“You’re right there,” Mr. Downey added. “All that troubles me in the matter is the fear that we may not be doing quite our duty by the boy in keeping him here with us, when he should be at school.”
“Don’t let that fret you; he’ll learn enough wherever he is, an’ it’s a heap of satisfaction to the little shaver when he believes he’s paying his own way,” Joe Cushing said quickly, and Dick Sawyer cried emphatically:
“If he don’t do all of that, then I’d like to see the boy, or man either for that matter, who does!”
[CHAPTER XIV.]
THE WRECKERS.
The crew at the station were, even under ordinary circumstances, out of bed early in the morning; but since the wreckers had been at work on the stranded steamer there was little possibility any one, except a very deaf person, could sleep after the first signs of day appeared in the sky.
The wrecking tugs, when they did not return to the city at nightfall, anchored off the cove near the station, and their whistles were sounded vigorously fully half an hour before daybreak, in order that the men might be ready for work as soon as there was sufficient light.
As Sam Hardy said, “it came pretty rough on a fellow who’d been patrolling the coast till midnight, to be wakened at four o’clock,” but grumbling on the part of the life savers effected no change in the situation, and as a rule breakfast had been eaten before the man whose tour of duty ended only at daylight, had returned to the station.
On this morning when Tom Downey was to visit the city, all hands had been awakened even earlier than usual, and the keeper set off a full hour before Joe Cushing, who had the last trick at patrolling, came into the building.
“It’s like to be a long day for us, lad,” Sam Hardy said as he entered the kitchen where Benny was washing the breakfast dishes. “I’m thinkin’ you can’t be so very busy ’twixt now an’ eleven o’clock.”