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We had drawn in rather close and could see that the calf was falling behind. The mother noticed it as well. She feared the thing that had stung her; but, mother-like, she clung to her little one. She swerved around and the line fell slack. "Look out, now, sir!" cried Tom Anderly again. "She's mad, and she's scared, and she's looking for us.
I had once been aboard of a turbine launch, and the black water was thrown up on either side of that whaleboat in a wave just as it had flowed away from the nose of the launch! This wave seemed to be three feet higher than the gunwale of the boat and as black as ebony. Even Tom Anderly cast a glance at the boat-hatchet as though he contemplated cutting the taut line.
But we couldn't pick the biggest this time, for as we shot through the rippling waves, aiming for a huge bull that rolled on the surface, up popped a young female, with a calf, right in our course. "Look out for her!" quoth old Tom Anderly. "She'll be ugly, sir with that kid beside her. Better think twice of it, Mr. Gibson."
When the whale was grappled onto the bark's side and the line unwound, we found that it still hung down into the sea and was quite taut. "This blamed critter was anchored!" growled Tom Anderly. "And he dragged his anchor at that." "Get onto the winch, boys," said Captain Rogers. "Let's see what's hung to it now." We wound in the line and up came the whale that we had actually struck!
But it was not his fund of information, or his tales, that first of all interested me in Tom Anderly. I had told nobody not even Ben Gibson about the actual event of my being swept out to sea from Bolderhead, nor had I said a word about my father. The fact that he had been a sea-going physician would not help me hold my own with the crew of the Scarboro.
The Scarboro was approaching it from behind and at an angle, so that its course and ours made the sides of a V. Captain Rogers followed the course of the whale alertly, swinging the muzzle of the cannon with skill. Most of the crew were grouped behind him in anxious expectancy. Suddenly I felt a touch upon my arm. It was Tom Anderly. He was pointing silently over the port bow.
I seized our second mate by his shirt collar. In a moment I had lifted him into the boat. At the same moment Tom Anderly got forward, seized the gun which poor Gibson had dropped, and sent a bomb-lance into the whale at so short a distance that it seemed as though we might have touched him by putting out a hand. But that fighting whale died hard.
It would be fifteen years the coming spring that my father had disappeared. Tom Anderly had hit the time near enough. Had there been any man named Carver who had suffered such an accident off Bolderhead Neck as the old seaman told of, I would have heard the particulars, knocking about among the Bolderhead docks as I had for years. The story seemed conclusive.
"Those are all great tales," quoth Tom Anderly, when we had marveled over these lucky voyages. "But how about the brig Emeline of New Bedford? She sailed on July 11, 1841 and in twenty-six months she returned home with how much ile d'you suppose?" Ben and I gave it up. Some enormous sum, we supposed, was realized. "Yah!" said Tom. "A fat lot.
But once I had entered into the agreement I found I had a hundred things to do and little time to do it in. Old Tom Anderly had not come back to the boarding house and I could not wait for him to appear. Captain Tugg was already thinking of loafing along to the dock where his two-stick schooner was moored. I bundled up my dunnage and went with him.
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