A bad penny

CHEEVER’S pursuers had forgotten that the fugitive had brought the Tempest up the harbor, a few days before; so that the latest changes of the bar were known to him. He chuckled, as he perceived that the voices of the men in the boat behind him were growing fainter, as the Scud swept past the light on Mark Island, so close that he could hear the breakers comb over on the beach.

With the wind from the north-west, the waves were swept along in easy curves, and the small boat behaved well under her reefed sail, with her bow pointed for the twin lights of Thatcher’s Island, glimmering faintly in the south-east, about fifteen miles away.

“I guess that I have outwitted the Deacon this time,” he said to himself, as he cut off a quid of tobacco and put it in his mouth. “They can’t reach me now, and in the morning, if I have luck, I shall be off Marblehead, where I shall be safe enough. I wonder what makes the old man keep his revenge so warm for all these years. Perhaps it’s because he has had to use pewter, instead of the silver which I buried that night under the lilac-bush in his back yard. I don’t see how I ever mustered up courage to break in. I remember I had been sitting with his daughter one evening on the front porch, when I heard the old man putting the silver away in the closet in the dining-room. The tavern-keeper was pressing me for my score. I owed Jim Noyes for a horse, and the thought entered my head that those spoons, the tea-service, and tankard would pay up my debts.

“Once in my head, the thought would not depart, and every day it took new shape.

“It must have been the ‘original Adam’ my father used to preach about. I certainly was not one of the ‘elect.’ I always felt sure of that. They used to make me pray that ‘I should be born again and have a change of heart.’ A change of luck might have been worth praying for. Fate brought that thought into my head; it was fore-ordained that I should break into that house and throw up all my chances of being a decent man. The Deacon believes that he was predestined to go to heaven and to lie in Abraham’s bosom, no matter how sneaking and mean he may be; and I suppose that I was cut out for the other place.

“Well, I don’t care; needs must, when the devil drives. It was easy for me, who knew the place since a boy, to get into the house and get the silver, but as soon as I got outside with the stuff, I didn’t know what to do with it.

“When the idea came into my head of stealing it, I meant to melt it down and sell it somewhere, but once it was on my hands, I saw that I could not dispose of it without being detected. It was a rainy night, I remember, and it didn’t take me long to bury the plunder under the lilac-bush and sneak home to bed. Father was awakened by my step on the stairs, and he called out my name.

“When I heard his voice, I was reminded of that verse in the Scriptures about ‘bringing thy father’s gray hairs in sorrow to the grave,’ and I did not answer him. I kicked off my muddy boots and crept into bed—and next morning I got the ring from Sally, and that was the end of Tom Cheever in Oldbury.”

As he pondered, the boat tore ahead, with gunwales under. Over to the west was the dim coast-line, with here and there a light shining from some lonely farmhouse; looking seaward, black wave followed black wave, crested with foam, dimly reflecting on their upward curves the stars in the wind-swept heavens. The water was full of phosphorescent gleams and now and then schools of fish, startled by the boat, shot in squib-like spirals of fire through the water under and away from the keel. Cheever shivered in the cold wind and buttoned his pea-jacket tightly around him. He was hungry too; for the Deacon had come on board of the Tempest before he had eaten his supper, but he was used to cold and hunger and the quid of tobacco was a comfort to him.

“I will have to put in another reef if it breezes any more,” he thought. “Why couldn’t the old man have left me alone? It’s hard luck to be in this cockle-shell of a boat running down the coast in a stiff breeze, cold and hungry, when I ought to be comfortably rolled up in my bunk on board the schooner. I’ve lost my pay too for deserting the ship; and if the revengeful old fellow had left me alone, I should have left Oldbury in the stage for Boston, with three thousand dollars in my pocket, enough to start me respectably in business. And it’s all owing to that silverware under the lilac-bush, which has done nobody any good since ’96. If I had steered clear of the tavern, I might have married Sally Fairbanks and have been a decent man,—almost as good, perhaps, as Captain Woodbury, who wouldn’t let me spoil the air in his house any longer than he could help. I wonder if Sally suspected that I was alive and in town, when the boy gave her that ring? It didn’t take the Deacon, her father, long to find it out. I wonder what she would have said to me, if I had gone to see her myself—she used to have enough to say to me. And so—she married Josh, the gawkiest lout in town; I remember that his fingers were all thumbs, and that he was generally as clumsy as a cow with a musket. How Sally used to laugh at him, when she set him fetching and carrying for her at the parties down the river—and he grinning all the time, happy over having the chance to serve her in any way. And yet he got her finally; though, seeing that his father was a ship-chandler in a small way of business, it was a bad match for a girl who might have had Parson Cheever’s son, if he hadn’t been rotten before he was ripe, like a summer apple. I used to think that Josh Pickering was fair game to be plucked, and many’s the time I have slipped my arm in ahead of him and squired Sally Fairbanks home, while he was edging around as red as a lobster, with ‘one foot afraid and t’other darsent.’ And he married her; and while I was rotting in that damned prison, her child used to climb over his knee and thrust her fingers into his red hair.”

The wind was lighter; a north-wester on the north Atlantic coast is a blustering wind, which cannot be depended upon in the summer, unless it has the sweep of the continent to give it vigor. Cheever kept his mind upon the boat all the time. He might have been in the middle of the Atlantic and not have seemed lonelier. The circle of waters in which he sailed seemed contracted, yet, looking seaward, his mental vision extended beyond the ever-changing curve of the dark horizon, over the ocean rolling without a break for thousands of miles.

Ahead were the Thatcher’s Island lights, off Cape Ann, the strong buttress of the Massachusetts coast; before long he heard the breakers thundering against the Dry Salvages, and he ran in between Londoner rock and the island. It was nearly ten o’clock he saw by his copper repeater. He changed his course, and all through the night the boat sailed along the coast and the outcast held the tiller with a firm grasp, keeping his eyes upon the stars and watching the coast-line. At sunrise, he was off the shores of Beverly and Manchester, the wooded hills sloping to the sea-washed rocks. Beyond, at the other side of the bay, was Marblehead, its gray houses growing out of the cliff like barnacles. He decided to run into this harbor for food and water; and the breeze, starting up from the sea at sunrise, soon brought him alongside of a wharf, and he began to furl his sail.

He climbed the street which winds up the hill from the wharf, past the weather-beaten houses of the fishermen,—quaint houses with gambrel roofs, huddled together like a flock of sheep, as if for protection against the keen Atlantic breezes. At that time, the whole village was astir; the women busy at household tasks in kitchen and yards, and the men and boys lounging beside fences, or on doorsteps. The fishing-vessels at anchor in the harbor explained this idleness on the part of the male population.

The Embargo Act and the disputes with England had put a stop to the fishing, at one time the main-stay of the town. During the embargo, the Marbleheaders had on hand two years’ catchings of fish, and no vent for them; and the fishermen ate out their hearts in enforced idleness, but retained through it all their loyalty to the government and applauded the law, which shut them out from the chances of getting bread, with a patriotism which should have put to the blush the citizens of the richer towns of Boston and Newburyport. The Marbleheaders have always been fervid in their patriotism. The first cruiser which bore the Stars and Stripes, the schooner Hancock, was commanded by a Marblehead man, Captain Manly, whose deeds of bravery even a Drake would not have disdained to claim as his own. A strange people are the Marbleheaders; to this day keeping their corners, their individualities, prejudices, and dislikes intact. In every war, the hardy fishermen, to whom the ocean was the field, which they tilled as other men tilled the earth, have been the first to respond to the call of their country.

That bright June morning, a messenger was riding post-haste along the coach road to Boston bearing the news of the declaration of war between the “United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, and the dependencies thereof, and the United States of America,”—a message which was to bring consternation to the merchants of State Street and the Federalist politicians, but which was to start out the idle fishing-schooners of Marblehead into privateers, to prey upon the commerce of the ruler of the seas.

Cheever was looked at with some suspicion, as he walked by the groups of men, who were eagerly talking politics. Marbleheaders are and were ever hostile to strangers,—an unpleasant trait, which they doubtless inherit from their ancestors, who came from the Guernsey and Jersey islands, where they had long been exposed to the frequent incursions of the French. But the suspicious natives soon recognized him to be a seafaring man and let him pass unmolested by questions; perhaps they were too much engrossed in discussing “Free Trade and Sailors’ Rights,” to be as vigilant as usual in the inspection of strangers.

At the corner of one of the narrow elm-shaded streets, Cheever saw the welcome sign of a tavern.

A stout man, with the air of proprietor, was seated on the front piazza of the hotel in a wooden chair. He seemed to be unconscious of the stranger’s approach, and to care little whether trade came to the hostelry or not. The indifference to custom of the genuine Yankee tavern-keeper is striking. He will not stir an inch to greet the people whom he calls his guests. Ease and an inn are not concurrent terms in New England, even at the present day.

Cheever put his valise down upon the floor of the piazza, and received the placid stare which the landlord transferred from a hound, who was licking his paws in the sun by the stone step.

“Good morning, Squire,” said Cheever, after waiting a moment for the landlord to make the first advance.

“Mornin’,” was the calm reply.

“Can you give me some breakfast?”

“Well, I guess so. I’ve eaten mine, but there may be some left. Just in, Captain?”

“I came in a small boat just now.”

“Where did you come from?”

“From Ipswich.”

“Any news?”

“No; I haven’t heard any.”

“The times are pretty hard here. ’Tisn’t really any use keepin’ tavern. I am about the only guest I have to entertain. It’s not good business to be eating and drinking your own stock in trade.”

The landlord, after placing his pipe carefully on a window-sill, got up slowly from his chair, and Cheever followed him into the bar,—a dingy room, with a sanded floor and rough plastered walls, painted gray. A large Franklin stove was at one end of the room, and around it were several wooden chairs, browned as to their arms, by much contact with the damp hands of the tavern frequenters. A colored print of George Washington and a copy of the Declaration of Independence broke the dull gray of the walls.

“I think that you had better break up your custom of drinking alone and have a horn with me, Landlord,” said Cheever, nodding his head significantly towards the bar. “I think that a little good old Medford would do neither of us any harm.”

“I will tell them dish you up some breakfast and be right back,” said the landlord, warming up towards the stranger.

Cheever, left alone, began to ponder over his plan of campaign. Marblehead was a good place to wait in until the storm blew over, and if he could get the boat out of the way, no one would trace him. Meanwhile, he would write to his brother-in-law, asking to have the money sent to him. With the money in his pocket, the world would be his oyster. With three thousand dollars cash in hand, a man may do anything; he may even live like a nabob, provided he is content to measure his life in days rather than in years. The landlord interrupted his golden dreams by opening the door through which he had disappeared to order breakfast, and in the twinkling of an eye he had produced a jug and two thick glasses from behind the bar. As he poured out the rum, he eyed Cheever.

“Step up, Captain,” he called out, when the glasses were half full of the Yankee toper’s nectar. “Back up your cart.”

“Here’s your good health, Landlord,” said Cheever, taking up the glass and looking placidly at the liquor. “By the way, Landlord, what’s your name?”

“You might have seen it on the sign-post, if you’d been as sharp as you look, Captain; but to save you the trouble of going out in the yard to read it, my name’s Noyes, James M. Noyes, and I’ve known you since you was knee-high to a grasshopper, Tom Cheever, and you haven’t paid me for that colt you bought of me in ’96! Tom Cheever!”

Cheever turned pale and started, but he was too cool a hand to betray emotion at being recognized. He drank his rum coolly, put the empty glass upon the bar, and stretched out his hand to the landlord.

“Why, bless my soul, so it is you, Jim Noyes. I’m glad to see you, Jim; I never should have known you. You’ve gained fifty pounds since I saw you last. You used to be as spry as a monkey, but I guess that it would be pretty hard for you to shin around the way you used to.”

“You look as if you could climb as actively as you did sixteen years ago,” said Noyes, with a meaning inflection in his voice. “Into dining-room windows at night, for instance.”

Cheever looked the man straight in the eye without changing color.

“Yes; I am as active as ever, Noyes; I haven’t spent my life seated upon a chair doing nothing harder than smoking a pipe and drinking rum. I have been at sea almost all these years. I refused to die, though I am buried at the cemetery up at Oldbury. Indeed, I’ve had knocks hard enough to kill a dozen such soft-muscled fellows as you; but this talking adds to my appetite, Jim, and I was as hungry as a chained wolf when you did me the honor to recognize me. Is breakfast ready, do you suppose?”

“I set Hannah pounding the beefsteak when I went to the kitchen, and I guess that it must be fried by this time. You may as well come into the dining-room.” He opened the door into that room as he spoke. It turned out to be more dismal than the bar-room, but more attractive to the flies, which swarmed over a long table, at one end of which a place was set. A tall, angular woman, with a sallow face, entered the room, bearing the viands from the kitchen,—doughnuts, pie, saleratus biscuit, fried beefsteak and coffee; the food upon which our imperial nation has fed and grown so great. Cheever did not need any urging to attack these comestibles.

“How long is it since you have been to Oldbury?” asked Noyes, as Cheever dropped his knife and fork to gain strength for a fresh attack upon the beefsteak. The landlord was consumed with an ardent curiosity to hear the tale of the adventures of his long-lost townsman, and he was especially anxious to know whether he had brought back money from his wild adventures.

His own sluggish spirit had impelled his body but a few miles from its birthplace during these sixteen years, so that in his whole experience of life there was no memory more exciting than that of stuttering Tom Cheever, the wild son of the Parson, who had left town charged with burglary and owing him one hundred dollars for a chestnut mare. Now here was the scapegrace returned to life, eating Noyes’ meat. This lost hundred dollars had been sincerely mourned over by the unfortunate vender of the chestnut mare, which had been lamed by the reckless purchaser soon after it came into his possession. Would the meat and drink be as cheaply purchased as the horseflesh? A puzzling question to the landlord.

“How long are you going to stay in our town?” was the question born of Noyes’ thoughts.

“A few days, if you’ll give me house-room. Don’t be alarmed, Jim. I’ll pay you in advance, if you wish; and if I am not disappointed I’ll settle with you for that chestnut mare. Damn it, she’s cost me dear enough.”

Noyes’ fat face lighted up. A hundred dollars, a shower of gold from the last century, a debt long since given up by him as utterly worthless! The sea had given up its dead and its treasures.

“You don’t mean it! Tom Cheever!” he cried out.

“Yes, I do. I always meant to pay you that, but I think you got the best of me in that trade, Jim; the nag wasn’t worth the money.”

“She had as pretty a gait as any animal I ever saw on the road, Tom Cheever,” said Noyes, indignantly; “I refused one hundred and twenty-five dollars for her the year before I sold her to you.”

“It seems to me that we had a talk pretty much like this just before I left Oldbury,” replied Cheever, with a queer laugh. “Tell me about your life since then, Jim.”

“I married old Isaac Dizmore’s daughter in ’97. He owned this tavern, and he died in ’02. I came here then with my wife to keep tavern, and she died five years ago.”

“Any children?”

“No; I have not been blessed with offspring.”

“Have you made money?”

Noyes’ eyes suddenly grew suspicious; it would never do to admit that he had any money to this dare-devil.

“No; I’ve grown poorer every year.”

“I don’t believe you, Jim; you’d make money if you were on a desert island. I believe that you are as rich as a Jew. You needn’t be afraid to tell me; I shan’t rob you. I have plenty of honest money of my own.”

Noyes still looked suspiciously at his guest.

“I have no money,” he insisted. “I own this house, my wife left it to me in her will, but the longer I own it the poorer I am.”

“I shall need some writing materials. Have you any?”

“I guess that I can find some in my desk. You’re welcome to them.”

“All right; I’ll write a letter when I get through breakfast.”

The fat landlord walked out of the room to get the paper, leaving Cheever to a further inroad against the breakfast.