“We’ll soon see,” replied Hank.
As they drew closer they saw a man leaning on the rail and watching them through a pair of binoculars. He seemed the only person on the ship.
Closer now, the old schooner began to speak of her disreputability. The paint, in Hank’s words, was less paint than blisters, the canvas, hurriedly stowed, was discoloured and patched—old stuff re-done by the hand of McGay, that stand-by of small ship owners in these days when a new mainsail for a small boat costs anything from two hundred dollars. Built in 1882 as a trading schooner, she had been built a bit too small, but she had looked honest when the fitters and riggers had done with her; honest, clean and homely, in those first days one might have compared her to a country girl starting for market with a basket a bit too small.
In two years this simple trader had changed her vocation; in thirty-five years she had done pretty much everything that a ship ought not to do, run guns, run gin and opium, fished in prohibited waters, and in some extraordinary way she bore the stamp of it all. If some ship lover had seen the Mary Burton—that was her first name—and the Heart of Ireland, which was her last, he might have been excused, if a moral man, for weeping.
“Ahoy!” cried Hank, as the boat came alongside grinding the blisters off her. “Fling’s a rope there—why! Good Lord! It’s Jake.”
It was. Jake, looking just the same as when Hank had fired him off the Wear Jack, only now, instead of a fur cap, he was wearing a dingy white Stetson with the brim turned down. He had come along with the McGinnis crowd, partly because he wanted a job and partly because he wanted to see the downfall of Hank. As a matter of fact he had seen the triumph of Hank, if you can call it a triumph, for he had been watching the whole of the proceedings from start to finish. Recognising the inevitable he made no bones but flung the rope.
“Well, you scoundrel,” said Hank, as he came on deck, “what you doing here?”
“What you doin’ yourself?” said Jake.
“I’ll jolly soon show you,” said Hank, who had no time to waste in verbal explanations. Seizing the scamp by the shoulders, he turned him round in some extraordinary way and giving him a shove that sent him running forward two yards. “Get the gaskets off the jib and look slippy about it—quick now or I’ll be after you. Bud, I’m going to leave the boat. There’s a dinghy aboard and that scow would clutter up the decks too much. Cut her adrift and come on. Clap on to the throat an’ peak halyards, now then, all together, yeo ho!”