"It isn't. We eat dinner at ten o'clock on an oyster-boat."
"Well, I'm not sorry to hear it," said Alec. "It can't come too early for me."
After dinner, dredging was resumed. By mid afternoon more than four hundred baskets of oysters were heaped up on deck of the Bertha B. Then the dredges were stowed aboard, and the ship headed for the mouth of the river. From every direction other boats were making for the same point. But this time there was no bar visible. There was water aplenty. Up the river raced the oyster-boats, sometimes three and even four abreast, every ship piled high with oysters. On the way up the river supper was served. Before five o'clock the Bertha B had reached the oyster piers. She pulled on past them to a huge float, on which the oysters were shoveled to allow them to lie in the brackish water to fatten. Then the deck was washed and the implements stowed in the hold. Captain Bagley headed the Bertha B down-stream once more, and in a few minutes she was moored snugly to the very pier on which Alec had sought shelter the night before.
But it was a very different world to Alec. He had a warm place to sleep on the Bertha B; he had all he could eat; he had a job; and he had found friends. He didn't know yet how much his job would pay him, for it hadn't occurred to him to ask. It was enough for the present to know that he had work and would no longer have to go hungry. About his new friends he knew almost nothing; but he felt sure they were going to be friends, for they all had treated him in a kindly fashion. Concerning his future he had as yet little idea. A few weeks previously it had never occurred to him that he would ever be an oysterman. But now that he had had a taste of oystering and had begun to get an insight into it, he saw at once that it was entirely possible that he might become an oysterman. He knew that men could rise in the oyster business as well as in any other. Like the sensible boy he was, Alec told himself that he would work as hard as he could, learn all he could, and earn and save all he could. If he got ready for an opportunity, the opportunity might come. Now that he did have to support himself, he meant to make the best job of it he knew how.
CHAPTER V EVENING AT THE OYSTER PIER
On the way across the river every man in the crew had pulled off his oilskins, and now all were ready to go ashore.
"Come along with me, Alec," said Captain Bagley as he scrambled over the rail.
The Bertha B's pier, and all the other piers, were covered for the greater part of their length by an enormous roof sloping up to the building that extended along the landward side of the piers. This building, hundreds of feet in length, was tenanted by the various oyster shippers. Each occupied a small section of it containing wareroom and storage compartments on the pier level, and office rooms on the floor above. At every pier little openings, like tiny tunnels, led through this long building to the wide shipping platform on the farther side, where the trains were loaded.