Pirate Gold | Page 3

and here McMurtagh's anxiety led him to interfere at any cost. An ill-favored, slight man was he, stooping of habit; and he came in rubbing his hands and looking anxiously, one eye on the father, the other on the son, as his oddly protuberant eyes almost enabled him to do.
"There is a ship coming up the harbor, sir, full-laden, and I think she flies the signal of James Bowdoin's Sons."
"Damn James Bowdoin's Sons, sir!" says Mr. James Bowdoin. "And as for you, sir, not a stick or shingle shall you have"--
"If you'll only take the girl, you're welcome to the house, sir," says Mr. James.
"Oh, I am, am I? Then, by gad, sir, I'll take both houses, and Sam Dowse's daughter'll live in one, and your mother and I in the other!"
"Sam Dowse's daughter?"
"Yes, sir, Miss Abby Dowse. Have you any objections?"
"Why, she--she's the other arrangement," says Mr. James.
"Oh, she is, is she?"
Mr. James Bowdoin hesitated a moment, as if in search of some withering reply, but failed to find it.
"Humph! I thought it was time you came to your senses. Now, here's the keys, d'ye see? And the house was old Judge Allerton's; it's too large for his daughter, and, now that you'll marry the girl I've got for you, I'll let you have it."
"I shall marry what girl I like," says Mr. James; "and as for the house, damme if I'll take it,--not a stick, sir, not a shingle!"
Mr. James Bowdoin looked at his son for one moment, speechless; then he slammed out of the room. Mr. James put his foot on the desk and whistled. McMurtagh rubbed his hands.

IV.
The office in which Mr. James found himself was a small, square, sunny corner room with four windows, in the third story of the upper angle of the long block of granite warehouses that lined the wharf. Below him was the then principal commercial street of the city, full of bustle, noisy with drays; at the side was the slip of the dock itself, with its warm, green, swaying water, upon which a jostled crowd of various craft was rocking sleepily in the summer morning. The floor of the room was bare. Between the windows, on one side, was an open, empty stove; on the other were two high desks, with stools. An eight-day clock ticked comfortably upon the wall, and on either side of it were two pictures, wood-cuts, eked out with rude splashes of red and blue by some primitive process of lithography: the one represented the "Take of a Right Whale in Behring's Sea by the Good Adventure Barque out of New Bedford;" the other, the "Landing of H. M. Troops in Boston, His Majesty's Province of Massachusetts Bay in New England, 1766." In the latter picture, the vanes on the town steeples and the ships in the bay were represented very big, and the town itself very small; and the dull black and white of the wood-cut was relieved by one long stream of red, which was H. M. troops landing and marching up the Long Wharf, and by several splotches of the same, where the troops were standing, drawn up in line, upon each frigate, and waiting to be ferried.
A quiet little place the office would have seemed to us; and yet there was not a sea on earth, probably, that did not bear its bounding ship sent out from that small office. And if it was still, in there, it had a cosmopolitan, aromatic smell; for every strange letter or foreign sample with which the place was littered bespoke the business of the bright, blue world outside. From the street below came noise enough, and loud voices of sailors and shipmen in many a foreign tongue. For in those days we had freedom of the sea and dealings with the world, and had not yet been taught to cabin all our energies within the spindle-rooms of cotton-mills. As Mr. James looked out of the window he saw a full-rigged ship, whose generous lines and clipper rig bespoke the long-voyage liner, warping slowly up toward the dock, her fair white lower sails, still wet from the sea, hanging at the yards, the stiff salt sparkling in the sunlight.
Mr. James Bowdoin was already standing at the pier-head (for it was indeed their ship of which McMurtagh had been speaking), and Mr. James made bold to turn the key upon the counting-room and go to join his father. Here he was standing, side by side with him, swaying his body, with his thumbs in his waistcoat pocket, in some unconscious imitation of ownership, when his father caught sight of him and ordered him sharply back. "Yes, sir," said Mr. James, and moved to the other angle of the wharf, for he had caught the word "pirates;"