"Five years ago," remarked Captain Eri, "there was six foot of water where we are now. This beach changes every winter. One good no'theaster jest rips things loose over here; tears out a big chunk of beach and makes a cut-through one season, and fills in a deep hole and builds a new shoal the next. I've heard my father tell 'bout pickin'
huckleberries when he was a boy off where them breakers are now. Good dry land it was then. Hey! there's Luther. Ship ahoy, Lute!"
The little brown life-saving station was huddled between two sand-hills.
There was a small stable and a henhouse and yard just behind it. Captain Davis, rawboned and brown-faced, waved a welcome to them from the side door.
"Spied you comin', Eri," he said in a curiously mild voice, that sounded odd coming from such a deep chest. "I'm mighty glad to see you, too?
Jump down and come right in. Pashy 'll be out in a minute. Here she is now."
Miss Patience Davis was as plump as her brother was tall. She impressed one as a comfortable sort of person. Captain Eri did the honors and everyone shook hands. Then they went into the living room of the station.
What particularly struck Mrs. Snow was the neatness of everything. The brass on the pump in the sink shone like fire as the sunlight from the window struck it. The floor was white from scouring. There were shelves on the walls and on these, arranged in orderly piles, were canned goods of all descriptions. The table was covered with a figured oilcloth.
Two or three men, members of the crew, were seated in the wooden chairs along the wall, but rose as the party came in. Captain Davis introduced them, one after the other. Perhaps the most striking characteristic of these men was the quiet, almost bashful, way in which they spoke; they seemed like big boys, as much as anything, and yet the oldest was nearly fifty.
"Ever been in a life-saving station afore?" asked Captain Eri.
Elsie had not. Ralph had and so had Mrs. Snow, but not for years.
"This is where we keep the boat and the rest of the gear," said Captain Davis, opening a door and leading the way into a large, low-studded room. "Them's the spare oars on the wall. The reg'lar ones are in the boat."
The boat itself was on its carriage in the middle of the room. Along the walls on hooks hung the men's suits of oilskins and their sou'westers.
The Captain pointed out one thing after another, the cork jackets and life-preservers, the gun for shooting the life line across a stranded vessel, the life car hanging from the roof, and the "breeches buoy."
"I don't b'lieve you'd ever git me into that thing," said the Nantucket lady decidedly, referring to the buoy. "I don't know but I'd 'bout as liefs be drownded as make sech a show of myself."
"Took off a bigger woman than you one time," said Captain Davis. "Wife of a Portland skipper, she was, and he was on his fust v'yage in a brand-new schooner jest off the stocks. Struck on the Hog's Back off here and then drifted close in and struck again. We got 'em all, the woman fust. That was the only time we've used the buoy sence I've been at the station. Most of the wrecks are too fur off shore and we have to git out the boat."
He took them upstairs to the men's sleeping rooms and then up to the little cupola on the roof.
"Why do you have ground-glass windows on this side of the house?" asked Elsie, as they passed the window on the landing.
Captain Davis laughed.
"Well, it is pretty nigh ground-glass now," he answered, "but it wa'n't when it was put in. The sand did that. It blows like all possessed when there's a gale on."
"Do you mean that those windows were ground that way by the beach sand blowing against them?" asked Ralph, astonished.
"Sartin. Git a good no'therly wind comin' up the beach and it fetches the sand with it. Mighty mean stuff to face, sand blowin' like that is; makes you think you're fightin' a nest of yaller-jackets."
With the telescope in the cupola they could see for miles up and down the beach and out to sea. An ocean tug bound toward Boston was passing, and Elsie, looking through the glass, saw the cook come out of the galley, empty a pan over the side, and go back again.
"Let me look through that a minute," said Captain Eri, when the rest had had their turn. He swung the glass around until it pointed toward their home away up the shore.
"Perez," he called anxiously, "look here quick!"
Captain Perez hastily put his eye to the glass, and his friend went on:
"You see our house?" he said. "Yes; well, you see the dinin'-room door.
Notice that chair by the side of it?"
"Yes, what of it?"
"Well, that's the rocker that Elsie made the velvet cushion for. I want you to look at the upper southeast corner of that cushion, and see if there ain't a cat's hair there. Lorenzo's possessed to sleep in that chair, and--"
"Oh, you git out!" indignantly exclaimed Captain Perez, straightening up.
"Well, it was a pretty important thing, and I wanted to make sure. I left that chair out there, and I knew what I'd catch if any cat's hairs got on that cushion while I was gone. Ain't that so, Mrs. Snow?"
The housekeeper expressed her opinion that Captain Eri was a "case,"
whatever that may be.
They had clam chowder for dinner--a New England clam chowder, made with milk and crackers, and clams with shells as white as snow. They were what the New Yorker calls "soft-shell" clams, for a Fulton Market chowder is a "quahaug soup" to the native of the Cape.
Now that chowder was good; everybody said so, and if the proof of the chowder, like that of the pudding, is in the eating of it, this one had a clear case. Also, there were boiled striped bass, which is good enough for anybody, hot biscuits, pumpkin pie, and beach-plum preserves. There was a running fire of apologies from Miss Patience and answering volleys of compliments from Mrs. Snow.
"I don't see how you make sech beach-plum preserves, Miss Davis,"
exclaimed the lady from Nantucket. "I declare! I'm goin' to ask you for another sasserful. I b'lieve they're the best I ever ate."
"Well, now! Do you think so? I kind of suspected that the plums was a little mite too ripe. You know how 'tis with beach-plums, they've got to be put up when they're jest so, else they ain't good for much. I was at Luther for I don't know how long 'fore I could git him to go over to the P'int and pick 'em, and I was 'fraid he'd let it go too long. I only put up twenty-two jars of 'em on that account. How much sugar do you use?"
There was material here for the discussion that country housewives love, and the two ladies took advantage of it. When it was over the female portion of the company washed the dishes, while the men walked up and down the beach and smoked. Here they were joined after a while by the ladies, for even by the ocean it was as mild as early May, and the wind was merely bracing and had no sting in it.
The big blue waves shouldered themselves up from the bosom of the sea, marched toward the beach, and tumbled to pieces in a roaring tumult of white and green. The gulls skimmed along their tops or dropped like falling stones into the water after sand eels, emerging again, screaming, to repeat the performance.
The conversation naturally turned to wrecks, and Captain Davis, his reserve vanishing before the tactful inquiries of the captains and Ralph, talked shop and talked it well.
CHAPTER XI
HEROES AND A MYSTERY
Luther Davis had been commandant at the life-saving station for years and "Number One Man" before that, so his experience with wrecks and disabled craft of all kinds had been long and varied. He told them of disasters the details of which had been telegraphed all over the country, and of rescues of half-frozen crews from ice-crested schooners whose signals of distress had been seen from the observatory on the roof of the station. He told of long rows in midwinter through seas the spray of which turned to ice as they struck, and froze the men's mittens to the oar-handles. He told of picking up draggled corpses in the surf at midnight, when, as he said, "You couldn't tell whether 'twas a man or a roll of seaweed, and the only way to make sure was to reach down and feel."
Captain Eri left them after a while, as he had some acquaintances among the men at the station, and wished to talk with them. Miss Davis remembered that she had not fed the chickens, and hurried away to perform that humane duty, gallantly escorted by Captain Perez. The Captain, by the way, was apparently much taken with the plump spinster and, although usually rather bashful where ladies were concerned, had managed to keep up a sort of side conversation with Miss Patience while the storytelling was going on. But Ralph and Elsie and Mrs. Snow were hungry for more tales, and Captain Davis obligingly told them.
"One of the wust wrecks we ever had off here," he said, "was the Bluebell, British ship, she was: from Singapore, bound to Boston, and loaded with hemp. We see her about off that p'int there, jest at dusk, and she was makin' heavy weather then. It come on to snow soon as it got dark, and blow--don't talk! Seems to me 'twas one of the meanest nights I ever saw. 'Tween the snow flyin' and the dark you couldn't see two feet ahead of you. We was kind of worried about the vessel all evenin'--for one thing she was too close in shore when we see her last--but there wa'n't nothin' to be done except to keep a weather eye out for signs of trouble.
"Fust thing we knew of the wreck was when the man on patrol up the beach--Philander Vose 'twas--telephoned from the shanty that a ship's long-boat had come ashore at Knowles' Cove, two mile above the station.
That was about one o'clock in the mornin'. 'Bout h'af-past two Sim Gould--he was drownded the next summer, fishin' on the Banks--telephoned from the shanty BELOW the station--the one a mile or so 'tother side of the cable house, Mr. Hazeltine--that wreckage was washin' up abreast of where he was; that was six miles from where the longboat come ashore.
So there we was. There wa'n't any way of tellin' whereabouts she was layin'; she might have been anywheres along them six miles, and you couldn't hear nothin' nor see nothin'. But anyhow, the wreckage kept comin' in below the cable station, so I jedged she was somewheres in that neighborhood and we got the boat out--on the cart, of course--and hauled it down there.
"'Twas a tremendous job, too, that haulin' was. We had the horse and the whole of us helpin' him, but I swan! I begun to think we'd never git anywheres. 'Tween the wind and the sand and the snow I thought we'd flap to pieces, like a passel of shirts on a clothes line. But we got there after a spell, and then there was nothin' to do but wait for daylight.
"'Bout seven o'clock the snow let up a little bit, and then we see her.
There was a bar jest about opposite the cable station--it's been washed away sence--and she'd struck on that, and the sea was makin' a clean breach over her. There was a ha'f a dozen of her crew lashed in the riggin', but I didn't see 'em move, so I presume likely they was froze stiff then, for 'twas perishin' cold. But we wrastled the boat down to the water and was jest goin' to launch her when the whole three masts went by the 'board, men and all. We put off to her, but she was in a reg'lar soapsuds of a sea and awash from stem to stern, so we knew there was nothin' livin' aboard.