So far as she knew, she had never been on board the Ninety-Nine when it
carried a smuggled cargo. She had not broken the letter of the law.
Her father, on asking her to come on this cruise, had said that it
was a pleasure trip to meet a vessel in the gulf.
The pleasure had not been remarkable, though there had been no bad
weather. The coast of Anticosti is cheerless, and it is possible even to
tire of sun and water. True, Bissonnette played the concertina with
passing sweetness, and sang as little like a wicked smuggler as one might
think. But there were boundaries even to that, as there were to his
love-making, which was, however, so interwoven with laughter that it was
impossible to think the matter serious. Sometimes of an evening Joan
danced on deck to the music of the concertina--dances which had their
origin largely with herself fantastic, touched off with some unexpected
sleight of foot--almost uncanny at times to Bissonnette, whose
temperament could hardly go her distance when her mood was as this.
Tarboe looked on with a keener eye and understanding, for was she not
bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh? Who was he that he should fail
to know her? He saw the moonlight play on her face and hair, and he
waved his head with the swaying of her body, and smacked his lips in
thought of the fortune which, smuggling days over, would carry them up to
St.
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