Blow The Man Down: A Romance Of The CoastDay, Holman
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Blow The Man Down: A Romance Of The Coast
Day, Holman
Love stories; Ship captains -- Fiction; Yachts -- Fiction
A young man may have the best intentions. He may resolve to be a martyr,
to bow to the law's majesty. But at that moment Mayo was receiving
imperious command from the shipmaster whose orders he had obeyed for so
long that obedience was second nature. And panic seized him! Men were at
hand to arrest him. There was no time to reason the thing out. Flight is
the first impulse of innocence persecuted. Manly resolve melted. He ran.
“I'll stay behind and bluff 'em off! I'll say you're just out for a
minute, that I'm waiting here for you,” cried Captain Wass. “That will
give you a start. Try the docks. You may find one of the boys who will
help.”
Mayo escaped into a yard, dodged down an alley, planning his movements
as he hurried, having a mariner's quickness of thought in an emergency.
He made directly for the pier where steam-vessels took water. A huge
ocean-going tug was just getting ready to leave her berth under the
water-hose. Her gruff whistle-call had ordered hawsers cast off. Mayo's
'longcoast acquaintance was fairly extensive. This was a coal-barge tug,
and he waved quick greeting to the familiar face in her pilot-house and
leaped aboard. He climbed the forward ladder nimbly.
“I reckon you'll have to make it hello and good-by in one breath, mate,”
advised the skipper. “I'm off to take a light tow down-coast. Norfolk
next stop.”
“Let her go--sooner the better,” gasped the fugitive. “I'll explain why
as soon as you are out of the dock.”
“You don't say that you want to take the trip?”
“I've got to take it.”
The skipper cocked an eyebrow and pulled his bell. “Make yourself to
home, mate,” he advised. “I hope you ain't in so much of a hurry to get
there as you seem to be, for I've got three barges to tow.”
Mayo sat down on the rear transom and was hidden from all eyes on the
pier.
There was no opportunity for an explanation until the barges had been
picked up, for there was much manouver-ing and much tooting. But he
found ready sympathy after he had explained.
“The law sharps are always hankering to catch a poor cuss who is trying
to navigate these waters and suit the inspectors and the owners at the
same time,” admitted the master of the tug. “I have read everything the
papers had to say about your case, and I figured they didn't give you a
fair show. Newspapers and lawyers and owners don't understand what a
fellow is up against. I'm glad you're aboard, mate, because I want to
hear your side, with all the details.”
The threshing over of the matter occupied many hours of the long wallow
down the Jersey coast, and the tug captain weighed all features of the
case with the care of a man who has plenty of time on his hands and with
the zest a mariner displays in considering the affairs of his kind of
folk.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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