The Roll-Call of The Reef

The Roll-Call Of The Reef, by

A. T. Quiller-Couch (AKA "Q.") 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 Roll-Call Of The Reef
Author: A. T. Quiller-Couch (AKA "Q.")
Release Date: October 27, 2007 [EBook #23217]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
ROLL-CALL OF THE REEF ***

Produced by David Widger

THE ROLL-CALL OF THE REEF
By A. T. Quiller-Couch ("Q.")
"Yes, sir," said my host, the quarryman, reaching down the relics from
their hook in the wall over the chimneypiece; "they've hung here all my
time, and most of my father's. The women won't touch 'em; they're

afraid of the story. So here they'll dangle, and gather dust and smoke,
till another tenant comes and tosses 'em out o' doors for rubbish. Whew!
'tis coarse weather, surely."
He went to the door, opened it, and stood studying the gale that beat
upon his cottage-front, straight from the Manacle Reef. The rain drove
past him into the kitchen, aslant like threads of gold silk in the shine of
the wreck-wood fire. Meanwhile, by the same firelight, I examined the
relics on my knee. The metal of each was tarnished out of knowledge.
But the trumpet was evidently an old cavalry trumpet, and the threads
of its party-colored sling, though fretted and dusty, still hung together.
Around the side-drum, beneath its cracked brown varnish. I could
hardly trace a royal coat-of-arms and a legend running, "Per Mare Per
Terrain"--the motto of the marines. Its parchment, though black and
scented with wood-smoke, was limp and mildewed; and I began to
tighten up the straps--under which the drumsticks had been loosely
thrust--with the idle purpose of trying if some music might be got out
of the old drum yet.
But as I turned it on my knee, I found the drum attached to the
trumpet-sling by a curious barrel-shaped padlock, and paused to
examine this. The body of the lock was composed of half a dozen brass
rings, set accurately edge to edge; and, rubbing the brass with my
thumb, I saw that each of the six had a series of letters engraved around
it.
I knew the trick of it, I thought. Here was one of those word padlocks,
once so common; only to be opened by getting the rings to spell a
certain word, which the dealer confides to you.
My host shut and barred the door, and came back to the hearth.
"'Twas just such a wind--east by south--that brought in what you've got
between your hands. Back in the year 'nine, it was; my father has told
me the tale a score o' times. You're twisting round the rings, I see. But
you'll never guess the word. Parson Kendall, he made the word, and he
locked down a couple o' ghosts in their graves with it; and when his
time came he went to his own grave and took the word with him."

"Whose ghosts, Matthew?"
"You want the story, I see, sir. My father could tell it better than I can.
He was a young man in the year 'nine, unmarried at the time, and living
in this very cottage, just as I be. That's how he came to get mixed up
with the tale."
He took a chair, lighted a short pipe, and went on, with his eyes fixed
on the dancing violet flames:
"Yes, he'd ha' been about thirty year old in January, eighteen 'nine. The
storm got up in the night o' the twenty-first o' that month. My father
was dressed and out long before daylight; he never was one to bide in
bed, let be that the gale by this time was pretty near lifting the thatch
over his head. Besides which, he'd fenced a small 'taty-patch that winter,
down by Lowland Point, and he wanted to see if it stood the night's
work. He took the path across Gunner's Meadow--where they buried
most of the bodies afterward. The wind was right in his teeth at the
time, and once on the way (he's told me this often) a great strip of
oarweed came flying through the darkness and fetched him a slap on
the cheek like a cold hand. But he made shift pretty well till he got to
Lowland, and then had to drop upon hands and knees and crawl,
digging his fingers every now and then into the shingle to hold on, for
he declared to me that the stones, some of them as big as a man's head,
kept rolling and driving past