“Still,” he mused, “if it had not been for Captain Braceworth, there might have been a different story to tell.”
The letter, however, delighted him more than he showed. It demonstrated for one thing that the company appreciated what he had done, and that, if all continued to go well, he was in the line of promotion. He dreamed night and day of his next step upward, and longed for a berth on one of the Titan Steamship Company’s coasting vessels that ran to Galveston and Central American and West Indian ports. They carried passengers, and they paid their operators much more than the Ajax class of wireless men received.
“If I can only get some more opportunities to show what I can do,” thought the boy, “I’m bound to get on. ‘Keep plugging,’ my dad used to say, and that is just what I am going to do, no matter how many discouragements or hardships I meet. And then, perhaps, some day——”
Jack went off into a day dream, and it was an odd thing that his reverie led him into a sudden determination to seek out Captain Dennis at the address that had been given him, and to call on the captain. Perhaps there was another member of the captain’s household that Jack was anxious to see, too!
CHAPTER XXVII.
AN UNEXPECTED MEETING.
He found Captain Dennis installed in a pleasant, though small, flat in that section of New York known as Greenwich Village. It is a queer old quarter, full of once fashionable houses with dormer windows and white doorsteps, and some of them with shutters. Captain Dennis had been unable to find another ship, and was working for a ship chandler. But he bore up bravely under his misfortunes, and as for his daughter Jack thought that she was the most charming, enslaving bit of budding womanhood he had ever seen.
Under the circumstances it is not surprising that the young wireless man did not need to be pressed to stay to supper. How the time flew! Captain Dennis dozed and only took part at times in the lively chatter of young Ready and his “little gal,” but Jack did not find anything to object to about this, you may be sure.
When at last he left with the promise to come soon again and his head full of plans for a “regular party” on the old Venus, he found a raw, foggy night outside, and at that late hour the streets of the old-fashioned quarter almost deserted.