The Foaming Fore Shore

Front matter

A COMPLETE NOVELETTE

by Samuel Alexander White Author of "Ambush," "The Trail of the Rabiscaws," etc.

I. The Schooner "Graywing"

CHAPTER I THE SCHOONER GRAYWING

Now, brothers, for the icebergs of frozen Labrador Floating spectral in the moonshine, along the low, black shore! Where in the mist the rock is hiding, and the sharp reef lurks below And the white squall smites in Summer, and the Autumn tempests blow; Where through gray and rolling vapor, from evening unto morn, A thousand boats are hailing, horn answering unto horn

Whittier's "The Fisherman."

HUGHIE HAY, lookout on the Gloucester schooner Graywing, queen of the American fishing fleet that fished the Labrador waters on the heels of the advantageous Reciprocity Treaty of 1854, paused at the foot of the perpendicular ladder that led from the vessel's deck down into her cramped cabin. In the act of unceremoniously breaking in on the scene below, his captain's uplifted finger held him, and he waited thus, staring across the smoke-blurred forecastle triangle, waiting for the forefinger of the brown sea-fist to fall.

It was a huge fist he watched, and the frame behind, lolling on a bunk, fully matched the fist. A full six feet it sprawled, ponderous in its bulky oilskins, the frame of a Viking surmounted by a Viking head.

Waves of fair hair, luxuriant, silky, topped bronzed features, fiercely tender, and from under golden brows bold sea-blue eyes looked out as Norseman's eyes in the ages gone looked out from their shield-hung bulwarks. They were the eyes of pride, the eyes of a conqueror, the eyes of a man who would never be denied, and yet in the face they illumined was more than colossal daring, more than unalterable determination. In it was that philosophic repose of the seaman who in his thirty-five years of voyaging had communed deeply with the deep sea and gaged its measureless strength as vastly over and above the measure of his own.

In the nearby bunks that lined the oilskin-decorated walls sat the rest of his crew: "Irish" Kerrigan in his attitude of eternal expectoration, shoulders hunched, hands in pockets, his ruddy Erin-bred face glistening under the light of the lantern hung on a beam and his pipe and his brogue on the tip of his tongue; "Boston Jim," slim, straight and strong as a stanchion, with sallow skin and features gentle, almost esthetic, as if he might have been a New England parson drifted out to sea; Patterson, a lopped-off Titan of a man, placid, somnolent-eyed, five feet tall but two hundred and twenty pounds in weight; Brown, a wizened Gloucester shark with a twang that suggested an A-string somewhere down in his bony chest; "Scotty" McCaig, a braw strutting Highlander whose strut had compromised with the sailor's roll in his columnar legs till he two-stepped his way wherever he went about the schooner Graywing; Tom Halifax, a famous sealer with the scars of a dozen trips to the ice floes marring his leathery face; and Bolero, the cook from Cuba, dark-hued, quiet, excellent, like the black cigars of his birth- place with which he hazed his cookery-perfumed galley.

God-fearing men of Gloucester all, native or adopted, up on Newfoundland's French shore for cod, in Baie Verte with their trap, they listened to the prayer of the Reverend Lance, the itinerant missionary of this vast fore shore dropped aboard by night from his Church yacht Star of the Sea.

Up-standing straight in his ministerial black by the long table that ran from the sharp angle of the Graywing's bows to her stout foremast, his spectacles glittering over short-sighted eyes and his purged face haloed by the yellow light of the oil lantern, he was concluding his short service with a benediction, giving them the peace of God and asking His protection for them while they seined the deep under menace of storm and fog and reef and berg.

Quick with an oath in anger, with a fist-blow in a brawl, they were, nevertheless, each according to his breed, inherently religious, and to Lance's benediction they chorused sonorous "Amen." As into the eyes of God they had looked overlong into the depths of the sea, and the Omnipotence of its creation had bound them with stronger bonds than any landsmen's creed or sect.

Swift to devotion, swifter perhaps to action, the captain's finger of warning dropped for his lookout Hughie Hay, and Hughie, himself a fresh-faced, auburn-haired lump of a Gloucester lad with the glowing cheeks of a woman and the wise gray eyes of a child, went on to announce the news he had carried down the ladder.

"Cap'n Taylor, it's thet freighter ez wuz makin' into Chateau; thar's trouble aboard—yellin' an' fightin' goin' on," he informed. "She's yawin' about somethin' turrible an' thar's no tellin' what truck's draggin' overside to walk plumb through aour cod trap. I thaought you aought to knaow!"

"Confound it all, Hughie—you're right I ought to know!" cried his Viking captain.

He sprang from his bunk as he spoke and rushed for the ladder, yelling for his men to follow.

"Tumble up, boys!" he exhorted. "Out of the way, Hughie—I'll go first! Oh, yes—Lance, come on if you want to!"

II. The Freighter "Auk"

CHAPTER II THE FREIGHTER AUK

TAYLOR was up the ladder and on deck with amazing agility for one of such great frame, and on his heels tumbled Hughie and all the crew with the Reverend Lance hastily ascending in the rear.

From the deck of the Graywing the captain looked out across the heaving Strait of Belle Isle, across the green-blue waters streaked with frozen froth, jeweled with pale-emerald floating ice and overlaid with the mother-of-pearl of a rising moon. Southeastward, between him and Belle Isle Island, wrapped ghost-like in Atlantic fog, yawed the freighter Hughie Hay had sighted, not an ocean-going cargo steamer but a sixty-ton schooner carrying Labrador stationers to their Summer fishing-stations.

Too poor to own their own schooners, the stationers were freighted down the coast to their rooms every Spring and herded up again like cattle in the Autumn on vessels belonging to the firm with which they dealt.

"Yonder she is!" the captain pointed out to Reverend Lance. "And a fine little plague-ship for your ministering, Lance!"

"What ship is it?" demanded Lance, peering short-sighted over the shimmering sea.

"The Auk, over from Bay of Islands on Newfoundland," Taylor told him. "Belongs to old Peter Laval and doing business from Château to Chidley."

"H'm. H'm. Laval, eh? One of my best church supporters," commented Lance.

"Sanctimonious old whelp," corrected Taylor. "Good heavens, his old wagon will ruin my eight-hundred-dollar cod trap! Where's the French fishery cruiser? Where's Admiral Pellier and his Groix?"

"Yaonder off'n York Point, Cap'n!" spoke Hughie Hay.

He pointed where, almost invisible behind a jumble of low icebergs deep azure in the shadows, the long black hulk of the Fishery Protection Service cruiser lay at anchor together with the admiral's private yacht Esperance, which he used as an auxiliary vessel for shore work 'round the harbors.

"Then why isn't he on his job?" demanded Taylor who had run foul of Pellier several times on his Newfoundland voyages and who had at last been definitely warned off the French Shore. "If I happen to dry a seine taut in the sun he's after me for the size of my mesh, but Laval's blundering Auk here can—by the tall Pole Star, look, there's no one at her wheel! We've got to board her!"

Swiftly he sprang to take his own wheel, beckoning the regular wheelsman, Brown, to his side, and at the same time calling orders to his men who, swift as he, ran up the big mainsail and backed over the jib.

"No time for dories, boys," he warned. "Have to jump her rail as we go by. Brown, grab this wheel when I say! And you, Bolero, fall to and handle the sheets for Brown when he comes about on the other tack!"

Under Taylor's guidance the Graywing caught her stride, headsails ballooning, fore and main booms crashing across as she leaped toward the yawing Auk not three cable-lengths away. The freighter swung drunkenly to starboard. Taylor veered a point or two in his course, and as swiftly, as silently and as smoothly as a knife skirts a pot of grease he skirted her rail and barked to Brown at his elbow.

Brown's hands fell upon the spokes Taylor's hands left, and Taylor with a running jump vaulted the rails of the Graywing and Auk as a double hurdle. Hughie Hay, Irish Kerrigan, Boston Jim, Patterson, Scotty McCaig and Tom Halifax were over the hurdle with him. With him they landed upon the cluttered deck of the Auk, and as they heaved themselves up out of the amazing muddle of things that burdened the freighter they found to their surprise the Reverend Lance in their midst.

"You here too, Lance?" grinned Taylor. "Haven't lost your college legs yet, eh? Well, maybe you'll need your college fists as well. Looks like a free-for-all fight and lots of unsavory facts—but steady, boys o' mine, steady, we have to handle the schooner, you see, before we handle her crew. Lower the heavy canvas—yes, both of them, fore and main."

He himself grasped the freighter's kicking wheel and quickly brought her to under jumbo alone.

Then with a rush he and his men jumped away from the canvas-billowed booms and dived down among the struggling mass that glutted the Auk below decks.

III. The Flower of the Coast

CHAPTER III THE FLOWER OF THE COAST

"A FINE little floating plague-ship, eh, Lance?" was Taylor's war-cry as he went smiting right and left into the packed rabble that would have made a full passenger list for a five-hundred-ton coasting steamer.

Being of only sixty tons, the Auk had no space below to boast of, and what space she had was crammed to the last inch, so that Taylor and his crew could get no footing at first but rode upon the hips and backs and shoulders of men in their effort to smash an opening in the jam.

According to the custom of freighters, the Auk's hold was first spread with a layer of unbreakable cargo. A second layer of traps, nets and seines overspread this. While upon the bed of twine rested the bunks of the stationers with their gear in bags, boxes and barrels sheering in pyramids to the deck overhead.

Here they herded, eating and sleeping in cramped unsanitary quarters, carrying on a travesty of cooking by turns at the tiny galley or bolting their food raw. Nothing but make-shift sailcloth partitions screened the women's bunks from the men's. In the mêlée these partitions had been torn away and shrieking women and girls in various stages of dishabille were maelstromed in the swaying horde that trampled their bunks under foot and sent the tiers of boxes and barrels toppling on their heads.

Under the showering ruin they huddled in the dancing light of the smoky lanterns, raising hopeful eyes at the coming of the Graywing's crew, and one young girl, crouching for shelter at the foot of the mast, flung out her arms in appeal to Taylor in the lead.

"Ah, mon Américain—mon Américain!" she cried.

White as a lily she gleamed in the unwashed horde, her delicate, beautifully-chiseled, oval face terror-bleached till it seemed carved from ivory. Over the tapered curves of her half-bare shoulders where her enfolding cloak lay low on her neck, over her forehead patricianly high, her hair was tossed in a tangle like silken floss, and through the golden net her great eyes flashed out, eyes violet-blue as the tint of Labrador ice in shadow, as the water-heart of a lonely cliff-walled Labrador fiord—such eyes as a man may see but once in a thousand miles of Labrador coast.

"Ah, mon Américain—vite!" she appealed in a voice like the silver lapping of the Summer waves. "Mon Américain—vite!"

"Great heavens!" exclaimed Taylor involuntarily as he struggled toward her. "Who in the name of the mermaids is she?"

"Marie Laval—the flower of the coast, they call her!" spoke the voice of Lance at his shoulder. "You know old Peter. He's her father."

"But—but how is it I've never seen her before?" panted Taylor, knocking men this way and that in his effort to reach her.

"She's been schooling at St. John's. I guess she's through this Summer. I remember now old Peter told me he was going to take her on the stations. Yonder's old Peter behind her—and her mother, old Anne. Both too fond of their smuggled brandy, Taylor, if I do say it with a clerical tongue. Can't you smell it in the air? A perfect reek, and I shouldn't be at all surprised at this bedlam! I know Peter's brandy has been the cause."

"And that's their daughter!" marveled Taylor. "The flower of the coast! Yes—a flower in the slime! Quick, boys o' mine, get the women up on deck!"

Drunkenly clinging to the mast behind Marie, he had full glimpse of her parents in his rush, old Anne, brown-faced, brown-eyed as a gipsy, fat, ungainly, in slovenly galoshes, tubbed-up skirt and greasy head-shawl covering her oiled black hair from which gold ear-rings peeped; old Peter in worn hip boots and oilskins, his yellow toothless face lighted by cold, colorless, icicle-like eyes and, by strange anomaly, shaven bare except for a narrow snow-white fringe of whisker that rimmed it from ear to ear under his drooping southwester.

He glimpsed them, unconsciously noting every characteristic, every detail, but his thought was only of Marie, and, jamming swaying bodies apart with his shoulders and knees, he forced an opening and gathered her pliant body into his arms.

"Merci, mon Américain—merci, mon Viking!" she half-laughed, half-sobbed in impetuous gratitude. "I had the fear of death under those stamping heels but, voilà, I knew you would come when I called!"

"Ha, my flower of the coast!" breathed Taylor as he fought his way on deck with her. "Could I leave such a flower as you in the slime?"

IV. Admiral Fellier and the "Esperance"

CHAPTER IV ADMIRAL PELLIER AND THE ESPERANCE

BEHIND Taylor, breaking into the cool night air upon the chaotic deck, came Lance, guiding the stumbling Peter and Anne up the ladder by the arms, while after Lance, with tugging and shouting, Hughie Hay, Irish Kerrigan, Boston Jim, Patterson, Scotty McCaig and Tom Halifax heaved the women to safety.

As Taylor straightened himself up on the Auk's deck he saw through the black snarl of her mainsheets the wings of another schooner all silver in the moonlight.

"Brown," he yelled, taking it at first for the Graywing. "Brown—but hold on, it's not my schooner! It's the Esperance."

"Oui, the Esperance, and quite at your service, Capitaine Taylor," spoke an even voice from the stern of the Auk.

Taylor wheeled and stared through the amazing litter of boats, oars, buoys and fishers' paraphernalia that covered the vessel from bow to stern. A boat full of men was moored to the rail, and three boarding figures cast long inky shadows across the afterdeck.

Instantly Taylor recognized the figures that cast the shadows: Pellier of the Groix, his well-knit body and military shoulders filling his commanding admiral's uniform, his close-clipped brown beard touched silver by the moon and his keen brown eyes,' far-focused from their constant sea-ranging, burning out under the peak of his cap; Jacques Beauport, boyish midshipman of the Groix, likewise in uniform, dark-eyed, swarthy-skinned, with the stealthy reserve of a heart unfathomable stamped on his Breton face; and "Codroy John," Pellier's skipper of the Esperance, a gigantic bearded Newfoundlander dressed in moleskin trousers and canvas jacket, with a rugged, craggy face and deep blue eyes prophetic as the eyes of a seer.

"At your service, Capitaine Taylor!" repeated Pellier. "And what is the trouble this time, I would like to know?"

"None of my making but yours for the 'tending," answered Taylor gruffly. "Though I've done half the job for you. There was a drunken fight below and we got the Lavals and all the women out for fear of their being trampled."

"Dieu—the Lavals!" exclaimed Pellier, leaning forward and staring at old Peter and Anne in the moonlight.

His eyes switched to the face of the girl Taylor held, and the Gloucester captain saw him start and draw up his shoulders more rigidly.

"Then in that case," Pellier went on rapidly in a voice official in its intonation, "I shall put them ashore in my boat while my men restore order in the Auk's hold. Jacques! Codroy John! Tell them I am aboard and let that still their tongues or they will be taken in charge."

Jacques Beauport and Codroy John dived below, and Taylor could hear them yelling above the din, Beauport's shrill staccato cries spacing Codroy John's booming roar.

"Stinking cod-hunters! Voilà, will you revel in the cells at St. John's? Listen, makers of a thousand smells—the admiral himself is on your cluttered deck. Oui, Admiral Pellier of the Groix!"

"Aye," in Codroy's bass, "I'd like to die if he bain't! A stench ye be in the nose o' the Lard, ye fools! A powerful lot o' breakers o' Newfoundland navigation laws, runnin' a vessel wild like this! Back to yer bunks or ye'll lose yer voyage and face the Admiralty Court at St. John's!"

Under the threat and the warning of Pellier's nearness the tumult died down below decks, and Pellier himself waved old Peter and Anne, meek as whipped curs, into the Esperance's waiting boat.

"You, too, Marie—quickly!" he begged, anxious to retrieve as far as possible an awkward situation.

Marie hesitated, her violet-blue eyes meeting Taylor's for a moment in the moon-glow before she slipped out of his protecting grip.

"Au revoir, mon Viking, I will thank you better when I can," she whispered as she glided after her father and mother.

With an odd feeling that somehow he had been robbed of the fruits of his efforts below, Taylor watched the black boat streaking off to the Esperance.

"Marie, Pellier called her," he exclaimed, turning slowly to Lance. "So the admiral knows her as well as the parents—knows her that well?"

Lance nodded confidentially.

"Knows her well," he coincided, "and he would marry her in a moment if she would speak the word. But, there, hers is the heart of a maid with a score of suitors, among whom Jacques Beauport and his commander are chief. The heart of a maid, Taylor, and an impulsive heart at that. You know how they are. She won't pledge herself to the admiral, much less to Beauport, though old Peter and Anne urge and threaten and scheme. Do you think her beautiful, Captain?"

"The most beautiful girl on the fore shore!" admitted Taylor without hesitation. "But is she—is she—well, Lance, I can't bring myself to say it of a girl like her, but you know what some of the women on these cursed freighters are, don't you?"

Again Lance nodded, seriously, regretfully, his face all thoughtful lines in the moonlight.

"That I do," he confessed, "and my protest based on this specific case goes to the Government tonight. But not Marie! I can take an oath under heaven on that. Marie is pure as the heart of an iceberg is pure. A victim of nothing but circumstances, Taylor—that and unsavory parents. Hello—there's another schooner abeam of the Esperance. Is it your Graywing coming about? My eyes fail me in the dazzle of the moon.

Taylor looked up and gave an affirmative shake of his head.

"The Graywing, boys o' mine," he announced to his clustering crew. "Borrow some of the Auk's dories for a minute and we'll row back to the schooner."

V. Hauling the Trap

CHAPTER V HAULING THE TRAP

IN THE blaze of the rainbow dawn across the glittering facades of the scores of scattered icebergs the Graywing hove to by Taylor's trap berth in the strait, and seven of the eight dories dropped overside.

Ever quick to progress, it was the Americans themselves that had introduced seines into the haunts of the cod. In place of the ancient method of taking the fish by hook and line or jigger, Captain Norman of Brigus had brought the cod-trap down on the Labrador. No longer men with the ready money to purchase a trap bothered with the hook and line or jigger or puttered with the trawl.

With the great seines rich harvests were drawn from the icy deep, and Taylor himself on more than one occasion had gathered an even hundred quintals at one haul. Of the customary two hauls a day, this was the lucky morning haul, and with song and shout the Graywing's crews in the dories raced expectantly for the moorings of their berth.

Dead ahead of them, shining blood-red upon the sapphire sea, bobbed the four anchored buoys that buoyed the corners of the vast square-topped bag of meshed twine. The bag itself, invisible in the watery depths of the strait, was open at the top, its edges, full fifty feet to the side, supported by long lines of cork floats streaking from buoy to buoy.

From one corner branched a leader, a single wall of net that walled the Belle Isle currents across and inveigled up or down- swimming fish into a funnel-like opening in the trap. Once in, they never found the small end of the funnel again, but swam imprisoned 'round and 'round their huge elastic cell.

Underrunning the agitated edges of the trap, the seven dories sculled in place and, laying aside their oars, the seven rowers seized the floating edges of the pound. Standing up to their work, swaying to the heave of the swell through the strait, timing their pull to a fisherman's chanty, they hauled their trap, lusty giants reaping their finny harvest as fishers of all ages, ever since the day of Peter, have cast forth their nets and harvested the sea.

Heaving thus in the sudden glare of golden sunlight, etched starkly against the round blue hills of the Atlantic beyond, every man stood out, his individuality fixed, like a row of cleanly-sculptured bronze statues poised against the azure sky: the Viking Taylor, the adolescent Hughie Hay, the expectorating Irish Kerrigan, the parson-like Boston Jim, the lopped-off Titan Patterson, the braw McCaig, the battered sealer, Halifax!

To the drone of their chanty they pursed and pursed the trap, rising and falling, heaving and holding, quivering there in a web of striking color, color of indigo ocean, crimson buoy, green-painted dory, sun-gilded oilskins, diamond-dewed net—a blood-pulsing picture all vivid as a startling seascape hung upon dun walls.

Lustily they heaved and lustily they sang.

And in the center of the picture, rimmed 'round by the dripping, scintillating net that sagged with the weight of its catch, boiled a maelstrom of quicksilver, the packed cod, mobile twenty-pounders lashing furiously as they were pocketed tightly in a solid mass.

"By the ribs o' sunken Spanish galleons!" cried Irish Kerrigan at the sight, "Ye've topped wan hundred quintal this toime, Capten!"

"That she is, men—an' a quarter," calculated the lopped-off Titan Patterson. "Ain't it a record for the coast?"

"I believe you, Patty," beamed Boston Jim. "I reckon one hundred and ten was all—"

But the rest of their calculations was lost in Taylor's roar.

"Alongside, Brown!" he bellowed, freeing one bronzed hand and waving it to the wheelsman of the Graywing who, with the exception of the Cuban cook, Bolero, was the only man left aboard. "Walk her up in a hurry!"

"Right-o, Cap'n!" twanged Brown in acknowledgment. "Araound an' araound she goes!"

Holding hard, they could see Bolero dive like a dark snake for the jib to back it over, could mark Brown give and take his spokes with sureness and serenity, and almost before Taylor's waving hand returned to its grip on the net the silver-gray schooner, graceful as a gull, breasted lightly down on the dories.

VI. Château, the Storied

CHAPTER VI CHÂTEAU, THE STORIED

"WHAT livers to fry!" gasped Bolero at sight of the prize haul.

He took the brown cigar from his teeth and wiggled it exultingly. Then he and Brown jumped snappily to the rail to handle the dory tackles.

"Sluice them on deck—quick!" urged Taylor. "Sag enough here to unjoint a man's arms!"

Bolero and Brown hooked on and swiftly swung outboard the dip-net rigged on a pulley. Up and down the splattering dip-net plunged. In a silver stream the cod were scooped inboard, all alive and flopping in the pen, and while the dories, leaving Taylor aboard, sheered off again to reset the empty trap, Brown and Bolero hastened to spread the splitting-tables amidships.

"Never mind, boys," Taylor stopped them. "I'm not salting these down. I'm taking them in to Château to be made ashore."

Without a wink of surprise Bolero and Brown desisted, Bolero going off immediately to his tiny galley and Brown taking his accustomed place at the wheel. They made no comment then, but when the dories were nested aboard once more and sail crowded on the Graywing the crew had opportunity to pass the word as the schooner headed inshore.

"Aye, an' 'tis made fish ashore, they'll be, ye ken," winked Scotty McCaig to Halifax. "An' for why? Are the cod nae plentiful an' this the first week o' June? October's a lang way aheid, Tammy. Loys o' time tae dry a few hundred quintals ashore an' still fill our hold tae ballast us hame tae Gloucester! Eh, mon—wha' are ye gulletin' doon yer laughs for?"

"Why 're you puttin' that squint in them canny eyes of yours, Scotty?" countered Halifax. "Did you hear me gossip a word about dryin' ashore? So a Château firm makes them cod—what? Well, Scotty, I'll jist venture a whisper in your cauliflowered ear. I'll bet you a pound o' Fisherman's Friend I kin name the room they'll go to."

"I take ye! Wha' room, ye seventh son o' a prophet?" challenged McCaig.

"Old Peter Laval's room!" prophesied the battered sealer.

Wing and wing, the speed of a water-witch in her rakish beautiful lines, Taylor himself in Brown's place at the wheel, the Graywing drove on for Château Bay, the grandest fiord on Labrador's southern fore shore. Past York Point, its western entrance, she tacked, raising the sheer basaltic cliff of the Devil's Dining Table capping Henley Island and fluttered on through the cove-like harbor of Château itself.

Rimmed 'round by towering Laurentian hills covered with birch, balsam and spruce, snuggling at the foot of Beacon Hill the hoary thousand-foot sentinel of all, spread the ancient, storied settlement. Here, Taylor knew, Jacques Cartier in 1534 had first set down his wandering foot on the shores of his La Nouvelle France.

Here was the founding of his first settlement of French colons that grew by the hundreds, to be swelled in the middle of the seventeenth century by bold Breton emigrants, to be further augmented a full century later by exiled Acadians who in 1843 located at Matashquan and inevitably drifted in to Château till it hived in its present glory of swarming population and hummed with the ceaseless industry of the fishing.

The industry of the fishers was the blood and fiber of the place. Newfoundland merchants marketed the catch, and of the several firms doing business there Peter Laval secured the bulk of the trade. Of all the old-time dealers, slave-masters of the outports and rogues and hypocrites at heart, Taylor acknowledged old Peter the peer.

No more skilful hand than old Peter's to cull a fisherman's voyage and grade it for his profit as damp or Madeira!

No swifter pencil than old Peter's to charge the planters double prices for supplies and carry on his books without interest their balance at the settling up!

No, nor no greater pride than Peter's when sober, nor no deeper devotion as, a pillar of the church, he sat in the front pew and prayed for his delinquent livyeres in the seats behind him.

And, lastly, no more sordid coiner of men's and women's lives into Terranovan dollars as evidenced in his custon of working women as cheaper labor than men upon his Labrador stations.

VII. Old Peter's Room

CHAPTER VII OLD PETER'S ROOM

LAVAL'S establishment lay in the curve J of the cove below the village graveyard sleeping under the slant of Beacon Hill. It consisted of a long wooden jetty, a barn-like supply store generally known as the barter-house, miserable, tumble-down fish-sheds and a disgraceful room, sod-thatched and rough-boarded on unbarked studs.

Up and down the jetty stalked old Peter, his keen, colorless, icicle-like eyes overseeing everything that went on and at the same time watching the crowded shipping of the harbor.

"What have you there, Capitaine Taylor?" he cried as the Graywing swung to anchor off his wharf. "A trap haul for me, perhaps?"

"Aye, Peter, a record haul of one hundred and twenty-five quintals for a trap of that size, all alive and kicking, yours at the current figure," proffered Taylor. "And no damp or Madeira about them—no, nor any Miquelon brandy either!"

Peter grinned a deep grin that wrinkled his sanctimonious face.

"Voilà, I was drunk last night, but I am sober and penitent today," he declared piously. "Oui, and the Auk is many souls lighter and gone on her way to Camp Islands. It would have been a pity to drag a hole through a bag like that. My room is ready, Capitaine, and I'll send the carteel boat out for your fish. No, you can't moor alongside till I get the harbor-end of my jetty in place. Comment? You know how much there was to do."

Peter stumped down the wharf to give his orders, and immediately the carteel boat, a long fish-barge used to freight the catches from the fishing-grounds to the rooms, put out in charge of homespun-jacketed livyeres. The morning haul of the Graywing was dumped in and conveyed across the harbor, Taylor himself riding his own dory, trailed by the carteel boat with the livyeres and the Graywing's men aboard, in to old Peter's stage.