Читать книгу In the Path of La Salle or Boy Scouts on the Mississippi - Percy Keese Fitzhugh - Страница 7

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The hurrying throng which surged through the gates to the waiting suburban trains that Saturday evening did not notice the tall boy who stood apart from the bundle-laden procession, waiting. Now and again, he glanced wistfully toward some little straggling group which, rushing pell-mell in his direction, heralded the arrival of another boat-load of commuters from the great metropolis. Crowd followed upon crowd and all were talking, laughing and pushing one another in good-natured haste. There seemed a kind of week-end good fellowship among them, and a care-free spirit, with the one dominating thought—to get home.

The boy was conscious of a little feeling of envy. He realized that his trip home would not be of the pleasantest. He must tell his father of the ruin of a canoe worth fifty dollars and of his having used three dollars and five cents which did not belong to him. He suspected that his father would not understand his coming all the way to the city when he could have waited at home with this unpleasant news, for in his heart he knew that he had done so simply from a weak dread of landing at Oakwood. The launch had set him ashore at a nearby wharf and gone chugging merrily off down the bay.

For the first half hour of waiting he was glad that his father did not come; he experienced a certain sense of relief as each throng of ferry arrivals passed and as he heard the first train for Oakwood starting. Wesley had never found it easy to make a confidant of his father (perhaps he was not entirely to blame for that), and he was wondering now how he should begin, what he should say, and how it would be received. He dreaded the ordeal. If he had had a mother, I dare say he would have gone straight home and found a loving ally in his trouble, who would have smoothed the path and made it easy for him. But he had a step-mother, and however much she may have deserved the boy’s affection and respect, there was not much confidence between them. He thought of his own mother now; she would have understood, he felt sure; and it needed only this thought of the woman who had been so much his sympathizer and his friend but two short years before, to increase his nervousness and cause him to lose his grip upon himself.

There was a hot film before his eyes as he glanced up at the station clock and saw that the last of the early evening trains would leave in three minutes. Presently, he heard the metallic rattle of the mooring-wheel which told that another boat was in the slip. Then the crowds came hurrying, helter-skelter, for the train, and the boy tried to master his weakness and stood erect and manly, waiting for his father.

The crowd thinned out to a few stragglers and still Wesley’s father had not come. Last of all there came a group of boys and a man who said, “Take your time, take your time, we’ve got a whole minute,” and Wesley, startled at the voice, edged himself behind a laden baggage truck. All of the boys but one wore scout regalia. This one, who walked with the man, was tall and slim, with regular features and large, gray eyes. He was trying as he walked to balance on end a pole four or five feet long with canvas wrapped around it. The whimsical earnestness which he gave to this attempt seemed to amuse the man and provoked satirical comments generally. But a rebellious lock of wavy hair which fell over the boy’s face proved his Waterloo, for in a quick, jerky attempt to brush it back, the pole fell to the ground.

“You big kid!” laughed one of the group.

“You want to paint that mast red so it’ll match the canoe, Harry,” observed a small boy.

“That wouldn’t be much of a matchness,” replied the one addressed. “The canoe is vermilion, if anybody should ask you. The next shade to vermilion is verbillion; you learn that in the third grade.”

“Yes,” retorted the small boy; “and I know who told you to paint it vermilion, too; and you trotted right off like a good little china doll and did it, didn’t you! It was Marjorie Danforth, and you’re going to take her out canoeing to-night if there’s a moon! Y-e-e-s!”

The man cast an amused look at the tall boy to see how he would take this. Then he winked at the speaker. In another moment they had all passed through the gate and disappeared.

To Wesley it had been but a brief, passing picture, but he emerged sick at heart. Whatever resolution he may have mustered was gone. To think of Arnold buying a mast and sail for a canoe which was ruined! And he expected to use it this very night! Then suddenly, Wesley realized what it meant to have missed his father. Well, in any event, he could do nothing here, so he started across toward the boat, but was roughly stopped by a guard who told him that if he wished to cross the ferry he must go through the waiting-room and buy a ticket. With a hope born of despair, he searched his pockets, but found not a cent. Yet there was but one thing to do now and that was to get across to the city where he had at least one friend, a fellow who used to live in Oakwood. There he could borrow money enough to go home on the one remaining train at midnight.

A little troubled smile, rather of nervousness than of mirth, hovered on the boy’s lips as he wandered out of the station and along a neighboring wharf. It was almost dark but at the end of the wharf he saw a tug-boat and by it stood a very stout man in his shirt sleeves, smoking a pipe.

“Hello,” said Wesley.

“How do, sonny,” said the man.

“You’re not going across—soon—I suppose—are you?” Wesley ventured anxiously.

“’Bout one minute, if you call that soon.”

“Would you—could you—take me over?”

“I sure could; hop on. What’s trouble, sonny—you cleaned out?”

“Not ex— well, I—want to economize,” said Wesley.

“Well, now, you let me tell you, Noo York is a mighty poor place to go to if you want to economize, and you can take that with no extra charge from your Uncle Dudley.— Come up in the wheel-house where it’s clean.”

They were soon plowing out into mid-stream.

“I’ll have to take you down far as Pier 8, but you won’t mind a little trot back, with a good long pair o’ legs like them. As the feller says, don’t make no difference where you set me off so long as it’s on terra cotta.”

“That’s the idea,” said Wesley, absently. “Do you live right on board here?”

“Correct,” he said, looking straight ahead through the glass window.

Wesley liked the burly, hearty man. His talk made the boy forget his predicament for the few minutes it took them to cross the river. He, too, seemed to lead a care-free, gypsy kind of life, and Wesley felt that he would like to have a tug-boat for his home. There was a smell of oil and tarry rope about it that he liked.

He remembered the address of the apartment where his erstwhile friend lived and to this refuge he now looked as a shipwrecked mariner to his lifebelt. At the house, the hall-boy told him that the family had moved away, out of town, he did not know where. It was the last straw, and at the matter-of-fact announcement which meant so little to the boy and so much to Wesley, he all but collapsed.

He had had a long tramp uptown and he was tired, utterly fagged out, so that it seemed he could not go another step. Troubled as he was, he felt that he could throw himself down on the deep, inviting leather settee in the apartment lobby and sleep for a week. For a moment he looked at it wistfully, then went out and down the crowded thoroughfare.

It was close upon midnight when he found himself again in the dark, unfrequented lower part of town, trudging through streets of warehouses, where barrels stood about and there was the odor of rotting fruit. Once, he noticed some one lying in a doorway sound asleep.

“I can do that if I have to,” he said.

He was so weary, so utterly exhausted, that he had to pause now and then and raise one foot to give it momentary rest. But there was one good thing, his bodily fatigue obliterated his mental trouble for the time. He came to Pier 8 and dragged himself along it to where the tug lay moored. Up in the wheel-house he could see his stout friend reading a newspaper, holding it in the glare of a cabin lamp. He was very conspicuous in his lighted enclosure, with silence and darkness all about. Wesley went aboard and up the ladder. He hesitated a moment, then opened the door and, leaning against the jamb, smiled a tired, almost ghastly, smile at the man’s surprise.

“Here I am back again, like—like a bad penny,” he said, with a pitiful note of entreaty in his voice. “If you can’t let me stay here till morning, I won’t have any place to stay.”

“Stay? ’Course you can stay. Set down. That ain’t been troublin’ yer, has it? I was kind o’ puzzled when I set yer ashore, but says I, that kid’s going home and he’ll be all right when he gets there. If I hadn’t thought that, I wouldn’t a’ let yer go ashore cleaned out, any more’n I would my own son. But it tickled me when you started fer to come across to Noo York to economize. Lord! I’d as soon think o’ goin’ to the North Pole to pick wild flowers! Glad you come back!”

“I walked up to One Hundred and Thirtieth Street and back; friends I know had moved away.”

“So yer thought o’ me, eh?”

“Yes, I—I kind of liked you,” he blurted out.

“Well, that’s right,” said the man, approvingly. “What’s matter?”

“Oh, I don’t know—I guess I’m just tired.” The man watched him closely for a moment while Wesley tried to control himself.

“D’yer stop anywheres goin’ up-town or comin’ down?”

“No.”

The man left the wheel-house. Presently, a voice assailed Wesley’s ears from somewhere below.

“Yer have yer eggs turned over?”

It was Sunday afternoon when Wesley awoke, and that night also he remained on the hospitable tug, somewhat of a mystery to its jovial captain. Seeing that the boy was preoccupied, he tried to draw him out, but his friendly efforts in that direction were fruitless. Through the dense fog of his tobacco-pipe, he observed the boy’s wistful look and wondered what was passing in his mind. For a full two hours before dark, Wesley sat curled up on the old leather settee in the wheel-house, absorbed in a book of harbor charts with a lengthy introduction about salvage, wrecking work, and so forth.

“Guess you don’t find that much like a Wild West story, eh?” his host ventured.

“I don’t care for Wild West stories,” said Wesley; “how do they make these soundings? They have to go right on the dangerous places, don’t they?”

“Well, now,” Captain Brocker drawled, “the folks that make life easy and safe for the rest of us, they have a pretty tough job of it, first and last, you may lay to that, sonny. And they’re the fellows that don’t get their names in the papers, neither. And they don’t get paid neither, ’cause the world hasn’t got money enough to pay ’em!”

He went down the ladder and Wesley, drawing his knees up and clasping his hands about them, looked out through the gathering darkness across the harbor. Thus the captain found him half an hour later when he came up to light the lamp.

“You dreamin’ ’bout goin’ to sea?” he queried, good-naturedly.

“No, just looking out of the window.”

“Now, look here, sonny, you sure o’ bein’ able to find your father here in the city to-morrer? ’Cause—”

“Yes, I wasn’t thinking about that.— What’s that light, Captain Brocker?”

The man crossed the little room, placed his hand on Wesley’s shoulder and stooping, looked off to where a certain small light shone across the water.

“That one over there?” he asked, cheerily; “why, Lord bless you, that’s your old Uncle Samuel watchin’ at the door—old Rough-and-Ready, I call him. He trudges round whilst me and you are asleep, that old feller, and some way it kind of cheers me up to see his light.”

“You mean Governor’s Island?”

“There you are—right the first time!” the captain said, pounding Wesley’s shoulder as if to cheer him with his own contagious heartiness; “or Spotless Town, as the feller says. Well, he’s good company, no matter where you find him, and that’s a fact. It’s pretty hard to say what he isn’t up to these days. Here I was readin’ the other night o’ the jinks he’s cuttin’ up out in Dakoty and Montanny, alterin’ rivers over to suit himself. Now you let that old duffer—”

“Uncle Sam?”

“That’s him—you let that old duffer write a letter to Germany or any o’ them foreign countries, or bust up some trust or other, and the whole world hears about it. But I tell you, what that old man can do with his hands and feet and a pick-ax and a tape-measure, has got me. An’ him over a hundred years old! He’s got some o’ them western rivers guessin’, and them bad lands, too; just gives ’em a drink o’ water and makes ’em brace up. I tell you what, boy, it’s what he does with his hands and feet that’s got me!”

He sat down and lighting his pipe, proceeded to write up a greasy little memorandum book which seemed ridiculously out of proportion to the size of its owner.

“They’ve got some o’ them geologist fellers over there, I guess. They was measurin’ up the Passaic River, and then later they was up the Hudson—far as Sing Sing, I heard.— Well,” he added, thumbing his little book, “a good many of us ought to be up that far, I guess.”

“Why?” asked Wesley, turning quickly.

“Oh, not you, bless your soul!” laughed Captain Brocker. “Let’s see, how old d’you say you was?”

“Eighteen.— Do you think, Captain Brocker, that it’s better to work with your hands and feet than with your brain?”

“Well, sonny, I wouldn’t just say that, but everybody’s better for havin’ some work to do with his hands and feet—as the feller says.”

“What fellow?”

“Oh, that’s just a way o’ speaking. But you can make a note o’ this, that the greatest man that ever came ashore on this here continent is always chorin’ round and workin’ with his hands and feet—and that’s—”

“Uncle Sam?” laughed Wesley.

“Right, the second time—and it’s good to hear you laugh.”

“It’s good to hear you talk, Captain Brocker.”