Some three years before the site had been marked by a spindle bearing an iron cage and fastened to a huge boulder known as Shark Ledge Rock, and covered at low water.  The unloading of various sloops and schooners under his orders had enlarged this submerged rock to a miniature island, its ragged crest thrust above the sea.  This obstruction to the will of the wind and tide, and the ever-present six-mile current, caused by the narrowing of Long Island Sound in its onrush to the sea, acted as a fallen log that blocks a mountain stream, or a boulder that plugs a torrent.  That which for centuries had been a steady “set” every six hours east and west, had now become a “back-and-in suck” fringed by a series of swirling undercurrents dealing death and destruction to the ignorant and unwary.

Not been long since a schooner loaded with concrete had been saved from destruction by the merest chance, and later on a big scow caught in the swirl had parted her buoy lines and would have landed high and dry on the stone pile had not Captain Joe run a hawser to her, twisted its bight around the drum of his engine and warped her off just in time to save her bones from sea worms.

As the tug approached, the Ledge, looming up on the dim horizon line, looked like a huge whale spouting derricks, a barnacle of a shanty clinging to its back.  Soon there rose into relief the little knot of men gathered about one of the whale’s fins—­our landing stage,—­and then, as we came alongside, the welcome curl of the smoke, telling of fried pork and saleratus biscuit.

Captain Joe’s orders now came thick and fast.

“Hurry dinner, Nichols,”—­this to the shanty cook, who was leaning out of the galley window,—­ “And here,—­three or four o’ ye, git this divin’ stuff ashore, and then all hands to dinner.  The wind’s ag’in Baxter,—­he won’t git here for an hour.  Startin’ on one o’ them long legs o’ his’n now,”—­and the captain’s eye rested on the sloop beating up Fisher’s Island way.

“And, Billy,—­’fore ye go ashore, jump into the yawl and take a look at that snatch block on the spar buoy,—­that clam digger may want it ’fore night.”

This spar buoy lay a few hundred yards off the Whale’s Snout.  Loaded vessels were moored to this quill bob, held in place by a five-ton sinker, until they were ready to drop into the eddy and there discharge their stone.

Dinner over the men fell to work, each to his job.  The derrick gang was set to shifting a boom on to the larger derrick, the concrete mixers picked up their shovels, and I went to work on the pay-roll of the week.  This I always figured up in the little dry-goods box of a room opening out of the galley in the end of our board shanty, its window looking toward Montauk.

As I leaned my arms on the sill for a glimpse of the wide expanse of blue and silver, the cotton rag that served as a curtain flapped in my face.  I pushed it aside and craned my neck north and south.  The curtain had acted as a weather vane,—­the wind had hauled to the east.