Their names were much more notorious than sweet; and yet in Quebec men
laughed as they shrugged their shoulders at them; for as many jovial
things as evil were told of Tarboe. When it became known that a
dignitary of the Church had been given a case of splendid wine, which
had come in a roundabout way to him, men waked in the night and laughed,
to the annoyance of their wives; for the same dignitary had preached
a powerful sermon against smugglers and the receivers of stolen goods.
It was a sad thing for monsignor to be called a Ninety-Niner, as were all
good friends of Tarboe, high and low. But when he came to know, after
the wine had been leisurely drunk and becomingly praised, he brought his
influence to bear in civic places, so that there was nothing left to do
but to corner Tarboe at last.
It was in the height of summer, when there was little to think of in the
old fortressed city, and a dart after a brigand appealed to the romantic
natures of the idle French folk, common and gentle.
Through clouds of rank tobacco smoke, and in the wash of their bean soup,
the habitants discussed the fate of "Black Tarboe," and officers of the
garrison and idle ladies gossiped at the Citadel and at Murray Bay of the
freebooting gentlemen, whose Ninety-Nine had furnished forth many a table
in the great walled city. But Black Tarboe himself was down at
Anticosti, waiting for a certain merchantman. Passing vessels saw the
Ninety-Nine anchored in an open bay, flying its flag flippantly before
the world--a rag of black sheepskin, with the wool on, in profane keeping
with its name.
There was no attempt at hiding, no skulking behind a point, or scurrying
from observation, but an indolent and insolent waiting--for something.
"Black Tarboe's getting reckless," said one captain coming in, and
another, going out, grinned as he remembered the talk at Quebec, and
thought of the sport provided for the Ninety-Nine when she should come up
stream; as she must in due time, for Tarboe's home was on the Isle of
Days, and was he not fond and proud of his daughter Joan to a point of
folly? He was not alone in his admiration of Joan, for the cure at Isle
of Days said high things of her.
Perhaps this was because she was unlike most other girls, and women too,
in that she had a sense of humour, got from having mixed with choice
spirits who visited her father and carried out at Angel Point a kind of
freemasonry, which had few rites and many charges and countercharges.
She had that almost impossible gift in a woman--the power of telling a
tale whimsically. It was said that once, when Orvay Lafarge, a new
Inspector of Customs, came to spy out the land, she kept him so amused
by her quaint wit, that he sat in the doorway gossiping with her, while
Tarboe and two others unloaded and safely hid away a cargo of liquors
from the Ninety-Nine. And one of the men, as cheerful as Joan herself,
undertook to carry a little keg of brandy into the house, under the very
nose of the young inspector, who had sought to mark his appointment by
the detection and arrest of Tarboe single-handed. He had never met
Tarboe or Tarboe's daughter when he made his boast. If his superiors had
known that Loco Bissonnette, Tarboe's jovial lieutenant, had carried the
keg of brandy into the house in a water-pail, not fifteen feet from where
Lafarge sat with Joan, they might have asked for his resignation. True,
the thing was cleverly done, for Bissonnette made the water spill quite
naturally against his leg, and when he turned to Joan and said in a
crusty way that he didn't care if he spilled all the water in the pail,
he looked so like an unwilling water-carrier that Joan for one little