The Dock Rats of New York | Page 4

"Yer did, eh?"
"Yes."
The man leaned toward the detective with the remark:
"Well, it's my turn now!"
And his turn it proved to be, as he received a rap, which caused him to
turn clean over.
Sol Burton was raving mad when he once more regained his feet; the
fellow was an ugly chap, a great bully ashore, and a cruel heartless man
afloat. As he arose he exclaimed:
"All right, you're fixed for me to-night; but my time will come! I'll get
square with you before you're much older!"
Sol Burton turned and walked away a baffled man.
Spencer Vance walked to the point on the beach where he had stood
when the girl had come to him with the strange warning.
The young man was a Government officer, a special detective, and had
been assigned to the collector at the port of New York to run down an
organized gang of smugglers who were known to be doing a large
business off the Long Island coast.
Several detectives had been detailed to work up the matter, and one
after another they had mysteriously disappeared, and the Government
had never succeeded in solving the mystery of their taking off; and
further, none of the officers had ever been able to locate the
head-quarters of the gang.
One fact had been established: large quantities of smuggled goods had
been carried into New York, and each week the Government was
swindled out of thousands of dollars of revenue; and the illicit traffic

had grown to such an extent that a number of honest merchants had
subscribed a large sum of money which had been placed at the disposal
of the collector to be used as a fund for the breaking up of the gang,
who were ruining regular importers in certain branches of trade and
commerce.
Spencer Vance, although but a young man, had quite a reputation as a
detective. He had done some daring work in running down a gang of
forgers, and in the employ of a State Government, he had been very
successful in breaking up several gangs of illicit whisky distillers. He
was a resolute, cool, experienced man, an officer who had faced death a
hundred times under the most perilous circumstances. and when
summoned upon the new duty he accepted the position readily.
By methods of his own he got upon the track of the workers; the men
who did the actual work of landing the contraband goods.
The latter were not the really guilty men. They were not the principals,
the capitalists; but they were the employees who for large pay ran off
the coast, intercepted the steamers carrying the contraband goods, and
landed them within certain assigned limits.
The men ostensibly were fishermen, and honest people among whom
they associated never "tumbled" to their real calling.
CHAPTER III.
The necessities of our narrative do not demand that we should locate
the exact quarter where the smugglers operated; and, besides, as there
were numerous gangs covering a space of fifty miles along the coast, it
would be almost impossible to indicate intelligibly the field of their
operations, were we so inclined.
Spencer Vance, as stated, had adopted his own measures for locating
the men; in his earlier life he had been a sailor, and had worked his way
up until at the age of nineteen he held the position of second mate on a
large schooner; and when he was assigned to the special duty of
"piping" the smugglers, his sea experience came in good play, and was

of great aid to kiln in his perilous duty.
The officer started out on his work by taking passage to the Island of
Cuba, and one day in the port of Havana a ragged sailor dropped into a
groggery kept by a Frenchman and made himself acquainted with a
number of sailors, who were having a good time ashore.
The ragged Jack told his own tale, won upon the good-will of the jolly
fellows who were in for a good time, and in the end was shipped for
New York on a fast-sailing schooner.
The detective had an eye on the schooner, and well knew, when as a
sea-tramp he shipped on the vessel, he had struck a smuggler.
It was a clear starry night when the vessel sighted the Long Island shore
after having slipped inward past Fire Island.
The detective lay low and watched for some hours.
He had known that something unusual was in progress on board the
schooner. The captain was below, and one of the mates had charge of
the deck; a light shone in the distance, like a red star dancing over the
waves, and the men on the schooner moved about in a stealthy manner
to and fro across the deck.