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Updated: August 21, 2024
As they moved toward Flag Point the gaily colored crowds moved with them past the post-office, the stores, the burned wharfs, and the fish stands. Captain Bijonah Tanner, by right of seniority, led the way in the Rosan as commodore of the fleet. He stood to his tiller like a graven image, looking neither to right nor left, but gripping his pipe with all the strength of his remaining teeth.
But he sat quiet as the vessel drifted down upon the anchored Rosan. As he looked her over his eyes were drawn aloft to a series of wires strung between her topmasts. Other wires ran down the foremast to a little cubby just aft of it. "By the great squid, they've got wireless!" he said. "This beats me!" At fifty yards the familiar man with the enormous megaphone made his appearance.
Now, as he looked around the still sea, the white or yellow sails of the fishing fleet showed on all sides in a vast circle. Not five miles away was the Rosan, and to the southward of her the Herring Bone with mean old Jed Martin aboard.
The flame was coming, however, from the house next but one Bijonah Tanner's place. A crowd was gathering in the yard that was overgrown with dusty wire-grass, and the squire was pushing his way through to take charge. Code knew that only two days before Captain Bijonah and his wife had sailed in the Rosan to St. John's for lumber, leaving Nellie alone in charge of the three small Tanners.
It was such an account that Bijonah Tanner fed upon that morning in the tiny cabin of the Rosan, and half an hour after he had read it he was under way. Special mention had been made of Code Schofield's rescue of little Bige, with a sentence added that the Tanner place had been wiped out.
No, sir; kept us off with poles an' asked for me. "When I got in clost they told me the Rosan had found you, and handed me an envelope with a message inside of it. Just as I was goin' away there came the most awful clickin' an' flashin' amidships I ever saw " "Wireless," said Code. "Wal, I've heard of it, but I never see it before; an' I come away as quick as I could."
Nat Burns, when he noticed the accident, laid to in turn and announced his intention of standing by the Rosan until she was ready to go on. As these were among the fastest vessels in the fleet, the others proceeded on their way, and Nat seized the opportunity of the repairs to pay his fiancée a visit and remain to supper on the Rosan.
When dawn broke wild and dirty, the Charming Lass was reeling through the water less than a quarter of a mile astern of the Rosan and the Herring Bone. Through the murk Code could see the Nettie B. three miles ahead. An hour and she had drawn abreast of her two rivals; another hour and she had left them astern.
They carried the plague with them and no matter where they fled, they died. I never encountered but one survivor of any of them Mungerson. He was afterwards a Santa Rosan, and he married my eldest daughter. He came into the tribe eight years after the plague. He was then nineteen years old, and he was compelled to wait twelve years more before he could marry.
His ardor dampened by this rebuke, the gleam in Nat's eye became one of ugliness at his humiliation before the crew of the Rosan. He scowled furiously and stood by her side without saying a word. It was in this unfortunate moment that Nellie seized on the general topic of the day.
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