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

by Ruel Perley Smith

“You’re the boy to do it,” commented Haley.

It was afternoon, and the bug-eye, Brandt, was coming up to the Patuxent for a night’s harbour. Jack Harvey and Tom Edwards, eyeing the stranger, who remained sullenly by himself, felt a depression of spirits as they noted the appearance of the man. His bruises and the fresh scar, and indeed the very fact of his being there, were evidence to them of the cause that had brought him aboard. They had become familiar enough with the ways of the dredging fleet to know what it meant.

What the stranger thought of them, no one would ever know. But theirs was perhaps not altogether a favourable appearance by this time. There was less of incongruity in the dress of Tom Edwards now than when he had begun work. Daily toil at the dredges, drenching in icy spray, the wear and tear of the life aboard the Brandt, had wholly obliterated whatever of newness and stylishness there had been to his clothing. He had taken on the shabby, rough, wretched characteristics of the ordinary dredger. His one collar had long ago been discarded. He looked the part into which his ill fortune had cast him.

Nor had Harvey fared better. His clothes were torn and worn and discoloured by the salt water. His face, like that of Tom Edwards, was reddened and roughened and weather-beaten. His hands were roughened and scarred from hard work, with the broadening and flattening at the finger tips acquired through handling the heavy iron dredges and through knotting ropes.

The two friends were still depressed with the disappointment of their failure to make their escape, but they were not hopeless. They talked of it whenever they dared, and planned for another attempt when opportunity should offer.

The bug-eye ran up into the mouth of the river, and came to anchor off the northern shore, that being the lee with the wind from the northwest. It lay about half a mile out from the Drum Point shore and about the same distance to the eastward of Solomon’s Island. There was little sign of life or habitation on the land about the light-house, save that Harvey noticed one large house which set up on the hill, overlooking the surrounding country. But the many lights on Solomon’s Island and the many small craft at their moorings close to its shore indicated that there was quite a settlement there. Later in the evening, there came out to him, once or twice, with the wind, the sounds of jigging music, as from banjos and fiddles; and once he thought he heard, faintly, the sound of a piano, played noisily.

These suggestions of freedom and of merriment, though borne to him all indistinctly, filled Harvey’s mind with the old longing to escape. He could seem to see the interior of the town hall, perhaps, whence the sounds came; the lamps about the sides of the room; the fishermen’s daughters waiting for partners for the dance; the fiddler at the end of the hall, calling off the numbers. He had seen the like away up in Samoset bay, and had taken part in the fun.

He looked down at the side of the vessel, where the black water of the bay tossed gently, and away off to shore, indistinct save where a light gleamed here and there. There was the icy sting and nip of winter in the air. The water looked forbidding. It was out of the question to think of swimming—and, besides, there was Tom Edwards whom he could not desert. But, for all that, Harvey turned in for the night with greater reluctance than ever before; and he lay for a long time, uneasy, not able to sleep.

It could not have been very late in the night, though he knew not the time, when he roused up from a light slumber. Something had awakened him. The picture he had fancied of the dance hall ashore leaped into his mind, and something seemed to impel him to turn out and take another look.

Then he thought he heard some slight sound over his head on deck. Grumbling at himself at his seeming folly, he stepped out on to the forecastle floor and went softly up the companion ladder to the deck.