"I'm glad you have come back to wait till all your troubles are settled.
The most consoling friends are those who know and who sympathize and who
keep still! Now come with me and listen to the children and see what
the women are doing. You will be proud and glad because you spoke up for
them that day when we went over to Hue and Cry."
After that there was no constraint between them; they kept their own
affairs hidden from each other. The autumn passed and the long, chill
evenings came, and when the fishing-schooner was in port at Maquoit,
between trips, Mayo and the girl spent comfortable hours together,
playing at cards under the widow's red-shaded lamp and under the widow's
approving eyes.
"No, they ain't courting, either," she informed the pestering neighbors.
"Do you suppose I have been twice married and twice a widder not to know
courting when I see it? It's 'Boyd this' and 'Polly that,' to be sure,
the whole continyal time; but she is engaged to somebody else, because
she has been wearing an engagement ring that has come to her since she
has been here. She showed it to me, and she showed it to him! And as for
him, everybody 'longcoast knows how dead gone on him that millionaire
girl is! Now everybody mind their own business!"
As the days passed the widow's counsel seemed to apply to all the
affairs of Maquoit; folks went at their business in good earnest.
The winter wind nipped, the wharf piles were sheathed with ice, and only
hardy men were abroad on the waterfront of the coast city, but the crew
of the Ethel and May were unusually cheerful that day.
The schooner had stayed on Cashes Banks and had ridden out a gale that
had driven other fishermen to shelter. Then in the first lull she had
sent her dories over the rail and had put down her trawls for a set,
and a rousing set it was! It seemed as if the cod, hake, and haddock had
been waiting for that gale to stop so that they might hunt for baited
hooks and have a feast. Nearly every ganging-line had its prize. The bow
pulley in each dory fairly chuckled with delight as the trawl line was
pulled over it. Every three feet was a ganging-line. Each dory strung
out a mile of trawl. And when the dories returned to the schooner and
dumped the catch into the hold the little craft fairly wallowed under
her load.
They caught the market bare; the gale had blown for nearly a week.
Fish-houses bid spiritedly against one another, and when at last a trade
was made and the schooner's crew began to pitchfork the fish into the
winch buckets, and the buckets rose creaking out over the rail, the two
captains went into the office of the fish-house to figure some mighty
gratifying profits.