CHAPTER XII ALEC GETS A NEW JOB
Like many another wish, that for the two sets of wireless telephones was unexpectedly slow of achievement. The oyster shipper's instruments arrived promptly enough, and Alec installed them and taught Captain Rumford and his family how to manipulate them. But it was a long, long time before Alec's own set was completed. Needing to save every cent possible, Alec bought only such materials as he could not pick up free, and set about constructing his instruments; but it was a slow job.
For now he was once more back on the oyster-boat; and his plan to learn all there was to learn about oystering, and to spend every minute of his waking hours at work, was more than an idle boast. So he was up by four in the morning or soon thereafter, helping the cook. All day he was busy catching oysters. By the time the Bertha B was scrubbed off and made fast to her pier, darkness was at hand. Alec's evenings were necessarily very brief, as it was absolutely necessary for him to go to bed early if he was to get up early. The only free time he had was that consumed by the trips to and from the oyster grounds. And even that grew steadily less, as he took more and more burdens upon his shoulders.
Like most boys of his age, Alec knew considerable about gasoline motors. In fact Alec was fairly skilled in their handling. Often he had helped a neighbor at home clean and repair his motor-car. His high school physics had taught him a great deal about the theory of gas engine operation. And he had many times driven his neighbor's car. Altogether, he was a handy lad to have about where there were gas engines of any sort.
Down in the hold, where the Bertha's engine chugged so steadily, the air was always tainted with the sickening fumes of exploded gasoline, and the smell of oil. For hours every day, year in and year out, Joe had sat beside his engine, unrelieved. Never before had the Bertha B numbered among her crew any one else who was capable of tending the engine. Now, as Alec, little by little, showed his capacity and won Joe's confidence, he was allowed to handle the big motor. In time, he was permitted, for limited periods, to operate it altogether, while Joe went to deck for a breath of fresh air. Thus Alec learned a great deal about the Bertha B's motor in particular and ship motors in general.
As against his capability in some lines, was balanced Alec's utter ignorance in others. He knew nothing whatever about navigation. But he set himself to learn, and the captain, seeing his desire, aided him. He explained the compass to Alec and showed him how to steer by it so that he could keep a given course, when no landmarks were in sight. He told him how fast the Bertha B ordinarily traveled, and what her maximum speed was. He explained the best speeds for dredging, the proper length of chain to use on the dredges at given stages of the tide, showed him the distant landmarks by which he could locate the Rumford oyster grounds when the stakes were missing, taught him how to find his way into the river at night by the range-lights, and how to distinguish East Point Light from Egg Island Light and all the other lights along the Bay. And the captain taught him about the tides, and how to figure them and take advantage of their flow and allow for drift in steering the boat. He also taught Alec how to find his way through a fog, and how to judge the direction and distance of sounds in a fog. These and many other things Captain Bagley explained to his new hand, delighted, as men of accomplishment always are, to find a lad who was really eager to learn.
Day by day Alec grew in knowledge. All that he needed to make his knowledge wisdom was experience. And with every revolution of the sun he was acquiring that. Occasionally the captain let Alec steer the boat while he himself went back in the cabin for a time. Sometimes the engineer asked Alec to run the motor for a few minutes. And often, when they were all on deck culling oysters, and Alec and Bishop had cleaned up their dredgeful, Dick would call across the deck to Alec and ask if he would look at the roast in the oven, or put a little more water on the beans or stir the potatoes. And Alec would skip inside and execute the commission. So he came to know, not only how to prepare the foods furnished on the Bertha B, but also to know which foods sailors like and which they will not eat. In these and a hundred other ways, Alec was daily making good his assertion that he wanted to know all there was to know about the oyster business, and storing away a vast fund of information that would some day be of the greatest value to him.
Necessarily, therefore, the construction of his wireless outfit was delayed. With the ship pitching and rolling, as it usually did in the Bay, it was difficult to do the fine, exacting work required, such as the winding of the variometer he was making, or the fitting of the parts of a large, loose coupler. Yet every available moment went into the work.
Meantime, Alec had gained Captain Bagley's permission to put up his telegraph set on the Bertha B. He ran a single-wire aerial from masthead to cabin roof and brought his lead-in wire directly into his bunk. He built a shelf at the foot of his bunk and fastened his instruments on it. His cells he secured in a corner of the bunk itself.
In these narrow quarters where he could hardly sit upright he carried on whatever wireless communications he held. They were brief enough. Yet he listened to many a message speeding through the air, and he particularly liked to "take Cape May." Never before had Alec been so near a great wireless plant. The station there, only twenty miles from the Bertha's pier, sent its powerful messages snapping into Alec's ear as distinctly as though the sending instruments were in the Bertha's very cabin.
Best of all were the brief conversations Alec had with Roy Mercer, when the Lycoming passed. Every time that steamer went up or down the coast, Roy and Alec got into touch by wireless and told each other what they had been doing. And sometimes Roy was able to talk to Charley Russell, another member of the Camp Brady Wireless Patrol, who had become first a fire patrol and then a ranger in the forests of Pennsylvania, and had saved the state's finest stand of timber by the help of his wireless and the powerful battery his fellows of the Wireless Patrol had purchased for him. Often Alec caught Charley's answers himself, without needing to have Roy relay them to him. It was mighty good to hear from his old comrade back among the Pennsylvania mountains.
At last, however, Alec completed his telephone set. He still lacked a battery, but his keen sense of obligation would not let him buy one until he had entirely wiped out his debt to Captain Rumford. For Alec now regarded his indebtedness for the gravestone as an obligation to the shipper rather than to the marble dealer. Every week Alec turned over to Captain Rumford practically all of his pay. This mounted steadily from the ten dollars earned in his first week to full pay. So the debt was extinguished much sooner than Alec had dreamed it would be.
His next expenditure was for a battery. Once he had secured that, he wired up his telephone set and found it worked well. That night he broke his rule about retiring early. He was talking to Elsa. After that the two conversed for a time in the early evening before the great electrical companies began to broadcast their programmes, so as to be done with the instruments before Captain Rumford appeared to listen to the music. The dream of the captain's life was realized. He had music in his home every night, and an amplifying horn made it audible to all.
Alec, needless to say, became a first-class deck-hand. Not a day passed that he did not learn something new about the oyster business. As he had practically no expenses, his savings grew fast.
Cold weather came. From time to time it was too cold to operate the oyster-boats. Then the fleet lay in port and the shippers worried because they could not fill their orders.
"When I get my boat," said Alec to himself, "nothing but the heaviest ice will prevent her from operating. She will be high enough so the men can work in the hold, and there won't be any likelihood of the oysters freezing."
Truly it is an ill wind that blows nobody good. The cold days, though they brought loss to shippers and sailors alike, were helpful to Alec. When there was no work for the lad aboard the Bertha B, Captain Rumford brought him into the office. The shipper still clung to the old-fashioned business methods he had learned as a boy. He had no clerical help, but tried to keep his accounts and carry on his correspondence in person. Though it was more of a task than he could handle, for a long time he obstinately refused to alter his methods.
One cold day in midwinter, when every boat in the fleet was tied up, Alec noticed that the captain was fairly sweating under the mountain of clerical work that had accumulated. He was writing some letters, which he had later to copy so as to have duplicates; and there were bills to be made out, bills to be paid, accounts to be entered in the books, correspondence to be answered, and a dozen other tasks to be done.
"Won't you let me help you?" said Alec. "I haven't done a thing since you brought me into the office but run errands. Any ten-year-old can do that as well as I can. In high school I studied bookkeeping, typewriting, commercial correspondence, and a good many other things about business and office work. I've had the training. Won't you let me help you?"
The captain hesitated. In all his life nobody but himself had ever written a business letter for him, or posted an account in his books. He looked at the pile of work heaped up on his desk. Then he looked at the unopened mail Alec had just brought from the post-office.
"You can slit the envelopes," he said, still hesitating. "That would save some time."
Alec had to turn sharp about to hide the smile that he couldn't prevent. Then he whipped out his knife, and in a minute every letter was cut and ready to open. Alec even pulled each letter part way out of its envelope, to facilitate handling.
"Now let me copy that list, while you look over your mail," urged Alec.
"I don't know," said the shipper. "Let me see your handwriting."
Alec wrote the shipper's name and address. His penmanship was a great deal better than the shipper's cramped and hurried chirography.
"Well, you be careful—very careful," said the shipper, reluctantly surrendering his pen to Alec.
Alec's task was purely mechanical. He copied the list faster and more legibly than the captain had done. When he completed it, the captain was addressing shipping tags. "Let me do that, while you do something more important," urged Alec.
"Be careful. Be very careful," warned the shipper.
When the tags were finished, and Captain Rumford found that not a single mistake had been made, he gave Alec another task. So the two worked busily all the morning long. Before either was aware of it, noon had arrived.
"By George!" cried the shipper, with sparkling eyes. "There's a whole day's work done and it's only dinner time. We'll be able to make a big hole in this pile this afternoon," and he pointed to the accumulated work awaiting attention at one end of his desk.
The cold spell continued for several days, and in that time Captain Rumford and Alec cleaned up every one of the accumulated tasks; the captain got his books posted, and even got a little ahead with some routine work. The captain felt as though a mountain had been lifted from his shoulders. Alec realized that another opportunity had come his way. He had gained an insight into the clerical end of oystering. He didn't know whether other offices were run like Captain Rumford's or not; but he did understand that in this particular office, at least, there was room for great improvement. If only the captain would change his methods, he could still do his work single-handed. And with the cost of clerk hire so high, that was a thing worth accomplishing. In his own mind Alec pictured the office as he would conduct it if it were his. He thought over all the time-saving devices he could employ. And he decided that he could do as much work as the captain did in about half the time it took the shipper. That was not because Alec considered himself a superior clerk, but because he knew how to use modern clerical devices and appreciated their value.
"Captain Rumford," he said, when he had turned the matter over well in his mind, "I notice that you write out your shipping tags by hand day after day, and that it takes quite a little time. Don't you have regular customers that you ship to year after year?"
"Why, lad, I've got customers I've shipped to for twenty years," said the captain proudly.
"And in all those twenty years I suppose you've addressed all your tags by hand?"
"Certainly, certainly."
"Wouldn't you save time, Captain, if you had a rubber stamp made for each old customer? Here's a tag you've addressed to Day and Moore, Scranton, Pennsylvania. Ever since I've been here I have noticed bags of oysters going to them almost daily. So I judge they are old customers."
"Exactly," replied the shipper. "One of my oldest customers."
"If you had a rubber stamp with their name and address on it, you could stamp a tag much faster than you can write it, and the address would be much easier to read. With a stamp for each old customer, hung up with the address of each customer over his particular stamp, you could address a good many tags in a minute. Think how much time you would save."
"Um!" grunted the captain. "Um! I'll think it over. It might work. It might work."
Alec tried hard to keep down the smile that wanted to come. "And, Captain Rumford," he went on, "if only you would get a typewriter, I could write letters for you and make carbon copies or copy them in the copying-press. It wouldn't take one-fourth the time it takes to write your letters by hand, let alone make copies of some of them. Then you'd have copies of everything."
"Um!" said the captain again. "But who'd do the typewriting when you are not here? The Bertha B won't always be tied up by cold weather."
"Well," laughed Alec, "I don't suppose I'll always be a deck-hand on the Bertha B, for that matter. If you wanted to make a deck-hand into an office hand, I don't know what would prevent you. And I'm sure 'Barkis would be willin'.'"
"Barkis," said the shipper, straightening up. "Who's he, and what's he got to do with my business, anyway?"
"Oh! He's just a character in a book," said Alec. This time he could not conceal the smile, and he added, "He's just a funny sort of fellow that makes you laugh when you think of him."
"But what's this about his being 'willin''? What's the connection, anyway?"
"Oh! That was just a phrase of his, that came into my head. What I meant was that I would be willing to change from deck-hand to office hand any time you wanted me to."
Captain Rumford wheeled around toward Alec as though he were about to bite him. "Are you getting tired of catching oysters so soon?" he demanded. "I thought you had some sand."
"Tired!" cried Alec. "I love it. But I don't want to be a deck-hand forever, and I don't intend to be, either. There's so much to learn about the business that I've got to keep moving, or I'll never learn it."
"So you think you already know all there is to learn on shipboard, do you?" said the captain with cold contempt.
"No, sir. I do not," replied Alec, his cheeks aflame at the captain's words. "But I realize there are so many things to learn that I must be moving on or I'll be an old man before I'm ready to start in the business."
"So you're still determined to be an oysterman?"
"Absolutely."
"That's very good. But if I were you I'd wait a while before I tried to teach old oystermen how to run their business."
"If you think that's the way I feel," cried Alec indignantly, "you are very much mistaken. What I want to do now is to learn all there is to know about oystering. But that doesn't mean I'm not going to learn some of the things oystermen have never done. I don't know what they are, yet, but there are some such things. You don't catch oysters to-day the same way you did when you were young. Then you didn't have gasoline engines, or telephones, or motor-boats, or automobiles. And to-morrow we shall be using lots of things we don't use to-day. I'm going to find out what they are and learn all about them, so I'll be right up-to-date when I become an oyster shipper."
The shipper looked long and hard at Alec. "Why are you so all-fired keen about doing things in what you call an 'up-to-date way'? Suppose a man doesn't take up with these newfangled notions, he's still an oysterman, isn't he, and he still has his beds and still sells oysters, doesn't he?"
"Yes, for a time," said Alec slowly.
"What do you mean?"
"I mean," said Alec, "that no man and no business can be very much behind the times and remain successful. If a merchant lighted his store with candles instead of electricity, he would not keep his trade very long in these days. Some of the oystermen are still using sails, I notice, while the rest of you are using gasoline. Well, they will eventually be driven out of the oyster business. They have to pay the same wages for hands that you do, and they don't catch more than half as many oysters in the same time. See how that cuts their margin of profit. When they strike a poor season, a lot of them will go broke."
"I reckon you're about right."
"Well, when I become a shipper, I don't intend to go broke, I'm going to stay right up with the leaders. So I want to know all I can learn about oystering—office work as well as navigation. And as for your office work, if you had a typewriter I could answer your letters in the afternoons, after the Bertha B gets in. The skipper could put me ashore before he unloads his oysters. Why, I could have your letters pretty well cleaned up before the boat made fast for the night. I could help you quite a lot, sir."
"Um!" grunted the shipper. "I'll think it over."
But before the captain came to a decision, Alec had found another task that took every moment of his spare time. The weather turned warm, and the fleet resumed work. The usual activity again prevailed at the pier shed. In the midst of it, old Pete had a paralytic stroke. He could no longer collect shells, and many a shipper found himself with his scows still full of shells when morning came. Captain Rumford was one of them. Alec was quick to see the opportunity. If he could take care of these shells, he would help both his employer and himself, for he could sell the shells when spring came, to the oyster-planters. At once he spoke to Captain Rumford about it.
"If I could get a boat," he said, "I would guarantee to keep your scows clean."
"If there was any way you could do it," said the shipper, "I'd be mighty glad to let you. I'm tired of fooling with these old fellows. It's a real shell game they work on us."
"I can do it easily, sir," pleaded Alec. "I have lots of time after the Bertha B reaches her pier."
"Maybe you could," said the shipper, still hesitating.
"Of course I could. I might have to work after dark sometimes, but I wouldn't mind that."
"We'll try it," said the shipper suddenly, "but what are you going to do about a boat?"
"I've got enough money saved to buy a boat," said Alec, "unless it costs too much. Would you be willing to help me buy it?"
"Certainly."
They found just the boat Alec wanted. It was long, wide, and flat bottomed with square ends and very high sides. It would hold at least fifty bushels of shells when full.
"What do you want such a big boat for?" demanded the shipper.
"Because I'll need it," said Alec. "While I am taking your shells away, I might just as well get some more, too. I'm sure some of the other shippers will give me their shells if I guarantee their removal every day. There's one thing still puzzling me, though. Where am I to dump the shells after I have collected them?"
"I'll fix that," said the shipper. "Old Si Newcomb owns the land along the river below the sheds. It's just the place you want. He'll let you put your shells there if I ask him."
"Thank you," said Alec. "Now I'll take my boat and get your shells."
"I'll ride back with you," said the shipper.
Alec took the sculling oar and shoved off. But when he tried to propel the boat as he had seen men doing, his oar flew out of water and he could not budge his craft.
The shipper laughed. "I thought you might find yourself in trouble. It seems there are still some things an old-timer can teach the young fry. Give me that oar."
He fitted it into place and the boat fairly flew over the water under his skilful strokes. Yet he seemed to be working very little. "Watch that oar," said the shipper. And after a moment, "Watch my wrist."
Alec soon caught the trick of twisting the oar with each stroke, and with a little practice found himself able to propel the boat fairly well. He sculled the craft to the captain's pier and collected his shells. Then he asked the shippers at adjoining piers for their shells, guaranteeing their removal each evening if he could have the shells. Still awkward in the handling of his boat, Alec was slow in finishing his task. When he started for his dumping-ground, the tide had turned and was against him. It was all he could do to force the heavy boat against the swift current.
"I see two improvements I need to make right away," said Alec to himself. "I need lights and I need power. I can buy the lights at once. And when I get a little more money saved, I'll get one of these portable motors to hang over the stern. Then I can work faster and easier."
As soon as he had emptied his shells and made his boat fast, Alec walked over to Port Norris, the nearest town, where he found an acetylene lamp that would answer his purpose. He bought it and some carbide and walked back to Bivalve. He went to his boat, and decided how he would mount the light. Then he started for the Bertha B. But first he paused to look at the little pile of shells he had thrown on the shore. There were only a few bushels and the heap seemed very small indeed.
"I suppose there aren't more than thirty cents' worth altogether," said Alec to himself, "but never mind. Great oaks from little acorns grow. Nobody knows how big this shell pile will become, or what will come of the venture. But one thing's sure. I started at the bottom, and I haven't gotten far yet, but I've climbed one rung of the ladder, anyhow. I'm more than a mere deck-hand. I'm a shell merchant, now," and Alec laughed heartily at the joke. "How long will it be before I'm an oyster merchant?"