The Harbor Master

The Harbor Master

Project Gutenberg's The Harbor Master, by Theodore Goodridge Roberts This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Harbor Master
Author: Theodore Goodridge Roberts
Release Date: February 1, 2006 [EBook #17658]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
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THE HARBOR MASTER
BY
THEODORE GOODRIDGE ROBERTS
AUTHOR OF
"Rayton: A Backwoods Mystery," "A Captain of Raleigh's," "A Cavalier of Virginia," "Captain Love," "Brothers of Peril" and "Hemming, the Adventurer."
MADE IN U.S.A.
M.A. DONOHUE & COMPANY CHICAGO NEW YORK
Copyright, 1911
BY STREET & SMITH
Copyright, 1913
By L.C. Page & Company
(INCORPORATED)
All rights reserved

First Impression, January, 1913 Second Impression, February, 1913
The English edition of this book is entitled "The Toll of the Tides," but the American publishers have preferred to retain the author's original title, "The Harbor Master."
CONTENTS PAGE
I. BLACK DENNIS NOLAN 1
II. NOLAN SHOWS HIS APTITUDE FOR COMMAND 19
III. FOXEY JACK QUINN SLIPS AWAY 36
IV. DEAD MAN'S DIAMONDS 54
V. FATHER MCQUEEN VISITS HIS FLOCK 64
VI. THE GIRL FROM THE CROSS-TREES 86
VII. THE GOLD OF THE "ROYAL WILLIAM" 101
VIII. THE SKIPPER STRUGGLES AGAINST SUPERSTITION 115
IX. SOME EARLY VISITS 135
X. MARY KAVANAGH 147
XI. THE SKIPPER CARRIES A LETTER 164
XII. DICK LYNCH GOES ON THE WAR-PATH 181
XIII. BILL BRENNEN PREACHES LOYALTY 194
XIV. DICK LYNCH MEETS MR. DARLING 210
XV. MR. DARLING SETS OUT ON A JOURNEY 225
XVI. MR. DARLING ARRIVES IN CHANCE ALONG 235
XVII. MARY KAVANAGH USES HER WITS 250
XVIII. MOTHER NOLAN DOES SOME SPYING 265
XIX. MARY AT WORK AGAIN 279
XX. FATHER MCQUEEN'S RETURN 292

THE HARBOR MASTER
CHAPTER I
BLACK DENNIS NOLAN
At the back of a deep cleft in the formidable cliffs, somewhere between Cape Race to the southward and St. John's to the northward, hides the little hamlet of Chance Along. As to its geographical position, this is sufficient. In the green sea in front of the cleft, and almost closing the mouth of it, lie a number of great boulders, as if the breech in the solid cliff had been made by some giant force that had broken and dragged forth the primeval rock, only to leave the refuse of its toil to lie forever in the edge of the tide, to fret the gnawing currents. At low tide a narrow strip of black shingle shows between the nearer of these titanic fragments and the face of the cliff. The force has been at work at other points of the coast as well. A mile or so to the north it has broken down and scattered seaward a great section of the cliff, scarring the water with a hundred jagged menaces to navigation, and leaving behind it a torn sea front and a wide, uneven beach. About three miles to the south of the little, hidden village it has wrought similar havoc, long forgotten ages ago.
Along this coast, for many miles, treacherous currents race and shift continually, swinging in from the open sea, creeping along from the north, slanting in from the southeast and snarling up (but their snarling is hidden far below the surface) from the tide-vexed, storm-worn prow of old Cape Race. The pull and drift of many of these currents are felt far out from land, and they cannot be charted because of their shiftings, and their shiftings cannot be calculated with any degree of accuracy, because they seem to be without system or law. These are dangerous waters even now; and before the safeguard of a strong light on the cape, in the days when ships were helplessly dragged by the sea when there was no wind to drive them--in the days before a "lee-shore" had ceased to be an actual peril to become a picturesque phrase in nautical parlance--they constituted one of the most notorious disaster-zones of the North Atlantic.
We are told, as were our fathers before us, that one man's poison may be another man's meat, and that it is an ill wind indeed that does not blow an advantage to somebody. The fundamental truths of these ancient saws were fully realized by the people of Chance Along. Ships went down in battered fragments to their clashing sea-graves, which was bad, Heaven knows, for the crews and the owners--but ashore, stalwart and gratified folk who had noted the storms and the tides ate well and drank deep and went warmly clad, who might otherwise have felt the gnawing of hunger and the nip of the wind.
The people of Chance Along, with but a few exceptions, were Nolans, Lynches, Learys and Brennens. Their forebears had settled at the back of the cleft in the cliff a hundred years or more before the time of