Nineteen out of twenty saw the schooner this way, as a freak.
The twentieth saw it as an interesting if disconcerting experiment.
Adam Long saw her as a bride.
A bride for somebody else?
He wheeled around, hands clenched, scowling, as though at a shouted challenge from the town, which, however, slumbered on. He glared at it, as at a rival for the affections of his beloved.
He must get out of here! He had his fortune to make, and they weren't going to hold him up—not any longer!
The white Moses boat, the schooner's gig, was not paintered to the stringpiece, as it should have been, and to find another boat at this hour might be difficult or noisy—or both. Well, he didn't need a boat.
He took his shoes off and stuck them into the pockets of his coat.
The water was cold, and he swam swiftly, lungingly, weighted by his clothes, but dogged, making scarcely a ripple.
Resolved Forbes popped his eyes with an almost audible click when his captain pulled himself over the larboard gunwale.
"This'll hold through morning. Let's have the hook up."
"Aye, aye, sir."
Afraid of fresh air, as sailors so often are, the hands had closed the forecastle hatch. Resolved Forbes flung it open, shouted an order. He returned to Adam.
"Reason why the Moses wasn't there—"
"I was about to ask you that, Mister."
"Man named Seth Selden came aboard with her, little while ago. Said he's an owner. Said he'd decided to go along, as a passenger."
Adam nodded amiably.
"Drunk?"
"He was getting that way."
"Where is he now?"
"Asleep in your bunk, sir. Should I put him ashore?"
With a minimum of grumbling, all things considered, sleepy men walked the capstan. Jethro Gardner, the hard-bitten bosun, made for the halyards. Adam himself took the tiller. He shook his head.
"No." He doubted that there was anything in this part of the world could catch Goodwill, but he wasn't going to take any chances of Seth's raising the town. Wait till they'd left Brenton's Reef well astern. "We could use an extra hand. Let him asleep. I'll take care of him later."
You had to pay some way for all that speed. Goodwill to Men in any kind of sea was a roller. She was a pitcher, too, and would take over all sorts of green water, which fact, together with the sucked-in bows and quarters even more cramped than was customary, made the forecastle in dirty weather a miserable place. The officers' cabin, a tiny one reached by ladder through a slide-hatch on the after deck near the tiller, was scarcely more commodious, though it was less likely to be wet.
When Adam Long went below, dawn was graying the deck and the vessel was truly outside, standing about in a lively manner, but booming.
In the middle of the cabin was his own sea chest and on top of that Seth Selden's. Resolved Forbes' effects were neatly stowed away in the larboard locker and his chest was under the larboard bunk. On the starboard bunk, asleep, indeed snoring, was Seth Selden.
This was the captain's berth, to which Seth had not lingered to hear himself elected. Here was, in fact, though he didn't know it, the real skipper, the legal one.
In his two hands, upright, though the cork was out, was a bottle of rum, half empty. It was good rum, too, as Adam knew, who'd bought it —no dunder, nine pence a bottle. Adam corked it and put it away. He stood a moment, staring at the mean-faced man. He began to grin.
He drew back his right foot.
A portion of Seth Selden's backside hung over the edge of the bunk. It was not a large target; and Adam might have done better, too, with more room to swing in—nevertheless the kick was a hearty one and it slammed Seth against the bulkhead, so that he woke screeching.
Adam grabbed him by the front of his fearnought and yanked him off the bunk and to the foot of the ladder, not far. He drew back a fist as red and almost as large as a Westphalian ham.
"Stowaway, eh? Well, we'll keep you busy! You want to get along on this vessel, Mr. Stowaway, you'd better learn to listen to the captain!"
Seth looked at the fist. He wet his lips.
"Do I make myself clear?" asked Adam Long.
Seth nodded.
Then Adam seized him fore and aft—collar of fearnought, seat of breeches.
"You, up there! Stow these things in the forecastle!"
He heaved Seth to the deck. He heaved Seth's chest after him.
Adam took off and hung up his freedom suit. It was not a very good suit, the sort of thing Mr. Sedgewick would give him, having been legally obliged to. Adam would get better suits soon, much better ones; but he thought that he might always save this one.
It swung back and forth with the movement of the schooner.
Naked then as the day he was born, Adam Long knelt and said his prayers. Afterward he got into the starboard bunk and turned his face to the wall. There were tears in his eyes, he didn't know why. He must have been mighty wrought-up. It was some time before he fell asleep.
PART TWO. Won’t Anybody Buy My Eels
There is not much that's noble about a bowsprit, at least to a sailing man, who thinks of it primarily as a thing you sit over when you want to relieve yourself—the head of the vessel, dedicated to a practice not good for neatness when she's climbing into weather-but the Goodwill bowsprit was something special. To Adam Long it was a humbling post, an article to be gazed on as another might gaze on a skull, an hourglass, or some similar memento mori.
For Adam had opposed this bowsprit. He would have had it steeved at a much sharper angle. Goodwill though more or less a community venture, represented the most advanced ideas in design. "The ship of the future," a few proudly averred. "A tarnation freak," said others. Throughout her building the yard had been visited by men who shook their heads, clucked their tongues.
"She won't even float, that hooker! She won't float!"
A lad of less than twenty then, a 'prentice who had never been to sea except as a baby when his mother brought him over, Adam nevertheless had insisted upon plenty to say about the construction of Goodwill; and in most matters, indeed in all but this one, he had been loud on the side of the ahead-lookers. But concerning the bowsprit he'd gone conservative. A straight-out sprit would weaken the hull. The elimination of the sprit-sail—there just wouldn't be room for a spritsail the way they were building Goodwill—would cost speed. It would put too great a strain on the sticks. It would make the whole vessel look silly.
Well, he'd been crashingly wrong; and this was his private scourge. He had vowed that whenever he felt himself waxing cocksure he would go forward and have a good long look at that bowsprit.
He did this the first morning out. The day was a dandy. Goodwill fairly leapt through the water, and all was atauto aloft and alow—in Jeth Gardner the bosun's phrase they had cracked on everything but the cook's shirt. The seas danced bright in the sun.