Stories for Boys

by Richard Harding Davis

That was enough for Mr. Mooney. He said with a sneer that Tommy would be afraid, and of course Tommy was told of this at once, and Tommy, after a careful survey of the jump, said it was suicide. And then Mooney called him a coward, and said he’d do it, and he’d show him who was fit to lead the gang.

The elder boys told him not to be a fool, Tommy among the number; but he said they were cry-babies, and told them to keep quiet about it and to meet at the wharf at seven that evening.

The tide was low then, and the piles showed high above the water. At high tide they were covered, and besides there were very few people about at that hour.

At seven o’clock twenty of them gathered at the end of the wharf. They were badly scared and wished they were well out of it, but there was no stopping Mooney. The more they begged him not to do it, the more he laughed at them. He climbed the ladder to the top of the derrick alone, and stripped off every thread but his swimming tights and the scapular around his neck. The big posts rose out of the water in front of the slip—black, slimy-looking, and as pitiless as rocks.

Van Bibber and some of his friends in their steam yacht lying at anchor off the New York Yacht Club’s wharf saw the boy mounting the ladder and shouted to the other boys to stop him. The other boys would have liked to do what the gentlemen suggested, but it was too late. But Tommy ran half-way up the ladder, begging his rival to come down. Mooney swore at him to go back, and Tommy hung there half-way up and fearful to do more lest he should rattle the ex-leader of the gang.

The gentlemen on the yacht told two of the crew to jump into the rowboat and pick the young fool up, and the sailors ran to cast off the skiff.

Then they saw Mooney outlined against the dark background of the tenements, as motionless as a marble statue on a high pedestal.

He raised his arms slowly over his head until the finger tips met and interlaced, then he bent his knees and his body swung forward. There was a brief, breathless silence as he dived out and down, and then a yell from the yacht and a gasping cry from the boys, as they saw him throw out his hands wildly to save himself, and saw that he had misjudged the distance and would strike the posts. Some of the youngest boys turned sick and sank whimpering to their knees, and six of the older ones dived like one man into the water to pull him out. He had struck the posts with his arm, had turned, striking them again, and then sank without a cry into the river.

The sailors in the rowboat had just started toward the spot and the club men were cursing them for their slowness. The six boys in the water were shut off from Mooney by the posts, and slipped back after they had tried vainly to climb over them.

“He’s killed. He’ll be drowned. Ah, he’s sunk for good,” the boys wailed and cried in chorus.