Jack Harvey's Adventures; or, The Rival Campers Among the Oyster Pirates

by Ruel Perley Smith

It was very dark, the density of the clouds increasing as the night wore on; and the shore showed a vague, dark smear as they turned and went up the river. But it was all clear to Hamilton Haley. Born in a little settlement farther up the river, it was an open book to him by night or day. There was not an eddy, a cross-current, a deepening or a shoaling of all its waters for fifty miles that he could not have told you, offhand. A blur on the landscape defined itself to his eye as with the clearness of sunlight, bred of familiarity and long experience. He knew when to stand in close to shore; where to make a détour to avoid the long wharves that made out from the warehouses. He knew where seed oysters had been planted, by the owners that planned to tong for them when they should have grown to sufficient size. He knew when the beds had been planted, and which to leave untouched, and which would afford fat dredging.

There were no long waits between the winding here, as in many of the places down the bay. When the dredge went down, it was filled almost instantly. It was wind in and wind again, and the oysters, big and small, went into the hold almost as fast as they came aboard.

Harvey and his companions, drenched to the skin with perspiration, sore and lame, toiled on, driven by the threats of Jim Adams. There was no waiting for rest—only once in the night, when the cook brought out a pail of coffee, to keep them up to their work.

There was a ruthless, brutal disregard of the rights and precautions of the owners of the beds. Stakes and branches of brush, that had been carefully stuck down to mark the boundaries of this and that planter, were over-ridden and torn away. The Brandt was reaping a rich harvest, dodging in and out from shore here and there, making up for the time lost in the reefs off Hooper Island.

The hours passed, and a steamer, delayed by freight on its trip from Baltimore, passed along up the river. To Harvey, toiling away at the winch, in a sheltered sweep of the shore, this boat presented a strange and mysterious picture. Its lights, gleaming through the mists and the blackness, made a pretty spectacle. Its white wake looked like a scar on the dusky bosom of the water. It seemed, with its life and noise aboard, like a living thing.

A little way up the river, the steamboat drew in to a pier at the end of a long wharf. Harvey saw the doors of the warehouse on the shore and of the one on the pier open, and emit a glow of light from several lanterns; and, through the mingled lights and shadows, figures passed vaguely to and fro. Wagons rattled up along the country road, and the cries of the negro stevedores added to the noise.

All work had been stopped aboard the Brandt, and Harvey stood and watched the landing made by the steamer. The sounds told of business and of home life; passengers going ashore; once, the voices of young folks in laughter. Harvey gazed, with eyes that moistened.

Hamilton Haley, also, gazed, but with an earnestness of a different nature. He had not meant to be here, at the passing of the steamer. He had planned differently, but the steamer had been late and—well, the dredging at that moment when he had heard the distant whistle had been particularly fruitful, and he had waited and taken the chance. Now he wondered if that one sweep of the steamer’s search-light, as it passed, had found him out. Had he been espied by the watchful eye of the captain, keen for river poachers? At all events, he would lose no time in getting away from the place, once the steamer had gone.

The steamer went on its way, and Haley pointed his vessel up river after it. A mile above, he resumed his unlawful dredging.

The captain of the river steamer, bound for the port of Benedict, some fifty miles up from the mouth of the river, and already having lost much time, had urged the engineer to force all speed between the landings. The steamer’s funnel belched forth clouds of black smoke and sparks, as the craft churned its way noisily along. But the captain, eager as he was to end his long run, had something else on his mind; and the search-light now shot its shaft far ahead up river, now darted to the left or right, lighting up the banks and hidden places, so that objects along shore seemed to leap forth of a sudden as if surprised into life.