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No more came of it until this particular morning, some days after Maurice and Withrow had quarrelled. Wesley Marrs and Tommie Clancy, two men that I never tired of listening to, were on the dock and sizing up the new vessel. Wesley Marrs was himself a great fisherman, and master at this time of the wonderful Lucy Foster. When she swings the main boom over And she feels the wind abaft,
Wesley Wesley Marrs wasn't hurrying her, of course. As Mrs. Miner says, the vessels going to the east'ard don't hurry, except now and then when two of them with records get together. And the Lucy was logy, of course, with the three hundred and odd hogsheads of salt and other stuff in her.
Our hold was still to fill up, and only two weeks and a day to the race. Wesley Marrs, Tom O'Donnell, Sam Hollis, and the rest were then talking of going home and making ready for the race. Bottoms would have to be scrubbed, extra gear put ashore a whole lot of things done and a few try-outs in the Bay by way of tuning up. The race was the talk of all the fleet.
On a cruise along the water front I found a whole lot of people. I saw Wesley Marrs and Tommie Ohlsen sorrowful and neither saying much looking after their vessels Ohlsen seeing to a new gaff. "I ought to've lost," said Ohlsen. "Look at that for a rotten piece of wood." Sam Hollis was around, too, trying to explain how it was he didn't win the race.
It was too bad, for with Ohlsen, Marrs, and O'Donnell, each in his own vessel in a breeze, you could put the names in a hat and shake them up. When we went by the Nannie O her crew were getting the trysail out of the hold, and they finished the race with that, and made good going of it, as we saw afterward. Indeed, a trysail that day would have been sail enough for almost any men but these.
But I don't think that the sea checked them so very much not as much as one might think, for they were driving these vessels. We were next to the last vessel across the starting line. The Nannie O we couldn't see them all about held the Lucy Foster and the Colleen Bawn level. The Withrow showed herself to be a wonderful vessel off the wind, too. Wesley Marrs was around the stake-boat first.
He took a seat on the lockers and began to whittle a block of soft pine into a model of a hull, and after a while, with a squint along the sheer of his little model, he asked if anybody had seen Tom O'Donnell or Wesley Marrs.
So we attended to the sand, and on the way back hauled our second seine out of the hold of the Lucy Foster, and piled it into the seine-boat. With the last of the twine into the seine-boat and just as we were about to push off from the Lucy, Wesley Marrs put a foot on the rail of his vessel and spoke to Maurice.
The Lucy was out of the race, and going by her, we didn't look at Mr. Duncan nor Wesley Marrs we knew they were both taking it hard but watched the Withrow. Over on the other tack we went, first the Withrow, then the Johnnie. We were nearing the finish line, and we were pretty well worked up the awful squalls were swooping down and burying us.
And Clancy and the skipper were something in the line of able seamen themselves. Generally a day in harbor is a day of loafing for the crew of a seiner; but it was not so altogether with us that day. Within two hours of the time that Wesley Marrs came in to the Breakwater in such slashing style the skipper had us into the seine-boat and on the way to the Lucy Foster.
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