CHAPTER XII A GOOD LINE

Many a true word is spoken in jest--or figure! All war service wings are not the same.

Atlas was upholding shipping. Atlas was bearing up the country. Atlas was upholding the world and its blue arch of freedom, just as the fabled Atlas of old--stalwart sea-god--was supposed to bear heaven and earth upon his broad shoulders.

That is how the modern Atlas--eighteen-year-old shipyard worker--felt.

It had not been an easy day for Atlas, otherwise, young Atwood Atwell, Olive’s cousin, heir to millions, future prop of a wealthy banking-house, at present steadying--holding up, rather in imagination than reality--a raw and ponderous yellow ship’s rib, and, according to his excited feeling, the whole free world with it.

It had been a harder, and in some ways more stirring, day than if he had been a?rially breakfasting on “fish-tails,” supping on cloud-puffs, doing Immelmann turns in the sky, “zooming” upward, or nosing down, to scan the home-shores through powerful binoculars for tell-tale signs of spy-work which might frustrate the labors of Atlas and his fellow-toilers by sooner or later bringing about the sinking of the vessels they built.

Atlas had seen the scouting air-plane pass over the shipyards, five days previous, just before sunset, but he had not paid much attention to it. He was just starting off in his neat little racing-car for a welcome rush back to the open arms of luxury in and about the paternal summer residence at Manchester-by-the-Sea.

“By George! I’m beginning to feel sick of the sight of these dead-an’-alive shipyards,” he muttered to himself, throwing a backward glance, as he drove off, at the yards full of skeleton shapes, like a scarecrow Armada. “Working on moulding timbers--laying the thin moulds on the timbers out there in the field beyond the yard, marking those timbers down to the proper size and beveled shape, using my mathematics until my head aches--nice pastime when the sun’s hot! And, for variety, steering Blind Tim, that old draft-horse--hitched to one o’ those half-ton timbers when at last it’s polished down to a rib--from end to end o’ the yard, between green stock and seasoned stock, an’ every other kind of lumber!” He tooted his horn fiercely, to warn some homing workman, swerved to avoid another automobile, and so snapped the thread of meditation.

As he did so, he caught the critical glance of a trio of blue-shirted ship-carpenters hailing from his own sphere of labor, wending their way homeward, too; and almost he caught the carping comment of one of them, Libby Taber--professional shipyard pessimist.

“There! Aw, there goes the ‘Candy Kid’!” grunted Libby, and his voice was flatter than a marsh-fog. “Well, he ain’t putting up much of a front, is he? He’s ‘soured’ on shipyard work already. He’ll be knocking off, some fine day, pretty soon, an’ tucking himself away, as a Mamma’s boy, in some soft little ‘bunk-fatigue’ job--lazy man’s job for war-time.... See if he don’t!”

“Well, now, I’m not so sure about that,” tempered the foreman. “He side-tracked the ‘bunk-fatigue’ jobs when he was drafted for work. An’ if he ain’t stuck on the shipyard stunt, he’s sticking to it, with muscle an’ nerve--and risks don’t faze him; he’s as ready to take a chance as another!”

But despite these sterling qualifications, before the boy reached home that evening, Libby’s marsh-fog mood had, somehow, mysteriously communicated itself to the young draftee of labor, the wealthy banker’s son, who, until the war summons sounded, had never before done anything he wasn’t particularly interested in doing.

“Oh, confound it all! I do want to knock off. May as well own up to it,” he acknowledged to himself then, and during the days immediately following. “How about jumping my job at the end of next week, after I’ve given the foreman--he’s a fine old fellow--due warning, and--and slipping into some niche in the bank, or in Uncle Peter’s patent attorney’s office, as the Mater wanted me to do? Maybe, after all, I strained a point, leaving the softer snaps for older men, and starting in to help build ships, as I’m too young to go across--too young to enter the Army or Navy, or Aviation either; at least, the family is against it--Uncle Sam, too, it seems--until I’ve had another year or two of college. Well! there’s not much sugar in the deal I’ve chosen.... Pretty raw deal all round! Bah!”

He forged this latter comment, in a moody play upon words, five days after the scouting war-plane had flown over the shipyards and landed by a Council Fire, as he pursued the monotonous task of leading the big blind horse hauling a half-ton of that raw “deal”--unpainted timber--through the shipyard, amid yellow reefs of the same “ships’ stuff” all about him.

Then, suddenly, under the forenoon sun, Atlas--he had not yet become Atlas, though, upholding shipping and the world--jumped, caught his breath, and yanked at Tim’s rein--sightless Tim!

A limousine had stopped by the country shipyard--the open, unguarded shipyard--where vessels were built by the roadside.

A lady stepped out, his mother.

“Don’t hurt my boy!” she said to the yard foreman. “Don’t work him too hard. He’s beginning to look tired of an evening.”

“Well! I guess that won’t hurt him any,” returned the foreman, smiling, not unfeelingly. “He’s doing his bit, and who--who knows when it may become the main bitt?” perpetrating a whimsical joke as he looked towards a finished vessel, wedged up on the launching-ways of an adjoining shipyard, all ready to be launched to-day. “See--see that sawed-off, drab post rising from her deck, ma’am?” he challenged, being a man of words, with a voice that habitually hovered about the sky-line, if Libby’s clung to the marshes. “That’s one o’ the two bitt-heads--weather main bitt, we call it--to which by’n-by the main-sheet controlling the mains’l will be belayed--made fast--safety an’ progress both, y’ understand!”

The mother stared at him smilingly--began to set him down as a “character.”

“I’d let the boy alone if I were you, lady,” went on the yard-boss earnestly. “If his present ‘tough’ bit never shows up on deck as the main bitt on which everything hangs, yet it’s that for him now, if the best in him is anchored to it. Get--me?”

The mother did. She refrained from condoling with her son upon the sameness of the work in which Blind Tim and he were a team, patted the sightless horse, which had “pulled himself blind” in the service of a city fire department, upon the nose, and drove off.

But the boy felt that he had been made an object of solicitude; he “gloomed” outright and made up his mind, once for all, to “jump his job” before another ten days were over, in favor of one softer, or swifter, as the case might be.

“Bah! I could stick it out better in the trenches,” he said to himself.

But----

“It’s a good line. Hold it--Mike!” challenged the foreman, reading, perhaps, what was passing in his mind.

Young Cr?sus started. It was novel to hear himself addressed as “Mike.” A red glow rose to his neck. He did not resent it. Instead it warmed him a very little, as if he had stretched just one toe towards a fire--but not enough to redden the blues.

“‘A good line,’” he repeated to himself. “Pshaw! I wonder if that flock of girls will think so--those who are coming up the river this afternoon, from that distant beach, to see the launching? At least, Olive said so in her note. Will leading a blind horse which ‘tugged himself blind’ carrying the hook and ladder to city fires--straining harder than he was driven, as if he knew there were lives in danger--will that seem a good line to them? Oh, they’ll gush over him, of course!... Ha! Here comes another visitor! ‘Never rains but it pours!’” truculently.

Carefully--indeed, tenderly--guiding Tim, duty’s blind hero, he had reached that part of the lumber-littered shipyard where the ponderous beveled “frame,” or yellow ship’s rib which the horse was hauling, would be set up, hoisted by a rude derrick worked by man-power, until it was in line with sixty-odd of those square frames already branching outward and upward from the keel of a skeleton vessel propped high upon the building-stocks.

“Hum-m! ‘Some’ visitor he seems to be! They’re dropping auger, mallet, and saw to shake hands with him--the ship-carpenters!”

Curiously enough, young Atwood, leaning against his equine hero--a sturdy, boyish figure, light-haired, ruddy-skinned, as Captain Andy had described him, in smeared khaki trousers, a white duck shirt, a duck hat on the back of his head--wanted to do the same, while he waited for the rib to be set up.

But the visitor did not look at him. He exchanged a few greetings, hearty, but rather heavy-hearted. In his eye there was a brooding sense of loss, but a very slight birth-mark beneath it burned like fire--a flaming star that could not be extinguished.

It magnetized Atwood’s gaze, that star; he kept glancing curiously up at it--it looked so indomitable, burning upon the tall cheek-bone of a bronzed man who must have measured six feet one even from the red horizon-line across his tanned forehead to the highly polished toe of his tan shoe which burrowed speculatively into the matted shavings of the shipyard.

“I’ve come to see what vessels you’ve got on the stocks, that’ll be ready for launching pretty soon,” he said, addressing the foreman, within hearing of Atwood, Blind Tim--who pricked his ears at the lusty voice--and an interested circle of workmen.

“What! You’re not thinking of going out again--so soon, Captain Bob? Why! It’s only two weeks since--since that dandy schooner we built for you a year ago was sunk by a submarine.” The master shipwright gasped. “Named after your two little boys she was, wasn’t she? Sufferin’ catfish! that did make me feel bad; I’m the boy who--built--her.”

Captain Bob’s tall lip-line quivered, then tightened--flamed like the birth-star.

“Yes, they sank my savings with her,” he admitted. “All I had was in that vessel! An eight-thousand-dollar fare o’ fish, too, that we had faced dirty weather to get! ’Twill come heavier on the crew, though, mostly married men with families who’ll lose their share, four hundred dollars each, from the trip. Gosh!”

“You had a hard time trying to make shore, too, when the ‘Jerries’ let you get off with your lives--after you saw them whipsaw a bomb under your schooner, and--and----”

The big captain put out a big hand as if warding off something.

“She crumpled up like a paper bag,” he said sorrowfully, “and went down.... Yes! we had a row of fifty-eight hours in the dories--rough sea, too, part o’ the time--before we sighted land.”

“Anything to eat, had you?”

“One bag o’ biscuits that the cook grabbed up when we were ordered to leave her, a gallon of water between sixteen of us, and three parts of a rhubarb pie that we gave to the--kid.”

“Yes, I heard that you had a thirteen-year-old boy--a Boy Scout--with you.”

“So! Son of one of the fishermen--dead game, too!” Captain Bob nodded. “He was standing at the vessel’s rail. I told him to get into the first dory. Not a bit of it! Not until he was sure his father was safe! When at last we reached shore a woman asked him if he had ‘steered’ the dory at all. He misunderstood her, being weak--having gone fifty hours on that three-quarters of a rhubarb pie--mean sour it was, too; we hadn’t much sugar aboard! But, Statue o’ Liberty! you should have seen him fire up: ‘No!’ he yells at her weakly; ‘I wasn’t skeered!’

“True--he wasn’t! Kept a scout’s mouth on, as they call it, all the time, corners turning up--an’ whistled, curled up in the bow, as long’s a drop of the rhubarb juice held out, to--well, to wet his whistle!”

Eyes were wet now among the ship-carpenters--Atwood’s, too! He tickled Blind Tim’s ear and wished that he could muster up enough horse sense to understand the story.

“Well, the game young one spoke for the rest of you; you’re none of you ’skeered o’ the subs if you’re ready to go out again--looking for another vessel!”

It was the moved foreman who spoke. Instantly Captain Bob came back to business, sent his critical gaze roving over the wooden hulls most nearly finished upon the building-stocks.

“Oh! we’re all ready to go to-morrow,” he remarked unconcernedly, chewing his lip, like a cud of courage. “There’s a man I know who wants to buy a fishing-vessel--and he’s after me to take her out. He sent me up here to look ’em over. The ‘Jerries’ ain’t going to keep me ashore.”

“I reckon not! You’re like the rest o’ the skippers, Capt’n Bob--heart of a bullock, with no back-down to it! The subs couldn’t----”

But it was at that very moment--that full and flattering moment--that the inevitable pessimist spoke up, breaking in upon the foreman’s tribute.

“Aw-w! What’s the use?” groaned Libby Taber, in swampy tones--he who had predicted that the rich boy among them would soon be taking ease in a “bunk-fatigue job.” “Where’s the use?... Gloucester’s gone up. It’s good-bye--Gloucester! Day, day, Gloucester! We can’t build ships faster than the submarines can sink ’em!”

There was an explosive sound in the yard. Blind Tim--duty’s hero--heard it. The foreman heard it, too, and knew it for what it was--the sob of a young soul coming into its own!

“‘Gloucester gone up!... Good-bye, Gloucester!’” gritted a voice between clenched teeth. “Well--I guess not! ‘We can’t build ships fast as the subs can sink them!’ ... Well! maybe we can now.”

It was the voice of the “Candy Kid”; the voice of a young David crying aloud in the shipyards against the Philistine menace of his people.

Ship-carpenters stared. Another minute and they might have scoffed at the stripling--a discouraged stripling, at that--turning spokesman.

But the foreman didn’t. He promptly gave a diverting order:

“Frame up!”

Then while workmen proceeded to loop the “falls,” hempen ropes, of the hoisting derrick about the ponderous yellow rib which Tim had hauled from the shaping sawmill, he muttered to the visitor:

“Go round with you in a minute, Cap’n Bob! Just let’s get this half of a square frame in place first, so’s they can bolt her down! Whoops-ma-daisy! Up she goes!”

Up she went, indeed, the rich boy leaving Tim nosing blindly into the dry shavings and helping to steady her--the great rib--in the hoisting-tackle.

“I knew the lad had it in him,” was the foreman’s silent comment. “There’ll be no more thought of quitting; he’ll work overtime now, to stand back of Cap’n Bob--and his kind--to the last punch in him!... Steady her there--now!” he cried aloud, as the beveled frame hovered over the backbone-keel to which it would be bolted, and then settled down upon it, another rib added to the ship’s skeleton. “A mite more to the right! Hold her now!”

Ship-carpenters did. Two, leaping upon the stocks--the platform of protruding blocks, arranged cross and criss-cross, on which the skeleton rested--steadied the rib with their horny hands.

The boy did more--the boy who had cried out against Gloucester “going up.”

Aflame from neck to heel--bareheaded now--he sprang upon the protruding stocks, too, and, facing the yard, bent his back, his broad, muscular, young back, under that ponderous frame, so contributing his mite towards steadying it in place until it could be shored up--propped in its own place.

And it was then--then--to his own excited feeling, not to his conscious thought--that he became Atlas upholding Gloucester, supporting shipping--bearing up the World!

A cramped position! Well, presently every bone in him ached, and swelled, as it seemed, under the heavy pressure, although the half-ton rib, balanced upon the narrow keel, was still suspended in--supported by--the derrick’s falls.

Water dripped from his disheveled hair--his face--and ran down in rivulets over his bare, red chest, from which the open shirt-collar--the limp, soiled shirt-collar--fell back.

But still he crouched--bearing up the World!

Ho! All of a sudden, his bent frame stiffened, reacted to a lightning-like, cleaving thrill which made him conscious that it was growing numb.

Two bright eyes were looking audaciously--challengingly--into his. They were pretty eyes--brown eyes--each harboring a mocking firefly. And the lashes, half-veiling them, were unusual--dark brown, shading into amber at the tips, now borrowing the sunshine’s gold--mocking gold!

Atlas scowled now as he bore up shipping; his subconscious feeling of importance--his “it” feeling--was being derided, laughed at, by a girl.

Vaguely, for the blood was congesting in his head, he saw that there were, at least, a dozen other girlish forms behind her. Girlish faces, fresh as May-flowers, with a little tan on them, flocked before his swimming vision.

One swam into sight which he knew. It was lit by dark eyes, with stars in them.

But, somehow, at the moment, he did not welcome them--their starry sympathy. He felt, too, hotly provoked with the firefly ones which challenged him.

“Hul-hullo--Olive!... How d’you do?” he managed to get out, in response to his cousin’s quivering glance.

“Hullo! Atlas.... Atlas holding up the World!” came in laughing admiration, with swift intuition, from Blue Heron. Her hands were clasped--her whole slim girlish form a tribute. “My! but his wings have grown--war-service wings!” The silent homage tickled her throat.

“When--when is the launching to be?” she asked. “When is that new vessel to be launched over there, in that other yard?”

“About--an hour from now--I--think!” answered Atlas, with difficulty, from under the yellow ship’s rib.