“Well,” replied Jim Adams, “if he was mine, I’d let him go, seeing as he didn’t cost any money. Tom’s going across to t’other shore to-day. Why not let him have him and leave him? We don’t want to land him down here.”
Haley grumbled, but acquiesced.
“Take him out,” he said. “He’s no good, anyway. I’ve got square. That’s what I wanted.”
Jim Adams lifted Artie Jenkins bodily and carried him out of the cabin.
A bug-eye that ran across from the eastern shore that afternoon carried the unfortunate Artie Jenkins as a passenger. He lay asleep in the cabin. Toward dusk the bug-eye reached the other shore, and anchored near land. A skiff left the side, with Artie Jenkins in the bottom of it. It landed, and two men carried the youth up to an old deserted shanty by the shore of a small creek in St. Mary County, some five or six miles above Otter Point. They left him there, alone, threw some mouldy blankets over him, and departed.
Artie Jenkins’s dredging experience was over.
CHAPTER XVIII
THE BATTLE OF NANTICOKE RIVER
The morning after Artie Jenkins was shipped away across the Chesapeake, Haley’s bug-eye lay in Hooper strait, discharging her cargo of oysters into another craft alongside. Four other craft waited near by; and, when the Brandt had finished, they, likewise, unloaded the oysters they had, aboard the carrying vessel.
“What’s Haley unloading now for?” asked Wallace Brooks of the sailor, Jeff, as they were swinging a basket of the oysters outboard. “He’s got only half a cargo, anyway.”
“How do I know?” was the somewhat gruff reply. “Reckon we’ll see when the time comes. There’s something up, though, like as not,” he added; “I heard Haley ask Jim Adams how he thought the Brandt sailed best—with a quarter of a cargo in her, or a little more. That’s just so much more ballast, you know. So I guess that when Haley wants to sail his best, he expects someone to follow; and if someone follows, I reckon he’ll want to get away as slick as he can. Do you see?”