Читать книгу Caleb West, Master Diver - Francis Hopkinson Smith - Страница 3

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The rising sun burned its way through a low-lying mist that hid the river, and flashed its search-light rays over the sleeping city. The blackened tops of the tall stacks caught the signal, and answered in belching clouds of gray steam that turned to gold as they floated upwards in the morning air. The long rows of the many-eyed tenements cresting the hill blinked in the dazzling light, threw wide their shutters, and waved curling smoke flags from countless chimneys.

Narrow, silent alleys awoke. Doors opened and shut. Single figures swinging dinner-pails, and groups of girls with baskets, hurried to and fro. The rumbling of carts was heard and shrill street cries.

Suddenly the molten ball swung clear of the purple haze and flooded the city with tremulous light. The vanes of the steeples flashed and blazed. The slanting roofs, wet with the night dew, glistened like silver. The budding trees, filling the great squares, flamed pink and yellow, their tender branches quivering in the rosy light.

Now long, deep-toned whistles—reveille of forge, spindle, and press—startled the air. Surging crowds filled the thoroughfares; panting horses tugged at the surface cars; cabs rattled over the cobblestones, and loaded trucks began to block the crossings.

The great city was astir.

At the sun’s first gleam, Henry Sanford had waked with joyous start. Young, alert, full of health and courage as he was, the touch of its rays never came too early for him. To-day they had been like the hand of a friend, rousing him with promises of good fortune.

Dressing with eager haste, he had hurried into the room adjoining his private apartments, which served as his uptown business office. Important matters awaited him. Within a few hours a question of vital moment had to be decided,—one upon which the present success of his work depended.

As he entered, the sunshine, pouring through the wide windows, fell across a drawing-table covered with the plans of the lighthouse he was then building; illumined a desk piled high with correspondence, and patterned a wall upon which were hung photographs and sketches of the various structures which had marked the progress of his engineering career.

But it was toward a telegram lying open on his desk that Sanford turned. He took it in his hand and read it with the quiet satisfaction of one who knows by heart every line he studies. It was headed Keyport, and ran as follows:—

To Henry Sanford, C. E., Washington

Square, New York.

Cape Ann sloop arrived and is a corker.

Will be at your uptown office in the morning.

Joseph Bell.

“Dear old Captain Joe, he’s found her at last!” he said to himself, and laughed aloud.

With a joyous enthusiasm that lent a spring and vitality to every movement, he stepped to the window and raised the sash to let in the morning air.

It was a gala-day for the young engineer. For months Captain Joe had been in search of a sloop of peculiar construction,—one of so light a draught that she could work in a rolling surf, and yet so stanch that she could sustain the strain of a derrick-boom rigged to her mast. Without such a sloop the building of the lighthouse Sanford was then constructing for the government on Shark Ledge, lying eight miles from Keyport, and breasting a tide running six miles an hour, could not go on. With such a sloop its early completion was assured.

The specifications for this lighthouse provided that the island which formed its base—an artificial one made by dumping rough stones over the sunken rock known as Shark’s Ledge—should be protected not only from sea action, but from the thrust of floating ice. This Sanford was to accomplish by paving its under-water slopes with huge granite blocks, to form an enrockment,—each block to be bedded by a diver.

The engineer-in-chief of the Lighthouse Board at Washington had expressed grave doubts as to the practicability of the working methods submitted by Sanford for handling these blocks, questioning whether a stone weighing twelve tons could be swung overboard, as suggested by him, from the deck of a vessel and lowered to a diver while the boat was moored in a six-mile current. As, however, the selection of the means to be employed lay with the contracting engineer, and not with the Board, Sanford’s working plans had finally been approved. He had lacked only a sloop to carry them out. This sloop Captain Joe had now found.

No wonder, then, that the splendor of the early sunshine had seemed a harbinger of success, nor that as the minutes flew his eagerness increased to grasp the captain’s hand.

At the first sound of his heavy step in the hall outside, Sanford sprang from his desk and threw the door wide open to welcome the big, burly fellow,—comrade and friend for years, as well as foreman and assistant engineer on his force.

“Are you sure she’ll handle the stones?” were the first words he addressed to the captain,—there were no formalities between these men. “Nothing but a ten-horse engine, remember, will lift them from the dock. What’s the sloop’s beam?”

“Thirty foot over all, an’ she’s stiff as a church,” answered Captain Joe, all out of breath with his run up the stairs,—pushing his Derby hat back from his forehead as he spoke. “An’ her cap’n ain’t no slouch, nuther. I see him yesterday ’fore I come down. Looks’s ef he hed th’ right stuff in him. Says he ain’t afeard o’ th ’Ledge, an’ don’t mind layin’ her broadside on, even ef she does git a leetle mite scraped.”

“How’s her boiler?” Sanford asked, with sudden earnestness.

“I ain’t looked her b’iler over yit, but her cylinders is big enough. If her steam gives out, I’ll put one of our own aboard. She’ll do, sir. Don’t worry a mite; we’ll spank that baby when we git to ’t,”—and his leathery, weather-tanned face cracked into smiles.

Sanford laughed again. The cheerful humor of this man, whose judgment of men never failed him, and whose knowledge of sea-things made him invaluable, was always a tonic to him.

“I’m glad you like her skipper,” he said, taking from a pigeonhole in his perfectly appointed desk, as he spoke, the charter-party of the sloop. “I see his name is Brandt, and the sloop’s name is the Screamer. Hope she’ll live up to her name. The charter-party, I think, ought to contain some allusion to the coast-chart, in case of any protest Brandt may make afterwards about the shoaliness of the water. Better have him put his initials on the chart,” he added, with the instinctive habit of caution which always distinguished his business methods. “Do you think the shallow water round the Ledge will scare him?” he continued, as he crossed the room to a row of shelves filled with mechanical drawings, in search of a round tin case holding the various charts of Long Island Sound.

Captain Joe did not answer Sanford’s question at once. His mind was on something else. He took off his hat and pea-jacket, hung them on a hook, moved back the pile of books from the middle of the table, with as little consideration as he would have shown to so many bricks, corked a bottle of liquid ink for safety, flattened with his big hands the chart which Sanford had unrolled, weighted its four corners with a T square and some color-pans, and then, bending his massive head, began studying its details with all the easy confidence of a first officer on a Cunarder.

As he leaned over the chart the sunlight played about his face and brought into stronger relief the few gray hairs which silvered the short brown curls crisped about his neck and temples. These hairs betrayed the only change seen in him since the memorable winter’s day when he had saved the lives of the passengers on the sinking ferry-boat near Hoboken by calking with his own body the gash left in her side by a colliding tug. But time had touched him nowhere else. He was still the same broad-as-he-was-long old sea-dog; tough, sturdy, tender-eyed, and fearless. His teeth were as white, his mouth was as firm, his jaw as strong and determined.

The captain placed his horn-tipped finger on a dot marked “Shark’s Ledge Spindle,” obliterating in the act some forty miles of sea-space; repeated to himself in a low voice, “Six fathoms—four—one and a half—hum, ’t ain’t nothin’; that Cape Ann sloop can do it;” and then suddenly remembering Sanford’s question, he answered, with quick lifting of his head and with a cheery laugh, “Skeer him? Wait till ye see him, sir. And he won’t make no pro-test, nuther. He ain’t that kind.”

When the coast-chart had been rolled up and replaced in the tin case, to be taken to Keyport for the skipper’s initials, both men resumed their seats by Sanford’s desk. By this time some of the young engineer’s enthusiasm over the finding of the sloop had begun to cool. He seemed, as he sat there, a different man, as with businesslike address he turned to the discussion of various important details connected with the work.

“Anything left of the old house, captain?” he asked, taking from the table a rough sketch of the new shanty to be built on the Ledge,—the one used while the artificial island was being built having been injured by the winter storms.

“Not much, sir: one side’s stove in an’ the roof’s smashed. Some o’ the men are in it now, gittin’ things in shape, but it’s purty rickety. I’m a-goin’ to put the new one here,”—his finger on the drawing,—“an’ I’m goin’ to make it o’ tongue-an’-grooved stuff an’ tar the roof to git it water-tight. Then I’ll hev some iron bands made with turnbuckles to go over the top timbers an’ fasten it all down in the stone-pile. Oh, we’ll git her so she’ll stay put when hell breaks loose some night down Montauk way!” and another hearty laugh rang out, shaking the captain’s brawny chest, as he rolled up the drawing and tucked it in the case for safety.

“There’s no doubt we’ll have plenty of that,” said Sanford, with a slight touch of anxiety in his tones. “And now about the working force. Will you make many changes?” he asked.

“No, sir. We’ll put Caleb West in charge of the divin’; ain’t no better man’n Caleb in or out a dress. Them enrockments is mighty ugly things to set under water, an’ I won’t trust nobody but Caleb to do it. Lonny Bowles’ll help tend derricks; an’ there’s our regular gang,—George Nickles an’ the rest of ’em. I only got one new man so far: that’s a young feller named Bill Lacey. He looks like a skylarkin’ chap, but I kin take that out o’ him. He kin climb like a cat, an’ we want a man like that to shin the derricks. He’s tended divers, too, he says, an’ he’ll do to look after Caleb’s life-line an’ hose when I can’t. By the way, sir, I forgot to ask ye about them derricks. We got to hev four whackin’ big sticks to set them big stone on top o’ the concrete when we git it finished, an’ there ain’t no time to lose on ’em. I thought maybe ye’d order ’em to-day from Medford?”

While Sanford was writing a telegram to a shipbuilder at Medford ordering “four clean, straight, white pine masts not less than twenty inches at the butt,” and delivering it to his negro servant, Sam, whom he called from the adjoining room, Captain Joe had arisen from his chair and had taken down his pea-jacket and Derby hat, without which he never came to New York,—it was his one concession to metropolitan exactions: the incongruity between the pea-jacket and the Derby hat always delighted Sanford.

“But, Captain Joe,” said Sanford, looking up, “you mustn’t go; breakfast will be ready in a minute. Young Mr. Hardy is coming, whom you met here once before. He wants to meet you again.”

“Not this mornin’, sir. I’ve got a lot o’ things to look after ’fore I catch the three-ten. I’m obleeged to ye all the same,” and he humped his arms and shoulders into his weather-beaten pea-jacket and picked up the tin case.

“Well, I wish you would,” said Sanford, with a hand on the captain’s shoulder, and real disappointment in his tone, “but you know best, I suppose.”

With the big brown hand of the captain in his own he followed him to the top of the stairs, where he stood watching the burly figure descending the spiral staircase, the tin case under his arm, spy-glass fashion.

“You’ll see me in the morning, captain,” Sanford called out, not wanting him to go without another word. “I’ll come by the midnight train.”

The captain looked up and waved his hand cheerily in lieu of a reply.

Sanford waited until the turn of the staircase hid him from view, then turned, and, drawing the heavy curtains of the vestibule, passed through it to his private apartments, flooded with the morning light.