Jack Harvey's Adventures: or, The Rival Campers Among the Oyster Pirates. Smith Ruel Perley

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СКАЧАТЬ to you,” said Harvey, by way of reply. He had, at the sight of this companion in misery, regained his composure a little. Unconsciously, the fact that here was someone with whom he could share misfortune had raised his courage. For Harvey had taken in the appearance of the man at once. He was well dressed. His clothes were of fine material and of a stylish cut – albeit they were wrinkled and dusty from his recent experiences. A torn place in the sleeve of his coat told, too, of the rough handling he had received. His collar was crumpled and wilted, his tie disarranged. A derby hat that he had worn lay now on the floor, in one corner, with the crown broken. On the little finger of his left hand he wore a ring.

      Instinctively, Jack Harvey and the stranger extended arms and grasped hands, with the warmth of sudden friendship born of mutual sympathy.

      “Well, I’ll be hanged, if they’re not a lot of scoundrels!” exclaimed the man, surveying Harvey with astonishment. “Why, you’re only a boy. How on earth did they get you? Didn’t drug your drink, did they?”

      “No, I don’t drink,” said Harvey. “I signed for a cruise, all right, but not on this craft. I signed to go a month on that schooner that brought me down. Cracky, but it looks as though I’d made a mess of it. A chap named Jenkins got me into this – ”

      “Jenkins!” cried the man, bursting out in a fury. “Jenkins, was it? Slim, oily chap, flashy waistcoat and sailor tie?”

      Harvey nodded.

      The man clenched his fist and raised it above his head.

      “Told you he was going to Johns Hopkins when he earned the money – nice family but poor – and all that sort of rot?”

      “That’s the chap,” said Harvey.

      The man dropped his fist, put out a hand to Harvey, and they shook once more. The man’s face relaxed into a grim smile.

      “Well, I’m another Jenkins recruit,” he said. “I’m an idiot, an ass, anything you’re a-mind to call me. There’s some excuse for you – but me, a man that’s travelled from one end of this United States to the other, and met every kind of a sharper between New York and San Francisco – to get caught in a scrape like this!”

      “Why, then your name is not Tom Saunders,” exclaimed Harvey, who now recognized in his new acquaintance the man he had seen struggling with the men of the schooner. “They said you were a sailor.” The man made a gesture of disgust. “I hate the very smell of the salt water!” he cried.

      There was a small sea chest next to the bulk-head at the forward end of the forecastle, and Harvey and the stranger seated themselves on it. The man relapsed for a moment into silence, his elbows on his knees, his face buried in his hands. Then, all of a sudden, he sat erect, and beat his fist down upon one knee.

      “This ends it!” he cried, earnestly. “Never again as long as I live and breathe.”

      Harvey stared at him in surprise.

      “I mean the drink,” cried the man, excitedly. “Mind what I say, and I mean it. Never another drink as long as I live. I’ve said, before, that I’d stop it, but this ends it. Say, what’s your name, anyway?”

      “Jack Harvey.”

      “Well, my name’s Edwards – Tom Edwards. Now look here, Harvey, I mean what I say; if you ever see Tom Edwards try to take another drink, you just walk up and hit him the hardest knock you can give him. See?”

      Harvey laughed, in spite of the other’s earnestness.

      “I won’t have any chance for some time, by the looks of things,” he said. “You won’t need to sign any pledge this month. I reckon there’s no saloon aboard this vessel.”

      “I’m glad of it,” exclaimed Edwards. “I wouldn’t walk into one now, if they were giving the stuff away. Look what it’s got me into. Say, how did our Johns Hopkins friend catch you?”

      Harvey quickly narrated the events that had followed the departure of his parents for Europe, and the meeting with young Mr. Jenkins. Mr. Edwards, listening with astonishment, eyed him with keenest interest.

      “That’s it,” he exclaimed, as Harvey recounted the engaging manner in which Jenkins had assured him he would return in one short month, with a nautical experience that should make him the envy of his boy companions; “put it in fancy style, didn’t he? Regular Tom Bowline romance, and all that sort of thing, eh?”

      Mr. Edwards’s eyes twinkled, and he was half smiling, in spite of himself.

      “Well,” he continued, noting Harvey’s athletic figure, “I guess you can stand a month of it, all right, and no great hurt to you. And, what’s best, your folks won’t worry. But I tell you, Harvey, it’s going to be tough on me, if I can’t force this bandit to set me ashore again. I’m in an awful scrape. My business house will think I’ve been murdered, or have run away – I don’t know what. And when it comes to work, if we have much of that to do, I don’t know how I’m going to stand it. You see, my firm pays my expenses, and I’m used to putting up at the best hotels and living high. So, I’m fat and lazy. Billiards is about my hardest exercise, and my hands are as soft as a woman’s. See here.”

      Mr. Edwards stretched out two somewhat unsteady hands, palms upward; then slapped them down upon his knees. As he did so, he uttered a cry of dismay and sprang to his feet, sticking out his little finger and staring at it ruefully.

      “The thieves!” he cried, angrily. “The cowardly thieves! See that ring? They’ve got the diamond out of it. Worth two hundred dollars, if ’twas worth a cent. They couldn’t get the ring off, without cutting it, and I suppose they couldn’t do that easily; so they’ve just pried out the stone.”

      Harvey looked at the hand which Edwards extended. The setting of the costly ring had, indeed, been roughly forced, and the stone it had contained, extracted.

      “I wouldn’t care so much,” said Edwards, “if it hadn’t been a gift from the men in the store.” Impulsively, he turned to Harvey and put a hand on his shoulder.

      “Say, Harvey,” he exclaimed, “when you and I get ashore again – if we ever do – we’ll go and hunt up this young Mr. Jenkins.”

      “All right,” replied Harvey; “but it may not be quite so bad as you think. We’ll get through some way, I guess.”

      Oddly enough, either by reason of the lack of responsibility that weighed on the spirits of the man, or because of a lingering eagerness for adventure, in spite of the dubious prospects, the boy, Harvey, seemed the more resolute of the two.

      “Well,” responded Edwards, “I’m sorry you’re in a scrape; but so long as you’re here, why, I’m glad you’re the kind of a chap you are. We’ll help each other. We’ll stand together.”

      And they shook hands upon it again.

      “Now,” said Edwards, “here’s how I came here. I’m a travelling man, for a jewelry house – Burton & Brooks, of Boston. I was on the road, got into Washington the other night, and sold a lot of goods there. But one of my trunks hadn’t come on time, and I was hung up for a day with nothing to do. Never had been in Baltimore, and thought I’d run down for a few hours.

      “I got dinner at a restaurant and went out to look around. I went along, hit or miss, and brought up down by the water-front. This chap, Jenkins, bumped into me and apologized СКАЧАТЬ