Kitobni o'qish: «What Happened at Quasi: The Story of a Carolina Cruise»

I
INTERSTATE CHUMMING

It was hot in Charleston – intensely hot – with not a breath of air in motion anywhere. The glossy leaves of the magnolia trees in the grounds that surrounded the Rutledge house drooped despairingly in the withering, scorching, blistering sunlight of a summer afternoon in the year 1886. The cocker spaniel in the courtyard panted with tongue out, between the dips he took at brief intervals in the water-vat provided for his use. A glance down King Street showed no living creature, man or beast, astir in Charleston’s busiest thoroughfare.

In the upper verandah of the Rutledge mansion, four boys, as lightly dressed as propriety permitted, were doing their best to keep endurably cool and three of them were succeeding. The fourth was making a dismal failure of the attempt. He was Richard Wentworth of Boston, and he naturally knew little of the arts by which the people of hot climates manage to endure torrid weather with tolerable comfort and satisfaction. He kept his blood excited by the exertion of violently fanning himself. While the others sat perfectly still in bamboo chairs, or lay motionless on joggling boards, Dick Wentworth was constantly stirring about in search of a cooler place which he did not find.

Presently he went for the fourth or fifth time to the end of the porch, where he could see a part of the street by peering through the great green jalousies or slatted shutters that barred out the fierce sunlight.

“What do you do that for, Dick?” asked Lawrence Rutledge in a languid tone and without lifting his head from the head-rest of the joggling board.

“What do I do what for?” asked Dick in return.

“Why run to the end of the verandah every five minutes? What do you do it for? Don’t you know it’s hot? Don’t you realize that violent exertion like that is unfit for weather like this? Why, I regard unnecessary winking as exercise altogether too strenuous at such a time, and so I don’t open my eyes except in little slits, and I do even that only when I must. You see, I’m doing my best to keep cool, while you are stirring about all the time and fretting and fuming in a way that would set a kettle boiling. Why do you do it?”

“Oh, I’m only observing, in a strange land,” answered Dick, sinking into a wicker chair. “I’ll be quiet, now that I have found out the facts.”

“What are they, Dick?” asked Tom Garnett, otherwise known to his companions as “the Virginia delegation,” he being the only Virginian in the group. “What have you found out?”

“Only that the cobblestones, with which the street out there is paved, have been vulcanized, just as dentists treat rubber mouth plates. Otherwise they would melt.”

“I’d laugh at that joke, Dick, if I dared risk the exertion,” drawled Calhoun Rutledge, the fourth boy in the group, and Lawrence Rutledge’s twin brother. “Ah, there it comes!” he exclaimed, rolling off his joggling board and busying himself with turning the broad slats of the jalousies so as to admit the cool sea breeze that had set in with the turning of the tide.

Lawrence – or “Larry” – Rutledge did the same, and Tom Garnett slid out of his bamboo chair, stretched himself and exclaimed:

“Well, that is a relief!”

Dick Wentworth sat still, not realizing the sudden change until a stiff breeze streaming in through the blinds blew straight into his face, bearing with it a delicious odor from the cape jessamines that grew thickly about the house. Then he rose and hurried to an open lattice, quite as if he had expected to discover there some huge bellows or some gigantic electric fan stirring the air into rapid motion.

“What has happened?” he asked in astonishment.

“Nothing, except that the tide has turned,” answered Larry.

“But the breeze? Where does that come from?”

“From the sea. It always comes in with the flood-tide, and we’ve been waiting for it. Pull on your coat or stand out of the draught; the sudden change might give you a cold.”

“Then you don’t have to melt for whole days at a time, but get a little relief like this, now and then?”

“We don’t melt at all. We don’t suffer half as much from hot weather as the people of northern cities do – particularly New York.”

“But why not, if you have to undergo a grilling like this every day?”

“It doesn’t happen every day, or anything like every day. It never lasts long and we know how to endure it.”

“How? I’m anxious to learn. I may be put on the broiler again and I want to be prepared.”

“Well, we begin by recognizing facts and meeting them sensibly. It is always hot here in the sun, during the summer months, and so we don’t go out into the glare during the torrid hours. From about eleven till four o’clock nobody thinks of quitting the coolest, shadiest place he can find, while in northern cities those are the busiest hours of the day, even when the mercury is in the nineties. We do what we have to do in the early forenoon and the late afternoon. During the heat and burden of the day we keep still, avoiding exertion of every kind as we might shun pestilence or poison. The result is that sun strokes and heat prostrations are unknown here, while at the north during every hot spell your newspapers print long columns of the names of persons who have fallen victims.”

“Then again,” added Calhoun, “we build for hot weather while you build to meet arctic blasts. We set our houses separately in large plots of ground, while you pack yours as close together as possible. We provide ourselves with broad verandahs and bury ourselves in shade, while you are planning your heating apparatus and doubling up your window sashes to keep the cold out.”

“It distresses me sorely,” broke in Larry, “to interrupt an interesting discussion to which I have contributed all the wisdom I care to spare, but the sun is more than half way down the western slope of the firmament, and if we are to get the dory into the water this afternoon it is high time for us to be wending our way through Spring Street to the neighborhood of Gadsden’s Green – so called, I believe, because some Gadsden of ancient times intended it to become green.”

The four boys had been classmates for several years in a noted preparatory school in Virginia. Dick Wentworth had been sent thither four years before for the sake of his threatened health. He had quickly grown strong again in the kindly climate of Virginia, but in the meanwhile he had learned to like his school and his schoolmates, particularly the two Rutledges and the Virginia boy, Tom Garnett. He had therefore remained at the school throughout the preparatory course.

Their school days were at an end now, all of them having passed their college entrance examinations; but they planned to be classmates still, all attending the same university at the North.

They were to spend the rest of the summer vacation together, with the Charleston home of the Rutledge boys for their base of operations, while campaigning for sport and adventure far and wide on the coast.

That accounted for the dory. No boat of that type had ever been seen on the Carolina coast, but Larry and Cal Rutledge had learned to know its cruising qualities while on a visit to Dick Wentworth during the summer before, and this year their father had given them a dory, specially built to his order at Swampscott and shipped south by a coasting steamer.

When she arrived, she had only a priming coat of dirty-looking white paint upon her, and the boys promptly set to work painting her in a little boathouse of theirs on the Ashley river side of the city. The new paint was dry now and the boat was ready to take the water.

“She’s a beauty and no mistake,” said Cal as the group studied her lines and examined her rather elaborate lockers and other fittings.

“Yes, she’s all that,” responded his brother, “and we’ll try her paces to-morrow morning.”

“Not if she’s like all the other dories I’ve had anything to do with,” answered Dick. “She’s been out of water ever since she left her cradle, and it’ll take some time for her to soak up.”

“Oh, of course she’ll leak a little, even after a night in the water,” said Cal, with his peculiar drawl which always made whatever he said sound about equally like a mocking joke and the profoundest philosophy. “But who minds getting his feet wet in warm salt water?”

“Leak a little?” responded Dick; “leak a little? Why, she’ll fill herself half full within five minutes after we shove her in, and if we get into her to-morrow morning the other half will follow suit. It’ll take two days at least to make her seams tight.”

“Why didn’t the caulkers put more oakum into her seams, then?” queried Tom, whose acquaintance with boats was very scant. “I should think they’d jam and cram every seam so full that the boat would be water tight from the first.”

“Perhaps they would,” languidly drawled Cal, “if they knew no more about such things than you do, Tom.”

“How much do you know, Cal?” sharply asked the other.

“Oh, not much – not half or a quarter as much as Dick does. But a part of the little that I know is the fact that when you wet a dry, white cedar board it swells, and the further fact that when you soak dry oakum in water, it swells a great deal more. It is my conviction that if a boat were caulked to water tightness while she was dry and then put into the water, the swelling would warp and split and twist her into a very fair imitation of a tall silk hat after a crazy mule has danced the highland fling upon it.”

“Oh, I see, of course. But will she be really tight after she swells up?”

“As tight as a drum. But we’ll take some oakum along, and a caulking tool or two, and a pot of white lead, so that if she gets a jolt of any kind and springs a leak we can haul her out and repair damages. We’ll take a little pot of paint, too, in one of the lockers.”

“There’ll be time enough after supper,” interrupted Larry, “to discuss everything like that, and we must be prompt at supper, too, for you know father is to leave for the North to-night to meet mother on Cape Cod and his ship sails at midnight. So get hold of the boat, every fellow of you, and let’s shove her in.”

The launching was done within a minute or two, and after that the dory rocked herself to sleep – that’s what Cal said.

“She’s certainly a beauty,” said Dick Wentworth. “And of course she’s better finished and finer every way than any dory I ever saw. You know, Tom, dories up north are rough fishing boats. This one is finished like a yacht, and – ”

“Oh, she’s hunky dory,” answered Tom, lapsing into slang.

“That’s what we’ll name her, then,” drawled Cal. “She’s certainly ‘hunky’ and she’s a dory, and if that doesn’t make her the Hunkydory, I’d very much like to know what s-o-x spells.”

There was a little laugh all round. As the incoming water floated the bottom boards, the name of the boat was unanimously adopted, and after another admiring look at her, the four hurried away to supper. On the way Dick explained to Tom that a dory is built for sailing or rowing in rough seas, and running ashore through the surf on shelving beaches.

“That accounts for the peculiar shape of her narrow, flat bottom, her heavy overhang at bow and stern, her widely sloping sides, and for the still odder shape and set of her centre board and rudder. She can come head-on to a beach, and as she glides up the sloping sand it shuts up her centre board and lifts her rudder out of its sockets without the least danger of injuring either. In the water a dory is as nervous as a schoolgirl in a thunder storm. The least wind pressure on her sails or the least shifting of her passengers or cargo, sends her heeling over almost to her beam ends, but she is very hard to capsize, because her gunwales are so built out that they act as bilge keels.”

“I’d understand all that a good deal better,” answered Tom, laughing, “if I had the smallest notion what the words mean. I have a vague idea that I know what a rudder is, but when you talk of centre boards, overhangs, gunwales, and bilge keels, you tow me out beyond my depth.”

“Never mind,” said Cal. “Wait till we get you out on the water, you land lubber, and then Dick can give you a rudimentary course of instruction in nautical nomenclature. Just now there is neither time nor occasion to think about anything but the broiled spring chickens and plates full of rice that we’re to have for supper, with a casual reflection upon the okra, the green peas and the sliced tomatoes that will escort them into our presence.”

In an aside to Dick Wentworth – but spoken so that all could hear – Tom said:

“I don’t believe Cal can help talking that way. I think if he were drowning he’d put his cries of ‘help’ into elaborate sentences.”

“Certainly, I should do precisely that,” answered Cal. “Why not? Our thoughts are the children of our brains, and I think enough of my brain-children to dress them as well as I can.”

In part, Cal’s explanation was correct enough. But his habit of elaborate speech was, in fact, also meant to be mildly humorous. This was especially so when he deliberately overdressed his brain-children in ponderous words and stilted phrases.

They were at the Rutledge mansion by this time, however, and further chatter was cut off by a negro servant’s announcement that “Supper’s ready an’ yo’ fathah’s a waitin’.”

II
THE STORY OF QUASI

Major Rutledge entertained the boys at supper with accounts of his own experiences along the coast during the war, and incidentally gave them a good deal of detailed information likely to be useful to them in their journeyings. But he gave them no instructions and no cautions. He firmly believed that youths of their age and intelligence ought to know how to take care of themselves, and that if they did not it was high time for them to learn in the school of experience. He knew these to be courageous boys, manly, self-reliant, intelligent, and tactful. He was, therefore, disposed to leave them to their own devices, trusting to their wits to meet any emergencies that might arise.

One bit of assistance of great value he did give them, namely, a complete set of coast charts, prepared by the government officials at Washington.

“You see,” he explained to the two visitors, “this is a very low-lying coast, interlaced by a tangled network of rivers, creeks, inlets, bayous, and the like, so that in many places it is difficult even for persons intimately familiar with its intricacies to find their way. My boys know the geography of it fairly well, but you’ll find they will have frequent need to consult the charts. I’ve had them encased in water-tight tin receptacles.”

“May I ask a question?” interjected Tom Garnett, as he minutely scanned one of the charts.

“Certainly, as many as you like.”

“What do those little figures mean that are dotted thickly all over the sheets?”

“They show the depth of water at every spot, at mean high tide. You’ll find them useful – particularly in making short cuts. You see, Tom, many of the narrowest of our creeks are very deep, and many broad bays very shallow in places. Besides, there are mud banks scattered all about, some of them under water all the time, others under it only at high tide. You boys don’t want to get stuck on them, and you won’t, if you study the figures on your charts closely. By the way, Larry, how much water does your boat draw?”

“Three feet, six inches, when loaded, with the centre board down – six inches, perhaps, when light, with the board up.”

“There, Tom, you see how easily the chart soundings may save you a lot of trouble. There may be times when you can save miles of sailing by laying your course over sunken sandbars if sailing before the wind, though you couldn’t pass over them at all if sailing on the wind.”

“But what difference does the way of sailing make? You see, I am very ignorant, Major Rutledge.”

“You’ll learn fast enough, because you aren’t afraid to ask questions. Now to answer your last one; when you sail before the wind you’ll have no need of your centre board and can draw it up, making your draught only six or eight inches, while on the wind you must have the centre board down – my boys will explain that when you’re all afloat – so if you are sailing with the wind dead astern, or nearly so, it will be safe enough to lay a course that offers you only two or three feet of water in its shoalest parts, while if the wind is abeam, or in a beating direction, you must keep your centre board down and stick to deeper channels. However, the boys will soon teach you all that on the journey. They’re better sailors than I am.”

Then, turning to his own sons, he said:

“I have arranged with my bank to honor any checks either of you may draw. So if you have need of more money than you take with you, you’ll know how to get it. Any planter or merchant down the coast will cash your checks for you. Now I must say good-bye to all of you, as I have many things to do before leaving. I wish all of you a very jolly time.”

With that he quitted the room, but a few minutes later he opened the door to say:

“If you get that far down the coast, boys, I wish you would take a look over Quasi and see that there are no squatters there.”

When he had gone, Cal said:

“Wonder if father hopes to win yet in that Quasi matter, after all these years?”

“I’m sure I don’t know,” answered Larry. “Anyhow, we’ll go that far down, if only to gratify his wish.”

“Is Quasi a town?” asked Dick, whose curiosity was awakened by the oddity of the name.

“No. It’s a plantation, and one with a story.”

Dick asked no more questions, but presently Cal said to his brother:

“Why don’t you go on, Larry, and tell him all about it? I have always been taught by my pastors and masters, and most other people I have ever known, that it is exceedingly bad manners to talk in enigmas before guests. Besides, there’s no secret about this. Everybody in South Carolina who ever heard the name Rutledge knows all about Quasi. Go on and tell the fellows, lest they think our family has a skeleton in some one or other of its closets, and is cherishing some dark, mysterious secret.”

“Why don’t you tell it yourself, Cal? You know the story as well as I do.”

“Because, oh my brother, it was your remark that aroused the curiosity which it is our hospitable duty to satisfy. I do not wish to trespass upon your privileges or take your obligations upon myself. Go on! There is harkening all about you. You have your audience and your theme. We hang upon your lips.”

“Oh, it isn’t much of a story, but I may as well tell it,” said Larry, smiling at his brother’s ponderous speech.

“Quasi is a very large plantation occupying the end of a peninsula. Except on the mainland side a dozen miles of salt water, mud banks and marsh islands, separate it from the nearest land. On the mainland side there is a marsh two or three miles wide and a thousand miles deep, I think. At any rate, it is utterly impassable – a mere mass of semi-liquid mud, though it looks solid enough with its growth of tall salt marsh grass covering its ugliness and hiding its treachery. The point might as well be an island, so far as possibilities of approach to it are concerned, and in effect it is an island, or quasi an island. I suppose some humorous old owner of it had that in mind when he named it Quasi.

“It is sea island cotton land of the very finest and richest kind, and when it was cultivated it was better worth working than a gold mine. There are large tracts of original timber on it, and as it has been abandoned and running wild for more than twenty years, even the young tree growths are large and fine now.

“That is where the story begins. Quasi belonged to our grandfather Rutledge. He didn’t live there, but he had the place under thorough cultivation. When the war broke out my grandfather was one of the few men in the South who doubted our side’s ability to win, and as no man could foresee what financial disturbances might occur, he decided to secure his two daughters – our father’s sisters, who were then young girls – against all possibility of poverty, by giving Quasi to them in their own right. ‘Then,’ he thought, ‘they will be comfortably well off, no matter what happens.’ So he deeded Quasi to them.

“When the Federals succeeded, early in the war, in seizing upon the sea island defences, establishing themselves at Beaufort, Hilton Head, and other places, it was necessary for my grandfather to remove all the negroes from Quasi, lest they be carried off by the enemy. The place was therefore abandoned, but my grandfather said that, at any rate, nobody could carry off the land, and that that would make my aunts easy in their finances, whenever peace should come again. As he was a hard-fighting officer, noted for his dare-devil recklessness of danger, he did not think it likely that he would live to see the end. But he believed he had made his daughters secure against poverty, and as for my father, he thought him man enough to take care of himself.”

“The which he abundantly proved himself to be when the time came,” interrupted Cal, with a note of pride in his tone.

“Oh, that was a matter of course,” answered Larry. “It’s a way the Rutledges have always had. But that is no part of the story I’m telling. During the last year of the war, when everything was going against the South, grandfather saw clearly what the result must be, and he understood the effect it would have upon his fortunes. He was a well-to-do man – I may even say a wealthy one – but he foresaw that with the negroes set free and the industries of the South paralyzed for the time, his estate would be hopelessly insolvent. But like the brave man that he was, he did not let these things trouble him. Believing that his daughters were amply provided for, and that my father – who at the age of twenty-five had fought his way from private to major – could look out for himself, the grim old warrior went on with his soldierly work and bothered not at all as to results.

“In the last months of the war, when the Southern armies were being broken to pieces, the clerk’s office, in which his deeds of Quasi to my aunts were recorded, was burned with all its contents. As evidence of the gift to his daughters nothing remained except his original deeds, and these might easily be destroyed in the clearly impending collapse of everything. To put those deeds in some place of safety was now his most earnest purpose. He took two or three days’ leave of absence, hurried to Charleston, secured the precious papers and put them in a place of safety – so safe a place, indeed, that to this day nobody has ever found them. That was not his fault. For the moment he returned to his post of command he sat down to write a letter to my aunts, telling them what he had done and how to find the documents. He had not written more than twenty lines when the enemy fell upon his command, and during the fight that ensued, he was shot through the head and instantly killed. His unfinished letter was sent to my aunts, but it threw no light upon the hiding place he had selected.

“When the war ended, a few weeks later, the estate was insolvent, as my grandfather had foreseen. In the eagerness to get hold of even a little money to live upon, which was general at that time, my grandfather’s creditors were ready to sell their claims upon the estate for any price they could get, and two of the carrion crows called money-lenders bought up all the outstanding obligations.

“When they brought suit for the possession of my grandfather’s property, they included Quasi in their claim. When my father protested that Quasi belonged to his sisters by deeds of gift executed years before, he could offer no satisfactory proof of his contention – nothing, indeed, except the testimony of certain persons who could swear that the transfer had been a matter of general understanding, often mentioned in their presence, and other evidence of a similarly vague character.

“Of course this was not enough, but my father is a born fighter and would not give up. He secured delay and set about searching everywhere for the missing papers. In the meanwhile he was energetically working to rebuild his own fortunes, and he succeeded. As soon as he had money of his own to fight with, he employed the shrewdest and ablest lawyers he could find to keep up the contest in behalf of his sisters. He has kept that fight up until now, and will keep it up until he wins it or dies. Of course he has himself amply provided for my aunts, so that it isn’t the property but a principle he is fighting for.

“By the way, the shooting ought to be good at Quasi – the place has run wild for so long and is so inaccessible to casual sportsmen. If the rest of you agree, we’ll make our way down there with no long stops as we go. Then we can take our time coming back.”

The others agreed, and after a little Dick Wentworth, who had remained silent for a time, turned to Larry, saying:

“Why did you say it wasn’t much of a story, Larry?”