I followed after that big man with a raging desire to kick him under the sleek tads of that coat—to pound my fists into his fat back. I might have given quite an account of myself, at that, for I was full grown at twenty and as hard as hickory.
“As I say,” I heard before he slammed the door behind him, “you better come along with me down to Trull wharf and talk to Vose himself. He can tell you—”
I gathered my wits and chased along behind. The two of them paid as little attention to me as they would to a prowling cat. But if they were on the way to talk to “Vose himself,” that surely was my opportunity.
It was some distance and by way of devious alleys, but we came at last to where a lighter was tied beside a wharf.
There was a derrick and the scow was loaded with blocks of granite. A man was slowly and ceaselessly turning the wheel of a queer-looking machine, another was carefully handling hose which passed over the side of the lighter and down into the water, and still another was tending ropes. It did not occur to me at first what this activity indicated.
But when the big man called out, “Is Vose about due to come up?” I understood at once and was mightily interested.
I looked down into the dock and saw water like liquid muck, filled with floating refuse, and a good deal of the glamour of a diver’s life departed from my imagination. Somehow I had thought that Jodrey Vose spent his days in blue depths of pure ocean water, looking around at strange fishes and exploring mysterious caves. That he was obliged to go down into any such mess as that and work on blocks of stones with his two hands was a depressing discovery.
After a time there was a bubbling of the turbid water close beside the lighter, and for the first time in my life I saw a diver’s helmet emerge; the goggling eye-plates, the grotesque excrescences, the sprouting antennæ of the hose lines, the venomous hissing of the air from the vents—it all seemed uncanny, and made me shiver.
Men reached down to help him up the ladder, and when he was on deck in full view, scuffing his huge, weighted shoes, a balloon-like creature, as shapeless as the doughnut men my mother used to cut for me when she was in good humor on frying-day, I was sure I had never seen so curious a sight.
After he sat down they twisted off the helmet, and the fat man, whom I reckoned must be Manager Anson C. Doughty, escorted the other man aboard the lighter and the three started a conversation which I could not hear.
I knew the diver for Jodrey Vose because I had seen his picture at the tavern.
The business, whatever it was, did not take much time and the manager and the other man went away. Helpers began to shuck the diver from his suit; it was nearing sundown and work for the day was over, it seemed. When he was free from the bulk of the stuff and was starting for the cabin of the lighter I went to him and gave him the letter.
“From Dod, hey?” Then he told me to follow him.
I looked at him while he read the letter by the light of a bracket lamp. He was a wiry man with a twist of grizzled chin-beard. I was much comforted when he looked up from the letter and grinned.
“Ben Sidney’s boy! Well, your father was the only critter on two legs in Levant, in the old days, who could stand in a barrel, like I could, and jump out without touching the sides. You look as if you have some of his spryness and grit!”
“I hope so, sir. I have always worked at what has come to my hands to do.”
“Dod says business is a mite slow in Levant and that you want a job.”
“Yes, sir.”
Now there was gratitude in me as well as comfort; it was evident that Dodovah Vose had not written that I was a runaway.
The diver laid down the letter and went fumbling for his street clothes in a closet.
“At any rate, you can come up to my boarding-place with me for the night and we’ll talk it all over,” he said, in a very kind way. “If you had only made yourself known a few minutes ago I could have introduced you to Manager Anson C. Doughty. But to-morrow will do as well.”
I did not dare to offer comment. I wondered what there was about Anson C. Doughty to keep my hatred of him so stirred.
“He takes my recommendations as to my helpers,” said Vose. “There is one thing a diver has to be sure about—that’s picking his helpers. We’ll talk it over, I say. If I find there’s considerable of Ben Sidney in you, I reckon we can make a go of it. Have you a hankering to learn the business, itself?”
I blossomed under the warmth of this kindness, I was full of words by that time. I hadn’t opened my mouth to talk for two days. I told him about my evenings in that tavern, my poring over his curios, my ambitions, my dreams and hopes after hearing the stories his brother had to tell me.
When he had finished dressing he clapped me on the shoulder.
“Oh, I calculate you’re going to do,” he told me. “Don’t get your expectations too high. I have given up all the deep work—too old. Five or six years steady at deep work finishes a man. I have nursed myself along. Wharf work—fifteen to thirty feet—that’s my limit these days. But I like your spirit, son. Can’t find boys in the city like that! I should say that you’ve got the real hankering. Cigarettes, ever?”
“No, sir! No tobacco.”
“No cider jamborees? No express packages from the city?”
“No, Mr. Vose.”
“Good! I reckon I’ll keep the old town of Levant on the map in the diving line. I know the game, my boy. And I know how to teach it to the right kind of a pupil.”
“I’m sure you do, Mr. Vose.”
“So we’ll talk it all over this evening—and while we’re about it, if you don’t call me Captain Vose down this way they’ll think you don’t know me very well.”
I blushed, then I followed him out and away.
Before I tumbled into bed that night we had settled upon the future so far as our words to each other went; the bargain only needed the ratification of Anson C. Doughty—and that was secured next morning. I had expected that sleep would soothe my nerves and remove my ugly grouch in the case of that gentleman. However, there must have been something instinctive in my dislike for him; he looked me up and down and caught my scowl.
“You seem to have picked out a pretty surly up-country steer, Vose! However, put him to work if you like that kind!”
So to work I went.
I cleaned diving-suits and thus became familiar with the parts and the mechanism. I soaked out mud-caked ropes, I tended lines and learned signals, and was always busy with a hundred other odd jobs as a satellite of Diver Vose. He used me well enough, though he was never as warm toward me as he was at our first meeting.
After some weeks I lost my fear that I would be followed and taken back to Levant. I was not sure whether I felt more relief than rancor. To be considered as not worth chasing, to know they were saying “Good riddance!” behind my back, gave me thoughts which hurt a certain kind of pride.
I was afraid of the city and I went nowhere except to my work and to my boarding-place. So there was an epoch in my life which was bare of adventure until Diver Vose sent me down for the first time.
He