However unnecessary the hot waves of the New York summer may appear to
some people, they were never wasted on Bubbles. He had a passion for the
water, and to his love of swimming was added a passion for the
underworld gossip with which the piers of the East River reek in bathing
weather. For just as mice are more intimate with the details of houses
than landlords are, so the small boys of a city have the best
opportunities for being acquainted with its workings, and with the
intimate lives of its inhabitants. The street-boy's mind matures while
his body is still that of a child. Births and deaths are familiar
spectacles to him. He knows and holds of high import hundreds of things
which men have forgotten. He can see in the dark. He can hide in a
handful of shadow. And when he isn't overhearing on his own hook, he is
listening to what somebody else has overheard. Second-story men fear
him, lovers loathe him, and nature, who has been thwarted in her
intention that he should run in sweet meadows, sleep in fresh air, and
bathe in clean water, sighs over him.
It was so hot that the policeman whose duty and privilege it was to see
that no small boy cooled himself from Pier 31A, disappeared tactfully
into the family entrance of a water-front saloon. The city had many
laws which to this particular officer appeared unreasonable and which he
enforced only when he couldn't help himself. In men there is the need of
gambling and some other things. As for small boys, they _must_ play
baseball and they _must_ swim.
Bubbles went overboard at about three o'clock. There were twenty or
thirty boys of all sizes already in the water, and the addition of one
to the struggling group of wet heads was not to be noticed. Nor was the
disappearance of that head noticed, nor the fact that it appeared to
remain under water for nearly three-quarters of an hour, nor that when
it finally did emerge it looked on the whole as if it had seen a ghost.
Bubbles, it seems, was less interested in the waters around Pier 31A
than in the waters underneath. And for this reason: on the previous
night, while stripping for a swim, he had heard a muffled sound of
voices coming from directly under the pier, followed by a long subdued
roaring as of a load of earth being emptied into the water. Now, under
Harry West's tuition Bubbles had formed the habit of investigating
whatever he did not understand. And he wished very much to find out why
people should talk under piers at night, how they could get under Pier
31A except by swimming, and _if_ they were throwing earth overboard
_why_ they were doing so, and where they got the earth.
His head filled with vague and highly colored notions of a smugglers'
cave, his narrow lungs filled with air, Bubbles dove, swam between two
slimy barnacled piles, and came up presently in a dark, dank, stale,
gurgling region, wonderfully cool after the blazing sunlight which he
had just left.
Toward the shore the light that filtered between the supporting piles of
Pier 31A became less and less, until completely shut off by walls of
solid masonry. Into this darkness Bubbles swam with great caution,
accustoming his eyes to the obscurity and holding himself ready to dive
in retreat at the first alarm.
The shore end of Pier 31A had originally been a clean wall of solid
masonry. The removal of half a dozen great blocks of stone had made a
jagged opening in the midst of this, and into this opening, pulling
himself a little out of the water, Bubbles strained and strained his
eyes and saw nothing but the beginning of a passageway and then
pitch darkness.
His heart beat very hard and fast like the heart of a caught bird. Here,
leading into the city from the shore of the East River, was a mysterious
passageway. Who had made it and why? There were two ways of finding out.
One was to wait patiently until some one entered the passage or emerged
from it. The other way, and the better, was to forget how very much the
idea of so doing frightened you, climb into the opening, and follow the
passage to its other end. Bubbles compromised. He waited patiently for
half an hour. Nothing happened. Then he pulled himself into the opening
and crawled through the darkness for perhaps the length of a city block.
"What," he then said to himself, "is the use of me going any further? I
can't see in the dark. I've got no matches, and if anything happens to
me, there'll be nobody to tell Harry about this place. Better make a
get-away now, find Harry, and bring him here to-night. Then if we find
anybody there'll be something doing."
He had turned and was crawling rather rapidly toward the entrance of the
passage.