Cheer up, Jack, bright smiles await you
From the fairest of the fair,
And her loving eyes will greet you
With kind welcomes everywhere.
Rolling home, rolling home,
Rolling home across the sea.
Rolling home to dear old England,
Rolling home, dear land, to thee!
--Rolling Home.
There was no niggardliness in the trade the Vose folks made with Captain
Mayo. They contracted to co-operate with him and his men in floating the
steamship, repairing her in dry dock, and refitting her for her
route. She would be appraised as she stood after refitting, as a
going proposition, and Mayo was to receive stock to the amount of her
value--stock in the newly organized Vose line.
"Furthermore," stated old man Vose, "we shall need a chap of just about
your gauge as manager. You have shown that you are able to do things."
He was up on the Conomo's deck after a long inspection of the work
which had been done under difficulties.
"You would have had this steamer off with your own efforts if your money
had lasted. Your next job is the Montana; but you'll simply manage
that, Captain Mayo--use your head and save your muscle."
"I'll get her off, seeing that I put her on."
"We all know just how she was put on--and Marston will pay for it in his
hard coin."
Under these circumstances Razee Reef was no longer a mourners' bench!
The dreary days of makeshift were at an end.
The lighters of one of the biggest wrecking companies of the coast
hurried to Razee and flocked around the maimed steamer--Samaritans of
the sea. Gigantic equipment embraced her; great pumps gulped the water
from her; bolstered and supported, as a stricken man limps with his arms
across the shoulders of his friends, the steamer came off Razee Reef
with the first spring tide in July, and toiled off across the sea in
the wake of puffing tugs, and was shored up and safe at last in a dry
dock--the hospital of the crippled giants of the ocean.
No music ever sounded as sweet to Captain Mayo as that clanging chorus
the hammers of the iron-workers played on the flanks of the Conomo.
But he tore himself away from that music, and went down to Maquoit along
with a vastly contented Captain Candage, who remembered now that he had
a daughter waiting for him.
She had been apprised by letter of their success and of their coming.
Maquoit made a celebration of that arrival of the Ethel and May, and
Dolph and Otie, cook and mate of the schooner, led the parade when the
men were on shore.