The Northern Iron — Story, Setting & Ideas

sail, and come up under my lee.”

Maurice and Neal obeyed. The sea was rougher than it had been near the shore. The boat, when Maurice had made fast the rope flung to him, plunged up and down beside the brig, and needed careful handling to prevent her being damaged.

The crew looked over the side with eager curiosity.

“Say, boys,” said the captain, “what will you take for your fish? I’ll trade with you.”

“I don’t want to sell them,” said Maurice. “I’ll give them to you.”

His voice and accent, his refusal to barter, betrayed the fact that he was a gentleman.

“I guess,” said the captain, “that you’re an aristocrat, a British aristocrat, too proud to take the money of the men who whipped you in the States. That’s so.”

“I’m an Irish gentleman,” said Maurice.

“Well, Mr. Irish Gentleman, if you’re too darned aristocratic to trade, I’ll give you a present of a case of good Virginia, and you may give me a present of your fish. I’d call it a swap, but if that turns your stomach I’ll let you call it a mutual present, an expression of international goodwill.”

“Fling him up the fish, Neal,” said Maurice.

Then another man appeared beside the captain on the quarter-deck. He was not a seafaring man. He was lean and yellow, and had keen grey eyes. His face seemed in some way familiar to Neal, though he could not recollect having ever seen the man before.

“Yon are the Causeway cliffs,” he said, “and yon’s Pleaskin Head, and the islands we passed are the Skerries?”

“You know this coast,” said Neal.

“I knew this coast, young man, before your mother had the dandling of you. I know it now, though it’s five and twenty years since I set foot on it. But that’s not the question. What I want to know is this. Can you put me ashore? I could do well if you land me at the Causeway. I’d make shift with my bag if you put me out at Port Ballin-trae. I don’t want to be going on to Glasgow just for the pleasure of coming back again.”

“I’ll land you at the Black Rock under Run-kerry,” said Maurice, “if you can pull an oar. The wind’s rising, and I’ve no mind to carry idle passengers.”

“I can pull an oar,” said the stranger.

“I guess he can pull enough to break your back, young man,” said the captain. “He’s an American citizen, and he’s been engaged in whipping your British army. I guess an American citizen can lick a darned aristocrat at pulling an oar same as he did at shooting off guns.”

“Shut your damned mouth,” said Maurice, suddenly angry, “or I’ll leave you to land your passenger yourself and see how you like beating the bottom out of your brig against our rocks. You’ll find an Irish rock harder than your Yankee wood.”

The passenger fetched a small hand-bag and lowered it into the boat. Under a shower of jibes from the captain, Maurice and Neal pushed off and started for the row home against the wind.

The passenger took his seat in the bow of the boat and stripped off his coat in readiness to pull an oar. But no oar was offered to him. Maurice St. Clair seemed to have entirely forgotten the stranger’s presence. The remarks of the American captain had angered him, and his mind worked on the insults hurled at him in parting. Neal was angry, too. They pulled viciously at the oars. From time to time Maurice broke out fiercely--

“An unmannerly brute! I wish I had him somewhere off the deck of his brig. I’d teach him how to speak to a gentleman.

“Is that his filthy tobacco at your feet, Brown-Eyes? Pitch it overboard.

“I suppose he’s a specimen of the Republican breed. That’s what comes of liberty and equality and French Jacobinism and Tom Paine and the Rights of Man. Damned insolence I call it.”

“I’d like to remind you, young man------.” The words came with a quiet drawl from the passenger in the bow.

Maurice stopped rowing, and turned round.

“Well, what do you want to say? More insolence? Better be careful unless you want to try what it feels like to swim ashore.”

“I’d like to remind you, young man, that Captain Hercules Getty, of the State of Pennsylvania, who commands the brig ‘Saratoga,’ belongs to a nation which has fought for liberty and won it.”

“What’s that got to do with his insolence?”