The Golden Age of Pulp Fiction MEGAPACK ™, Vol. 1: George Allan England. George Allan England

death rate had risen so high that Briggs had even considered bringing some of the black ivory on deck, and increasing the ration. But in the end he had decided to hold through, and trust luck to arrive in Cuba with enough slaves to pay a good margin. Results had justified his decision.

      “I was right about that, too,” thought he. “Seems like I’m always right—or else it’s gilt-edged luck!”

      Yet, in spite of all, that voyage had left some disagreeable memories. The reek and stifle of the hold, the groaning and crying of the blacks—that no amount of punishment could silence—had vastly annoyed the captain. The way in which his crew had stricken the shackles from the dead and from those manifestly marked for death and had heaved them overboard to the trailing sharks, had been only a trivial detail.

      But the fact that Briggs’s own cabin had been invaded by vermin and by noxious odors had greatly annoyed the captain. Not all Doctor Filhiol’s burning of pungent substances in the cabin had been able to purify the air. Briggs had cursed the fact that this most profitable trafficking had involved such disagreeable concomitants, and had consoled himself with much strong drink.

      Then, too, a five-day blow, three hundred miles west of the Cape Verdes, had killed off more than forty of his negroes and had made conditions doubly intolerable. Once more he formulated thoughts in words:

      “Damn it! I might have done better to have scuttled her, off the African coast, and have drawn down my share of the insurance money. If I’d known what I was running into, that’s just what I would have done, so help me! I made a devilish good thing of it, that way, in the old White Cloud two years ago. And never was so much as questioned!”

      He pondered a moment, frowning blackly.

      “Maybe I did wrong, after all, to bring the Fleece into port. But if I hadn’t, I’d have had to sacrifice those hundred boxes of opium, that will bring me a clear two hundred apiece, from Hendricks. So after all, it’s all right. I’m satisfied.”

      He drained the last of the Four-X, and carefully inspected his watch.

      “Ten-fifteen,” said he. “And I’m to meet Hendricks at ten-thirty at the Tremont House. I’ll hoist anchor and away.”

      He paid his score with scrupulous exactness, for in such matters he greatly prided himself on his honesty, lighted a fresh cigar, and departed from the Bell-in-Hand.

      Cigar in mouth, smoke trailing on the May morning, he made his way to School Street and up it. A fine figure of a mariner he strode along, erect, deep-chested, thewed and sinewed like a bull.

      In under the columned portals of the old Tremont House—now long since only a memory—he entered, to his rendezvous with Hendricks, furtive buyer of the forbidden drug.

      And as he vanishes beneath that granite doorway, for fifty years he passes from our sight.

      CHAPTER XIII

      AFTER FIFTY YEARS

      If you will add into one total all that is sunniest and most sheltered, all that hangs heaviest with the perfume of old-fashioned New England gardens, all that most cozily combines in an old-time sailor’s home, you will form a picture of Snug Haven, demesne of Captain Alpheus Briggs, long years retired.

      Snug Haven, with gray-shingled walls, with massive chimney stacks projecting from its weather-beaten, gambreled roof, seemed to epitomize rest after labor, peace after strife.

      From its broad piazza, with morning-glory-covered pillars, a splendid view opened of sea and shore and foam-ringed islets in the harbor of South Endicutt—a view commanding kelp-strewn foreshore, rock-buttressed headlands, sun-spangled cobalt of the bay; and then the white, far tower of Truxbury Light, and then the hazed and brooding mystery of open Atlantic.

      Behind the cottage rose Croft Hill, sweet with ferns, with bayberries and wild roses crowding in among the lichen-crusted boulders and ribbed ledges, where gnarly, ancient apple-trees and silver birches clung. Atop the hill, a wall of mossy stones divided the living from the dead; for there the cemetery lay, its simple monuments and old, gray headstones of carven slate bearing some family names that have loomed big in history.

      Along the prim box-hedge of Captain Briggs’s front garden, the village street extended. Wandering irregularly with the broken shore line, it led past time-grayed dwellings, past the schoolhouse and the white, square-steepled church, to the lobstermen’s huts, the storehouses and wharves, interspersed with “fish-flakes” that blent pungent marine odors with the fresh tang of the sea.

      Old Mother Nature did her best, all along that street and in the captain’s garden, to soften those sometimes insistent odors, with her own perfumes of asters and petunias, nasturtiums, dahlias, sweet fern, and fresh, revivifying caresses of poplar, elm and pine, of sumac, buttonwood and willow.

      With certain westerly breezes—breezes that bore to Snug Haven the sad, slow chant of the whistling buoy on Graves Shoal and the tolling of the bell buoy on the Shallows—oakum and tar, pitch, salt and fish had the best of it in South Endicutt. But with a shift to landward, apple-tree, mignonette and phlox and other blooms marshalled victorious essences; and the little village by the lip of the sea grew sweet and warm as the breast of a young girl who dreams.

      The afternoon on which Captain Alpheus Briggs once more comes to our sight—the 24th of June, 1918—was just one of those drowsy, perfumed afternoons, when the long roar of the breakers over Dry Shingle Reef seemed part of the secrets the breeze was whispering among the pine needles on Croft Hill, and when the droning of the captain’s bees, among his spotted tiger-lilies, his sweet peas, cannas and hydrangeas, seemed conspiring with the sun-drenched warmth of the old-fashioned garden to lull man’s spirit into rest and soothe life’s fever with nepenthe.

      Basking in the sunlight of his piazza, at ease in a broad-armed rocker by a wicker table, the old captain appeared mightily content with life. Beside him lay a wiry-haired Airedale, seemingly asleep yet with one eye ready to cock open at the captain’s slightest move. A blue cap, gold-braided, hung atop one of the uprights of the rocking-chair; the captain’s bushy hair, still thick, though now spun silver, contrasted with his deep-lined face, tanned brown. Glad expectancy showed in his deep-set eyes, clear blue as they had been full fifty years ago, eyes under bushy brows that, once black, now matched the silver of his hair.

      White, too, his beard had grown. Once in a while he stroked it, nervously, with a strong, corded hand that seemed, as his whole, square-knit body seemed, almost as vigorous as in the long ago—the half-forgotten, wholly repented long ago of violence and evil ways. Not yet had senility laid its clutch upon Alpheus Briggs. Wrinkles had come, and a certain stooping of the powerful shoulders; but the old captain’s blue coat with its brass buttons still covered a body of iron strength.

      The telescope across his knees was no more trim than he. Carefully tended beard, well-brushed coat and polished boots all proclaimed Alpheus Briggs a proud old man. Though the soul of him had utterly changed, still Captain Briggs held true to type. In him no laxity inhered, no falling away from the strict tenets of shipshape neatness.

      The captain appeared to be waiting for something. Once in a while he raised the telescope and directed it toward the far blue sheet of the outer harbor, where the headland of Pigeon Cliff thrust itself against the gray-green of the ship channel, swimming in a distant set of haze. Eagerly he explored the prospect, letting his glass rest on white lines of gulls that covered the tide-bars, on the whiter lines of foam over the reef, on the catboats and dories, the rusty coasting steamers and clumsy coal-barges near or far away. With care he sought among the tawny sails; and as each schooner tacked, its canvas now sunlit, now umber in shade, the captain’s gaze seemed questioning: “Are you the craft I seek?”

      The answer came always negative. With patience, Captain Briggs lowered his glass again and resumed his vigil.

      “No use getting uneasy,” said he, at last; and brought out pipe and tobacco from the pocket of his square-cut jacket. “It won’t bring him a bit sooner. He wrote me he’d be here sometime to-day, and that means he surely will be. He’s a Briggs. What he says he’ll do he will do.