Wind and tide favored them, and Harry was an excellent sailor, so that in a comparatively short time they had left the waters of the Hudson behind them, had rounded Fort George, the Battery of to-day, and were headed up the East River, with New York on the one side, and the then scattered town of Brooklyn on the other. Skilfully tacking in long slants from shore to shore, the wharves and shipping were soon exchanged for the sloping banks of Manhattan Island on the left, and of Long Island on the right, and then suddenly the dismasted hulk of the old “Jersey” loomed up before them.
She was a dreary enough looking object to any one, but if, like Harry, you had been a prisoner aboard of her for eighteen long months, you would, like him, no doubt, have shuddered at the sight of her. Josephine shuddered too. “Oh, do not let us go any nearer!” she said.
“All right,” was Harry's quick response, for, in point of fact, nothing pleased him better than to comply with Josephine's slightest wish, so the “Gretchen” veered off again.
“Oh! can't we go aboard?” cried Flutters, with a world of disappointment in his tone, for in imagination he had already scaled the gangway ladder that hung at her larboard side, and turned more than one somersault on the wide sweep of her upper deck.
“Why, no, child!” answered Hazel, who was fast assuming a most patronizing air toward her little protégé; “no one would think of going aboard of her, would they, Cousin Harry?”
“Why, why not?” Flutters asked, half-impatiently, for Harry, giving his attention for the moment to the management of the boat, did not at once reply.
“Because,” he said, finally, “there has been far too much sickness in that old hulk for any one to safely venture aboard of her; she has been responsible for the lives of eleven thousand men. I doubt if the strongest and longest of north winds could ever blow her free from the fever that must be lurking in her rotten timbers.”
That was a new phase of the matter to Flutters, and he subsided at once into thoughtful silence.
“I think this would be a good place to anchor,” suggested Harry, but waited a moment till Josephine had given her consent before letting the anchor run the length of its rope and bury itself in the mud bottom beneath them.
As soon as the “Gretchen” had settled into the position determined for her by the tide, the little party of five ranged themselves about the boat, so as to be as comfortable as possible, for there they meant to stay for the next hour, or two, or three, as the case might be. It had been for some time a thoroughly understood matter between Hazel and Harry Avery, that whenever the day should come for this trip to the “Jersey,” they were to anchor their boat in full sight of her, and then and there he was to tell them the “whole story”—from the day he volunteered till the day of his release in the previous summer.