A Man and His Money

by Frederic Stewart Isham

"Leave to-night!" Mr. Heatherbloom's face changed; suppressed eagerness, expectancy shone from his eyes; he turned away to conceal it from the other. "Looks like good fishing over there near the island," he observed after a pause.

"Tain't so much for fishin' as crabbin'," returned the other.

"Crabbing!" repeated Mr. Heatherbloom. "A grand sport! Now if—are you a crabber?" The darky confessed that crabbing was his main occupation; his boat swung right over there; for a dollar he would give the other several hours' diversion.

Mr. Heatherbloom accepted the offer with alacrity. A few moments later, seated in a dilapidated cockle-shell, he found himself slamming over the water. The boat didn't ship the tops of many seas but it took in enough spray over the port bow to drench pretty thoroughly the passenger. In the stern, the darky handling the sheet of a small, much patched sail, kept himself comparatively dry. But Mr. Heatherbloom didn't seem to mind the drenching; though the briny drops stung his cheek, his face continued ever bent forward, toward a point of land to the right of which lay the island that came ever nearer, but slowly—so slowly!

He could see the top of the spars of a vessel now over the high sand-hills; his body bent toward it; in his eyes shone a steely light. Their little boat drew closer to the near side of the island; the hillocks stood up higher; the tapering topmasts of the craft on the other side disappeared. The crabber's cockle-shell came to anchor in a tranquil sandy cove.

Mr. Heatherbloom, although inwardly chafing, felt obliged to restrain impatience; he could not afford to awaken the darky's suspicions, therefore he simulated interest and—"crabbed". He enjoyed a streak of good luck, but his artificial enthusiasm soon waned. He at length suggested trying the other side of the island, whereupon his pilot expostulated.

What more did his passenger want? The latter thought he would stretch his legs a bit on the shore; it made him stiff to sit still so long. He would get out and walk around—he had a predilection for deserted islands. While he was gratifying his fancy the darky could return to his more remunerative business of gathering in the denizens of the deep.

Five minutes later Mr. Heatherbloom stood on the sandy beach; he started as if to walk around the island but had not gone far before he turned and moved at a right angle up over the sand-hill. The dull-hued bushes that somehow found nourishment on the yellow mound now concealed his figure from the boatman; the same hardy vegetation afforded him a shelter from the too inquisitive gaze of any persons on the yacht when he had gained the summit of the sands.

There, he peered through the leaves down upon a beautiful vessel. She lay near the shore; whatever her injury, it seemed to have been repaired by this time for few signs of life were apparent on or about her. Steam was up; a faint dun-colored smoke swept, pennon-like, from her white funnels. Some one was inspecting her stern from a platform swung over the rail, and to Mr. Heatherbloom's strained vision this person's interest, or concern, centered in the mechanism of her rudder. The trouble had been there no doubt, and if so, the yacht had probably come, or been brought near the island at high water, and at low tide any damage she might have suffered had been attended to. Her injury must have been more vexatious than serious. Would she, as the darky had affirmed, leave when the tide was once more at its full? Her lying in the outer, instead of in the inner harbor, seemed significant. Time passed; the person on the platform regained the deck and disappeared. In the bushes the watcher suddenly started.

Something at one of the port windows had caught his glance. A ribbon? A fluttering bit of lace? A woman's features that phantom-like had come and vanished? He looked hard—so steadily that spots began to dance before his sight, but he could not verify that first impression. Yet he remained. The shadows on the furze grew longer, falling in strange angular shapes down the hillside; the sun dipped low. At length Mr. Heatherbloom, after the manner of one who had made up his mind to something, abruptly rose.