The foaming fore shore/Chapter 6

HAT livers to fry!" gasped Bolero at sight of the prize haul.

He took the brown cigar from his teeth and wiggled it exultingly. Then he and Brown jumped snappily to the rail to handle the dory tackles.

"Sluice them on deck—quick!" urged Taylor. "Sag enough here to unjoint a man's arms!"

Bolero and Brown hooked on and swiftly swung outboard the dip-net rigged on a pulley. Up and down the splattering dip-net plunged. In a silver stream the cod were scooped inboard, all alive and flopping in the pen, and while the dories, leaving Taylor aboard, sheered off again to reset the empty trap, Brown and Bolero hastened to spread the splitting-tables amidships.

"Never mind, boys," Taylor stopped them. "I'm not salting these down. I'm taking them in to Château to be made ashore."

Without a wink of surprise Bolero and Brown desisted, Bolero going off immediately to his tiny galley and Brown taking his accustomed place at the wheel. They made no comment then, but when the dories were nested aboard once more and sail crowded on the Graywing the crew had opportunity to pass the word as the schooner headed inshore.

"Aye, an' 'tis made fish ashore, they'll be, ye ken," winked Scotty McCaig to Halifax. "An' for why? Are the cod nae plentiful an' this the first week o' June? October's a lang way aheid, Tammy. Loys o' time tae dry a few hundred quintals ashore an' still fill our hold tae ballast us hame tae Gloucester! Eh, mon—wha' are ye gulletin' doon yer laughs for?"

"Why 're you puttin' that squint in them canny eyes of yours, Scotty?" countered Halifax. "Did you hear me gossip a word about dryin' ashore? So a Château firm makes them cod—what? Well, Scotty, I'll jist venture a whisper in your cauliflowered ear. I'll bet you a pound o' Fisherman's Friend I kin name the room they'll go to."

"I take ye! Wha' room, ye seventh son o' a prophet?" challenged McCaig.

"Old Peter Laval's room!" prophesied the battered sealer.

Wing and wing, the speed of a water-witch in her rakish beautiful lines, Taylor himself in Brown's place at the wheel, the Graywing drove on for Château Bay, the grandest fiord on Labrador's southern fore shore. Past York Point, its western entrance, she tacked, raising the sheer basaltic cliff of the Devil's Dining Table capping Henley Island and fluttered on through the cove-like harbor of Château itself.

Rimmed 'round by towering Laurentian hills covered with birch, balsam and spruce, snuggling at the foot of Beacon Hill the hoary thousand-foot sentinel of all, spread the ancient, storied settlement. Here, Taylor knew, Jacques Cartier in 1534 had first set down his wandering foot on the shores of his La Nouvelle France.

Here was the founding of his first settlement of French colons that grew by the hundreds, to be swelled in the middle of the seventeenth century by bold Breton emigrants, to be further augmented a full century later by exiled Acadians who in 1843 located at Matashquan and inevitably drifted in to Château till it hived in its present glory of swarming population and hummed with the ceaseless industry of the fishing.

The industry of the fishers was the blood and fiber of the place. Newfoundland merchants marketed the catch, and of the several firms doing business there Peter Laval secured the bulk of the trade. Of all the old-time dealers, slave-masters of the outports and rogues and hypocrites at heart, Taylor acknowledged old Peter the peer.

No more skilful hand than old Peter's to cull a fisherman's voyage and grade it for his profit as damp or Madeira!

No swifter pencil than old Peter's to charge the planters double prices for supplies and carry on his books without interest their balance at the settling up!

No, nor no greater pride than Peter's when sober, nor no deeper devotion as, a pillar of the church, he sat in the front pew and prayed for his delinquent livyeres in the seats behind him.

And, lastly, no more sordid coiner of men's and women's lives into Terranovan dollars as evidenced in his custoncustom [sic] of working women as cheaper labor than men upon his Labrador stations.