Sheila of Big Wreck Cove.

by James A. Cooper.

CHAPTER I

CAP'N IRA AND PRUE

Seated on this sunshiny morning in his old armchair of bent hickory, between his knees a cane on the head of which his gnarled hands rested, Captain Ira Ball was the true retired mariner of the old school. His ruddy face was freshly shaven, his scant, silvery hair well smoothed; everything was neat and trig about him, including his glazed, narrow-brimmed hat, his blue pilot-cloth coat, pleated shirt front as white as snow, heavy silver watch chain festooned upon his waist-coat, and blue-yarn socks showing between the bottom of his full, gray trouser legs and his well-blacked low shoes.

For Cap'n Ira had commanded pa.s.senger-carrying craft in his day, and was a bit of a dandy still. The niceties of maritime full dress were as important to his mind now that he had retired from the sea to spend his remaining days in the Ball homestead on Wreckers' Head as when he had trod the quarter-deck of the old _Susan Gatskill_, or had occupied the chief seat at her saloon table.

"I don't know what's to become of us," repeated Cap'n Ira, wagging a thoughtful head, his gaze, as that of old people often is, fixed upon a point too distant for youthful eyes to see.

"I can't see into the future, Ira, any clearer than you can,"

rejoined his wife, glancing at his sagging, blue-coated shoulders with some gentle apprehension.

She was a frail, little, old woman, one of those women who, after a robust middle age, seem gradually to shrivel to the figure of what they were in their youth, but with no charm of girlish lines remaining. Her face was wrinkled like a russet apple in February, and it had the colorings of that grateful fruit. She sat on the stone slab which served for a back door stoop peeling potatoes.

"I swan, Prue, you cut me in two places this mornin' when you shaved me," said Cap'n Ira suddenly and in some slight exasperation. "And I can't handle that dratted razor myself."

"Maybe you could get John-Ed Williams to come over and shave you, Ira."

"John-Ed's got his work to do. Then again, how're we going to pay him for such jobs? I swan! I can't afford a vally, Prue. Besides, you need help about the house more than I need a steward. I can get along without being shaved so frequent, I s'pose, but there's times when you can't scurce lift a pot of potatoes off the stove."

"Oh, now, Ira, I ain't so bad as all that!" declared his wife mildly.

"Yes, you be. I am always expecting you to fall down, or hurt yourself some way. And as for looking out for the Queen of Sheby--"

"Now, Ira, Queenie ain't no trouble scurcely."

"Huh! She's more trouble than all our money, that's sure. And she's eating her head off."

"Now, don't say that," urged his wife in that soothing tone which often irritated Cap'n Ira more than it mollified him.

He tapped the metal top of the huge k.n.o.b of his cane and the spring cover flew open. Ira took a pinch of snuff, inhaled it, closed the cover of the box, delicately brushed a few flecks of the pungent powder from his coat lapel and shirt front, and then, burying his nose in a large silk handkerchief, vented a prodigious:

"_A-choon!_"

Prudence uttered a surprised squeak, like a mouse being stepped on, jerked herself to a half-standing posture, and the potatoes rolled to every point of the compa.s.s.

"Goodness gracious gallop!" she e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed, quite shaken out of her usual calm. "I should think, Ira, as many times as I've told you that scares me most into a conniption, that you'd signal me when you're going to take snuff. I--I'm all of a shake, I be."

"I swan! I'm sorry, Prue. I oughter fire a gun, I allow, before speakin' the ship."

"Fire a gun!" repeated the old woman, panting as she scrambled for the potatoes. "That's what I object to, Ira. You want to speak _this_ ship 'fore you shoot that awful noise. I never can get used to it."

"There, there!" he said, trying to poke the more distant potatoes toward her with his cane. He could not himself stoop; or, if he did, he could only sit erect again after the method of a ratchet wheel.

"I won't do so again, Prudence. I be an onthoughtful critter, if ever there was one."

Prudence had recovered the last potato. She stopped to pat his ruddy cheek, nor was it much wrinkled, before she returned to peeling the potatoes.

"I know you don't mean to, Iry," she crooned. Married couples like the b.a.l.l.s, where the man has been at home only for brief visits between voyages, if they really love each other, never grow weary of the little frills on connubial bliss usually worn shabby by other people before the honeymoon is past. "I know you don't mean to. But when you sneeze I think it's the crack o' doom."

"I'm sorry about them potatoes," repeated Cap'n Ira. "I make you a lot of extry work, Prue. Sometimes I feel, fixed as I be in health, I oughter be in the Sailors' Snug Harbor over to Paulmouth. I do, for a fact."

"And what would become of me?" cried the old woman, appalled.

"Well," returned Cap'n Ira, "you couldn't be no worse off than you be. We'd miss each other a heap, I know."

"Ira!" cried his wife. "Ira, I'd just _die_ without you now that I've got you to myself at last. Those long years you were away so much, and us not being blessed with children--"

Ira Ball made a sudden clucking sound with his tongue. That was a sore topic of conversation, and he always tried to dodge it.

"It did seem sometimes," pursued Prudence, wiping her eyes with a bit of a handkerchief that she took from her bosom, "as though I wasn't an honestly married woman. I know that sounds awful"--and she shook her head--"but it was so, you only getting home as you did between voyages. But I was always looking forward to the time when you would be home for good."

"Don't you s'pose I looked forward to casting anchor?" he demanded warmly. "Seemed like the time never would come. I was always trying to speculate a little so as to make something besides my skipper's pay and share. That--that's why I got bit in that Sea-Gold proposition. That feller's prospectus did read mighty reasonable, Prudence."

"I know it did, Ira," she agreed cordially. "I believed in it just as strong as you did. You warn't none to blame."

"Well, I dunno. It's mighty nice of you to say so, Prue. But they told me afterward that I might have knowed that a feller couldn't extract ten dollars' wuth of gold from the whole Atlantic Ocean, not if he bailed it dry!"

"We've got enough left to keep us, Ira."

"Just about. Just about. That is just it. When I was taken down with this rheumatiz and the hospital doctors in New York told me I could never think of pacing my own quarter no more, we had just enough left invested in good securities for us to live on the int'rest."

"And the old place, here, Ira," added his wife cheerfully.

"Which ain't much more than a shelter," he rejoined rather bitterly.

"And just as I say, it isn't fit for two old folks like us to live alone in. Why, we can't even raise our own potatoes no more. And I never yet heard of pollack swimmin' ash.o.r.e and begging to be split and dried against winter. No, sir!"

"The Lord's been good to us, Ira. We ain't never suffered yet," she told him softly.

"I know that. We ain't suffering for food and shelter. But, I swan, Prue, we be suffering for some young person about the house. Now, hold on! 'Twarn't for us to have children. That warn't meant. We've been all through that, and it's settled. But that don't change the fact that we need somebody to live with us if we're going to live comfortable."

"Oh, dear, if my niece Sarah had lived! She used to stay with me when she was a gal and you was away," sighed Prudence.

"But she married and had a gal of her own. She brought her here that time I was home after my first v'y'ge on the _Susan Gatskill_. A pretty baby if ever there was one."

"Ida May Bostwick! Bostwick was Sarah's married name. I heard something about Ida May only the other day."

"You did?" exclaimed Cap'n Ira, much interested.

"Yes, Ira. Annabell Coffin, she who was a Cuttle, was visiting his folks in Boston, and she learned that Sarah Bostwick's daughter was working behind the counter in some store there. She has to work for her livin', poor child."

"I swan!" e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed the captain.

Much as he had been about the world, Cap'n Ira looked upon most mundane affairs with the eyes of the true Cape man. Independence is bred in the bone of his tribe. A tradesman or storekeeper is, after all, not of the shipmaster caste. And a clerk, working "behind the counter" of any store, is much like a man before the mast.