'I should not anything say,' the petty officer answered, and he didn't anything say, either. Instead, he gave O'Donnell the 240 marks he'd agreed to pay. O'Donnell handed the money to Butcher, who stuck it in his pocket.
The captain of the Ripple kept on trying to get more out of the German sailor, but he didn't have any luck. Finally, in frustration, he gave up and told George Enos, 'Hell with it. Give 'em their fish and we'll all go on about our business.'
'Right,' Enos said again. Had he got the extra ten pfennigs a kilo, he would have worked extra hard to make sure the Yorck got the finest fish he had in the hold. Some of the haddock scrod down there, the little fellows just over a pound, would melt in your mouth. When Charlie fried 'em in butter and bread crumbs-he got hungry just thinking about it.
But the young fish would also bring better prices back at the docks. He gave the Germans the bigger haddock and sole the trawl had scooped up from the bottom of the sea. They'd be good enough, and then some.
The Germans didn't raise a fuss. They were sailors, but they weren't fishermen. Their boat rode appreciably lower in the water when they cast off from the Ripple's rail and rowed back to the cruiser from which they'd come. The Yorck's crane lifted them out of the water and back on deck.
More flags broke out on the signal lines as the Yorck began steaming toward Boston once more. 'Thank you,' Captain O'Donnell read through the spyglass. 'Signal 'You're welcome,' Fred.'
'Sure will, Captain,' the mate said, and did.
George wished he had a good tall tumbler of Cookie's rum. Moving better than half a ton of fish out of the hold was hard work. With that on his mind, he asked Lucas Phelps, 'Ever hear of a sailor turning down the jug?'
'Not when you stand to get away with it clean as a whistle, like them squareheads did,' Phelps answered. 'Wonder what the hell was chewin' on their tails. That's good rum Cookie's got, too.'
'How do you know?' Enos asked him. Phelps laid a finger alongside his nose and winked. By the veins in that nose, he knew rum well enough to be a connoisseur. George Enos chuckled. Sure enough, he'd wheedled a shot or two out of Charlie himself. It helped compress the endless monotony of life aboard a fishing boat.
They hauled in the trawl full of flipping, twisting bottom fish. Once the load had gone into the hold, Captain O'Donnell peered down in there to see how high the fish were stacked. They could have piled in another couple of trawlfuls, but O'Donnell said, 'I think we're going to head for port. We're up over twenty tons; the owners won't have anything to grouse about. And we'll have some extra money in our pockets once Fred turns those marks into dollars at the bank.'
Nobody argued with him. Nobody would have argued with him if he'd decided to stay out another day or two and fill the hold right up to the hatches with haddock. He made his pay by having the answers.
Enos went into the galley for a mug of coffee. He found Fred Butcher in there, killing time with the Cookie. By the rich smell rising from Butcher's mug, he had more than coffee in there. Enos blew on his own mug, sipped, and then said, 'Bet we'd be out longer if that petty officer hadn't got the captain nervous.'
'Bet you're right,' the mate said. 'Captain O'Donnell, he doesn't like not knowing what's going on. He doesn't like that even a little bit.' Cookie nodded solemnly. So did George. Butcher's comment fit in well with his earlier thought about the captain: if he didn't have the answers, he'd go after them.
The Ripple puffed back toward Boston. At nine knots, she was most of a day away from T Wharf and home. Supper, near sunset, was corned beef and sauerkraut, which made the sailors joke about Charlie White's being a German in disguise. 'Hell of a disguise, ain't it?' the cook said, taking the ribbing in good part. He unbuttoned his shirt to show he was dark brown all over.
'You must be from the Black Forest, Charlie, and it rubbed off on you,' Captain O'Donnell said, which set off fresh laughter. Enos hadn't heard of the Black Forest till then-he'd gone to work when he was a kid, and had little schooling-but from the way the captain talked about it, he figured it was a real place in Germany somewhere.
They rigged their running lamps and chugged on through the night. The next day, they passed between Deer Island Light and the Long Island Head Light, and then between Governor's Island and Castle Island as they steamed toward T Wharf.
On the north side of the Charles River, over in Charlestown, lay the Boston Navy Yard. Enos looked that way as soon as he got the chance. So did Captain O'Donnell, with the spyglass. 'There's the Yorck, all right, along with the rest of the western squadron of the High Seas Fleet,' he said. 'Doesn't look like anything's wrong aboard 'em, any more than it does on our ships. All quiet, seems like.' He sounded annoyed, as if he blamed the Germans and the Americans-easily distinguishable because their hulls were a much lighter gray-for the quiet.
Fred Butcher had his eye on profit and loss: he was looking ahead to T Wharf. 'Not many boats tied up,' he said. 'We ought to get a good price at the Fish Exchange.'
They tied up to the wharf and came up onto it to get their land legs back after more than a week at sea. An old, white-bearded man awkwardly pushing a fish cart with one hand and a hook mounted on the stump of his other wrist folded his meat hand into a fist and shook it at Charlie White. 'You go to hell, you damn nigger!' he shouted in a hoarse, raspy voice. 'Wasn't for your kind, we wouldn't have fought that war and this here'd still be one country.'
'You go to hell, Shaw!' Enos shouted back at him. He turned to the Cookie. 'Don't pay him any mind, Charlie. Remember, his family were mucky-mucks before the damn Rebels broke loose. They lost everything after the war, and he blames colored folks for it.'
'Lots of white folks do that,' Charlie said, and then shut up. It was hard for the few Negroes in the United States to get away from the scapegoat role that had dogged them for more than fifty years now. Compared to their colored brethren south of the Mason-Dixon line, they had it easy, but that wasn't saying much. The Rebels didn't have nigger hunts through the streets, either- those were an American invention, like the telegraph and the telephone.
'You're jake with us, Charlie,' Lucas Phelps said, and all the fishermen from the Ripple nodded. They'd proved that, in brawls on the wharf and in the saloons just off it. George Enos rubbed a scarred knuckle he'd picked up in one of those brawls.
T Wharf was chaos-horse-drawn wagons and gasoline trucks, pushcarts and cats and dealers and screeching gulls and arguments and, supreme above all else, fish-in the wagons, in the trucks, in the carts, in the air.
Shouting newsboys only added to the racket and confusion. George didn't pay them any mind till he noticed what they were shouting: 'Archduke dies in Sarajevo! Bomb blast kills Franz Ferdinand and his wife! Austria threatens war on Serbia! Read all about it!'
He dug in the pocket of the overalls he wore under his oilskins for a couple of pennies and bought a Globe. His crewmen crowded round him to read along. A passage halfway down the column leaped out at the eye. He read it aloud: 'President Roosevelt stated in Philadelphia yesterday that the United States, as a member of the Austro- German Alliance, will meet all commitments required by treaty, whatever the consequences, saying, 'A nation at war with one member of the Alliance is at war with every member.' ' He whistled softly under his breath.
Lucas Phelps' finger stabbed out toward a paragraph farther down. 'In Richmond, Confederate President Wilson spoke in opposition to the oppression of small nations by larger ones, and confirmed that the Confederate States are and shall remain part of the Quadruple Entente.' Phelps spoke up on his own hook: ' England and France 'll lead 'em by the nose the way they always do, the bastards.'
'They'll be sorry if they try anything, by jingo,' Enos said. 'I did my two years in the Army, and I wouldn't mind putting the old green-gray back on, if that's what it comes down to.'
'Same with me,' Phelps said.
Everybody else echoed him, sometimes with profane embellishments, except Charlie White. The Negro cook said, 'They don't draft colored folks into the Army, but damned if I know why. They gave me a rifle, I'd shoot me a Confederate or three.'
'Good old Charlie!' George declared. ' 'Course you would.' He turned to the rest of the crew. 'Let's buy Charlie a beer or two.' The motion carried by acclamation.
From the heights of Arlington, Sergeant Jake Featherston peered across the Potomac toward Washington, D.C. As he lowered the field glasses from his eyes, Captain Jeb Stuart III asked him, 'See anything interesting over there in Yankeeland?'
'No, sir,' Featherston answered. His glance slipped to one of the three-inch howitzers sited in an earthen pit
