Prisoners of the North Read Free Page B

back and dream of sailor days in the Pacific Islands and he would chaff me about the dusky-eyed belles.” Bredenberg, an old Klondiker and a former sailor before the mast, wrote to the Romanian queen recalling how “we would sit and spin yarns of our younger days, or our fights on some of the hard Yankee ships.” Apart from Bredenberg, she was the only one whom Boyle allowed to pierce that bluff exterior.
    In one of his many letters to Marie there is a glimpse of an earlier Boyle, a lonely and romantic teenager, thrust into a hard, foreign world of adventure—a world of his own choosing, but one fraught with pitfalls. He was by far the youngest hand on the Wallace , and he was, in a sense, a kind of teacher’s pet, hired on a whim by the ship’s captain who had noticed him lazing about on the dock, taken an interest in him, and offered to sign him on. Those first days as a green deckhand took away much of the romance; but Boyle endured, and the memory of the early days endured, too. He wrote: “I have just been out looking at the stars who have so many times been my companions and comforters—as a boy sailor at sea on a ship on which every man was against me and was more alone than if I had been the only soul on her—I used to lie on my back on the hatch at night and pick out a bright star, which used to seem to send me a message and wink and get brighter and let me know that he would be there the next night.”
    How had he spent those three years aboard the Wallace and later the cargo steamer Susan , which brought him back to New York? The two brief glimpses we have of him through family tradition may be apocryphal, yet they ring true because they forecast events of his later career. When a fellow seaman tripped on the deck and tumbled into the water, Boyle was the first over the side to rescue his shipmate. That was the first time, but not the last, when he would risk his life to save another through quick thinking. Again, en route to the Indian Ocean the frail barque was crippled in a series of raging storms, and the exhausted crew working the pumps were about to give up the struggle when Boyle, the take-charge youth, rallied them, forced them back to work, and took command of the life-saving operation until the barque limped into port.
    At twenty, having risen to ship’s quartermaster, he turned up unannounced in New York. There he was reunited with his older brother Dave who introduced him to a fellow boarder, a lively and attractive divorcee, Mildred Josephine Raynor, whom Dave himself hoped to marry. Heedless of his brother’s anguish, Joe plunged into a whirlwind courtship that swept Mildred off her feet. In just three days they were married. Dave Boyle, a shy, unassuming man, was deeply affected by the collapse of what had been a secret romance. Many years later Flora Boyle wrote, “No one will ever know how badly he was hurt. He never married and all through her tumultuous lifetime, he remained Mildred’s closest, most faithful friend.”
    Joe Boyle certainly was not. He and Mildred were incompatible almost from the beginning. He was a skilled boxer and, like his father, a lover of horses. His natural homes now were the racetrack and the boxing ring; his cronies were bookmakers and pugilists. She had social pretensions. When their daughter Macushla died at the age of six months from scarlet fever, Boyle began to drink heavily. One night he and a playboy companion were arrested for being drunk and disorderly and also for trying to steal a cab and threatening the driver. A bookmaking friend eventually bailed them out, but the incident changed Boyle.

    Mildred Raynor. She married young Joe Boyle after a whirlwind three-day courtship. She was nicknamed “Minky” because she loved costly furs .
    “It’s obvious I can’t drink like a gentleman,” he told his companion as they waited in jail, “and since I can’t hold my liquor I shall never drink again.”
    “You’ll get so virtuous you’ll be