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

“Jenkins!” cried the man, bursting out in a fury. “Jenkins, was it? Slim, oily chap, flashy waistcoat and sailor tie?”

Harvey nodded.

The man clenched his fist and raised it above his head.

“Told you he was going to Johns Hopkins when he earned the money – nice family but poor – and all that sort of rot?”

“That’s the chap,” said Harvey.

The man dropped his fist, put out a hand to Harvey, and they shook once more. The man’s face relaxed into a grim smile.

“Well, I’m another Jenkins recruit,” he said. “I’m an idiot, an ass, anything you’re a-mind to call me. There’s some excuse for you – but me, a man that’s travelled from one end of this United States to the other, and met every kind of a sharper between New York and San Francisco – to get caught in a scrape like this!”

“Why, then your name is not Tom Saunders,” exclaimed Harvey, who now recognized in his new acquaintance the man he had seen struggling with the men of the schooner. “They said you were a sailor.” The man made a gesture of disgust. “I hate the very smell of the salt water!” he cried.

There was a small sea chest next to the bulk-head at the forward end of the forecastle, and Harvey and the stranger seated themselves on it. The man relapsed for a moment into silence, his elbows on his knees, his face buried in his hands. Then, all of a sudden, he sat erect, and beat his fist down upon one knee.

“This ends it!” he cried, earnestly. “Never again as long as I live and breathe.”

Harvey stared at him in surprise.

“I mean the drink,” cried the man, excitedly. “Mind what I say, and I mean it. Never another drink as long as I live. I’ve said, before, that I’d stop it, but this ends it. Say, what’s your name, anyway?”

“Jack Harvey.”

“Well, my name’s Edwards – Tom Edwards. Now look here, Harvey, I mean what I say; if you ever see Tom Edwards try to take another drink, you just walk up and hit him the hardest knock you can give him. See?”

Harvey laughed, in spite of the other’s earnestness.

“I won’t have any chance for some time, by the looks of things,” he said. “You won’t need to sign any pledge this month. I reckon there’s no saloon aboard this vessel.”

“I’m glad of it,” exclaimed Edwards. “I wouldn’t walk into one now, if they were giving the stuff away. Look what it’s got me into. Say, how did our Johns Hopkins friend catch you?”

Harvey quickly narrated the events that had followed the departure of his parents for Europe, and the meeting with young Mr. Jenkins. Mr. Edwards, listening with astonishment, eyed him with keenest interest.

“That’s it,” he exclaimed, as Harvey recounted the engaging manner in which Jenkins had assured him he would return in one short month, with a nautical experience that should make him the envy of his boy companions; “put it in fancy style, didn’t he? Regular Tom Bowline romance, and all that sort of thing, eh?”

Mr. Edwards’s eyes twinkled, and he was half smiling, in spite of himself.

“Well,” he continued, noting Harvey’s athletic figure, “I guess you can stand a month of it, all right, and no great hurt to you. And, what’s best, your folks won’t worry. But I tell you, Harvey, it’s going to be tough on me, if I can’t force this bandit to set me ashore again. I’m in an awful scrape. My business house will think I’ve been murdered, or have run away – I don’t know what. And when it comes to work, if we have much of that to do, I don’t know how I’m going to stand it. You see, my firm pays my expenses, and I’m used to putting up at the best hotels and living high. So, I’m fat and lazy. Billiards is about my hardest exercise, and my hands are as soft as a woman’s. See here.”

Mr. Edwards stretched out two somewhat unsteady hands, palms upward; then slapped them down upon his knees. As he did so, he uttered a cry of dismay and sprang to his feet, sticking out his little finger and staring at it ruefully.

“The thieves!” he cried, angrily. “The cowardly thieves! See that ring? They’ve got the diamond out of it. Worth two hundred dollars, if ’twas worth a cent. They couldn’t get the ring off, without cutting it, and I suppose they couldn’t do that easily; so they’ve just pried out the stone.”

Harvey looked at the hand which Edwards extended. The setting of the costly ring had, indeed, been roughly forced, and the stone it had contained, extracted.

“I wouldn’t care so much,” said Edwards, “if it hadn’t been a gift from the men in the store.” Impulsively, he turned to Harvey and put a hand on his shoulder.

“Say, Harvey,” he exclaimed, “when you and I get ashore again – if we ever do – we’ll go and hunt up this young Mr. Jenkins.”

“All right,” replied Harvey; “but it may not be quite so bad as you think. We’ll get through some way, I guess.”

Oddly enough, either by reason of the lack of responsibility that weighed on the spirits of the man, or because of a lingering eagerness for adventure, in spite of the dubious prospects, the boy, Harvey, seemed the more resolute of the two.

“Well,” responded Edwards, “I’m sorry you’re in a scrape; but so long as you’re here, why, I’m glad you’re the kind of a chap you are. We’ll help each other. We’ll stand together.”

And they shook hands upon it again.

“Now,” said Edwards, “here’s how I came here. I’m a travelling man, for a jewelry house – Burton & Brooks, of Boston. I was on the road, got into Washington the other night, and sold a lot of goods there. But one of my trunks hadn’t come on time, and I was hung up for a day with nothing to do. Never had been in Baltimore, and thought I’d run down for a few hours.

“I got dinner at a restaurant and went out to look around. I went along, hit or miss, and brought up down by the water-front. This chap, Jenkins, bumped into me and apologized like a gentleman; we got to talking, and he invited me into one of those saloons along the front. Beastly place, and I knew it; but I was off my guard. He certainly was slick, talked about his family and Johns Hopkins, and pumped me all the time – I can see it now – till he found I wasn’t stopping at any hotel, but had just run in to town for the day.

“That was all he wanted. Saw the game was safe, and then he and the fellow that ran the place must have fixed it up together. I’ll bet he stands in with most of these places on the water-front. He apologized for the place, I remember; said it was rough but clean, and the oysters the best in Baltimore. Well, I don’t remember much after that, until I woke up in that hole on the schooner that brought us down here. I know we had something to drink – and that, so help me, is the last that anyone ever gets Tom Edwards to take. Shake on that, too.”

He had a hearty, bluff way of talking, and a frankness in declaring himself to be the biggest simpleton that was ever caught with chaff, that compelled friendship.

Harvey again accepted the proffered hand, smiling a little to himself, and wondering if it were a habit of the other’s profession to seal all compacts on the spot in that fashion.

“So here I am,” concluded Mr. Edwards, “in the vilest hole I ever was in; sick from the nasty pitching of this infernal boat; the worst head-ache I ever woke up with – thanks to Mr. Jenkins’s drug – robbed of $150 in money, that I had in a wallet, a diamond that I wouldn’t have sold at any price – and, worst of all, my house won’t know what’s become of me. You see, I’m registered up in Washington at a hotel there. I disappear, they find my trunk and goods all right, and my accounts are straight. Nobody knows I came to Baltimore. I’m not registered at any hotel there. There’s a mystery for ’em. Isn’t it a fix?”

Harvey whistled expressively.

“You’re worse off than I am, a million times,” he said. “Besides, I’ve got a little money, if it will help us out any. It’s twenty-five dollars I had for fare back to Benton, and pocket-money.”

“Where’s that – where’d you say you were going?” asked Mr. Edwards, quickly.

“Benton.”

“Benton, eh? Well, that’s funny. I’ve been there; sold goods in Benton lots of times. You don’t happen to know a man by the name of Warren there, do you? He’s got three boys about your age, or a little younger – nice man, too.”

Harvey gave an exclamation of surprise and delight.

“Know him? I guess I do,” he cried. “And the Warren fellows, well rather. Hooray!”

It was Harvey’s turn to offer the hand of fellowship this time; and he gave Mr. Edwards a squeeze that made that gentleman wince.

“You’ve got a pretty good grip,” said he, rubbing his right hand with the other. “I guess you can stand some hard work.” Then they reverted to the subject of Benton, once more, and it brought them closer together. There was Bob White’s father, whom Mr. Edwards knew, and several others; and Jack Harvey knew their sons; and so they might have shaken hands at least a half dozen times more, if Mr. Edwards had been willing to risk the experiment again.

“Now, to get back to the money,” said he, finally; “you’ve got to hide that twenty-five dollars, or you’ll lose it. Here, I can help you out.”

He drew forth from a pocket a rubber tobacco pouch, and emptied the contents into an envelope in one of his inside coat pockets.

“I don’t see how they happened to leave me this,” he said, “but they did, and it’s lucky, too. It’s just what you need. We’ll tuck the bills in this, fold it over and over, wrap a handkerchief about it, and you can fasten it inside your shirt with this big safety-pin. Trust a travelling man on the road to have what’s needed in the dressing line. It may save you from being robbed. What are you going to do with that other five? Don’t you want to save that, too?”

Harvey had taken from a wallet in his pocket twenty dollars in bills, letting one five dollar bill remain.

“I’m going to use that to save the rest with,” replied Harvey. “Supposing this brute of a captain asks me if I’ve got any money, to buy what I’ll need aboard here, or suppose I’m robbed; well, perhaps they’ll think this is all I’ve got, and leave me the twenty.”