Billy Topsail, M.D.: A Tale of Adventure With Doctor Luke of the Labrador
Page 5
CHAPTER III
_In Which Timothy Light's Famished Dogs Are Committed to the Hands of Billy Topsail and a Tap on the Snout is Recommended in the Probable Case of Danger_
It is no great trick to make Tight Cove of the Labrador from the sea.There is no chart, of course. Nor is any chart of the little harboursneeded for safe sailing, as long as the songs of the coast are preservedin the heads of the skippers that sail it. And so you may lay withconfidence a bit west of north from the Cape Norman light--and raise andround the Scotchman's Breakfast of Ginger Head: whereupon a straightawayacross Schooner Bay to the Thimble, and, upon nearer approach to theharbour water of the Cove--
When Bill Pott's P'int you is abreast, Dane's Rock bears due west; An' west-nor'west you must steer, 'Til Brimstone Head do appear.
The tickle's narrow, not very wide; The deepest water's on the starboard side; When in the harbour you is shot, Four fathoms you has got--
and there you are: harboured within stone's throw of thirty hospitablecottages, with their stages and flakes clustered about, like offspring,and all clinging to the cliffs with the grip of a colony of mussels.They encircle the quiet, deep water of the Cove, lying in a hollow ofBill Pott's Point, Dane's Rock, and the little head called Brimstone.
Winter was near done, at Tight Cove, when Doctor Luke made the lights ofthe place from the north. Presently the sun and southwesterly winds ofspring would spread the coast with all the balmy, sudden omens of summerweather, precisely as the first blast from the north, in a single nightof the fall of the year, had blanketed the land with snow, and tucked itin, with enduring frost, for the winter to come. With these warm winds,the ice in Schooner Bay would move to sea, with the speed of a thief inflight. It would break up and vanish in a night, with all that was on it(including the folk who chanced to be caught on it)--a great, noisycommotion, and swift clearing out, this removal to the open.
And the ice would drift in, again, with contrary winds, and choke thebay, accompanied by Arctic ice from the current beyond, and depart andcome once more, and take leave, in a season of its own willful choosing,for good and all. When Doctor Luke made off across the bay, leavingTeddy Brisk to follow, by means of Timothy Light's komatik and scrawnydogs, Schooner Bay had already gone rotten, in a spell of southerlyweather. The final break-up was restrained only by an interval ofunseasonable frost.
A favourable wind would tear the field loose from the cliffs and urge itto sea.
* * * * *
Teddy Brisk could not go at once to Doctor Luke's hospital at OurHarbour. There came a mild spell--the wind went to the south and west inthe night; a splashing fall of tepid southern rain swept the dry whitecoats in gusts and a melting drizzle; and, following on these untimelyshowers, a day or two of sunshine and soft breezes set the roofssmoking, the icicles dissolving, the eaves running little streams ofwater, the cliffs dripping a promise of shy spring flowers, and packedthe snow and turned the harbour roads to slush, and gathered pools andshallow lakes of water on the rotting ice of the bay.
Schooner Bay was impassable; the trail was deep and sticky andtreacherous--a broken, rotten, imminently vanishing course. Andsea-ward, in the lift of the waves, vast fragments of the field wereshaking themselves free and floating off; and the whole wide body ofice, from Rattle Brook, at the bottom of the bay, to the great heads ofThimble and the Scotchman's Breakfast, was striving to break away to theopen under the urge of the wind.
Teddy Brisk's adventure to Our Harbour must wait for frost and stillweather; and wait it did--until in a shift of the weather there came aday when all that was water was frozen stiff overnight, and the windfell away to a doubtful calm, and the cliffs of Ginger Head were a loomin the frosty distance across the bay.
"Pack that lad, mum," said Skipper Thomas then. "'Tis now or never."
"I don't like the look of it," the mother complained.
"I warns you, mum--you're too fond o' that lad."
"I'm anxious. The bay's rotten. You knows that, sir--a man as old asyou. Another southerly wind would shatter----"
"Ecod! You'll coddle that wee lad t' death."
Teddy Brisk's mother laughed.
"Not me!" said she.
A cunning idea occurred to Skipper Thomas.
"Or cowardice!" he grumbled.
Teddy Brisk's mother started. She stared in doubt at old Skipper Thomas.Her face clouded. She was grim.
"I'd do nothin' so wicked as that, sir," said she. "I'll pack un up."
* * * * *
It chanced that Timothy Light was sunk in a melancholy regard of hisphysical health when Skipper Thomas went to arrange for the dogs. He wasdiscovered hugging a red-hot bogie in his bachelor cottage of turf andrough-hewn timber by the turn to Sunday-School Hill. And a woebegone oldfellow he was: a sight to stir pity and laughter--with his bottles andplasters, his patent-medicine pamphlets, his drawn, gloomy countenance,and his determination to "draw off" the indisposition by way of hislower extremities with a plaster of renowned power.
"Nothin' stronger, Skipper Thomas, knowed t' the science o' medicine an'the"--Skipper Timothy did not hesitate over the obstacle--"theprac-t'-tie-on-ers thereof," he groaned; "an' she've begun t' pull too.Ecod! but she's drawin'! Mm-m-m! There's power for you! An' if she don'tpull the pain out o' the toes o' my two feet"--Skipper Timothy's feetwere swathed in plaster; his pain was elsewhere; the course of its exitwas long--"I'm free t' say that nothin' will budge my complaint. Mm-m!Ecod! b'y, but she've sure begun t' draw!"
Skipper Timothy bade Skipper Thomas sit himself down, an' brew himself acup o' tea, an' make himself t' home, an' feel free o' the place, thewhile he should entertain and profit himself with observing theoperation of the plaster of infallible efficacy in the extraction ofpain.
"What's gone wrong along o' you?" Skipper Thomas inquired.
"I been singin' pretty hearty o' late," Skipper Timothy moaned--he wasof a musical turn and given frequently to a vigorous recital of thePsalms and Paraphrases--"an' I 'low I've strained my stummick."
Possibly Skipper Timothy could not distinguish, with any degree ofscientific accuracy, between the region of his stomach and the region ofhis lungs--a lay confusion, perhaps, in the matter of terms anddefinite boundaries; he had been known to mistake his liver for hisheart in the indulgence of a habit of pessimistic diagnosis. And whetherhe was right in this instance or not, and whatever the strain involvedin his vocal effort, which must have tried all the muscles concerned, hewas now coughing himself purple in the face--a symptom that held itsmortal implication of the approach of what is called the lung troubleand the decline.
The old man was not fit for the trail--no cruise to Our Harbour for himnext day; he was on the stocks and out of commission. Ah, well, then,would he trust his dogs? Oh, aye; he would trust his team free an'willin'. An' might Billy Topsail drive the team? Oh, aye; young BillyTopsail might drive the team an' he had the spirit for the adventure.Let Billy Topsail keep un down--_keep the brutes down_, ecod!--and notrouble would come of it.
"A tap on the snout t' mend their manners," Skipper Timothy advised. "Achild can overcome an' manage a team like that team o' ten."
And so it was arranged that Billy Topsail should drive Teddy Brisk toOur Harbour next day.