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

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СКАЧАТЬ to draw the boy, Joe, into conversation; but the latter was sullen, and chary of his words.

      Would Jenkins surely be down by the next vessel? The boy nodded, somewhat blankly. He guessed so. Where would they begin fishing, and how? Harvey would see, later. And so on. There was clearly little to be gotten from him.

      Once there came down into the cabin the same, odd individual who had sat, huddled in the cabin, smoking, the afternoon before. He got a dish of the flap-jacks and a pail of the coffee, and started out again. Harvey fired a question at him, as the man waited a moment to receive his grub.

      “How do we fish, down the bay, anyway?” asked Harvey.

      The man turned a little, stared at Harvey in a surly manner for a moment, and then – apparently not all in sympathy with methods aboard the schooner and in the trade generally – answered, “Hmph! You breaks yer back at a bloody winder.” And with this somewhat enigmatical reply, went about his business.

      “Say,” said Harvey, turning to the boy, once more, “what’s a winder?”

      “Why, it’s a – a – winder,” responded the boy.

      “That’s just what I thought,” said Harvey, smiling in spite of his perplexity. “And what’s it for?”

      “You get oysters with it,” replied the boy. “You heaves the dredge overboard, and you winds it in again.”

      “Oh, I see,” said Harvey, enlightened by this lucid explanation. “It’s a sort of windlass, eh?”

      Joe nodded.

      “Hard work?” continued Harvey.

      “Naw – easy.”

      But Harvey had his misgivings. And again he comforted himself with the thought, at worst, the cruise would be over and done in a month.

      “I guess I’m good for that,” he muttered; and went out on deck again.

      The schooner’s course had been changed a little, and they were now sailing almost directly south, down Chesapeake bay. The schooner was no longer winged out, but had both booms off to port, getting the wind on the quarter. Fore-staysail and jib and main gaff top-sail, as well, were set, and the old craft was swinging southward at a fair clip. The wind had begun to increase.

      This was action after Harvey’s own heart, and he walked forward, toward the gruff sailor, who was stationed near the forecastle. He observed, as he advanced, that there was still another man forward by the jibs; and that these two sailors, the captain and mate and the boy, Joe, were apparently the only ones aboard the vessel, besides himself.

      Harvey glanced at the man forward. He was almost dwarfish in stature, thick-set, with unusually broad shoulders. Clearly, this was not the man that Harvey had seen asleep, amid the bundle of blankets, in the cabin. Harvey had not seen the face of the sleeper, but he had noted once, when the man had stirred, that he was a tall man; that the figure stretched out at length took up an unusual amount of room.

      It flashed over Harvey that the man he had seen asleep in the cabin, the night before, was missing from there now. Harvey was certain he had not seen him, as he sat eating. To make sure, he went back and looked. The man was not there.

      “That’s odd,” said Harvey to himself, as he came on deck again. “I wonder if they’ve lugged him down into the forecastle, too. They must have done it in the night. By jimminy! I wonder how many they’ve got stowed away down there, anyway.”

      Somewhat startled at the idea that there might be other men held there, and curious to see for himself, Harvey approached the companion. As he did so, the surly seaman barred his way.

      “Keep out ’er there,” he said, roughly. “You can’t go below now. Them’s my orders.”

      Harvey stepped back, in surprise. There was a mystery to the forecastle, then, sure enough. He hazarded one question:

      “What’s the matter? What’s down there?”

      The man made no reply.

      Harvey went forward to where the other man stood.

      “Say, what’s there to do aboard here?” he asked.

      The fellow turned and eyed Harvey for a moment, curiously.

      “Nothin’ now,” he replied, finally. “Nothin’ till we get down the bay. We all takes it easy like, till then.”

      But further than this, he, too, became uncommunicative when Harvey questioned him about the cruise. It was discouraging, and Harvey gave it up. He seemed likely to have little companionship, if any, aboard the schooner, and the thought was not pleasing. Again he wondered at the strange disappearance of Mr. Jenkins, and hoped it might be true that the young man would rejoin them down the bay.

      The day passed somewhat monotonously for the most part. The schooner was holding an almost straight course down the bay, along the western shore. Harvey, having an eye for safety, noted that the coast was almost unbroken for miles and miles, affording no harbour in case of storm. He spoke of it once to the sailor by the forecastle.

      “Plenty of harbours down below,” replied the man. “We’re goin’ well; reckon we’ll lie in the Patuxent tonight. There’s harbour enough for you.”

      It was a positive relief to Harvey when, some time in the afternoon, it came on to blow very fresh, and the foresail and mainsail were both reefed. He lent a hand at that, tieing in reef points with the other two. They seemed surprised that he knew how to do it.

      But, with the freshening of the wind, it altered its direction and blew up finally, towards evening, from the eastward; so that they made slower progress, running now on the wind, close-hauled. Rain began falling at twilight, and a bitter chill crept into the air. Harvey thought of the oil-skins he had intended buying in Baltimore, and wished he had them. There was nothing for him to do on deck now, however, and he gladly went below.

      He ate his supper alone, for all hands were on deck. The schooner pitched and thrashed about in the short, rough seas. It was gloomy in the dimly lighted cabin, and the boy Joe, at work in the galley, positively declined to enter into conversation. Jack Harvey, left to himself, mindful of his strange situation, of the mysterious forecastle with its imprisoned men, and depressed by the wretched night, didn’t dare admit to himself how much he wished himself ashore. The confinement of the cabin made him drowsy, not long after he had eaten, and he was glad enough to roll up in a blanket on one of the bunks and go off to sleep.

      While he slept, the schooner thrashed its way in past a light-house on a point of land on the western shore, and headed up into the mouth of a broad, deep river. They sailed into this for something like half a mile, Scroop at the wheel, and the mate and two seamen forward, peering ahead through the rain.

      Presently the mate rushed aft.

      “There she lies,” he said, pointing, as he spoke, to where a lantern gleamed in the fore-mast shrouds of a vessel at anchor.

      “I see her,” responded Scroop.

      The old schooner, under the guiding hand of Scroop, rounded to and came up into the wind a few rods astern of the other vessel. And now, lying astern, the light from the other’s cabin shone so that the forms of three men could be distinguished vaguely, standing on the deck. The schooner’s anchor went down, the foresail was dropped, and, the jibs having already been taken in, the craft was СКАЧАТЬ