Читать книгу The Seiners - James B. Connolly - Страница 9

24

I had listened to them––skippers and others––and yet now, when she held out her hand to me and smiled, I didn’t feel nearly so set against her. She certainly was a handsome girl, and yet I hoped that Maurice wouldn’t fall in love with her, as most everybody did that came to the Arkell house.

I said that I did not have time to come in, and started to make off. Maurice asked me where I was bound. I told him that I thought of taking a look in at Crow’s Nest and getting the news.

“Yes, you’ll get it there, sure enough. When they can’t tell you anything else up there they can tell you what everybody’s doing.” He smiled at that, turned slowly toward the side-door, as if he would rather go with me to Crow’s Nest, and I went off.

Just outside the gate I saw Sam Hollis, a man I never did like. Tommie Clancy, the man that could size up a person quicker than anybody I’d ever met, used to say that deep down, if you could get at Hollis, you’d find a quitter, but that nobody had ever got into him. I’d been meeting Hollis after every trip in for two years in Withrow’s store. He was a successful fisherman, and a sharp, keen man ashore, but he was a man I never quite took to. One of his ambitions, I felt satisfied, was to be reckoned a devil of a fellow. He’d have given a year’s earnings, I knew, to have people 25 point him out on the street and say, “There’s Sam Hollis––there’s the boy to carry sail––nobody ever made him take his mains’l in,” the same as they used to say of a half dozen or so that really would carry sail––that would drive a vessel under before they would be the first to reef. But the people didn’t do that, although, let him tell it, he did wonderful things out to sea, and he had such a way of telling it, too, that he’d almost make you believe him. But as Clancy used to say, after he’d left you, and you had time to think it over, you’d see where here and there his story wasn’t well-calked. My own idea was that he wanted a reputation so that he could pose as a devil of a fellow with certain people ashore. It is easy enough to see that even a more careful man than Sam Hollis might take a chance for a smile from a woman like Minnie Arkell.

Anyhow, I never felt at home with Hollis, and so was willing to take Clancy’s judgment straight. Hollis was a man about forty, and had been one of Minnie Arkell’s admirers ever since I could remember––ever since she was old enough to have any, I mean, and she wasn’t any late bloomer, as Clancy used to say.

Hollis went into the Arkell house by the door that had only just closed behind Maurice and Minnie Arkell. I didn’t like that very much, and was 26 thinking of turning back and going in, too; but on second thought it occurred to me that perhaps only Maurice would have a welcome for me. So I didn’t enter, but kept on to Crow’s Nest instead.

27