Captain Caution (2 page)

Up and down the weather side of the quarter-deck paced Daniel Marvin, his blue-striped shirt and his bell-bottomed duck trousers, disreputable from countless washings, whipped against him by the hot winds from the northwest. When he turned at the break, an arm's length from Corunna, her eyes flicked at him, only to fall again to her work as he wheeled at the taffrail. He watched the sky; he watched the sea; he watched the helmsman. He watched the crew, forward, washing their garments by dragging them overside, attached to ropes. He studied the soft pitch, oozing, in spots, from the deck seams; he watched the set of the topgallant sails and royals; he watched the barque's wake, flowing out behind her, in small, endless folds. He watched everything, it seemed, except Corunna and her needlework.

Not even when she whispered, "Dam" as he prepared to wheel for his monotonous journey to the taffrail did he look at her, but only turned once more as if he had heard nothing.

At his next approach she stretched a hand toward him and spoke his name less softly. The hand, he saw, held a long needle, pointed firmly at his knee, and at no great distance from it.

"Ma'am7' Marvin asked. Moving to the rail beside her, he scanned, as if in eager inquiry, the swirling depths beneath.

"Ma'aml" Corunna said bitterly, but so faintly that even the helmsman could have caught no more than a murmurous sound. "Ma'am, indeed! You'd be careful not to commit yourself, wouldn't you, even if Gabriel was blowing his horn?"

Marvin's eye traveled from the water to the peak of the mizzen sail and back again, passing lightly over the face of the helmsman a Maine Indian as tall, almost, as Marvin himself, and clad in knee

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length trousers so voluminous that they had the look of a short fringed skirt. "Shipboard's shipboard, Corunna. There's always somebody to see what's happening. Plenty of time after we get ashore. And there's Cap'n Oliver: I wouldn't want him to have hard thoughts of me. A little patience never hurt anybody."

She drove her needle through the canvas background of the Holy Family and wrenched the yarn after it with such violence that it seemed to hiss. '~You weren't worrying about what anybody might see that night off Rio." When Marvin remained silent, she looked up at him quickly and found him smiling.

"What's more," she persisted in a tone as peremptory as it was quiet, "you weren't delivering any lectures on the necessity of being patient not that nightl I don't even recall you making mention, that night, of waiting till we got ashore. And I don't seem to remember being addressed as 'ma'am' not oncel What was it you called me that night, Dan? I hope it hasn't slipped your memory!"

"It was dark that night, Corunna."

"Darkl" she exclaimed. "Of course it was darkl Does it have to be dark to make you stop behaving as if I had yellow feverP That's the way you've acted ever since!" She thrust her needle recklessly through the center of the Holy Family, rolled the needlework together, reached up to the bulwark and swung herself quickly to her feet. Something about the heel of her Chinese slipper seemed amiss, for she half turned to look at it; and in so doing her fingers, seeking support, caught at the hand with which Marvin held to the rail. Her arm pressed, as if by accident, against his side.

He stepped back to scan with sudden solicitude the spread of canvas above him. "Mind your helm, Stevenl" he said sharply to the tall Indian. "Keep the upper sails full."

"You did it againl" Corunna whispered, when he turned to her once more. "A body'd think you'd be poisoned if you touched mel Didn't it mean anything to you that night off Rio?"

"Don't be foolish, Corunna. We can't always have what we want as soon as we want it, and it's better we shouldn't."

"You mean you've changed your mindl"

"No," he said, "no. I don't mean that. I don't change my mind that easily."

"You dol" she insisted. "You travel If you haven't changed your mind, you couldn't keep away from mel You'd want to touch me, every chance you gotl"

"So you find, do you, that all of us act alike?"

He laughed when she set her fists on her hips and stared up at

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him as if scorn at his words had robbed her of speech. "The way I figure it, Corunna, is that I'm sure enough about myself, but less sure of you. It's a long way home, and I'd dislike to have it said I'd taken advantage of a lady who's inclined to be hasty in her judgments."

"Hasty!" she exclaimed. "Hastyl I?" She drew in her breath slowly, almost as though it had been driven completely from her by his charge. "You seem to think I'm hasty because I'm able to make up my mindl Well, let me tell you this, Dan Marvin: It might be better for you if you had a little more of what you call hastiness in place of the patience you're forever preaching aboutl Patience! The Lord deliver us from your kind of patience, that won't let you do what you want to do till everything just suits you so that you never do it because you die of old age before you're suited!"

Marvin glanced quickly at the Indian helmsman; then moved a little away from the angry girl.

"Hasty!" she exclaimed again, moving after him. "Who are you, I'd like to know, to pass judgment on my hastiness? Doesn't that just prove that you think you're better than the rest of us? You think your family's better! You think you're better because you invent new ways of doing things yes, and because you're sizable enough to whip any man that might think to stand out against you. That's it, Dan: You're stuck up, like all the Marvinsl They've always been stuck up; always thought they were better than anybody in Arundel, ever since your aunt Phoebe marched to Quebec, and since your father helped that French duke to buy land from General Knox." She stamped her foot, seeming to Hatten beneath it all persons of title as well as all Frenchmen.

Marvin shook his head. "I never noticed it, Corunna. Seems to me my father makes more of knowing your father and Steven Nason and this man's father" he moved his head slightly toward the Indian helmsman "than of having done Talleyrand a good tum. If he's stuck up, maybe he's stuck up on account of being first mate on your father's brig when he was young."

She fell silent, fingering the stitches that held together a rip in the shoulder of her Chinese jacket. "I suppose," she said at length, "that if these things were bright and new, you might - "

The helmsman interrupted her. "Dan'l," he said, "seems to me I caught a sight of suthin off the weather beam."

Marvin swung himself over the bulwarks and into the mizzen ratlines with an ease and lightness that belied his height and breadth of shoulder. Halfway up he stopped and stared off to the southeast.

"What is it, Dan?" Corunna asked.

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"Get your father's glass," he said. Tell a sail to windward, and the wind's dropping."

She did as he ordered; then mounted the ratlines after him to sit on the crosstrees, clinging to his knee, while he focused the glass on the thick blue haze in the south, a haze so hot that it boiled and rolled like smoke.

Far below them, her father moved to the rail and looked upward, his round face, fringed with whiskers and grey hair, seeming to be balanced ludicrously atop of little more than a pair of shoes.

"What you make it out to be, Dan'l?" he shouted.

"Three sail," Marvin called down to him. "They must have caught a southeasterly breeze. One of 'em's headed straight for us. The other two, they're pointed more to the eastward."

Marvin lowered the glass and peered astern, past the limp, flapping expanse of the gaff topsail. The folds of the wake had Battened imto the oily, silvery surface of the sea a surface touched here and there by the small rufflings of vagrant airs. Ahead of and high above him, the staysails and the square sails on the mainmast hung limp and draggled; while from among them came a thousand slappings and lollopings as the staggerings of the barque in the renewed calm set blocks and sails and sheets to bumping and lamenting in mid-air.

He went quickly down the ratlines, leaving Corunna to follow or not, and gave the glass to Captain Dorman.

"Any sign of a breeze?" the captain asked.

Marvin shook his head. "Only the one the stranger caught."

Captain Dorman adjusted the glass and levered it. "First sail we've sighted m a dreadful long time! Seemed as if every seaman must have gone ashore and got himself the cow and garden he's always talking about." He growled and grumbled to himself as he watched the distant vessel, whose topsail, topgallant sail and royal were now visible from the deck of the Olive Branch, though the sails and yards and masts wavered and quivered in the heat, almost like reflections dimly seen in agitated water.

"What you make of her, Dan'l?" the captain asked suddenly.

"I think she left the other two sail on purpose to have a look at us."

Captain Dorman passed the glass to the second mate, who stood silently beside him. "Let's hear what you think of her, Noah."

Noah Lord studied the oncoming vessel deliberately. "Brig: full sail," he announced. "Pretty heavy sparred, she is. Pretty high hoist to her topsails, seems to me."

Captain Dorman's lips were pursed, and there was a grey cast to his face that may have come from the stifling heat that had again

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enveloped the barque. He made two turns the length of the quarterdeck, and in that time seemed to arrive at a decision. "Yes," he said, "they look high to me high and heavy. Get out the sweepsl We'll sweep 'round and get to moving, so to take advantage of that breeze when it reaches us. No sense lying here like a bump on a logl"

The second mate ran forward, shouting to the crew as he ran, and in a minute's time six twenty-four-foot oars had been thrust through the sweep holes between the gun ports, and the sweating men were working the Olive Brarlch around to the northwest.

"Who'd 'a' thought," Captain Dorman said to Marvin "who'd 'a' thought we'd strike anything off here? And I guess there ain't much doubt about her being something, with topsails that sizer She ain't a merchant vessel; she's got some men aboard." He looked around him uneasily. "The Britishers, they'd be sticking to the West Indies they and the yellow fever. It just don't seem reasonable to strike a thing like this, off in the middle of nowhere! There's something about it I'm taking a misliking to." He laughed with what may have been intended for carelessness, but to Marvin it seemed to be nervousness that impelled the captain to draw the folds of a blue bandanna handkerchief across and across his palms. "Some day, Dantl, we may have to fight somebody, so's to remind 'em we got a few rights on their

a

ocean.

Marvin nodded soberly. "We might," he said, "if we ever get half enough ships to do it, but it doesn't look as if we ever would."

Driven by the sweeps, the barque rocked slowly to the northwestward. The brig, now astern, moved steadily closer and before her the silvery blue of the ocean was darkened by the breeze that bore her on. The eyes of the three men moved constantly from the approaching brig to their own upper sails. At last the main topgallant sail and royal bellied a little, then slapped the mast.

The captain drew a deep breath. "There it is," he said. "Now we'll get it." The topgallant sail and royal filled again, and the topsail and the huge course seemed to come to life.

"We'll keep 'em sweeping," Captain Dorman said. "With the sweeps and the breeze, maybe we can show her a clean pair of heels. God knows what she is, but it don't seem likely she'd leave two other craft, just for a friendly call on us." He went through the motion of whistling silently. "We can't afford to take risks," he added. "She might be a Spanish privateer, or one of those damned Frenchmen from the Indies. They'd as fief cut our throats as eat a mess of greens, Dan'll We'll have to load and double-shot the guns, my boy. Everything I've got on earth is in this barquel If the worst comes to the

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worst, we can cut up her rigging and get away when she hauls off to repair the damage."

From the brig, so close that her white streak was visible, wavering raggedly in the heat waves, there grew a small white blossom that bloomed and broke and drifted off in pale streamers, all in a momenYs time. Down the wind there came a heavy thud, as if some vast horse, enraged, had driven a steel-shod hoof against a fragile wall.

III

tROM the main hatch, Marvin, superintending the castmg loose of the guns, as well as the bringing up of powder bags, six-pound shot, tubes, fuses and all the lumber that was necessary to the operation of the Olive Branch's small batteries, could hear Captain Dorman laying down the law to his daughter. "Go below," he told her, "and put off those heathen trappings. Get yourself into proper female dress, then hunt out a safe place below the water line, where you'll be off my mind."

Marvin had to listen hard for her answer; for her voice was low, with more entreaty in it than defiance. "One place is as safe as another," she told her father, "and I want to see what happens. I've been on the Olive Branch almost half my life since I was born in Corunna Harbor, and I never yet found a place safer than this quarter-deck. I'm not afraid of that brig. She's not as big as we are, and I don't believe there's anything to be afraid of, but if I have to be shut up below, where I can't tell what's going on, I'll diet I'm as much interested in this barque as you arel If there's to be any fighting over her, you'll need everybody you've got, and I want a hand in it."

As if overwhelmed by her flux of words, Captain Dorman looked desperately aloft and then astern, where the brig, thrusting thin white ribbons of foam from under her heavy bowsprit, was little more than a mile away. He signaled to Marvin, who ran aft, pausing only long enough to remind the panting men to load with wads between the shot unless they wanted their guns to burst.

"Now, here," Captain Dorman told him, "she's faster than we are, though she wouldn't be if we had some of the sculch off our bottom. Anyway, she's bound to come up with us; and if she fires on us, there's got to be steps taken. We've run up the American flag, and she ain't got no right to fire on us, no matter who she is. If she does, she's a pirate, entitled to be treated as one. We're peaceable folks, going about our business. If she fires on us, we'll keep on going till she starts to yaw again, to bring a gun to bear; then we'll veer and come into the wind clumsy and slow, as if we'd given up. We've got just the breeze for it, Dan'll There we'll be, Dan'l, helpless-looking as