The Young Supercargo: A Story of the Merchant Marine

KIT SILBURN’S START IN LIFE.

A big black steamship lay beside the wharf in front of Martin’s Stores, in Brooklyn. The cold November night was so dark that from the brick warehouse, a hundred feet away, hardly anything could be seen of her but the lantern that swung in her rigging, a faint light that shone through her cabin portholes, and occasionally one of her tall top-masts standing out against the pale moon that tried with little success to show itself between the scudding clouds. It was bitterly cold, for November; and a stiff wind from the northeast was driving the black clouds seaward at the rate of thirty or forty miles an hour.

The steamer was the North Cape, arrived the week before from Sisal, in Yucatan, with a cargo of hemp in bales. Though everything was dark and quiet about her on that wintry night, evidences of hard work in unloading lay all around. The bales had been taken out of her hold faster than the warehousemen could trundle them into the building, and the hundred feet of space between wharf and warehouse was littered with them. Some were piled up in tiers, and others lay scattered about in confusion.

That open space between the warehouse and the harbor was well sheltered from the cutting wind; and patrolman McSweeny, of the Brooklyn police, with ears and fingers tingling found it a warm corner, and made more frequent visits to it than his duty really required. If he had gone into one of the neighboring coffee-houses to warm himself, he might have been caught by the roundsman and fined; but in going through the brick archway under the building and prowling among the goods on the wharf in search of tramps or thieves he was strictly obeying orders. So on the cold November night he paid particular attention to the wharf of Martin’s Stores, and visited it so often that no burglar in the neighborhood would have had the least chance.

Patrolman McSweeny had been a Brooklyn policeman long enough to understand all the favorite police ways of stirring out homeless tramps who are so desperately wicked as to go to sleep in the warmest corner they can find. Among such goods as bales of hemp, for instance, he took his long nightclub and jabbed it into all the dark spaces that were wide enough for a boy or man to squeeze into. That way, he found, was certain to produce results, if anybody was there. Either the soft feeling at the end of the club told him that he had found a victim, or the vigor with which he poked it made the victim cry out with pain.

For a policeman weighing nearly two hundred pounds, and armed with a big club and a revolver, patrolman McSweeny, it must be admitted, made his rounds among the bales with great caution. The ordinary tramp is a mere bag of dirt for the average policeman to prod and cuff and shake as he likes; but about ten days before Mr. McSweeny had stirred up two tramps on that same wharf who had more muscle than most of their clan, and in their anger they had turned upon him and thrown him overboard. So he felt that his dignity needed a little polishing up, and he was ready to polish it up on the next tramp he caught.

And tramps were not his only victims along the wharves. Sometimes he came across a boy,--a frowsy, ragged, shivering, homeless boy; and that always gave him great delight, for a boy, unless he is a big one, is not as troublesome to handle as a hungry and desperate man. Some policemen have big hearts, and would rather buy a cup of coffee and a roll for a hungry boy than take him to the station house and lock him up; but patrolman McSweeny was not of that kind. He was trying to make a record on “the foorce,” and every arrest added to his laurels.

It was about eleven o’clock when the patrolman made his fourth trip that evening among the hemp bales. Never very good-natured, he was particularly cross that night. Something at the station had annoyed him; and with his aching fingers and one or two draughts of a stronger beverage than coffee, he was rather a dangerous person to be trusted at large with a club and a revolver and the authority of law. His next victim on the wharf of Martin’s Stores was pretty sure to have an unpleasant time.

He went from pile to pile of the bales, poking his club viciously into every dark nook and corner, always ready for a sudden attack. And he had not gone far before he poked something soft, lying between two bales, and heard a voice cry out, in startled but still sleepy tones:--

“Hey! who’s there?”

The voice was a relief to him, for it was the voice of a boy.

“Git up here, ye young thafe, till I show ye who it is. Will ye come out or shall I fan yer carcase wid me club?”

In answer to this gentle summons a boy’s head and shoulders appeared above the bales, and the big policeman seized the section of coat collar that was visible and snatched the rest of the boy out with a jerk.

“Stop that! Let go of me!” said the boy.

Such resistance as that almost took the policeman’s breath away. He was accustomed to having boys beg him to let them off, and promise to go home, or go to work, or almost anything else, to get out of his clutches. But here was a boy who demanded his liberty instead of begging for it. In such a case it would have made no difference, probably, even if it had been light enough for him to see that instead of an ordinary vagabond or river thief this boy was clean and well dressed.

“Lit go av ye, then, is it!” he repeated, giving his prisoner another shake; “it’s in the cells I’ll lit go av ye, an’ not before, ye young thafe. Yer caught in de act, an I’ll run yer in.”

“I am no thief,” said the boy, “and you have no business to poke me with your club or shake me. If you want to arrest me, I will go with you peaceably; but I have done nothing to be arrested for.”

“Done nothin’!” the policeman exclaimed, letting go of the boy’s collar and taking him by the sleeve; “didn’t I ketch ye stealin’?”

“What was I stealing?” the boy asked.

“Hemp, av coorse,” said the officer.

Indignant as he was, the boy could hardly help laughing at the idea of his stealing five hundred pound bales of hemp.

“I was sleeping there,” the boy answered, “because I had nowhere else to sleep.”

“Thin I’ll give yer a safe place ter slape!” the policeman declared. “You come wid me;” and he started toward the archway, still holding his prisoner by the sleeve.

They were just about to turn from the outer end of the arch into the almost deserted street when they nearly ran into a man who came along the sidewalk at a swinging gait and turned short about to enter the dark tunnel.

“Hello, officer; what’s this?” said the man, stopping to look at the young prisoner under the gas lamp.

“Good avenin’ to you, Captain Griffith,” the policeman answered, in a very different tone from the one he had used in speaking to the boy. “It’s one of them loafin’ wharf rats I’ve caught among your bales of hemp, sir. But I’ll put him where he won’t be sn’akin’ around the wharves for one while, sure.”

“Why, this is no wharf rat, officer,” the newcomer said, taking the boy by the shoulder and turning him around under the lamp to have a better view of him. “He looks like a respectable boy. What were you doing on the wharf, my boy?”

“I went there to sleep between two of the bales, sir,” the boy replied, “because I had nowhere else to go.”

“Well, that’s no crime,” said the man; “we all have to sleep somewhere, I suppose. I think I wouldn’t lock him up just for that, officer. He’s a decent-looking boy, and I can give him a place to sleep aboard the ship. It’s no wonder a youngster hunts a warm place on such a night as this.”

“Af ye think best, Captain,” the policeman readily answered, releasing his hold on the boy’s arm. “It’s in luck ye are, bye, that Captain Griffith of the North Cape put in a good word for ye, or ye’d a been in a cell by this toime. Then I lave the bye with you, Cap’n.”

“Very good,” said the Captain. “Good night, officer; you’ll have cold work to-night. Come along, my boy.”

The next minute the boy was retracing his steps through the tunnel, no longer a prisoner, but sure of a warm place to pass the night. He had no time to wonder why it was that the captain of a freight steamer had so much influence with the Brooklyn police; and no matter how much he had wondered he could hardly have guessed the truth, that every time the North Cape lay at Martin’s Stores policeman McSweeny received a five-dollar tip for keeping extra watch over her at night. The big patrolman was too shrewd not to oblige his patron whenever he could.

Captain Griffith led the way up an inclined gangway to a lower part of the deck, then up an iron ladder to a higher deck amidships, then down a companionway to the snug little cabin of the North Cape, where he turned up the big cabin lamp that had been burning dimly. That done, he threw off his overcoat, sat down in a revolving-chair at the head of the cabin table, and looked at the boy for several minutes as if he intended to look right through him, clothes and all.

What he saw standing by the cabin table, hat in hand, was a manly-looking boy of about sixteen or seventeen, perhaps a little large for his age, strong of build, with a good honest face and bright bluish-gray eyes, and wavy dark brown hair, and hands and face bronzed by the sun.

“No place to sleep, eh?” the Captain asked, at length.

“No, sir,” said the boy.

“What are you doing in Brooklyn without a place to sleep?” the Captain went on.

“I came to New York to look for work, sir,” the boy replied. “This afternoon I answered an advertisement in Brooklyn, but did not get the place.”

“Where do you live?” the Captain asked.

“In Huntington, Connecticut, sir,” the boy replied.