Doctor Luke of the Labrador

Doctor Luke of the Labrador, by Norman Duncan

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Title: Doctor Luke of the Labrador
Author: Norman Duncan
Release Date: November 30, 2006 [EBook #19981]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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[Illustration: "I've a bad son, the day, Skipper Tommy," said my Mother.--Page 23.]
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DOCTOR LUKE OF THE LABRADOR
BY NORMAN DUNCAN
GROSSET & DUNLAP
Publishers--New York
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Copyright, 1904, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY
New York: 158 Fifth Avenue Chicago: 63 Washington Street Toronto: 27 Richmond Street, W London: 21 Paternoster Square Edinburgh: 30 St. Mary Street
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To My Own Mother and to her granddaughter Elspeth my niece
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To the Reader
However bleak the Labrador--however naked and desolate that shore--flowers bloom upon it. However bitter the despoiling sea--however cold and rude and merciless--the gentler virtues flourish in the hearts of the folk.... And the glory of the coast--and the glory of the whole world--is mother-love: which began in the beginning and has continued unchanged to this present time--the conspicuous beauty of the fabric of life: the great constant of the problem.
N. D.
College Campus, Washington, Pennsylvania, October 15, 1904.
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CONTENTS
I. Our Harbour 13 II. The World from the Watchman 17 III. In the Haven of Her Arms 29 IV. The Shadow 35 V. Mary 48 VI. The Man on the Mail Boat 57 VII. The Woman from Wolf Cove 70 VIII. The Blind and the Blind 79 IX. A Wreck on the Thirty Devils 89 X. The Flight 102 XI. The Women at the Gate 110 XII. Doctor and I 115 XIII. A Smiling Face 125 XIV. In the Watches of the Night 133 XV. The Wolf 138 XVI. A Malady of the Heart 150 XVII. Hard Practice 167 XVIII. Skipper Tommy Gets a Letter 182 XIX. The Fate of the Mail-Boat Doctor 191 XX. Christmas Eve at Topmast Tickle 202 XXI. Down North 219 XXII. The Way from Heart's Delight 222 XXIII. The Course of True Love 239 XXIV. The Beginning of the End 258 XXV. A Capital Crime 265 XXVI. Decoyed 287 XXVII. The Day of the Dog 305 XXVIII. In Harbour 320
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[Illustration: SKETCH MAP of OUR HARBOR]
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DOCTOR LUKE of THE LABRADOR
I
OUR HARBOUR
A cluster of islands, lying off the cape, made the shelter of our harbour. They were but great rocks, gray, ragged, wet with fog and surf, rising bleak and barren out of a sea that forever fretted a thousand miles of rocky coast as barren and as sombre and as desolate as they; but they broke wave and wind unfailingly and with vast unconcern--they were of old time, mighty, steadfast, remote from the rage of weather and the changing mood of the sea, surely providing safe shelter for us folk of the coast--and we loved them, as true men, everywhere, love home.
"'Tis the cleverest harbour on the Labrador!" said we.
When the wind was in the northeast--when it broke, swift and vicious, from the sullen waste of water beyond, whipping up the grey sea, driving in the vagrant ice, spreading clammy mist over the reefs and rocky headlands of the long coast--our harbour lay unruffled in the lee of God's Warning. Skull Island and a shoulder of God's Warning broke the winds from the north: the froth of the breakers, to be sure, came creeping through the north tickle, when the sea was high; but no great wave from the open ever disturbed the quiet water within. We were fended from the southerly gales by the massive, beetling front of the Isle of Good Promise, which, grandly unmoved by their fuming rage, turned them up into the black sky, where they went screaming northward, high over the heads of the white houses huddled in the calm below; and the seas they brought--gigantic, breaking seas--went to waste on Raven Rock and the Reef of the Thirty Black Devils, ere, their strength spent, they growled over the jagged rocks at the base of the great cliffs of Good Promise and came softly swelling through the broad south tickle to the basin. The west wind came out of the wilderness, fragrant of the far-off forest, lying unknown and dread in the inland, from which the mountains, bold and blue and forbidding, lifted high their heads; and the mist was then driven back into the gloomy seas of the east, and the sun was out, shining warm and yellow, and the sea, lying in the lee of the land, was all aripple and aflash.
When the spring gales blew--the sea being