Rudyard Kipling For Children - 7 Books in One Edition (Illustrated Edition). Rudyard Kipling

some poor ground for a change, then."

      "All the graound I want to see—don't want to strike her—is Eastern Point," said Dan. "Say, dad, it looks 's if we wouldn't hev to lay more'n two weeks on the Shoals. You'll meet all the comp'ny you want then, Harve. That's the time we begin to work. No reg'lar meals fer no one then. 'Mug-up when ye're hungry, an' sleep when ye can't keep awake. Good job you wasn't picked up a month later than you was, or we'd never ha' had you dressed in shape fer the Old Virgin."

      Harvey understood from the Eldridge chart that the Old Virgin and a nest of curiously named shoals were the turning-point of the cruise, and that with good luck they would wet the balance of their salt there. But seeing the size of the Virgin (it was one tiny dot), he wondered how even Disko with the hog-yoke and the lead could find her. He learned later that Disko was entirely equal to that and any other business, and could even help others. A big four-by-five blackboard hung in the cabin, and Harvey never understood the need of it till, after some blinding thick days, they heard the unmelodious tooting of a foot-power fog-horn—a machine whose note is as that of a consumptive elephant.

      They were making a short berth, towing the anchor under their foot to save trouble. "Squarerigger bellowin' fer his latitude," said Long Jack. The dripping red headsails of a bark glided out of the fog, and the "We're Here" rang her bell thrice, using sea shorthand.

      The larger boat backed her topsail with shrieks and shoutings.

      "Frenchman," said Uncle Salters, scornfully. "Miquelon boat from St. Malo." The farmer had a weatherly sea-eye. "I'm most outer 'baccy, too, Disko."

      "Same here," said Tom Platt. "Hi! Backez vouz—backez vouz! Standez awayez, you butt-ended mucho-bono! Where you from—St. Malo, eh?"

      Ah, ha! Mucho bono! Oui! oui! Clos Poulet—St. Malo! St. Pierre et Miquelon," cried the other crowd, waving woollen caps and laughing. Then all together, "Bord! Bord!"

      "Bring up the board, Danny. Beats me how them Frenchmen fetch anywheres, exceptin' America's fairish broadly. Forty-six forty-nine's good enough fer them; an' I guess it's abaout right, too."

      Dan chalked the figures on the board, and they hung it in the main-rigging to a chorus of mercis from the bark.

      "Seems kinder unneighbourly to let 'em swedge off like this," Salters suggested, feeling in his pockets.

      "Hev ye learned French then sence last trip'?" said Disko. "I don't want no more stone-ballast hove at us 'long o' your calm' Miquelon boats 'footy cochins,' same's you did off Le Have."

      "Harmon Rush he said that was the way to rise 'em. Plain United States is good enough fer me. We're all dretful short on terbakker. Young feller, don't you speak French?"

      "Oh, yes," said Harvey, valiantly; and he bawled: "Hi! Say! Arretez vous! Attendez! Nous sommes venant pour tabac."

      "Ah, tabac, tabac!" they cried, and laughed again.

      "That hit 'em. Let's heave a dory over, anyway," said Tom Platt. "I don't exactly hold no certificates on French, but I know another lingo that goes, I guess. Come on, Harve, an' interpret."

      The raffle and confusion when he and Harvey were hauled up the bark's black side was indescribable. Her cabin was all stuck round with glaring coloured prints of the Virgin—the Virgin of Newfoundland, they called her. Harvey found his French of no recognised Bank brand, and his conversation was limited to nods and grins. But Tom Platt waved his arms and got along swimmingly. The captain gave him a drink of unspeakable gin, and the opera-comique crew, with their hairy throats, red caps, and long knives, greeted him as a brother. Then the trade began. They had tobacco, plenty of it—American, that had never paid duty to France. They wanted chocolate and crackers. Harvey rowed back to arrange with the cook and Disko, who owned the stores, and on his return the cocoa-tins and cracker-bags were counted out by the Frenchman's wheel. It looked like a piratical division of loot; but Tom Platt came out of it roped with black pigtail and stuffed with cakes of chewing and smoking tobacco. Then those jovial mariners swung off into the mist, and the last Harvey heard was a gay chorus:

      "Par derriere chez ma tante, Il y a un bois joli, Et le rossignol y chante Et le jour et la nuit... Que donneriez vous, belle, Qui I'amènerait ici? Je donnerai Québec, Sorel et Saint Denis."

      "How was it my French didn't go, and your sign-talk did?" Harvey demanded when the barter had been distributed among the "We're Heres".

      "Sign-talk!" Platt guffawed. "Well, yes, 'twas sign-talk, but a heap older'n your French, Harve. Them French boats are chock-full o' Freemasons, an' that's why."

      "Are you a Freemason, then?"

      "Looks that way, don't it?" said the man-o'war's man, stuffing his pipe; and Harvey had another mystery of the deep sea to brood upon.

      Chapter VI

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      The thing that struck him most was the exceedingly casual way in which some craft loafed about the broad Atlantic. Fishing-boats, as Dan said, were naturally dependent on the courtesy and wisdom of their neighbours; but one expected better things of steamers. That was after another interesting interview, when they had been chased for three miles by a big lumbering old cattle-boat, all boarded over on the upper deck, that smelt like a thousand cattle-pens. A very excited officer yelled at them through a speaking-trumpet, and she lay and lollopped helplessly on the water while Disko ran the "We're Here" under her lee and gave the skipper a piece of his mind. "Where might ye be—eh? Ye don't deserve to be anywheres. You barn-yard tramps go hoggin' the road on the high seas with no blame consideration fer your neighbours, an' your eyes in your coffee-cups instid o' in your silly heads."

      At this the skipper danced on the bridge and said something about Disko's own eyes. "We haven't had an observation for three days. D'you suppose we can run her blind?" he shouted.

      "Wa-al, I can," Disko retorted. "What's come to your lead'? Et it'? Can't ye smell bottom, or are them cattle too rank?"

      "What d'ye feed 'em?" said Uncle Salters with intense seriousness, for the smell of the pens woke all the farmer in him. "They say they fall off dretful on a v'yage. Dunno as it's any o' my business, but I've a kind o' notion that oil-cake broke small an' sprinkled—"

      "Thunder!" said a cattle-man in a red jersey as he looked over the side. "What asylum did they let His Whiskers out of?"

      "Young feller," Salters began, standing up in the fore-rigging, "let me tell yeou 'fore we go any further that I've—"

      The officer on the bridge took off his cap with immense politeness. "Excuse me," he said, "but I've asked for my reckoning. If the agricultural person with the hair will kindly shut his head, the sea-green barnacle with the wall-eye may perhaps condescend to enlighten us."

      "Naow you've made a show o' me, Salters," said Disko, angrily. He could not stand up to that particular sort of talk, and snapped out the latitude and longitude without more lectures.

      "'Well, that's a boat-load of lunatics, sure," said the skipper, as he rang up the engine-room and tossed a bundle of newspapers into the schooner.

      "Of all the blamed fools, next to you, Salters, him an' his crowd are abaout the likeliest I've ever seen," said Disko as the "We're Here" slid away. "I was jest givin' him my jedgment on lullsikin' round these waters like a lost child, an' you must cut in with your fool farmin'. Can't ye never keep things sep'rate?"

      Harvey, Dan, and the others stood back, winking one to the other and full of joy; but Disko and Salters wrangled seriously till evening, Salters arguing that a cattle-boat was practically a barn on blue water, and Disko insisting that, even if this were the case, decency and fisher-pride demanded that he should have kept "things sep'rate." Long Jack stood it in silence for a time,—an angry skipper makes an unhappy crew,—and