman she ought to,” was all I could say to that. It came into my mind just then that when I next saw my cousin Nell I’d tell her what I really knew, and more than that––what I really thought of my old employer. Perhaps she’d carry it to Miss Foster. If it was to be Maurice or Withrow, I knew on which side I was going to be.

Both of us were quiet then, neither of us quite knowing what to say perhaps. Then together we 23 started to walk to the corner of the side street. We were past the side-door of the boarding-house when a voice called out, “Oh, Maurice,” and then, maybe noticing me, I suppose, “Oh, Captain Blake,” and Maurice turned. Minnie Arkell––Mrs. Miner rather––was there at the kitchen window. I didn’t know she was in town at all––thought she hadn’t got back from Florida, or North Carolina, or wherever it was she had been for the winter.

“Won’t you come in a minute, Captain, and your friend? He doesn’t remember me––do you, Joe?––and yet we were playmates once,” which was true. I was often taken to Mrs. Arkell’s when a little fellow by skippers who were friends of my father’s. They used to tell me about him, and I liked to listen.

“I thought I’d run over and see granny,” she went on. “I’m back to the old house for a while. Won’t you come in?”

My mind had long been set against Minnie Arkell. I knew about her throwing over a fine young fellow, a promising skipper, to marry Miner. I may have been too young at the time to judge anybody, but after that I had small use for her. My ideas in the matter were of course pretty much what older men had put into me.

I had listened to them––skippers and others––and yet now, when she held out her hand to me and smiled, I didn’t feel nearly so set against her. She certainly was a handsome girl, and yet I hoped that Maurice wouldn’t fall in love with her, as most everybody did that came to the Arkell house.

I said that I did not have time to come in, and started to make off. Maurice asked me where I was bound. I told him that I thought of taking a look in at Crow’s Nest and getting the news.

“Yes, you’ll get it there, sure enough. When they can’t tell you anything else up there they can tell you what everybody’s doing.” He smiled at that, turned slowly toward the side-door, as if he would rather go with me to Crow’s Nest, and I went off.

Just outside the gate I saw Sam Hollis, a man I never did like. Tommie Clancy, the man that could size up a person quicker than anybody I’d ever met, used to say that deep down, if you could get at Hollis, you’d find a quitter, but that nobody had ever got into him. I’d been meeting Hollis after every trip in for two years in Withrow’s store. He was a successful fisherman, and a sharp, keen man ashore, but he was a man I never quite took to. One of his ambitions, I felt satisfied, was to be reckoned a devil of a fellow. He’d have given a year’s earnings, I knew, to have people 25 point him out on the street and say, “There’s Sam Hollis––there’s the boy to carry sail––nobody ever made him take his mains’l in,” the same as they used to say of a half dozen or so that really would carry sail––that would drive a vessel under before they would be the first to reef. But the people didn’t do that, although, let him tell it, he did wonderful things out to sea, and he had such a way of telling it, too, that he’d almost make you believe him. But as Clancy used to say, after he’d left you, and you had time to think it over, you’d see where here and there his story wasn’t well-calked. My own idea was that he wanted a reputation so that he could pose as a devil of a fellow with certain people ashore. It is easy enough to see that even a more careful man than Sam Hollis might take a chance for a smile from a woman like Minnie Arkell.

Anyhow, I never felt at home with Hollis, and so was willing to take Clancy’s judgment straight. Hollis was a man about forty, and had been one of Minnie Arkell’s admirers ever since I could remember––ever since she was old enough to have any, I mean, and she wasn’t any late bloomer, as Clancy used to say.

Hollis went into the Arkell house by the door that had only just closed behind Maurice and Minnie Arkell. I didn’t like that very much, and was 26 thinking of turning back and going in, too; but on second thought it occurred to me that perhaps only Maurice would have a welcome for me. So I didn’t enter, but kept on to Crow’s Nest instead.