Billy Topsail & Company: A Story for Boys. Duncan Norman
said Billy Topsail.
“Hello!” Jimmie Grimm echoed.
“You blokes live ’ere?” Bagg whined.
“Uh-huh,” said Billy Topsail.
“This yer ’ome?” pursued Bagg.
Billy nodded.
“Wisht I was ’ome!” sighed Bagg. “I say,” he added, “which way’s ’ome from ’ere?”
“You mean Skipper ’Zekiel’s cottage?”
“I mean Lun’on,” said Bagg.
“Don’t know,” Billy answered. “You better ask Uncle Tommy Luff. He’ll tell you.”
Bagg had been exported for adoption. The gutters of London are never exhausted of their product of malformed little bodies and souls; they provide waifs for the remotest colonies of the empire. So, as it chanced, Bagg had been exported to Newfoundland–transported from his native alleys to this vast and lonely place. Bagg was scrawny and sallow, with bandy legs and watery eyes and a fantastic cranium; and he had a snub nose, which turned blue when a cold wind struck it. But when he was landed from the mail-boat he found a warm welcome, just the same, from Ruth Rideout, Ezekiel’s wife, by whom he had been taken for adoption.
Later in the day, old Uncle Tommy Luff, just in from the fishing grounds off the Mull, where he had been jigging for stray cod all day long, had moored his punt to the stage-head, and he was now coming up the path with his sail over his shoulder, his back to the wide, flaring sunset. Bagg sat at the turn to Squid Cove, disconsolate. The sky was heavy with glowing clouds, and the whole earth was filled with a glory such as he had not known before.
“Shall I arst the ol’ beggar when ’e gets ’ere?” mused Bagg.
Uncle Tommy looked up with a smile.
“I say, mister,” piped Bagg, when the old man came abreast, “which way’s ’ome from ’ere?”
“Eh, b’y?” said Uncle Tommy.
“’Ome, sir. Which way is ’ome from ’ere?”
In that one word Bagg’s sickness of heart expressed itself–in the quivering, wistful accent.
“Is you ’Zekiel Rideout’s lad?” said Uncle Tommy.
“Don’t yer make no mistake, mister,” said Bagg, somewhat resentfully. “I ain’t nothink t’ nobody.”
“I knowed you was that lad,” Uncle Tommy drawled, “when I seed the size o’ you. Sure, b’y, you knows so well as me where ’Zekiel’s place is to. ’Tis t’ the head o’ Burnt Cove, there, with the white railin’, an’ the tater patch aft o’ the place where they spreads the fish. Sure, you knows the way home.”
“I mean Lun’on, mister,” Bagg urged.
“Oh, home!” said Uncle Tommy. “When I was a lad like you, b’y, just here from the West Country, me fawther told me if I steered a course out o’ the tickle an’ kept me starn fair for the meetin’-house, I’d sure get home t’ last.”
“Which way, mister?”
Uncle Tommy pointed out to sea–to that far place in the east where the dusk was creeping up over the horizon.
“There, b’y,” said he. “Home lies there.”
Then Uncle Tommy shifted his sail to the other shoulder and trudged on up the hill; and Bagg threw himself on the ground and wept until his sobs convulsed his scrawny little body.
“I want to go ’ome!” he sobbed. “I want to go ’ome!”
No wonder that Bagg, London born and bred, wanted to go home to the crowd and roar and glitter of the streets to which he had been used. It was fall in Ruddy Cove, when the winds are variable and gusty, when the sea is breaking under the sweep of a freshening breeze and yet heaving to the force of spent gales. Fogs, persistently returning with the east wind, filled the days with gloom and dampness. Great breakers beat against the harbour rocks; the swish and thud of them never ceased, nor was there any escape from it.
Bagg went to the fishing grounds with Ezekiel Rideout, where he jigged for the fall run of cod; and there he was tossed about in the lop, and chilled to the marrow by the nor’easters. Many a time the punt ran heeling and plunging for the shelter of the harbour, with the spray falling upon Bagg where he cowered amidships; and once she was nearly undone by an offshore gale. In the end Bagg learned consideration for the whims of a punt and acquired an unfathomable respect for a gust and a breaking wave.
Thus the fall passed, when the catching and splitting and drying of fish was a distraction. Then came the winter–short, drear days, mere breaks in the night, when there was no relief from the silence and vasty space round about, and the dark was filled with the terrors of snow and great winds and loneliness. At last the spring arrived, when the ice drifted out of the north in vast floes, bearing herds of hair-seal within reach of the gaffs of the harbour folk, and was carried hither and thither with the wind.
Then there came a day when the wind gathered the dumpers and pans in one broad mass and jammed it against the coast. The sea, where it had lain black and fretful all winter long, was now covered and hidden. The ice stretched unbroken from the rocks of Ruddy Cove to the limit of vision in the east. And Bagg marvelled. There seemed to be a solid path from Ruddy Cove straight away in the direction in which Uncle Tommy Luff had said that England lay.
Notwithstanding the comfort and plenty of his place with Aunt Ruth Rideout and Uncle Ezekiel, Bagg still longed to go back to the gutters of London.
“I want to go ’ome,” he often said to Billy Topsail and Jimmie Grimm.
“What for?” Billy once demanded.
“Don’t know,” Bagg replied. “I jus’ want to go ’ome.”
At last Bagg formed a plan.
CHAPTER VIII
In Which Bagg, Unknown to Ruddy Cove, Starts for Home, and, After Some Difficulty, Safely Gets There
Uncle Tommy Luff, coming up the hill one day when the ice was jammed against the coast and covered the sea as far as sight carried, was stopped by Bagg at the turn to Squid Cove.
“I say, mister,” said Bagg, “which way was you tellin’ me Lun’on was from ’ere?”
Uncle Tommy pointed straight out to the ice-covered sea.
“That way?” asked Bagg.
“Straight out o’ the tickle with the meetin’-house astarn.”
“Think a bloke could ever get there?” Bagg inquired.
Uncle Tommy laughed. “If he kep’ on walkin’ he’d strike it some time,” he answered.
“Sure?” Bagg demanded.
“If he kep’ on walkin’,” Uncle Tommy repeated, smiling.
This much may be said of the ice: the wind which carries it inshore inevitably sweeps it out to sea again, in an hour or a day or a week, as it may chance. The whole pack–the wide expanse of enormous fragments of fields and glaciers–is in the grip of the wind, which, as all men know, bloweth where it listeth. A nor’east gale sets it grinding against the coast, but when the wind veers to the west the pack moves out and scatters.
If a man is caught in that great rush and heaving, he has nothing further to do with his own fate but wait. He escapes if he has strength to survive until the wind blows the ice against the coast again–not else. When the Newfoundlander starts out to the seal hunt he makes sure, in so far as he can, that no change in the wind is threatened.
Uncle Ezekiel Rideout kept an eye on the weather that night.
“Be you goin’, b’y?” said Ruth, looking up from her weaving.
Ezekiel had just come in from Lookout Head, where the watchers had caught sight of the seals, swarming far off in the