The golden parrot

Front matter

GOLDED PARROT

Frederic A.

Fenger

Foreword

I RAN across the Tads, just the other day. They were rolling up Tremont Street —in their shirt-sleeves, if you will believe it, and brown as a couple of berries.

“Hello! young feller!’ cried they in unison and pretty much in the vernacular; “and what’r’ye doin’ now?”

“Nothing,” says I; “just finished —”’

“Wat? More fiction?”’

“No, a real yarn this time,” and I edged toward the curb; “a real story about treasure. A couple of old Tads —”’

I got no further. That is, in my speech. But I did get farther away from them and as quickly as possible. Across the street in two jumps and through the Common. It was clear sailing till I ran afoul of a thousand or two of half-naked children playing about the pool, but shucks! you should have heard them shout when the Tads tried to worry through ’em. A young chap this side of forty could dodge through ’em easier than a couple of Tads, and the advantage I gained thereby enabled me to lose ’em by the time I reached the Public Garden, where vill FOREWORD

I boarded a swan-boat, knowing they would never think of looking for me on such a craft.

I only tell you this that you may know that it is at no little risk I’m spinning this yarn to you at all.

ILLUSTRATIONS

A YELL FROM THE NEGRO SUDDENLY BROUGHT THEM

TO THE HOLE Frontispiece Tue Taps IN THEIR WHERRY Title-page Vignette Tuer Key To tHE TREASURE 124 CHART OF THE VIRGIN ISLANDS 158 Map or Norman IsLanp 180

OLD CHART OF THE VIRGINS 236 hk, Ah ' rt See , ae Y Bey rt he

CEN hi 4 Me ” iy \ #1, ne Met sah ay i ny ae bar Gust

¥ we Ate rte . iF OV) wks, ' uW fis 4 gp, : r fos, Salt iF ri A hal hay : wi ae! \ j pie ey i j ea a A ! a €, S ‘ ‘ ‘ A we w PI yh Pan, | - i) i Puy A Pha nis - ‘ , Oe 4 7 4 }

‘ Jai ‘ 4 wil | y ’ 2 r MH f | YJ ' : t< Z > , : , \ [ J rh | y . » A ‘

~~ Se eee a hag

—_

Chapter I

Ir strikes me as rummy that the yarn should come to me stern first, as you might say; then that I should get the fore end of it and, five years later, should meet up with the Tads at Thunderbolt where they spun the middle of it in the cozy little cabin of the Golden Parrot. I say rummy, for why should the yarn come to me without any seeking on my part? The more I think of it, the more I believe that the doubloons the Tads dug up on Norman were not those left there by the old buccaneer himself, but a picayune cache left by some fool upstart of a later day.

Now until I went to sea I was not what one would call superstitious. Of course, as a small boy I used to go up a dark stairway two steps at a time with my spine all akrinkle, and I’d jump by black doorways with my weather arm guarding and the other ready to strike, and then when I had gained my room I would light the gas and suddenly turn around to face — what? But all that passed away naturally as it should. I’m too old now to be afraid in the dark. But hoist the blue peter on Friday or carry a priest or a minister? Not for me! Others may do it and I have, but now I know better. Why? That’s not for me to say. You may shelve it as coincidence or admit as I do that there’s something back of it. That’s why I call it strange, for I have a feeling that the shade of old Norman took a friendly interest in me the first time I sailed down along Ginger and Cooper and Peter in the Yakaboo, and now, in my little schooner, I seem to hear him at night when the wind, coming in on the back of the insetting tide, thrums the rigging. “You fool, you fool!” he says; “go back some moonlight night and let me help you to it!”’ and I start up in my berth with the wind echoing, “You fool — you fool!”’ to the tap-tap of a neglected halyard on the mast. Perhaps I shall, says I, if that’s your idea, but you must wait till I have spun this yarn; it won’t seem long to you who have been dead a couple of hundred years or more. And, oh, by the way, if you want a little nip, I’ve left the cork out of a bottle of Old Rosalie rum so that you can flow right down the neck and take what you want if you'll promise not to bother me any more till I finish this twister.

To go back to the Yakaboo and the tail end of the yarn. I was sailing down Sir Francis Drake’s Channel, a bit of the Caribbean held like an inland sea between Tortola and the smaller cays of the Virgins where the Greater Antilles peter out into small fragments, and across the Anegada Channel the Leeward and Windward Islands take up the march of the West Indies from Yucatan to Trinidad. The Yakaboo was a pretty little deep-sea sailing canoe, and it may be that old Norman’s ghost took such a fancy to her when he saw her on the beaches at night, that he worked things my way, so to speak. Call it co- - Incidence if you like, but the yarn’s a fact. And unlike most other spinners of treasure yarns Ill show you the islands where it all happened exactly as they are on the Government chart. Of course, I can’t have a lot of you pestering me when I have to be looking after a hundred and one jobs on the ship; and this, by the way, is the only reason why I’m setting it all down on paper.

I had loafed down from Virgin Gorda that morning and as the trade began to die with the day I sailed into a little cove on the north of Peter — the one with the cross just outside to show that here lies a rock — and dragged the Yakaboo high and dry on the beach. I was alone,

I thought, and had started my customary search for a bit of firewood when a negro stepped out of the brush. He was a typical beach native, with an erect body carried on legs that never straightened out from a habit of much beach walking, which gave the peculiar effect of a marionette traversing a stage and somewhat affected by Dandy’s disease. His bleached shirt showed a liberal area of deep mahogany chest and his faded dungarees, tied around his middle with a piece of grass fish-pot line, hung down like a pair of inverted wind-sails. His feet, almost a paragraph in themselves, spread fanlike from horny cracked heels to a straight line at the forward end where the small toes sprouted like baby potatoes slightly elongated. The great toes, instead of following the line of the instep, were sprung athwart like thumbs and seemed almost prehensile.', They were beach feet and would never know any shoe but one of extraordinary dimensions. He took me in curiously through brown doggish eyes set wide apart; I should have said he might have been anywhere from thirty to fifty years of age.

“Good ev’nin’, marster,” he began. “‘I see you cumin’ ’roun’ Duchess (Dead Chest) an’ I cum to enquiah ef you like spen’ de night in de willige?” pointing across the cove to a small peninsula which ran out to the northwest. “Jes’

ee | ovah de lan’.

“No, Friday — think I’ll stay here to-night.”

**My name John, sur — John Smith, sur.”’

* All right, John. Perhaps I'll sail around and see the village in the morning,” and I turned to look for my firewood.

**Doan you bodder, me carry de wood an’ ketch de fire.”’

When the business of supper was over, the sun had gone down over the back of Peter and I settled into the hollow of an outcropping rock to wait for the new moon crescent to rise up from behind Virgin Gorda and take her place in the starry night. Tiny surf, hand high, broke with Lilliputian crash and left fleeting tracings of its measured reach in phosphorescent lace. A brigand barracuda lazily cruised with lucent wake where the tide current swirled close to the steepto beach. The scraping of a spoon foretold the end of a mess of peas and rice. The last drops of a pail of chocolate made their exit in a liquid sigh — indrawn.

“Now, wash the pails, John, and be damn careful to scour the black off the bottoms.”

There had been no conversation while I ate, but that damn had somehow broken the spell.

“You goin’ to Norman?” ventured the native; “nobody lib dere — you look for sumpin’?”’

“Yes, but if you mean Spanish gold, you’re on the wrong lay. If I knew where treasure was buried on Norman, I would n’t advertise it by coming in this way.”

“Da’s roit, sur. You go in de night an’ sleep in de bush in de da’. But dey wuz sumpin’ on Norman an’ — ”’ and he was off.

“You hear *bout de li'l’ ’merikin schooner wid de two ole men, wat cum down an’ sail ’roun’ jes’ like you, an’ den sail ’way?

“Lil ting, tirty ton, an’ she anchor one ev nin’ off de landin’ at Roa’town.

***Las’ port Sain’ Thomas,’ sez dey, wen de ha’bber-master cum ‘longside an’ dey give him de bil-a-helt. ‘T’aat we’d cum here fo’ a lil fishnin’.’”

There were five of them, I gathered, two old men with a crew of two sailors and a cook. The old men had asked for a guide who knew the channels and the “fishnin’” grounds, and the Government doctor had recommended one William Penn from Salt Island. For a week they had sailed and fished, returning each night to Roadtown. Then one day the old men said good-bye to the Commissioner and cleared for the high seas. They would put Penn ashore on Salt as they passed out, they said. But instead of landing the native that evening, they kept out to sea till the sun had set and then ran down to Norman with all speed. John Smith had watched them with his own eyes as they hauled up for Salt and lay to in the cove without making any pretense of communicating with the shore, and then fell off and ran out to sea. As to what happened at Norman, William Penn was strangely silent, and by the time Government ears had become attuned to the murmur of rumors, Penn, it seemed, had flown. The meager fact remained, however, that in the wee light of the next morning the schooner had sneaked up under the lee of Salt and, to quote John Smith, who had been night fishing along the rocks, “Dey lan’ he an’ square away she an’ dat wuz de las’ me see ob she.”

There it began. The next day I sailed for Norman, for I did have a little business of my own on the island, but as ill-luck would have it, an attack of sun drove me back to Tortola. Heeding the warning of the Government doctor, I was taken to Saint Thomas, whence I sailed for home on the next north-bound steamer. John Smith and his story became mere privates in the army of my Caribbean memories and for the time were forgotten.

Then I got the fore end of it. I had been spending the day in an alcove in Barton. Barton, if you must know, is one of those special retreats in the Public Library of Boston where the supposedly elect may cloister himself for terrific literary effort with nearly a million books at his command. I might almost have said, at her command, for at the time there seemed to be a preponderance of women; some, young students from a near-by college, I was told; some, club women, ballooning their minds in a short afternoon with the wisdom of a lifetime to be condensed into florid sentences in a paper that would take half an hour in the reading; and some, Grub- Streeters — poor literary scavengers hovering like hungry gulls continually scanning the sea of literature for any small tidbit which might be snatched up for a paragraph or a column in the daily papers or even a story in a popular magazine. While there is life and hope there will always be the people of Grub Street even when the name has long been erased by the flavous civilization to come.

Outside, the day wasutterly cheerless. Through a rectangle of gray sky over the courtyard a cold autumnal drizzle fell in myriad streaks which the eye could only detect by focusing on the wall opposite. Each drop as it passed downward contributed its infinitesimal bit of reflected light which came dead and spiritless through the high windows of the alcoves. It seemed amorphous and incapable of casting shadows. At the table in the adjoining alcove a ponderous woman sat stiff-backed in her chair reading a ponderous volume, the “ Epic of Saul,” over a high-terraced bosom that seemed not to move with breath. Perhaps those lungs had given up muscular action for the time and, by some strange process of osmosis, fresh air was reviving the old. I found myself wondering what travail was going on in the mind behind her large, expressionless face. She had sat there for hours, making no movement but occasionally to turn a page. She was a slow reader. There had been no shifting of position from the small agony of concentration. Her brow remained smooth. She fascinated me. At length her senses recorded the failing of the light outside and she automatically reached up to turn the switch of the desk lamp. It was then that I made out the “Epic of Saul,” for she held the book nearly perpendicular to the table. I began to speculate as to how long the woman would sit there. Did she have a home and children and a hungry husband to look after? She was too well fed for Grub Street; her digestion, I judged, must be vulgarly efficient. What would ever come of this reading the “‘Epic of Saul’’? That potential form must have brought forth children; why, then, in the name of Heaven was n’t she at home looking after her business? You see, I had long since left off careful reading and now returned to my book lazily scanning page by page in advance. Of a sudden my eye fixed its gaze on a certain paragraph, and I read the words Peter’s

Island. I braced up to the table and switched on my own light.

“In May (1806), I read, “‘the author,’ with a party, visited Peter’s Island, one of those which form the bay of Tortola, a kind of Robinson Crusoe spot, where a man ought to be farmer, carpenter, doctor, fisherman, planter; everything himself. The owner’s house has only the ground floor; a roof of shingles projects some six or eight feet beyond the sides, like a Quaker’s hat; not a pane of glass in the house; merely shutters for the apertures. In the centre of the drawing-room or hall, or best room, were triced up ears of Indian corn; on a chair lay a fishing net; in one corner hung another; a spy glass, fowling piece, chairs, looking-glass, and pictures of the four seasons, composed the furniture; the library consisted of a prayer-book, almanack, and one volume of the Naval Chronicle. On the left hand was a room, with a range of machines for extracting the seeds from the cotton. Round the house were abundance of goats, turkeys, fowls, a bull, cow, pigs, dogs, and cats. The house was situated to make a man feel its comforts whenever the weather was bad; on an inferior emminence, commanding a view of the bay, a musket-shot from the precipice.

“The old gentleman was dressed in a large broadbrimmed white hat which appeared to have been in use for half a century; a white night-cap covered his bald head; his blue jacket had lappels buttoned back; his duck waistcoat had flaps down to his knees;

1 Capt. Thomas Southey, R.N., brother of the poet. Southey’s Chronicles, vol. 111, p. 861.

the trousers were of the same material as his waistcoat. Negro girls, five or six years old, were running about without any fear of spoiling their frocks — they were quite naked. ‘We should think this an odd sight in England, Sir.’ ‘Oh we cover the Whites always, and the Mulattoes; but we should have enough to do to cover these,’ was his answer. But though naked, they appeared healthy and cheerful.

“The man leading this isolated life, with only his old wife, who looked more like an Egyptian mummy than any thing human, was worth £60,000 sterling. ... he had lived twenty years on that small island, and twenty upon Tortola...”

Ye gods! A flood of recollections swept off the woman and her bosom and her volume, and the spell of the tropics came back to me from the warm glow of the light over my head. The breath of romance was mingled with the book odor from the musty volume under my nose. I fancied I was once more inhaling the deceptive apple-scent of the poison manchioneel on hot sands. I was on the beach again at Peter’s and John Smith was talking to me as I sat and smoked. The native had also recounted the legend of the old man of Peter, and now I was reading about him, the old man, from a printed page before my very eyes. When I had finished reading, I remembered how John Smith had told me that the old man of Peter had gone into even greater seclusion on Norman presumably after his wife’s death, and he had lived on the pirate’s island the rest of his days, a hermit.

And then I bethought me of the story of how Norman had been named. This the Commissioner himself had told me the evening I had returned from Norman. This also I found in print, the day following, for, you see, I was going through things West Indian with a fine-tooth comb — but not for treasure. The spirit of old Norman himself popped them at me, of that I’m certain. On that rainy day when I was pawing over Southey he must have fretted and fumed in this manner: ““By the Holy Virgin! Will you never get over gazing at that fat wench and come to page 361? What the devil do you care for the ‘Epic of Saul’? Get back to your reading, confound you! Now we’ve come to the page! For the love of Drake and Hawkins, don’t go by!”’

But he did not have to fume the next day, for I was more careful in my reading, and when I took up a thin little volume,! I was sensible of his presence at my elbow. “Ah, now you are coming close aboard and you'll see it in print. You see, I really did leave treasure on Norman and if you only had sense enough to go down there again and try by moonlight...’ And then, to be sure, I found it.

1 Letters from the Virgin Islands (1843), p. 243, in which this is stated as common knowledge.

*“Norman, a bucanier, separating himself from his associates then in force at Anegada, had settled, with his portion of the general booty, on this key. The exclusive claims of Spain to the whole of America, insular and continental, had led, as is well known, to a war of atrocious reprisals between that nation and the other European adventurers. The relative position of the parent states in no way affected this: there was never peace beyond the line! The Spanish guard acostas continued actively engaged; their orders being to sink, burn, and destroy all they met with. ... In a conflict of this kind Norman and his followers perished, — not, however, until they had deposited their hoard in that common strong box, the earth. These premises our friend holds as incontrovertible, the where alone remaining.”

So now you have the two ends of it, as I had it long before 1 came across the Tads and got the belly of the yarn.

Chapter II

Ricnarp Hewes sat up in his bed, sniffing the air with funny little twitchings of his old tobaccosteeped nostrils, like a bunny pausing on the trail of a cabbage somewhere up wind. Then he got up and went to the window.

Spring had come overnight. For months a succession of gales and half-gales, brewing in the northwest and then quickly shifting to easterlies, had swept Boston with a raw atmosphere of salt air. Now — late in May — the guilty baggage had sneaked in upon the sleeping town which awoke to find her still puffing from her exertions — only they called it the southwest wind. And to show that she was in earnest and had come to stay, there was her fluffy white lingerie all strung out over the blue sky for the sun to bleach. Through open doors and windows she impishly whisked her breath of warming earth and new vegetation, advertising her presence with her perfume like any patchouli-scented wanton.

“By Gorry!’’ admonished the old man, “‘you’re late, to be sure —now see if you can’t stay around awhile,”’ and he drew in a deep breath as though he had caught some scented line she had thrown him and were coiling down the slack of it in his lungs.

Two or three times, while he was dressing, he started to pucker his lips, but managed to stop in time, remembering that it was bad luck to whistle before breakfast. This day he wanted all the luck that was possible. But he conversed about her to himself and to the colored elevator boy as that dignitary piloted him down through a succession of breakfast odors to the first floor, and he even paused for a moment at the top of the short flight of steps outside to reprove a brace of unsexed brownstone lions guarding the entrance.

“Tut, tut!” he scolded, following their gaze to an upper window across the way — and he left them to their shameless contemplation of a certain young lady in charming négligée.

“This is great!” he kept muttering to himself, sniffing his way, as you might say, around the corner to Berkeley, where like the Englishman and the dog he stuck to the sunny side of the street.

The tide of habit carried him to Boylston and into the Oaken Grove Restaurant, or the Open Grave as he had come to call it, where he paused near the table of a honeymoon couple from.

Brockton who were reveling in “Combination No. 6” — “Fruit,” a measly orange or a limp banana; “Cereal,” a dab of gummy oatmeal or a lone shredded wheat biscuit with a couple of china thumb-caps of bluish milk; “‘Ham or Bacon and Eggs”’; “Tea or Coffee and Rolls.” What the devil did you expect even in those days for forty cents?

“No! by Gorry”’ — he aidpenned the air about him to the astonishment of the couple from Brockton — “‘I’Il have a real breakfast,’ and he walked out again. “Grapefruit with sherry in it at the Thorndike and two shredded wheat biscuits, even if I have to pay thirty cents for ’em. Ill make ’em give me plenty of real cream!”

““Old Hewes” breezed into his office half an hour late. The first breach of discipline in all his working days.

“Just called you up, sir,” said his bookkeeper. ‘‘ Thought you might be sick. Mr. Bennett is coming at ten for that deed.”’

Richard removed his hat and took a step toward the coat closet. Then he stopped in the middle of the floor, turned to his bookkeeper, and put on his hat again. The click of a typewriter came through the open door of an ad- , joining room.

“How long have you been with me now, Clausen?’’ he asked the palish young man whom you would have difficulty in picking out in a crowd and who might be anywhere from twentyeight to thirty-five years of age.

**Sir? — Oh, eight years, Mr. Hewes.”’

“Thought I saw you and Miss Burke at Keith’s last night,’? questioned his employer regarding him shrewdly. The click of the typewriter stopped for a moment and then continued more deliberately, like the pecking of a hen after only the choicest bits.

“Why — yes, sir.” What the deuce had gotten into the Old Man, who had come in half an hour late and was now asking personal questions.

“You’ve a pretty good idea as to how I run things.”’ Richard was still scrutinizing that face intently. Miss Burke must have come upon a snarl in her notes, for the clicks now came very slowly. “Well, then, tend to Mr. Bennett yourself,’ and he faced about and walked out of his office.

“Hope the young fool catches on,” he grumbled as he stepped out on the sidewalk again. “ What a day!”’

I have an idea, somehow, that the “young fool’? did catch on, for when Mr. Bennett entered the office some twenty minutes later, the bookkeeper came from the inner room a bit more hurriedly than was his wont, and, as he motioned his client to a seat, the machine resumed its clatter ata furious rate. But this sort of thing has little place in our yarn and we'll leave it to take care of itself, like any active culture of bacilli.

The morning throng had now given place to the casuals of early forenoon. And strange to say, these began to have a depressing effect upon the old man. He was not used to walking in their company. His conscience seemed to be telling him of something he had forsaken; that he ought to be back in his office, bending over his desk in that attitude which suggested the grinding of his little mill; and for a block or two he seemed to be stemming the reaction from his cheerful uprising and the holiday breakfast at the Thorndike. As he looked about him — for he always held his head erect however his spirits might be — office windows bearing the names of those who were somewhere behind them, grinding righteously, frowned down at him; their letters seemed to form into accusing questions. It was only Habit, of course, tugging somewhere inside him, it seemed to be at his heart — perhaps he had been foolish in taking that extra cup of delicious coffee which had wound up his prandial spree. As suddenly his mood changed when he swung into the busier whirl of Newspaper Row; here bulletin boards gave him fresh thought — there was something going on in the world outside those mills where men bent over desks and ground. Spring and Adventure were having a battle royal with Habit and Doubt — Conscience was now leaning through the ropes — and Spring and Adventure were having the best of it. Richard tacked through the gaping crowd and dove into one of those capillaries through which the Bostonian is so fond of leading bewildered strangers.

It bore a name, this byway, but few troubled to look for the sign to learn what it might be. Richard merely remembered it by a sense of location, and then sought a certain doorway just beyond a basement where the wide window of a locksmith’s shop displayed innumerable keys in the blank, festooned on a sagging wire like poolroom markers. Some three feet below the footway a figure bent over a vise, filing keys with patient forward strokes — he, too, was grinding at his mill. The building next to the locksmith’s had no elevator, and we shall have to follow Old Hewes up the narrow stairway from floor to floor, or rather from gas-jet to gas-jet, past the door of a dealer in old silver; a hatter’s, where the young nobleman in the fashionable shop sends your old fedora to be cleaned and have a new band put on it — the rents are getting cheaper; to the topmost landing where one read the legend: “Wm. Baxter, Commercial Artist.’’ Somewhere on the doorpost is a porcelain push-button, but the light is so dim that unless you look for it you will knock on the panel as did Richard. With a “Hey, William!’’ he pushed open the door and stepped inside.

From the bare landing, which would remind you of a North End tenement but for its want of the odor of boiled cabbage and fried fish, you step directly upon a thick carpet whose color escapes you, for your eyes immediately fasten themselves on an old black-walnut double bedstead against the far wall and laid over with a wine-colored counterpane. Then the room seems to expand around you, for it extends the full width of the building and has two large dormer windows through which you see the roof edges across the way, with squares of blue sky above. Your eyes feast on the claret counterpane again and wander to a mahogany highboy from which a small Clytié, exquisitely done in snowy marble, smiles down at you. Continuing their survey they take in a funny little cabinet with glass doors that jealously guard some of William’s most cherished possessions, a small tin cup, battered but not rusty, a plug of tobacco, like some ancient black tile, some brass buttons, and a fatigue cap. There is another cabinet, of some dark wood with many shallow drawers, which upon further acquaintance you would find to contain a not indifferent collection of coins and medals. In the near wall — across from the foot of the bed — is a small black iron fireplace with its grate filled with cannel-coal, wood and paper under it ready for the match. On either side of the grate are a couple of deep, leather-upholstered chairs — worn shiny from the sitting in them of many years. One William had always used. The other — has been Richard’s for the last thirty. There are other pictures, but you only take note of the portrait of a young woman, hung over the fireplace, and you wonder if while reading in bed, the artist does not often lay aside his book and talk to her with his eyes. But the room impresses you as neither a sleepingchamber nor parlor, but the place where the artist lives in his freer hours with his most intimate belongings about him.