Adventure Magazine Cover — page 139: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

EAST OF THE BISHOP cherished the hope that his son would one day command an American ship as fine as the one that the Gilstone had taken. Rob sighed, and moved a trifle uneasily in his chair as he came to this part of the story that had been handed down to him. The N E ATLANTIC OCEAN pat" 1. Pos LIGHT Silio Oo ~£ 6 <4 Sven STaye A Pst many s ISLES of SciLiy 7° y ENGLISH CHANNEL 6° father, and the son for whom he had planned so hopefully, were drowned together between Annet and St. Agnes one calm day when it seemed impossible that the sea could do harm. The dream lived on, however, in a daughter of the house, the mother of Rob Trevellick. When Gunner’s Ledge claimed her husband, the dream faded dim indeed, and Rob, with the same philosophy that his grandfather had possessed, put his own prospects out of mind to devote himself to supporting his mother and her younger children as a fisherman. Now that the dream was becoming more vivid once more, Rob’s daring among the Rocks and the occasional windfall of a pound for a day’s work was slowly, very slowly, increasing a fund that might some time be large enough to send young Luke to the mainland and later put him aboard a merchant ship as an apprentice—with a future on the Seven Seas. Ships had changed since his grandfather had dreamed his dream. Luke would pace athwart ship on a bridge, instead of fore and aft on a quarterdeck, but the sea was the same sea, and an officer was still an officer. Often when hauling his pots alone among the rocks, or answering the innumerable questions of amateur fishermen, Rob Trevel- lick would see the big ships passing to the southward; mighty four-stackers racing for Cherbourg, twenty-thousand-tonners out- ward bound at a more leisurely pace; tramps loaded down to their Plimsolls plod- 133 ding the salt highway with the products of the Empire under their hatches. Would Luke set foot on one of these very ships? The thought would set him hauling more stoutly on the heavy lobster pot, or devot- ing himself more keenly to sailing his broad-beamed yawl over the hidden ledges where pollack and mackerel lurked. The number of daring visitors who desired to cruise among the Western Rocks was very few, and they must be given the best of sport and the most painstaking seamanship to please and protect them. Otherwise they might not come again, and young Luke would lose thereby. Rob sighed and knocked out his pipe. It was slow, deadly slow. Luke was growing like a willow sapling, and the fund went up only sixpence by sixpence. No amount of sacrifice by Rob and his wife seemed to make it grow faster. And with fools coming to Scilly to fling their boats and their bodies on the Rocks, it might well become even slower. Few men will pay a pound a day to put their bodies in jeopardy with only a few fish to be gained thereby. And then, too, occasionally among the Rocks, without a moment’s warning, would come a close call, a very breath of Death, to remind him that so far, in this long struggle, the sea had always won, and the fishermen had always died. He stooped and took the joined ropes from his son’s hand. “Fair, lad,’’ he said, squinting critically at the smooth splice. “But get ’ee to bed *fore your mother talks to ’ee.”’ HE dawn next day was a red dawn as full of promise of wind and rough waters as the yellow sunset of the night before. Rob was up and on board the Banner, his broad-beamed, slow- moving boat, earlier than usual, bent on visiting as many of his lobster pots among the Western Rocks as the rising sea would permit. It was a dead beat to windward down the Broad Sound toward the towering Bishop on its outlying rock, but that meant a quick run home, so Rob did not grumble. But the strengthening sou’wester was more than he had bargained for, as he found when he got to windward of that ragged, broken barrier of granite that is the backbone of the Rocks. DOOK C©