Excerpt: The Fisherman's Ring

San Francisco, October, 1853
Adelai Langton stood on the wharf with his hands in his vest pockets. A perpetually irritated man, Langton was already fevered with the seemingly slow progress of his team. This was despite the gifts of nature that his project was reaping. The air was unusually still for the lateness of the autumn, and stillness made the enormous task just a bit simpler for the men. The moon was high and full, and it provided ample illumination for the nighttime work. Above all, the fullness of the harvest moon had drawn an atypical high tide and it had flooded Yerba Buena Cove with an inky but calm medium for transportation.
A team of perhaps twenty men scrambled along the Washington Street Wharf with ropes in tow as the Troy silently floated towards shore atop the high tide. There were shouts of haphazard coordination as unskilled laborers attempted to essentially land an ocean going vessel only meters from shore. Silhouettes of men moved under, over and through a tapestry ropes with the chaotic movements of an ant hill. Four men moved steadily along the wharf, pacing themselves with the advance of the great wooden ship and using long timbered staffs to keep the Troy from prematurely concluding its final voyage into the freshly laid planking of the wharf that was still under development at the bay end.
“Get with it men, lest you lose the graces of the tide. There’ll be no pay for half of a job, I promise you. Put your backs into it!” Langton could see that the team of men who were crooks and thieves by trade were doing their best and making slow, sure progress. Perhaps it was even an admirable job if Langton were to admit it. But Adelai Langton was not a man to share praise easily. Or share praise at all. Praise a man and all that one builds is complacency. It was one of Langton’s business principals. And when an initiative involved this much of Langton’s hard earned profit there was double motivation to squeeze every last ounce of labor out of the unwitting.
The late harvest moon washed across the bow and the masts of the Troy and left them rinsed with a ghostly glow. Langton was fortunate to have acquired such a vessel before it could be ravaged by the winter storms of Northern California and the salt tides of San Francisco Bay. The Troy had been one of the recent arriving ships into San Francisco Bay and almost immediately it had been abandoned by the owner, captain and crew as they found alternative sailing for the trip up river to Sacramento. From the River City they had probably raced up to the Sierra foothills to join the migration of lost lives and lost fortunes. Once the port of San Francisco had declared the Troy to be abandoned Langton was able to purchase it from the City for no more than the potential cost of the raw materials and scuttling fees. Compared to the decayed fleet of skeletons that still made San Francisco Bay a floating graveyard the Troy was in immaculate condition.