The Best Short Stories of 1919 Part 30

TO THE BITTER END[13]

[Note 13: Copyright, 1919, by The Curtis Publis.h.i.+ng Company.

Copyright, 1920, by Richard Matthews Hallet.]

BY RICHARD MATTHEWS HALLET

From _The Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_

The feud between Hat Tyler and Mrs. Elmer Higgins sprang out of a chance laugh of Elmer's when he was making his first trip as cadet. Hat Tyler was a sea captain, and of a formidable type. She was master of the _Susie P. Oliver_, and her husband, Tyler, was mate. They were bound for New York with a load of paving stones when they collided with the coasting steamer _Alfred de Vigny_, in which Elmer was serving his apprentices.h.i.+p as a cadet officer.

The old cadet had just come up on the bridge from taking a sounding--he even had a specimen of the bottom in his hand, he said later, sand with black specks and broken sh.e.l.l--when something queer attracted his attention half a point on the starboard bow. It was a thick foggy night, s.h.i.+ps bellowing all round, and a weird-looking tow coming up astern with a string of lights one over another like a lot of Chinese lanterns. It was probably these lights that had drawn the mate's attention away from the s.h.i.+p's bows.

At all events he was standing with a megaphone to his ear hearkening for noises on the port hand when Elmer took him by the elbow and called out: "What in the name of Sam Hill would you call that great contraption mouching across our bows? My sorrows, Fred, it's a schooner!"

The mate went cold along his spine, and the vertebrae distributed there jostled together like knucklebones on the back of a girl's hand, and he yelled "Port helm!"

"I told Fred," Elmer said in discussing this circ.u.mstance later with his cronies of the Tall Stove Club--he had got back safe and sound to Winter Harbor by that time--"I says to him, 'Fred, we're going to b.u.mp into that s.h.i.+p jest as sure as taxes!' There he stood, swearing a blue streak. I never knew a man to be so downright profane over the little things of life as he was. And I was right when it come to that too.

There was that long Spanish ghost of a schooner dead in our path, with her port light s.h.i.+ning out there as red as an apple. They wanted me to say later--I know the skipper come to me personally and says, 'Elmer, now you know you didn't see no light.' 'Captain Tin,' I says to him, 'I have got the greatest respect for you as a man, and I would favor you in all ways possible if 'twas so 'st I could; but if I was to testify the way you want me to I would go against conscience. I wouldn't feel that I could go on paying my pew tax. These people here want to know the truth and I am going to give it to them.' Yes, sir, I saw the light as plain as plain, and I pointed it out to Fred, but the devil and Tom Walker couldn't have prevented them s.h.i.+ps from walking right up and into each other, situated as they was then.

"My conscience, warn't there works when those two come together! 'Fred,'

I says--I was down on my knees; throwed there, you understand--'we're hit!' 'Tell me something I don't know, will you?' he says. He always was comical, jest as comical as he could be. 'Get down there and look at her snout,' he said to me. 'Find out which of us is going to sink.' That was Fred all over--one of these fellows, all bl.u.s.ter, where it's a bucket of wind against a thimbleful of go-ahead."

"I know him," interposed another member of the Tall Stove Club. "I knew the whole family. He never amounted to nothing till he got to going to sea."

"Well, I down off the bridge," went on Elmer, "and I up on the fo'c'stle head, and there I see the schooner leaning over sort of faintish, jest the way a man will when he's sick to his stomach, and I says to myself, 'That s.h.i.+p's going the way of the wicked.' I sung out to Fred to keep the _Alfred_ going slow ahead, so as to give the crew a chance to come aboard, and it warn't no time before they was swarming up into our chains like so many ants out of a hill that has been knocked galley-west. I see we was all wrinkled up forward ourselves--the _Alfred_ was a tin s.h.i.+p--and it warn't to be wondered at when you come to consider that the _Susie Oliver_ was jest as full as she could hold of paving stones.

"And the next thing I knew there was Jed Tyler, right out of the blue sky, standing side of me in his s.h.i.+rt sleeves, and looking down, mournful enough. 'Where's Hat?' I sung out to him. 'Drowned,' he says.

'Drowned, am I?' Hat sung out. 'I guess that's just another case of the thought being father to the wish, that's what I guess!'

"So I leaned down, and my stars, there was Hat Tyler! She'd come up jest as she was--there she was sitting on the fluke of the starboard anchor.

And warn't she immense! I down over the s.h.i.+p's side with a rope, and s'

I, 'Heave and away, my girl!' and I got a grip of her, and away she come over the rail, mad as a wet hen, and jest as wet, too, with her hair stringing down, and her dander up, if ever I see a woman with her dander up."

"I hear she leads Tyler a life," said a member.

"Well, I laughed; I couldn't help it," continued Elmer, moving his ears at the recollection of it.

"'Hat,' I says, 'you never was caught out this way before in all your born days,' I says. She was fit to be tied. 'Laugh!' she says. 'You great b.o.o.by!' 'Hat,' I says, 'I shall give up, I know I shall.' 'It's jest your ignorance,' she says. 'I know it,' I says, 'but I couldn't help it no more than if you had slid a knife into me.' And I out with another. 'Come down into my cabin,' I says, 'and I will give you a little something in a gla.s.s.' And down she come, past all them sailors, in the face and eyes of everybody."

"She didn't lose nothing by what I hear," said Zinie Shadd. "They tell me the underwriters had just as good as told her that they wouldn't let the schooner go to sea again."

And now by your leave a word from Hat herself. There are two sides to every story. She told her tale just across the street from the s.h.i.+p chandler's, where the Tall Stove Club held its meetings. In Mrs.

Kidder's bake-shop were gathered the henchmen of Hat Tyler.

"Well, I never see your equal for falling on your feet," Lena Kidder said admiringly. "If I've told my husband once I've told him twenty times I'd rather have Hat Tyler's luck than a license to steal."

"Everybody has got a right to their own opinion on that point," said Hat Tyler heavily, sinking her jaws toward the mug of milk which Mrs. Kidder had set before her.

Hat Tyler was certainly a handful. Her shoulders were wide, as she often said herself, her cheeks were brick-red, her voice was as deep as the fattest gold pipe on the church organ, and the palm of her hand rasped when she took hold of a body. There wasn't a hornier-handed woman in the county. She wore tarred rope round her girth for a belt, knotted at the ends with star knots. She was what Margaret Fuller had in mind when she said to Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Let them be sea captains if they will."

"Where was you when she hit, Hat?" asked Mrs. Kidder.

"Asleep," said Mrs. Tyler. "I come up out of my bunk all standing, and went out on deck just as I was. And lo and behold, I had just time to get a grip on that anchor when the _Oliver_ give a lurch and over she went. She didn't s.h.i.+lly-shally, I can tell you, with that load of paving stones in her belly. Let me have another quart of milk, Lena. Talking's thirsty business. Well, I thought I'd get my never-get-over, waiting for those men to get a rig ready for me. And then who should I see but that fool Elmer Higgins looking down at me. 'Hang on, Hat,' he said, 'while I think what to do,' 'Think what to do!' I says. 'If you're any part of a man you'll fling me a rope.' 'Jest half a second,' he says. 'Rome wasn't built in a day.' 'It was burned up in a night, though,' I says quick as a flash, and I guess that floored him. 'Can't you lift me up, man?'

'Much as ever I can,' he says. 'And you call yourself an able seaman,' I said to him. 'I would sell out if I was you.'"

"He's going round with a different version, Hat," said Lena Kidder.

"Didn't he laugh as he says he did?"

"Laugh? I would like to see the man that would laugh," said Hat in her great hardy voice. Her fist closed round the mug of milk. "I'll have him laughing on the wrong side of his face."

"He says he give a bellow fit to wake the dead."

"That man? He stood there like a brazen image, and I had to say to him: 'Are you going to let me stand here in this peris.h.i.+ng cold without so much as lifting a hand? Just you stir your stumps and hotfoot a slug of square-faced gin into me if you know what's for your own best good.'

"That man? Why, I taught him all he knows. I was sailing my own s.h.i.+ps when he was a deckhand."

The truth was--and Pearl Higgins, his wife, could never quite forget it or forgive it--Elmer had once s.h.i.+pped before the mast on Hat Tyler's s.h.i.+ps; and Hat was not likely to forget it either. Rumor had it that Hat and Elmer had been as thick as thieves at one time, and that it was You-tickle-me-and-I'll-kiss-you between them then. But if such was the case they had later had a falling out, and Elmer had gone one way and Hat another.

"As a matter of fact I was more glad than sorry at what took place," Hat now continued. "That cargo of paving stones up and s.h.i.+fted and started her in a new place. She was leaking like a sieve. That little rat of an underwriter said to me: 'If I were you, as soon as I got out of sight of land I would turn round and kick the stern off her with a tap of my foot.' 'Maybe I will, for all you know,' I said. I'd like to see them bamboozle me!"

"Trust you, Hat!" said Lena Kidder in a voice of admiration.

"And so Elmer Higgins has the cast-iron nerve to say that he laughed at me to my face, does he?" continued Mrs. Tyler. "Well, he lies when he says it."

So the lie was pa.s.sed, and hostilities began; for before night word came to Pearl Higgins that Hat Tyler was back in town running down her husband for his part in the rescue. Elmer's wife, a dark thin-featured woman, had felt all along that Elmer had never been able to shake off vestiges of that time when he and Hat had been so kind of hand-in-glove; and she had privately determined to put the woman at a safe distance once and for all.

"The long and short of it is," she said grimly when Elmer had come home and spread his navigation books on the kitchen table "she's round town calling you a liar; and now I suppose you'll be just meek enough to put up with it."

Elmer took off his spectacles and rubbed his brow thoughtfully.

"I shouldn't wonder if it was a case of necessity, mamma," he said musingly. "If I know one thing better than another it is that I would want to go in training for a spell before crossing that woman. I know when I was before the mast with her--"

Pearl Higgins burst into tears promptly. "I think you might spare me an account of that," she sobbed. "I'm sure I don't want to hear about your goings-on with anyone so ignorant as Hat Tyler. Yes, she is; she's ignorant, and comes of ignorant people. What does she amount to, I'd like to know? There's nothing to her at all. And now," she blazed forth in fierier tones, "you're half in sympathy with the woman this blessed minute! I suppose you think just because you rescued her from a watery grave you're in duty bound to side in with her and take her part against your own wife. I don't know how it is, but everything seems to fall out in that woman's favor."

"Well, ain't it so!" said Elmer, not as a question but as if the full force of the proposition had just struck him. "Now you mention it, I don't know that I ever knew Hat Tyler to come off second best in a transaction. I was talking to a party only the other day, and he said the same thing himself. He says, 'Hat's a smart woman, Elmer.'"

"Why didn't you have her then, when you might have had her?"

"Always said I wouldn't marry a woman that had the heft of me," said Elmer sagely with a fond twinkle at his Pearl. "I know that night when I saw her arm on the fluke of that anchor I said to myself, 'I done just right to steer clear of you, my lady.' There 't was, bare to the shoulder, freckled all the way up, and jest that pretty size!"

"It's as big as a stovepipe!" shrieked Pearl.

"'T was smooth as a smelt," Elmer averred dreamily, "and jest of a bigness to work, and work well, in a pinch. A woman like that would be some protection to a man, Pearl. I wish you could have seen how she clim up into those anchor chains. But I said to myself, 'That woman has got too much iron in her blood to go with my const.i.tution!'