He struck up a friendship with the wireless man and spent most of the time in his cabin.
But he was glad when at last the shores of Staten Island slipped by as the New Hampshire came up the harbor of New York and the tall buildings and web-like fabric of the Brooklyn Bridge came into view.
Jack was no sooner ashore than he started off for the Erie Basin, where lay the old Venus, Uncle Toby Ready’s floating home. The recollection of his uncle’s strange letter was still strong in his mind. He wanted to get to Uncle Toby at once and dissuade him from rushing into any rash scheme. All the way over in the trolley car he had an odd presentiment in his mind that all was not well.
His uneasy feeling was increased when, having alighted from the car, he paced quickly along the docks. No smoke was curling from the stove pipe of the Venus’s cabin as he neared that venerable derelict. This in itself was unusual, for Uncle Toby was almost always to be found brewing his strange concoctions of herbs and plants over the small ship’s stove.
Jack hastened across the gang-plank leading on board the aged schooner that had sailed her last voyage many years before and now served as a floating home.
“Uncle Toby!� he hailed, “Uncle Toby!�
But no answer came to Jack’s loud hails. They only echoed among the other battered old derelicts lying at the rotting wharves in that part of the Erie Basin.
A sickening fear suddenly overwhelmed him as he gazed along the silent decks and at the empty window boxes which usually, at this time of the year, were abloom with tulips of Uncle Toby’s planting.
Could his uncle be dead?
But just at that moment he noticed on the door of the companionway, which led below to the living quarters, a square bit of paper. It was nailed there with enormous nails as if whoever had put it up was determined that it shouldn’t come down in a hurry.