Through all that afternoon and until darkness settled over the river, there was not a half hour that did not find Henry Burns either at a window or out in the dooryard, gazing off through Edward Warren’s spy-glass. He looked longingly for the sight of a craft, the image of which, with its exact lines and the cut of its sails, was clear and distinct in his mind.
George Warren pointed out at him, once, and called Edward Warren to look.
“He’s all cut up about poor Jack,” he said. “I never saw him so worked up about anything. You’d better hurry back from Baltimore, Cousin Ed, or he’ll be sailing off alone in the Mollie after Haley’s bug-eye.”
Edward Warren laughed.
“I’ll risk that,” he said. “Don’t you boys worry; we’ll get Haley, all right. We’ll have young Harvey ashore here before many days, or I miss my guess.”
That very afternoon, the bug-eye, Z. B. Brandt, was coming slowly up the coast, heading for Cedar Point, the lighthouse on which marked the turning-point for vessels bound into the Patuxent. Hamilton Haley, sitting gloomily at the wheel, turned a sour face upon the mate, as the latter stepped near.
“I never did see such all-fired mean luck since I took to dredging!” he burst out, glowering at the mate, as though Jim Adams were in some way at fault. “First it’s that sneaking foreigner, that we took to help Bill out, that gets away. Who’d have thought he’d ever swum for it, a night like that, and all that way from shore? I hope he drowned! I hope he drowned and the dog-fish ate him. That’s what.”
“He’d make pow’ful bad eatin’, I reckon,” suggested Jim Adams.
“Yes, but he could have turned a handle of the winch like a soldier,” said Haley. “And he’s a dead loss, being as I’m bound by the law as we make ourselves, and swear to, to leave Sam Black aboard Bill’s boat, so long as I’ve gone and lost Bill’s man.”
“I didn’t think that youngster, Harvey, and that business chap, Edwards, had the nerve to do what they did,” said Jim Adams.