[Illustration: “I ain’t blamin’ her, nor never will”]
CALEB WEST, MASTER DIVER
BY F. HOPKINSON SMITH
WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY
MALCOLM FRASER AND ARTHUR I. KELLER
BOSTON AND NEW YORK
HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY
The Riverside Press, Cambridge
1898
COPYRIGHT, 1897 AND 1898, BY HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND CO.
COPYRIGHT, 1898, BY F. HOPKINSON SMITH
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
CONTENTS
I. The Cape Ann Sloop
II. A Morning’s Mail
III. Captain Brandt at the Throttle
IV. Among the Blackfish and Tomcods
V. Aunty Bell’s Kitchen
VI. A Little Dinner for Five
VII. Betty’s First Patient
VIII. The “Heave Ho” of Lonny Bowles
IX. What the Butcher Saw
X. Strains from Bock’s ’Cello
XI. Captain Joe’s Telegram
XII. Captain Joe’s Creed
XIII. A Shanty Door
XIV. Two Envelopes
XV. A Narrow Path
XVI. Under the Willows
XVII. The Song of the Fire
XVIII. The Equinoctial Gale
XIX. From the Lantern Deck
XX. At the Pines
XXI. The Record of Nickles, the Cook
XXII. After the Battle
XXIII. A Broken Draw
XXIV. The Swinging Gate
XXV. Under the Pitiless Stars
XXVI. Caleb Trims His Lights
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
“I ain’t blamin’ her, nor never will”
“Swung back the gate with the gesture of a rollicking boy”
“Helen ... in white muslin—not a jewel”
“No, it’s my Betty”
“What’s she but a chit of a child that don’t know no better”
“Sanford ... raised her hand to his lips”
“Thank God, Tony! Thank God!”
“Victory is ours!”
“The diver knelt in a passive, listless way”
“Ain’t nothin’ to skeer ye, child”
CALEB WEST, MASTER DIVER
CHAPTER I
THE CAPE ANN SLOOP
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.