THE COAST GUARDSMAN

“Hell’s bells! You—thutty year old, an’ five of it in the service, an’ you aint discovered yit that the coast guard aint a substitute for the old ladies’ home! Devil of a prospec’ I’ve got—Jansen transferred to Sandy Holler station, an’ you in line to step into his shoes. You to be Number One surfman!”

“But, Cap’n Cole—” protested the fair-haired, sun-bronzed young Number Two surfman, squaring his sturdy shoulders.

“If the rum-runners o’ Cape Cod hear you’ve replaced Jansen,” the commander of Santuck station cut in, “they’ll declare a half holiday to celebrate. The story o’ the latest Seabright affair night ’fore last will likely go the length an’ breadth o’ the Cape, if it don’t go further.”

“You don’t need to remind me o’ that.” Aubrey Sears, Number Two surfman, diligently polished the brasswork of the beachcart, and the keen black eyes of Cap Cole roved through the apparatus shed—looking for something else to find fault with, Aubrey presumed. “But sometimes, Cap’n, things aint always what they seem—’specially on a dark night on Salt Marsh.”

“Aint what they seem? What d’yuh mean by that?”

“Jist that. All I’ve got to say is it’s a pity you didn’t see with yer own eyes what really happened, an’ not have to take Jansen’s word for it.”

Cap Cole’s heavy black mustache and shaggy eyebrows were scarcely darker than the thundercloud which passed over his square face. Menacingly he hunched his massive shoulders forward.

“You tryin’ to make me out a liar?” he roared.

“No—if I was, I’d tell you point-blank, Cap’n,” Sears clarified his position in the matter. “But I do accuse Jansen o’ lyin’, though I know it wont do me no good. When that smuggler from the Seabright run acrost the marsh towards me—”

“You let him keep on runnin’—an’ he’d be runnin’ yit if Jansen hadn’t put a bullet in his leg,” finished the Captain. “An’ I don’t want for you to call my Number One surfman a liar in my presence, Sears. He’s rankin’ above you, an’ I’ll take his word as final until I’m shown proof that’ll change my opinion. When you git through with that job on the beachcart,” he shifted the subject, “go up in the tower an’ touch up the brasswork there.” The Santuck commander turned on his heel and stalked out of the apparatus shed.

Sears sighed resignedly, and energetically applied a soft strip of flannel to the shining metal of the beachcart. Cap’s April-morning tirade was only a repetition of the mild abuse to which he had subjected the young surfman of late. It was beginning to keep the conscientious Aubrey awake nights, preying on his mind during precious hours when he should be resting for patrol duty on desolate Santuck beach, or getting in a wink of sleep after such a patrol in preparation for the next day’s work. And the duties of a member of the Santuck crew were strenuous the year round, for that strip of coast had come to be the rendezvous of the various specialists in smuggling who were operating extensively on Cape Cod.

The independent Yankee blood of Aubrey Sears had reached the boiling point, but it hadn’t boiled over—yet. Before he met Mamie Weston two years ago, he would have kicked over the traces, told Cap Cole where he could get off, and consigned Santuck and its highly efficient crew to Davy Jones. He was able-bodied, big-boned, hard as nails, and although the coast-guard job was the only line of work he was familiar with, he could find employment inland—something less to his liking, but productive of sufficient funds to support him. Time and again he was tempted to inform Cap that he was through.

But his reward at Santuck for taking Cap’s abuse unwhimperingly would quite probably be the Number One surfman’s job. He was in direct line for promotion, and under his skin Cap wasn’t half so savage as he appeared to be on the surface, for he had always recommended his crew for promotion without fear or favor according to seniority in the service. The trouble in the Seabright affair was that Cap believed Jansen because of the latter’s rating above Aubrey. Cap’s discipline was maintained by his backing the Number One surfman in all matters.

On the assumption that he would be thus promoted, Aubrey and Mamie had planned to marry. She was a pretty, lightbrown-haired and blue-eyed beam of irresponsible human sunshine who lived with her widowed mother in Howesport village.

On one side of the mantel of the cottage parlor where Aubrey and she could usually be found when he was off duty, hung a portrait of George Washington; balancing it on the opposite side was suspended one of Aubrey in his uniform.

Members of the Santuck crew were always welcome at the Widow Weston’s, for her husband had been keeper of Santuck station in the days when it was a unit of the life-saving service. He had died a hero at the wreck of the David Rothwell—one of the unsung martyrs of the grand old crews of Cape Cod life-savers who have died in vain attempts to rescue their shipwrecked fellow-men.

But during the past few weeks Jansen had rather overstepped the conventions of that hospitality by spending the greater part of his time off duty at the widow’s. Well enough Aubrey knew the nature of the attraction. But Mamie had declared to Aubrey that she detested the surfman Jansen. And Aubrey, putting his trust in that honest-eyed, straightforward new convert to flapperism who had promised to marry him, banished his jealousy. After one of Jansen’s calls at the widow’s, however, Aubrey always glanced at his portrait on the parlor wall to make sure it was still there. He had a suspicion that Jansen had a way with women.

That night Aubrey donned his best clothes, slipped his automatic pistol into his hip pocket—a precaution Santuck men always took because of numerous threats they received anonymously from the smuggling gentry—and trudged over the sandy road to Howesport village, two miles away. He had swapped his day off with surf man Paty—but not the night, for Mamie would be expecting him.

She was. She ushered him into the parlor as usual, and took a seat beside him on the sofa. But she didn’t seem like her ordinarily gay and unburdened self. Aubrey couldn’t remember ever having noticed that she was worried before.

“What’s the matter, Mamie?” he asked.

Mamie did not answer immediately. Then: “Did you see today’s Boston paper, Aubrey?”

“No! What’s in it?” But he already suspected.

And his suspicions were correct. Mamie showed it to him—the account of how the outlaw schooner Seabright had slipped past the cordon of coast-guard cutters off the back side of Cape Cod again—how the Santuck crew had been called out by Surfman Hubbard, who sighted the vessel on his patrol to the halfway house between Santuck and Sandy Hollow stations. How the crew had pounced on the landing-party from the schooner and captured the smuggled cargo of whisky brought ashore in the speedboat from the Seabright, scared off a shore party that had come from an automobile evidently to receive the contraband beverage, and cut off one of the landing-party before he could escape with his shipmates in the speedboat.

But after finishing that part of the narrative, Aubrey’s gray eyes fairly shot sparks, his coppery complexion darkened, and the newspaper shook in his strong calloused fingers.

“All the rest o’ that’s a lie!” he declared in a husky voice. “That feller run like a deer when we surrounded him—run straight for me. I run to meet him, an’ he up an’ veered off the other direction. Jansen was standin’ plumb in front o’ him. But when Jansen seen him bearin’ down on him, he let out a screech an’ turned an’ run. Run away from him—I swear to God! An’ when I seen that, I put a bullet in the smuggler’s leg—an’ down he went, moanin’.”

“But where was Cap Cole an’ the other Santuck boys all that time?” queried Mamie.

“Comin’ up from the shore—closin’ in on the smuggler. We was in a wide circle—”

“But didn’t Cap see it—see who done the shootin’?”

Aubrey sniffed contemptuously. “See it? Huh—if Jansen hadn’t knowed Cap couldn’t see it, he wouldn’t ’a’ lied like he did. ’Twas dark as a pocket on Salt Marsh. If Jansen hadn’t been so close to me, I wouldn’t ’a’ reco’nized him until he let out that screech when the smuggler put for him. But when that smuggler went down with my bullet in his leg! Lord, then Jansen was Johnny-on-the-spot. He was bendin’ over that smuggler an’ holdin’ down his arms before the rest o’ the crew come up. An’ ’twas then he told Cap his story—jist like it’s printed in that damn’ newspaper—taken, likely, from the report Cap sent to the superintendent.”

He crushed the paper in his powerful hands and hurled it to the floor.

Mamie laid a soothing little hand on his cheek and looked pityingly into his angry eyes.

“I know how you must feel, Aubrey dear,” she sympathized. “An’ I believe you—ev’ry word. Jansen is mean—I can see that in his eyes when he comes here. The worst of it is, it makes you out to be a coward. An’ I know you’d never be a coward, Aubrey.”

“Jansen’ll pay for this!” stormed Aubrey. “I wish I hadn’t been so meek for discipline’s sake when he told that lie to Cap. I should ’a’ made him swaller it right there on Salt Marsh. But I’ll do it tonight—discipline be damned! He’ll take back ev’ry word, even if I’m kicked out o’ the service for bearin’ him up!”

“And then when would we be married?” plaintively asked Mamie. “What would become of your record in the service? Thrown away! Even if Cap should be mean enough to hold you back from promotion now, another opportunity’ll come up where you can make a better name for yourself, one that Jansen can’t damage with his lies. An’ accordin’ to all accounts, they’s an opportunity here right now.”

Aubrey looked at her inquiringly. “What d’yuh mean, opportunity?” he asked.

“Amos Swift was in yesterday afternoon. He claims they’s smugglin’ goin’ on in Howesport harbor, right in front o’ his house.”

“Pshaw! I don’t b’lieve it!” Aubrey ridiculed the idea. “It aint likely smugglers’d be so bold. Amos an’ Cap Cole have been at swords’-points for years. I wouldn’t put it past Amos to start a story like that to make out that Cap’s asleep on his job.”

“Cap is!” declared Mamie. “None of the Santuck men ever patrol Howesport harbor now’days. When Father was in command at the station, he had it patrolled just like the main beach.”

“Yeah—but times have changed since then,” Aubrey defended his superior. “That Howesport harbor patrol took us two miles out o’ the reg’lar patrol—we hated it. That’s one service Jansen done at the station. He convinced Cap ’twas a waste o’ time, an’ Cap agreed with him. The result was we got orders from the superintendent not to include Howesport harbor in our post.”

“Then no wonder the smugglers are takin’ advantage of it!” retorted Mamie. “Amos says you can see ’em there any foggy night like tonight. He thinks they’re from the Seabright.”

“Why doesn’t Amos report it, then?” Aubrey asked indignantly. “If not to Cap, to one o’ the rest of us.”

“Aubrey, do you s’pose Amos wants trouble? Those smugglers might murder him an’ Emma, livin’ apart from the village like they do. You mustn’t even mention that I told you this, Aubrey, because Amos has left it with you to do somethin’ about it yourself without lettin’ Cap into it. He knows how Cap holds you down. It’s a chance for you, Aubrey, to capture those smugglers an’ get full credit for it yourself without Cap dictatin’ to you. Don’t you see?”

Aubrey saw. But not a chance to make a hero of himself. If those men Amos had reported were real smugglers, there was a possibility that Cap had a special reason for urging the discontinuance of the Howesport harbor patrol. Though Cap appeared to be the soul of honor, one never could tell.

If Aubrey should interfere with such an enterprise in which Cap was directly concerned, a fine chance he would have of winning promotion, dependingly largely, as he was, on Cap’s recommendation! Then too, he knew the crew of the Seabright were about as hard a bunch of cutthroats as the Lord ever put breath into. Jansen’s flight on Salt Marsh from one of them had been discreet if not valiant.

“It’s foggy tonight,” Mamie reminded him. “There couldn’t be a better night to jump on them. An’ after that piece in the Boston paper, Aubrey—”

“Amos an’ Emma are nervous,” he protested. “Livin’ alone like they do apart from the village, they prob’ly imagine—”

“They don’t imagine!” Mamie vigorously stamped her small foot. “The least you can do is to investigate. Are you—afraid, Aubrey?”

“Afraid? Course I aint afraid! If old Amos wants me to soothe his nerves by goin’ down there an’ lookin’ the ground over, I can do that much to pacify him. I’ll walk back to the station that way after I leave here, an’—”

“Let’s not wait till then. Aubrey,” Mamie pleaded. “Let’s go now!”

Aubrey looked at her through narrowed eyes. “You aint in on this, Mamie,” he declared. “You’ll stay right here. If Amos shouldn’t be misrepresentin’ it, an’ they turned out to be real smugglers from the Seabright, it’d be no place for you when they ketch me spyin’ on ’em.”

“I am goin’! I’ll go to Amos’ an’ call on Emma. You can escort me there, then go down to the landin’ below the house. We’ll watch from the upstairs window an’ telephone the station if you need help. Only I hope you wont need it, Aubrey. I hope you can do it all yourself so’s Cap an’ Jansen wont come into it.”

“A lot you’ll see from the upstairs winder, a thick night like this,” scoffed Aubrey. “But if you’d rather go prowlin’ round Howesport harbor than entertain me my night off—”

“Aubrey, you know better’n that!” she rebuked him. “I’m doin’ all this because—well, I’m sort of ashamed of that piece in the paper. An’ I want you to show ev’ryone in Howesport that you aint a coward an’ never was one.”

“Well, then come on!” Aubrey consented. Mamie ran upstairs, told her mother she was going to Emma’s, put on her wraps, and with Aubrey went out into the night.

Through the fog they walked down the sandy road to the harbor, talking in half-whispers, Mamie hurrying three steps to his one to keep up with him. The village clock dolefully tolled eight, its distant tones sounding more funereal than ever in the leaden atmosphere.

They branched off at the side road to the two-story Swift homestead set on a wooded hill overlooking Swift’s Landing on the sheltered little beach below. A light burned downstairs in the parlor.

“Wait here till I’m inside,” whispered Mamie, reassuringly squeezing his hand. “Then go to the landin’. If you need help, Aubrey, shout. We’ll be listenin’, an’ we’ll telephone the station if you holler. Amos’ll come down to help you while the crew’s gittin’ here.”

Aubrey laughed under his breath. Amos! A lot of help that timid old man would be! Aubrey waited until the door of the ark on the hill opened and closed, then descended the path to the landing.

Tiny waves lapped the fog-shrouded beach. Across the narrow strip of water—not much wider than Salt Marsh Creek at high tide—two unoccupied summer cottages bulked in the fog. To their right twinkled the kitchen light of Reuben Nickerson’s farmhouse, and a restless cow mooed in the stable behind it. A fine place for smugglers to operate! Why, they’d be just as likely to run their contraband ashore directly in front of Santuck station under the very noses of the crack crew of Cape Cod!

Lord—if the boys at the station ever learned that he’d snooped around looking for smugglers at Swift’s Landing, he’d never hear the last of it! It would be a standing joke at the station.

Aubrey withdrew from the beach to the stunted pines of the upland, and seated himself on an overturned dory. Far down the harbor mouth the fog whistle of Narrow Point lighthouse groaned intermittently. There was a chill in the air—a damper, clammier cold than he experienced in his patrols on the wider, more exposed stretches of Santuck beach.

The drone of the fog whistle and the continual lap-lap of the waves lulled him until he was half asleep. The village clock struck ten. Somewhere out on the Atlantic outside Howesport harbor a motorboat chugged. One of the coast-guard flotilla, most likely, combing the waters inside the three-mile limit for the elusive Seabright.

Suddenly he arose from his seat and strained his eyes at the landing. Out of the thickness loomed the bow of a dory. And astern of that dory rode another. Two men in each, one rowing, the other standing in the stern. And the oars of those dories were muffled!

Aubrey withdrew deeper into the stunted pines—just in time, for a flashlight from the leading dory played on the beach, and a deep voice, slightly hushed, sang out: “All right—straight ahead!”

The prow of the first dory scraped on the shore; then the second dory came to rest on the sand beside it. The occupants of both boats stepped into the water, and their sea-boots splashed as the dories were drawn up higher.

“Hand us a crate, thar, Russ!” the deep voice called out. “We’ve got a few more lobsters here ’n you have, I cal’late.”

A big arm shot up from a huge lumbering body, and with a thud a hand proportionately large snatched a flying crate out of the air. Carefully he and his smaller companion filled it with lobsters from the bottom of the dory, while the smaller men of the other dory lugged several lobster-laden crates ashore.

“I might ’a’ known ’twould turn out like this!” the watching Aubrey grumbled to himself. For Amos’ “smugglers” were old Nathan Holway and his three sons, harmless, industrious lobstermen who minded their own business—which was more than Amos could say of himself. And to put Aubrey in an even more ludicrous light if his presence there were detected, they were cousins of Jansen.

The young surfman took a step back, to put more pines between himself and the beach. But in doing so he stepped on an empty bottle, and it burst with a loud tinkle under his boots.

“What the hell was that?” exclaimed Nathan, and the flashlight’s ray penetrated the pines in which Aubrey was concealed.

“Thar he is—some one hidin’ in them pines!” the nasal tenor of Russ Holway rang out. “Come out o’ that thicket, you! We see yuh!”

“I’ll be damned!” shouted his brother Enoch. “It’s Aubrey Sears!”

Recognized, Aubrey stepped out of his hiding-place and walked boldly down to the landing. “Good ev’nin’,” he saluted the lobstermen. “Kinder thick, aint it?”

“What’re ye doin’, snoopin’ round an’ spyin’ on us?” belligerently roared old Nathan. “Can’t honest folks ’arn a livin’ ’thout some damned coast-guard comin’ two miles off’n his post to peek at us?”

“P’raps he’s lookin’ for that feller he run away from on Salt Marsh,” suggested Enoch, and his two brothers snickered.

That made Aubrey’s fighting blood heat up. “No matter why I’m here,” he defied them, resolved to maintain his dignity even though he felt like a fool. And he seized upon the salient feature of their landing: “You might tell me why you was rowin’ with muffled oars.”

“Hear the brave bully boy o’ Santuck!” derided Russ. “He’s puttin’ us under cross-examination. I don’t know as it’s any o’ his business why—”