The mystery of the Sea-Lark

“A lucky thing so few of the boats were out when the storm came up!” said Jack Holden. “I guess they’d have had a pretty hard time of it yesterday.”

“Cap’n” Crumbie nodded in satisfaction. “Only one missing,” he replied. “And why? Why? ’Cause Cap’n Crumbie told ’em what to expect. Not far out, I ain’t, as a rule. There was nigh a dozen o’ ’em wanting to get away to the grounds when I told ’em the gale was coming. And most o’ ’em took my advice and stayed safe an’ snug at home. ’Tain’t that I’m wanting to blow my own trumpet, as the saying is, but facts is facts. Bob Sennet laughed at me and put to sea. Laughed at me, mind you! Obstinate as they make ’em, Bob is――or should say _was_――just like his father afore him. If he hadn’t been so obstinate he’d ha’ been here to-day, alive an’ well. An’ instead o’ that, see where he is!”

“Where, Cap’n?” asked the boy, gravely.

The Cap’n dropped his voice to a sepulchral rumble. “Fathoms deep, son! Fathoms deep somewheres out there, he and the Ellen E. Hanks together; aye, and all hands as well. Fathoms deep; mark my words!”

Jack, suppressing a disrespectful grin, glanced seaward in the direction of the Cap’n’s pointing hand. The scene there held no suggestion of tragedy. The storm of the last two days was over. Since early morning the leaden skies had turned to blue and the fresh, salty breeze that swept in from the broad Atlantic was but the tag-end of the terrific gale that had lashed the waters of the harbor and raced, shrieking, up the quaint, narrow streets of the town. Now, instead of the storm-wrack, a few white clouds sailed eastward, and, in place of the fury of tormented waters, the harbor and the sea beyond the breakwater reflected the blue of the heavens in their dancing, white-capped waves.

A mile away, Gull Island was fringed with creamy foam, and, farther still, at the tip-end of the Point, the squat stone lighthouse gleamed snowy-white against the clear horizon. Washed and swept by rain and wind, the little Massachusetts fishing-town of Greenport looked bright and clean this May afternoon. The fishing-schooners, some at anchor, some lying snug at the wharves, were drying their sails in the warm sunlight.

Cap’n Crumbie viewed them approvingly as, with Jack at his side, he paced to and fro on Garnett and Sayer’s wharf, his short, slightly bowed legs working with the regularity of a pendulum, six paces nor’east, then six paces so’west. He had traveled a good many miles in that fashion in the last twenty years, for he was watchman at Garnett and Sayer’s, and this stretch of clear space on the busy wharf was the Cap’n’s quarter-deck. He was, let it be confessed, no ancient deep-sea mariner, although he had all the marks of the ocean-going skipper――leathery, crinkled face, with crow’s-feet at the corners of his twinkling eyes, skin tanned deeply from long exposure to the salt sea air, a fringe of yellowish-white whiskers, and a deep growl of a voice. True it is that he had been a captain, but captain only of a center-board sail-boat in which, before he had given up the precarious life, he had taken out pleasure parties for a day’s fishing――including chowder――or for a run around the Head. But everybody didn’t know that, more especially the “summer folks,” and among the latter he held the reputation for being not only the most dependable weather-prophet along the coast but a perfect example of the old-time ship’s captain, with experience gathered from Iceland to Fiji, from Seattle to Siam. And many a good yarn Cap’n Crumbie could spin, too, of his adventures in far-off climes. Indeed, he had related some of them so frequently that he had long since grown to believe them!

Jack had spent all of his sixteen years in Greenport and so knew the Cap’n for what he was, a kind-hearted, eccentric, and amusing old character.

“But,” he said, suppressing a smile, “if Bob does come back he’s pretty sure to have a tremendous catch. The mackerel are in and the water’s boiling with them, they say.”

“Maybe, maybe,” blustered the Cap’n; “but what good’s a load o’ mackerel to a drowned man? Terrible bad weather it was yesterday. Don’t know when I’ve seen such a snorter. Guess the last one was three years ago, the time your father was robbed.”

“I remember,” replied Jack. “There was a fierce gale that night, wasn’t there? Poor Dad was wet through when they brought him home. He’s never talked much about the robbery, Cap’n, and I never really understood just what happened that night. But I do know that poor Dad’s never been quite the same since.”

“And no wonder,” answered the Cap’n. “He was hard hit, Jack. More’n a thousand dollars went, as near as I recall.”

“Twelve hundred and forty. I asked him once and he told me, but he said I wasn’t to talk about it again.”

“Well, by gravy, ’twas a shame, anyway!” said the Cap’n, emphatically, with a belligerent glance at Barker’s wharf across the slip.

“Wasn’t it queer that they never caught any one!” Jack observed.

“That’s what Simon Barker always said,” replied the Cap’n, dryly, “but when he says that, he’s trying to suggest that Samuel Holden knows more about the affair than he cares to tell.”

Jack flushed slightly, and threw his shoulders back.

“I had forgotten that,” he said quietly. “I remember, though, that it was you who found Dad. You didn’t see anybody about, of course?”

Cap’n Crumbie shook his head.

“And I don’t know as they mightn’t have suspected me, if it hadn’t so happened that the new Baptist parson was with me, and they had to take his word.”

“Well, what’s your theory of it, Cap’n?” Jack asked.

Cap’n Crumbie paused in his sentry-go to stuff shreds of tobacco into the much blackened bowl of his old brier pipe and then, with deftness born of practice extending over many years on the exposed wharf, struck a match, cupped it in both hands under the lee of a broad shoulder turned away from the breeze, and puffed contentedly for a moment.

“Well, if I don’t know what happened that night, there ain’t no one as does,” he said at length, with a slightly judicial air. He had told the story a good many times, not because there was anything specially stirring about it, but because he was directly concerned and because it happened to be the nearest approach to an adventure ever happening to him in all his three score years――if one excepted the time when he fell overboard from his sail-boat and, after a few thrilling seconds, was ignominiously pulled back to safety by one of his passengers, who passed a boat-hook through his trousers. “Your father and Simon Barker were partners, as you know, as fish-merchants. ’Twas a pity Samuel Holden ever joined up with a feller like Barker, because nobody ever did any good harnessed to a mean cuss like that. They started in a small way, with one schooner, the Grace and Ella. There she is, now, lying up against Barker’s wharf. And many a thousand-dollars’ worth of fish has been landed from over her side since then. At the time I’m speaking of, she’d come in with a big haul, that fetched high prices. A day or two after that the gale sprang up. And it was a storm. Never since I was in the Indian Ocean――umph――er――er――”

Cap’n Crumbie coughed discreetly, remembering that his audience was “home folks,” and then resumed quite without embarrassment:

“Well, as I was saying, it was a gale that fair knocked Greenport galley-endwise. It started all of a sudden, raining cats and dogs, and the wind was so strong you couldn’t stand up. We lost two of our best fishing-vessels that day; windows were blown in and roofs ripped off; and a bunch o’ little sail-boats lying at their moorings were blown clean out to sea. Some of ’em never were found again. One or two got smashed up on the rocks. One of ’em went ’way up ’round Indian Head, drifted up the tide way o’ the Sangus River, and lodged on the sand-dunes there. Then the sea piled the sand up, changed the course o’ the river, and she’s been left high and dry ever since.”

“You mean the old Sea-Lark?” put in Jack.

The watchman nodded.

“I know where she is,” observed the boy. “I’ve climbed aboard her several times. She’s lying a couple of hundred yards from the river now.”

“Well,” Cap’n Crumbie went on, “that night, just when the gale was starting, your father left the office with the money he’d drawn from the bank to pay off the crew of the Grace and Ella. It was in a canvas bag, notes and silver together, and he didn’t like leaving it at the office all night. I was coming down High Street, when I met the parson, and we walked along together a ways. It was hard going and all-fired dark, when we turned down Wharf Street and fell right over your father. He was lying all in a heap on the sidewalk. I didn’t know it was him at first, mind you, because it was so dark. Parson and me tried to get him onto his feet, but he was all limp, like a wet string, and so we carried him into Simmons’s house, and there we saw who it was. When he recovered a bit he told us he’d been robbed. He had no idea who’d done it. All he knew was that he was hurrying along, with his head bent down, when some one laid hold of him. Then he got a smashing blow on the head, and didn’t know anything more until he came to in Simmons’s kitchen.”

“And the police never found any clue?” Jack asked.

“Not as I ever heard of. But Simon Barker went nearly crazy. You’d have thought, by the way he fussed, that Sam Holden was the biggest criminal unhung. Barker lost his head. He’s that mean he hates to see a mosquito walking on his wall-paper ’cause it’s wearing out the paper. You’d have thought it was him that had been half killed instead of Sam Holden. He swore ’twas a put-up job, and that your father had done it himself somehow, to get away with the money. And mighty unpopular he made himself by saying such things. Some of us told him what we thought o’ him, next day, and then he began to calm down a bit, but by that time the thief had covered up his tracks, and nobody has ever heard any explanation o’ what happened, from that day to this. It cost your father his partnership in the business, ’cause he had too much pride to go on working with a man who had as good as called him a thief, and he sold his home to replace the money that was stolen. I did hear that Simon Barker came near dropping dead when your dad handed it to him. You see, if things had been t’other way round, Barker couldn’t have brought himself to do such a thing in a month o’ Sundays, and so he couldn’t understand any one else doing it. Your father wasn’t obliged to pay the money to Barker, o’ course. If a thing gets stole, it’s stole, and that’s all there is to it. But your father wanted to clear his name. And he did, don’t you ever doubt it, Jack! Maybe Barker still has a sneaking notion that it was a put-up job, but if he does I can’t see how he figures your father made anything by it!”

“How can he?” protested Jack.

Cap’n Crumbie shook his head, and cast a glance in the direction of the tug Simon P. Barker, which was being coaled noisily at its owner’s wharf thirty yards away.