Then the sheeted, cold driving rain hid the promontory, with its
heavy, lumpy-looking fort, the old gray granite parish church, and
the clustered ships of the harbor, now dashing about and tugging
wildly at their doubled moorings, soon to be left high and dry on
the soft ooze when the thirty-foot tide receded. "There's where we
find our best customers," laughed the French wanton, as Alan Hawke
drew her to his knee, and they laughed merrily over the golden
harvest of the sea, the price of the recovered dead. Through the
narrow stone fanged streets lumbered along the heavy French hooded
carts, driven by squatty men in oil skins and sou'westers, and
laden down with the spoils of the whale, cod, and oyster fisheries.
Stout women in huge blue aprons, with baskets on their rounded arms,
gossiped at the protecting corners, while the shouts of Landlord
Etienne Garcin's drunken band of sea wolves now began to ring out
in the smoky salle a boire.
It was two o'clock when the burly form of Etienne Garcin was propelled
unceremoniously into Alan Hawke's room. A grin of satisfaction spread
over the bullet-headed old ruffian's face, and his round gray pig
eyes twinkled, as he noted the already established entente cordiale
between Jack Blunt's pal and the wanton spy who was the absent
Jack's own especial pet. But, Alan Hawke was temporarily blind to
the universally offered charms of the soubrette as he read Joseph
Smith's careful report.
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