A good speech for you, Jack Harvey, if you did but know it!
“So you missed all the fun, did you?” said the man, quietly. “That was too bad; too bad.”
He had put his oars into the water once more now, and resumed his rowing. He did not pause to rest again, but pulled long and steadily. Evidently he did not care to row and talk too, for he lapsed into silence now, and Harvey could not draw him into conversation again. At the end of another hour they had come close to the Grand Island shore, and shortly they had pulled alongside a ledge, where Harvey could jump out. The man started to row away.
“Here, hold on, there,” cried Harvey. “Don’t you want your dollar? You’ve earned it, fair enough.”
The man came slowly back to shore.
“Indeed,” he said, as he stretched out his hand, “I ought not to forget that, with the fishing as bad as it is.” And then he added, quietly, as he started to row away again, “And it’s worth a dollar to you to get here, isn’t it?”
“Indeed it is,” replied Harvey.
“Indeed it is,” said the man to himself.
Then he rowed down the shore for about a mile farther, turned into a sheltered cove, rowed his boat alongside a black sloop that lay moored there, climbed aboard, dragged the boat aboard, and waited for an hour or so, till a faint breeze stole across the water. Then he hoisted sail on the sloop and drifted slowly out of the cove; drifted slowly away from the island, and was swallowed up in the night.