The Penhale brothers grew and grew, put off childish things and began to seek the company of men worshipfully and with emulation, as puppies imitate grown dogs. Ortho’s first hero was a fisherman whose real name was George Baragwanath, but who was invariably referred to as “Jacky’s George,” although his father, the possessive Jacky, was long dead and forgotten and had been nothing worth mentioning when alive. Jacky’s George was a remarkable man. At the age of seventeen, while gathering driftwood below Pedn Boar, he had seen an intact ship’s pinnace floating in. The weather was moderate, but there was sufficient swell on to stave the boat did it strike the outer rocks—and it was a good boat. The only way to save it was to swim off, but Jacky’s George, like most fishermen, could not swim. He badly wanted that boat; it would make him independent of Jacky, whose methods were too slow to catch a cold, leave alone fish. Moreover, there was a girl involved. He stripped off his clothes, gathered the bundle of driftwood in his arms, flopped into the back wash of a roller and kicked out, frog-fashion, knowing full well that his chances of reaching the boat were slight and that if he did not reach it he would surely drown.
He reached the boat, however, scrambled up over the stern and found three men asleep on the bottom. His heart fell like lead. He had risked his life for nothing; he’d still have to go fishing with the timorous Jacky and the girl must wait.
“Here,” said he wearily to the nearest sleeper. “Here, rouse up; you’m close ashore . . . be scat in a minute.”
The sleeper did not stir. Jacky’s George kicked him none too gently. Still the man did not move. He then saw that he was dead; they were all dead. The boat was his after all! He got the oars out and brought the boat safely into Monks Cove. Quite a sensation it made—Jacky’s George, stark naked, pulling in out of the sea fog with a cargo of dead men. He married that girl forthwith, was a father at eighteen, a grandfather at thirty-five. In the interval he got nipped by the Press Gang in a Falmouth grog shop and sent round the world with Anson in the Centurion, rising to the rank of quarter-gunner. One of the two hundred survivors of that lucrative voyage, he was paid off with a goodly lump of prize money, and, returning to his native cove, opened an inn with a florid, cock-hatted portrait of his old commander for sign.
Jacky’s George, however, was not inclined to a life of bibulous ease ashore. He handed the inn over to his wife and went to sea again as gunner in a small Falmouth privateer mounting sixteen pieces. Off Ushant one February evening they were chased by a South Maloman of twice their weight of metal, which was overhauling them hand over fist when her foremast went by the board and up she went in the wind. Jacky’s George was responsible for the shot that disabled the Breton, but her parting broadside disabled Jacky’s George; he lost an arm.
He was reported to have called for rum, hot tar and an ax. These having been brought, he gulped the rum, chopped off the wreckage of his forearm, soused the spurting stump in tar and fainted. He recovered rapidly, fitted a boat-hook head to the stump and was at work again in no time, but the accident made a longshoreman of him; he went no more a-roving in letters of marque, but fished offshore with his swarm of sons, Ortho Penhale occasionally going with him.
Physically Jacky’s George was a sad disappointment. Of all the Covers he was the least like what he ought to have been, the last man you would have picked out as the desperado who had belted the globe, sacked towns and treasure ships, been master gunner of a privateer and killed several times his own weight in hand-to-hand combats. He was not above five feet three inches in height, a chubby, chirpy, red-headed cock-robin of a man who drank little, swore less, smiled perpetually and whistled wherever he went—even, it was said, at the graveside of his own father, in a moment of abstraction of course.
His wife, who ran the “Admiral Anson” (better known as the “Kiddlywink”), was a heavy dark woman, twice his size and very downright in her opinions. She would roar down a roomful of tipsy mariners with ease and gusto, but the least word of her smiling little husband she obeyed swiftly and in silence. It was the same with his children. There were nine of them—two daughters and seven sons—all red-headed and freckled like himself, a turbulent, independent tribe, paying no man respect—but their father.
Ortho could not fathom the nature of the little man’s power over them; he was so boyish himself, took such childish delight in their tales of mischief, seemed in all that boatload of boys the youngest and most carefree. Then one evening he had a glimpse of the cock-robin’s other side. They were just in from sea, were lurching up from the slip when they were greeted by ominous noises issuing from the Kiddlywink, the crash of woodwork, hoarse oaths, a thump and then growlings as of a giant dog worrying a bone. Jacky’s George broke into a run, and at the same moment his wife, terrified, appeared at the door and cried out, “Quick! Quick do ’ee! Murder!”
Jacky’s George dived past her into the house, Ortho, agog for any form of excitement, close behind him.
The table was lying over on its side, one bench was broken and the other tossed, end on, into a corner. On the wet floor, among chips of shattered mugs, two men struggled, locked together, a big man on top, a small man underneath. The former had the latter by the throat, rapidly throttling him. The victim’s eyeballs seemed on the point of bursting, his tongue was sticking out.
“Tinners!” wailed Mrs. Baragwanath. “Been drinkin’ all day—gert stinkin’ toads!”
Jacky’s George did not waste time in wordy remonstrance; he got the giant’s chin in the crook of his sound arm and tried to wrench it up. Useless; the maddened brute was too strong and too heavy. The man underneath gave a ghastly, clicking choke. In another second there would have been murder done in the “Admiral Anson” and a blight would fall on that prosperous establishment, killing trade. That would never do. Without hesitation its landlord settled the matter, drove his stump-hook into the giant’s face, gaffed him through the cheek as he would a fish.
“Come off!” said he.
The man came off.
“Come on!” He backed out, leading the man by the hook.
“Lift a hand or struggle and I’ll drag your face inside out,” said Jacky’s George. “This way, if you please.”
The man followed, bent double, murder in his eyes, hands twitching but at his sides.
At the end of the hamlet Jacky’s George halted. “You owe me your neck, mate, but I don’t s’pose you’ll thank me, tedd’n in human nature, you would,” said he, sadly, as though pained at the ingratitude of mortal man. “Go on up that there road till you’m out of this place an’ don’t you never come back.”
He freed the hook deftly and jumped clear. “Now crowd all canvas, do ’ee.”
The great tinner put a hand to his bleeding cheek, glared at the smiling cock-robin, clenched his fists and teeth and took a step forward—one only. A stone struck him in the chest, another missed his head by an inch. He ducked to avoid a third and was hit in the back and thigh, started to retreat at a walk, broke into a run and went cursing and stumbling up the track, his arms above his head to protect it from the rain of stones, Goliath pursued by seven red-headed little Davids, and all the Cove women standing on their doorsteps jeering.
“Two mugs an’ a bench seat,” Jacky’s George commented as he watched his sons speeding the parting guest. “Have to make t’other poor so............