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Title: The Grain Ship

Author: Morgan Robertson

Release Date: August 5, 2008 [EBook #26194]

Language: English

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THE GRAIN SHIP



BY

MORGAN ROBERTSON



PUBLISHED BY
McCLURE'S MAGAZINE
AND
METROPOLITAN MAGAZINE




The contents of this volume first appeared in the following magazines:

"The Grain Ship"--_Harper's Monthly_.
"From the Darkness and the Depths"--_New Story Magazine_.
"Noah's Ark"--_The All-Story Magazine_.
"The Finishing Touch"--_The Popular Magazine_.
"The Rock"--_The Sunday Magazine_.
"The Argonauts"--_Hampton's Magazine_.
"The Married Man"--_The Smart Set_.
"The Triple Alliance"--_Sunday Magazine_.
"Shovels and Bricks"--_Harper's Weekly_.
"Extracts from Noah's Log"--_The Home Magazine_.




CONTENTS


                                                   PAGE

THE GRAIN SHIP                                        1

FROM THE DARKNESS AND THE DEPTHS                     27

NOAH'S ARK                                           61

THE FINISHING TOUCH                                  84

THE ROCK                                            102

THE ARGONAUTS                                       131

THE MARRIED MAN                                     151

THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE                                 168

SHOVELS AND BRICKS                                  192

EXTRACTS FROM NOAH'S LOG                            232




THE GRAIN SHIP


I could not help listening to the talk at the next table, because the
orchestra was quiet and the conversation unrestrained; then, too, a
nautical phrasing caught my ear and aroused my attention. For I had
been a lifelong student of nautical matters. A side glance showed me
the speaker, a white-haired, sunburned old fellow in immaculate evening
dress. With him at the table in the restaurant were other similarly
clad men, evidently of good station in life, and in their answers and
comments these men addressed the white-haired man as Commodore. A navy
captain, I thought, promoted on retirement. His talk bore it out.

"Yes, sirree," he said, as he thumped the table mildly. "A good, tight
merchant ship, with nothing wrong except what might be ascribed to
neglect such as light canvas blown away and ropes cast off the pins,
with no signs of fire, leak, or conflict to drive the crew out, with
plenty of grub in the stores and plenty of water in the tanks. Yet,
there she was, under topsails and topgallant-sails, rolling along
before a Biscay sea, and deserted, except that the deck was almost
covered with dead rats."

"What killed them, Commodore," asked one; "and what happened to the
crew?"

"Nobody knows. It might have been a poisonous gas from the cargo, but
if so it didn't affect us after we boarded her. The log-book was gone,
so we got no information from that. Moreover, every boat was in its
chocks or under its own davits. It was as though some mysterious power
had come down from above and wiped out the crew, besides killing the
rats in the hold. She was a grain ship from 'Frisco, and grain ships
are full of rats.

"I was the prize-lieutenant that took her into Queenstown. She was
condemned in Admiralty proceedings and, later, restored to her owners.
But to this day no man has told the story of that voyage. It is thirty
years and more since then, but it will remain one of the unexplained
mysteries of the sea."

The party left the table a little later, and left me, an ex-sailor, in
a condition of mind not due to the story I had heard from the
Commodore. There was something else roused into activity--something
indefinite, intangible, elusive, like the sense of recognition that
comes to you when you view a new scene that you know you have never
seen before. It was nothing pertaining to myself or my adventures; and
I had never heard of a ship being found deserted with all boats in
place. It was something I must have heard at some time and place that
bore no relation to the sea and its mysteries. It tormented me; I
worried myself into insomnia that night, thinking about it, but at last
fell asleep, and awakened in the morning with a memory twenty-five
years old.

It is a long stretch of time and space from that gilded restaurant of
that night to the arid plans of Arizona, and back through the years of
work and struggle and development to the condition of a sailor on shore
beating his way, horseback and afoot, across the country from the Gulf
to the Pacific. But in my sleep I traversed it, and, lying on my back
in the morning, puffing at my first pipe, I lived again my experience
with the half-witted tramp whom I had entertained in my camp and who
changed his soul in my presence.

I was a line-rider for a cattle company, and as it was before the days
of wire fences, my work was to ride out each day along my boundary and
separate the company's cattle from those of its neighbor, a rival
company. It was near the end of the day, when I was almost back to
camp, that I saw him coming along the road, with the peculiar swing to
his shoulders and arms that, once acquired, never leaves the deep-water
sailor; so I had no hesitancy in greeting him after the manner of
seamen.

"Well, mate, how are you heading?" I inquired, as I leaned over the
saddle.

"Say, pardner," he said, in a soft, whining voice, "kin you tell me
where a feller might git a bite to eat around here?"

"Well," I answered, "yes and no. I thought you were a sailorman." Only
his seamanly roll had appealed to me. His face, though bearded, tanned,
and of strong, hard lines, seemed weak and crafty. He was tall, and
strongly built--the kind of man who impresses you at first sight as
accustomed to sudden effort of mind and body; yet he cringed under my
stare, even as I added, "Yes, I'll feed you." I had noticed a blue foul
anchor tattooed on his wrist.

"Come along, old man," I said, kindly. "You're traveling for your
health. I'll ask no fool questions and say nothing about you. My camp
is just around that hill."

He walked beside my horse, and we soon reached the camp, a log house of
one room, with an adobe fireplace and chimney, a rough table, and a
couple of boxes for seats. Also, there was a plank floor, a novelty and
a luxury in that country at that time. Under this floor was a family of
huge rats that I had been unable to exterminate, and I had found it
easier and cheaper to feed them than to have them gnawing into my
stores in my absence. So they had become quite tame, and in the
evenings, keeping at a safe distance, however, they would visit me. I
had no fear of them, and rather enjoyed their company.

I fed and hobbled my horse, then cooked our supper, of which my guest
ate voraciously. After supper I filled my pipe and offered him another,
but he refused it; he did not smoke. Then I talked with him and found
him weak-minded. He knew nothing of consequence, nothing of the sea or
of sailors, and he had forgotten when that anchor had been tattooed on
his wrist. He thought it had always been there. He was a laborer, a
pick-and-shovel man, and this was the only work he aspired to.
Disappointed in him, for I had yearned for a little seamanly sympathy
and companionship, I finished my smoke in the fire-light and turned to
get the bed ready, when one of the rats sprang from the bed, across the
floor and between the tramp and the fire; then it darted to a hole in
the edge of the floor and disappeared. But its coming and going wrought
a curious effect upon that wayfarer. He choked, spluttered, stood up
and reeled, then fell headlong to the floor.

"Hello!" I said, anxiously; "anything wrong?"

He got on his feet, looked wildly about the place, and asked, in a
hoarse, broken voice that held nothing of its former plaintiveness:

"What's this? Was I picked up? What ship is this?"

"No ship at all. It's a cow camp."

"Log cabin, isn't it?"--he was staring at the walls. "I never saw one
before. I must have been out of my head for a while. Picked up, of
course. Was the mate picked up? He was in bad shape."

"Look here, old man," I said, gently, "are you out of your head now, or
were you out of your head before?"

"I don't know. I must have been out of my head. I can't remember much
after tumbling overboard, until just now. What day is this?"

"Tuesday," I answered.

"Tuesday? It was Sunday when it happened. Did you have a hand in
picking me up? Who was it?"

"Not me," I said. "I found you on the road out here in a dazed state of
mind, and you knew nothing whatever of ships or of sailors, though I
took you for a shellback by your walk."

"That's right. You can always spot one. You're a sailor, I can see, and
an American, too. But what are you doing here? This must be the coast
of Portugal or Spain."

"No, this is a cow camp on the Crossbar Range in the middle of
Arizona."

"Arizona? Six thousand miles from there! How long have I been out of my
head?"

"Don't know. I've only known you since sundown. You've just gone
through a remarkable change of front."

"What day of the month is it?"

"The third day of December."

"Hell! Six months ago. It happened in June, Of course, six months is
time enough for me to get here, but why can't I remember coming?
Someone must have brought me."

"Not necessarily. You were walking along, caring for yourself, but
hungry. I brought you here for a feed and a night's sleep."

"That was kind of you--" He involuntarily raised his hand to his face.
"I've grown a beard, I see. Let's see how I look with a beard." He
stepped to a looking-glass on the wall, took one look, and sprang back.

"Why, it isn't me!" he exclaimed, looking around with dilated eyes.
"It's someone else."

"Take another look," I said. He did so, moved his head to the right and
left, and then turned to me.

"It must be me," he said, hoarsely, "for the image in the glass follows
my movements. But I've lost my face. I'm another man. I don't know
myself."

"Look at that anchor on your wrist," I suggested. He did so.

"Yes," he said, "that part of me is left. It was pricked in on my first
voyage." He examined his arms and legs. "Changed," he muttered. He
rubbed his knees, and passed his hands over his body.

"What year was it when, as you say, you jumped overboard?" I asked.

"Eighteen seventy-five."

"This is eighteen eighty-four. Matey, you have been nine years out of
your head," I said.

"Nine years? Sure? Can you prove that to me? My God, man, think of it!
Nine years gone out of my life. You don't know what that means to me."

I showed him a faded and discolored newspaper.

"That paper is about six months old," I said, "but it's an eighteen
eighty-four paper."

"Right," he said, sadly and somewhat wildly. "Got a pipe? I want to
smoke on this, and think it out. Nine years, and six thousand miles
travel! Where have I been, I wonder, and what have I done, to change
the very face of me, while I lived with it? It's something like death,
I take it."

I gave him a pipe and tobacco, and he smoked vigorously, trembling with
excess of emotion, yet slowly pulling himself together. Finally he
steadied, but he could not smoke. He put the pipe down, saying that it
sickened him. I knew nothing of psychology at the time, but think now
that in his second personality he had given up smoking.

I forbore questioning him, knowing that I could not help him in his
problem--that he must work it out himself. He did not sleep that night,
and kept me awake most of the time with his twitchings and turnings.
Once he was up, examining his face in the glass by the light of a
match, but in the morning, after a doze of an hour or so, I found him
outside, looking at the sunrise and smoking.

"I'm getting used to my new face," he said, "and I'm getting used to
smoking again. Got to. Nothing but a smoke will help a fellow at times.
What business is this you're in here?"

"Cow-punching--riding out after cattle."

"Hard to learn?"

"Easy for a sailor. I'm only hanging on until pay-day, then I make for
'Frisco to ship."

"And someone will take your place, I suppose. I'll work for my grub if
you'll break me in so that I can get the job. I'm through with going to
sea."

"Certainly. All I need is to tell the boss. I've an extra saddle."

So I tutored him in the tricks of cow-punching, and found him an apt
pupil. But he was heavy and depressed, seeming to be burdened with some
terrible experience, or memory, that he was trying to shake off. It was
not until the evening before my departure, when I had secured him the
job and we sat smoking before the mesquite-root fire, that he took me
into his confidence. The friendly rat had again appeared, and he sprang
up, backed away, and sat down again, trembling violently.

"It was that rat that brought you to yourself that evening," I
ventured. "Rats must have had something to do with your past life."

"Right, they did," he answered, puffing fiercely. "I didn't know you
had rats here, though."

"A whole herd of them under the floor. But they're harmless. I found
them good company."

"I found them bad company. I was shipmates with thousands of rats on
that last passage. Want the yarn? It'll raise your hair."

I was willing, and he reeled it off. His strong self-control never left
him from the beginning to the end, though the effect upon me was not
only to raise my hair, but at times to stop the beating of my heart. I
left him next morning, and have never seen or heard of him since; but
there is strong reason to believe that he never went to sea again, or
told that yarn in shipping circles. And it is because I have not seen
that old Commodore since the evening in the restaurant, and because I
cannot recall the name of the ship, or secure full data of marine
happenings of the year 1875, that I am giving that story to the world
in this form, hoping it will reach the right quarters and explain to
those interested the mystery of the grain ship, found in good shape,
but abandoned by all but the dead rats.

                     *      *      *      *      *

"I shipped in her at 'Frisco," began Draper. "She was a big,
skysail-yarder loading grain at Oakland, and as the skipper had offered
me second mate's berth, I went over and sized her up. She seemed all
right, as far as man may judge of a ship in port--nearly new, and well
found in gear and canvas, which the riggers had rove off and bent. Her
cargo of grain was nearly in, and there would be nothing much to do in
the way of hard work. Still, I couldn't make up my mind. Something
seemed to prevent me liking the prospect, so I went on up to Oakland to
visit some friends, and on the way back, long after dark, stopped again
at the dock for another look at her. And this time I saw what was
needed to ease my mind and decide me. You know as well as I do that
rats quit a ship bound for the bottom, and their judgment is always
right, though no one knows why. And I reasoned that if rats swarm into
an outbound ship she would have a safe passage. Well, that's what they
were doing. Wharf rats, a foot long--hundreds of them--going up the
mooring-chains, the cable to the dock, the lines, the fenders, and the
gangway, some over the rail, others in through the mooring-chocks. The
watchman was quiet, perhaps asleep; so, perhaps, every rat that went
aboard got into the hold. I signed on next morning.

"Nothing occurred aboard that ship except the usual trouble of breaking
in a new crew, until we'd got down to about forty south, when the
skipper brought up a rat-trap with a big, healthy rat in it. He was a
mild-mannered little man, and a rat and dog fight marked the limits of
his sporting nature. That was what he was after. He had a little
black-and-tan terrier, about the size of the rat, and there was a
lively time around the deck for a while, until the rat got away. He put
up a stiff fight with the dog, but finally saw his chance, and slipped
into the forward companion of the cabin; then, I suppose, he found the
hole he'd come up. But the dog had nipped him once, it seemed, for the
rat left a tiny trail of blood after him. As for the dog, he nearly had
a fit in his anger and disappointment, and when the skipper picked him
up he nipped him, too. It was only a little wound on the skipper's
thumb, but the dog's teeth were sharp, and the blood had come. The
skipper gave him a licking, and the work went on.

"The dog was a spirited little fellow, and used to sit on the skipper's
shoulder when we were going about, or wearing ship, or handling canvas,
and he would bark and yelp and swear at us, bossing each job as though
he knew all about it. It kept the men good-humored, and we all liked
the little beast. But from the time of the licking he moped, and
finally grew sick, slinking around the deck in a dispirited fashion,
refusing any attention, and unwilling to remain a minute in one place.
We felt rather sore at the skipper, who seemed ashamed now and anxious
to make friends with the dog, for the little bite in his thumb had
healed up. This went on for a few days, and then we woke up to what
really ailed that dog. He was racing around decks one morning with his
tongue hanging out, froth dropping from his mouth, and agonized yelps
and whines coming from him.

"'My God!' cried the skipper, 'Now I know. He was bitten in 'Frisco. He
is mad, and he has bitten me. Keep away from him everybody. Don't let
him get near you.'

"I'll always count that in the skipper's favor. Bitten and doomed
himself, he thought of others.

"We dodged the little brute until he had dropped in sheer exhaustion
and gone into a spasm. Then we picked him up with a couple of shovels
and threw him overboard. But this didn't end it, for the skipper was
bitten. He studied up some books on medicine he had below, but found no
comfort. I heard him tell the mate that there was nothing in the
medicine chest to meet such an emergency.

"'In fact,' he said, mournfully, 'even on shore, with the best of
medical skill, there is no hope for a man bitten by a mad dog. The
period of incubation is from ten days to a year. I will navigate the
ship until I lose my head, Mr. Barnes; then, for fear of harm to
yourselves, you must shoot me dead. I am doomed, anyway.'

"We tried to reassure him, but his mind was made up and nothing would
change it. Whether or not he had hydrophobia we could not tell at the
time, but we knew that strong and intense thinking about it would bring
on symptoms. In the light of after happenings, however, there was no
doubt of it. He got sick after we'd rounded the Horn, fidgety, nervous,
and excitable, and, like the dog, he couldn't stay long in one place;
but he wouldn't admit that the disease had developed in him until the
little scar on his thumb grew inflamed and painful and he experienced
difficulty in drinking. Then he gave up, but he certainly showed
courage and character.

"'I am against suicide on principle,' he said to Mr. Barnes and me, 'so
I must not kill myself. But I am not against killing a wild beast that
menaces the lives of human beings. I am to be such a wild beast. Kill
me in time before I injure you.'

"But we didn't. We had the same compunctions about killing a sick man
that he had about suicide. We strapped him down when he got violent,
and after three days of frightful physical and mental agony he died. We
buried him with the usual ceremonies, and Mr. Barnes took command.

"He and I had a consultation. We were well up toward the river Plate,
and he was for putting into Montevideo and cabling the owners for
orders. As he was a competent navigator I advised keeping on; and in
this, perhaps, is where I earned my punishment. He took my advice, and
we had reached up into the doldrums on the line, when a man turned out
at eight bells of the middle watch--midnight, you know--and swore that
a big rat had bitten him as he lay asleep. We laughed at him, even
though he showed four bloody little holes in his wrist. But, three
weeks later, that man was raving around the deck, going into periodic
convulsions, frothing at the mouth, and showing every symptom that had
preceded the death of the skipper. He died in the same horrible agony,
and we realized that not only the skipper, but the rat bitten by the
dog had been inoculated with the virus, and that the rat could
inoculate other rats. We buried the man, and from that time on slept in
our boots, with mittens on, and our heads covered, even in the hot
weather of the tropics. It was no use. Mad rats appeared on deck,
frenzied with pain, frothing at the mouth, fearless of all living
things, a few at first and after dark, then in larger numbers night and
day. We killed them as we could, but they increased. They filled the
cabin and forecastles, and we found them in coils of rope up aloft in
the tops, the crosstrees, and the doublings of the masts. They climbed
everywhere, up or down, on a sail or its leach, a single rope or a
backstay. The mate and myself, with the steward, could shut the doors
of our rooms and keep them out until they chose to gnaw through, but
the poor devils forward had no such refuge. Their forecastles and the
galley and carpenter shop were wide open. Man after man was nipped,
awake or asleep, on deck or below, or up aloft in the dark, when,
reaching for another hold on a shroud or a backstay, he would touch
something soft and furry, and feel the teeth and hear the squeak that
spelled death for him.

"In two weeks from the death of the first sailor, seven others were
sick; and all went through the symptoms--restlessness, talkativeness,
and the tendency to belittle the case and to deny their danger. But the
real symptom, which they had to accept themselves, was their inability
to drink water. It was frightful to see the poor wretches, staggering
around with eyes wide open and the terrible fear of death in them,
going to the barrel for a drink, only to tumble back in convulsions at
the sight of the water. We strapped them down as they needed it, and
they died, one by one; for there was no helping them.

"We had started with a crew of twenty, a carpenter, sailmaker, steward,
and cook, besides the mate and myself. Eight were gone now, and from
the exhaustion of the remainder, due to extra work and loss of sleep,
it became difficult to work ship. Men aloft moved slowly, fearing at
any moment the sting of small, sharp teeth. Skysails, royals, and
staysails blew away before men could get up to furl them. Gear that had
parted was left unrove; for a panic-stricken crew cannot be bullied or
coerced. Any of them would take a knock-down from the mate or myself
rather than go aloft at night.

"We got clear of the doldrums in time, and by then six more of the
crew, including the cook, had been bitten, and things looked bad. I now
strongly advised the mate to put in to St.-Louis or some other port on
the African coast, land the crew, and wait until the last rat had been
bitten by his fellow and died; but he would not have it. To land the
men, he said, meant to lose them, and to wait until another crew was
sent by the owners. This would be loss of time, money, and prospects. I
could only give way, even though the last item pertained solely to him.
I was not a navigator, and did not hope for promotion to a command.

"So we held on, dodging the crazed men when the disease had reached
their brains, knocking them down and binding them when necessary, and
watching them die in their tracks like so many mad dogs. And all this
time the number of rats that sought the deck for light and air was
increasing. We carried belaying pins in our boots now, ready to swipe a
rat that got too close; but as for killing them all this way, it was
beyond any chance. There were too many, and they ran too fast. Before
the six men had died, others had been bitten, and one had felt the
teeth of a maddened shipmate. So the terrible game continued; we had
only seven men before the mast now, and the carpenter and sailmaker had
to drop their work and stand watch, while the steward quit being a
steward to cook for those that were left.

"The man at the wheel had heard me arguing with the mate about making
port, and, counting upon my sympathy, had prevailed upon the others
forward to insist upon it. Well, you know the feeling of an officer up
against mutiny. No matter what the provocation, he must put the mutiny
down; so, when the men came aft, they found me with the mate, and dead
against them. We called their bluff, drove them forward at the muzzles
of our guns, and promised them relief from all work except handling
sail if they would take the ship to Queenstown. They agreed, because
they could not do anything else, and the mutiny was over. But my
conscience bothered me later on; for if I had joined them, some lives
might have been saved. Even though the mate was a big, courageous
Irish-American half again as heavy as myself, he could not have held
out against me with the crew at my back. But, you see, it would have
been mutiny, and mutiny spells with a big M to a man that knows the
law.

"Before we reached the Bay of Biscay every man forward, including the
carpenter, sailmaker, and steward, had been bitten, either by a mad rat
or a mad shipmate, and was more or less along on the way to convulsions
and death. The decks, rails, and rigging, the tops, crosstrees, and
yards, swarmed with rats darting along aimlessly biting each other, and
going on, frothing at their little mouths, and squeaking in pain. By
this time all thought of handling the ship was gone from us. The mate
and I took turns at steering, and keeping our eyes open for a sail. But
a curious thing about that passage is that from the time we dropped the
Farallones, off 'Frisco, we did not speak a single craft in all that
long four months of sailing. Once in a while a steamer's smoke would
show up on the horizon, and again a speck that might be a sail would
heave in sight for an hour or so; but nothing came near us.

"The mate and I began to quarrel. We had heeled ourselves with pistols
against a possible assault of some frenzied sailor, but there was
strong chance that we might use these playthings on each other. I
upbraided the mate for not putting in to St.-Louis, and he got back at
me for advising him against putting in to Montevideo. It was not an
even argument, for the first sailor had not been bitten at the time I
advised him. But it resulted in bad feeling between us. We kept our
tempers, however, and kept the maddened men away from us until they
died, one by one; then, with the wheel in beckets, and the ship
steering herself before the wind, we hove the bodies overboard. There
was no funeral service now; we had become savages.

"'Well,' said the mate, as the last body floated astern, 'that's done.
Take your wheel. I'm going to sleep.'

"'Look out,' I said, grimly, 'that it's not your last.'

"'What do you mean?' he asked, eying me in an ugly way. 'Do you strike
sleeping men?'

"'No; but rats bite sleeping men,' I answered. 'And understand, Mr.
Barnes, I'd rather you'd live than die, so that I may live myself. With
both alive and one awake a passing ship could be seen and signaled.
With one dead and the other asleep, a ship might pass by. I shall keep
a lookout.'

"'Oh, that's all, is it? Well, if that's all, keep your lookout.' His
ugly disposition still held him. He went down, and I steered, keeping a
sharp lookout around; for I knew that up in the bay there were sure
chances of something coming along. But nothing appeared, and before an
hour had passed, Mr. Barnes was up, sucking his wrist, and looking
wildly at me.

"'My God, Draper,' he said, 'I've got it! I killed the rat, but he's
killed me.'

"'Well, Mr. Barnes,' I said, as he strode up to me, 'I'm sorry for you;
but what do you want?--what I would want in your place?--a bullet
through the head?'

"'No, no.' He sucked madly at his wrist, where showed the four little
red spots.

"'Well, I'll tell you, Barnes. You've shown antagonism to me, and
you're likely to carry it into your delirium when it comes. I'll not
shoot you until you menace me; then, unless I am too far gone myself,
I'll shoot you dead, not only in self-defense, but as an act of mercy.'

"'And you?' he rejoined. 'You--you--you are to live and get command of
the ship?'

"'No,' I answered, hotly. 'I can't get command. I'm not certificated. I
want my life, that's all.'

"He left me without another word, and stamped forward. Rats ran up his
clothing, reaching for his throat, but he brushed them off and went on,
around the forward house, and then aft to me.

"'Draper,' he said, in a choked voice, 'I've got to die. I know it. I
know it as none of the men knew it. And it means more to me.'

"'No, it doesn't. Life was as sweet to them as to you or the skipper.'

"'But I've a Master's license. All I wanted was my chance, and I
thought my chance had come. Draper, if I'd taken this ship into port
I'd have been a hero and obtained my command.'

"'So, that's your cheap way of looking at it, is it?' I answered, as I
hove on the wheel and kicked rats from underfoot. 'A hero by the toll
of twenty-four deaths. Down off the river Plate I didn't realize the
horror of all this. Off St.-Louis I did, and advised you. You
withstood, to be a hero. Well, I'm sorry for you, that's all.'

"A big rat jumped from the wheel-box at this moment, climbed my
clothing, and had reached my chest before I knocked it off with my
fist.

"'You see, Barnes, the rat does not know, and I did not kill it. But
you do know, and I shall hasten your death with a bullet if you
approach me. It will not be murder, nor manslaughter. It will be an act
of mercy; but I cannot do it now. See how I feel?'

"'Oh, God!' he shrieked, running away from me. He reached the break of
the poop, then turned and came back.

"'Got your gun on you, Draper? Kill me now; kill me, and have it over
with. I'm down and done for. There's nothing more for me.'

"I refused; and yet I know that with regard to that man's mental agony
for the next few days, culminating in the first physical symptoms of
unrest, fever, and thirst, I should have obeyed his request. He was
doomed, and knew it. And he was a madman from mental causes before the
physical had produced effects, even though the disease ran its course
quickly in him. On the third day he was raving of a black-eyed woman
who kept a candy store in Boston, and who had promised to marry him
when he obtained command.

"I got out a bottle of bromide from the medicine chest and induced
Barnes to take a good dose of it. He drank about half a teacup of it,
and in an hour was asleep. Then, clad in boots and mittens, with a
sailor's clothes-bag over my head, I went aloft and lashed myself in
the mizzentopmast crosstrees, where I obtained about six hours' sleep,
which I needed badly. Barnes was worse when I came down; three more
rats had bitten him, he declared, and he begged me to shoot him. It
never occurred to him to do the job himself, and I couldn't suggest it
to him.

"'Well, Draper,' he said at last, 'I'm going, and I know it. Now, if
you escape, sometime you'll be in Boston. Will you take the street-car
out the Boston Road, and at Number 24 Middlesex Place drop in and say a
few words to that woman? Call her Kate, and say we were shipmates, and
I told you to. Tell her about this, and that I thought of her, and
didn't want to die because of her. Tell her, will you, Draper?'

"'Barnes, I promise,' I said. 'I will hunt up or write to that woman if
I get ashore. I'll tell her all about it. Now, go and lie down.'

"But he couldn't lie down; and when the time came that I had to sleep
in the crosstrees again, I found, on waking, that Barnes had followed
me, and in some way had got my gun out of my pocket. I knew he had it
by the insane way he laughed as I came down from my perch. I hunted
through the cabin for pistols or rifles, but he had been ahead of me;
and as I came up and he stood near the wheel--the wheel, like
everything else, was neglected now--there was a crazy look in his eyes
that meant bad luck for me.

"'Going to kill me, weren't you?' he chuckled. 'Well, you won't. Nor
will you get that woman out the Boston Road. I'm dead on to you, you
dog. And you'll get no credit for the advice you gave--that I put down
in the log. Not much you won't.'

"He darted into the cabin and returned with the ship's log, which he
had charge of, and the official log of the skipper. I do not know what
was entered in them, but he tossed them overboard.

"'There goes your record of efficiency,' he said.

"He came toward me on the run, his eyes blazing, but I did not budge.
He made no gun-play, but put up his fists, and I met him; I was used to
this form of fighting. However, I went down before his plunges and
punches, and realized that I was up against a bigger, heavier, stronger
man than myself, and could not hope to win. I'm no small boy, as you
see, but Barnes was a giant, and a skilled fighter.

"I got away from him and kept away. I wanted to hoist an ensign, union
down, but the lunatic prevented me; his intelligence had left him. He
watched me as a cat watches a mouse, or I might have brought a
handspike down on his head and ended his troubles and some of my own.
And it would have been no foul play to have done so; but I could not.
He followed me everywhere, ready to pounce upon me at the first move I
made.

"I spent that night walking away from him as he nosed me around the
deck, and brushing off the crazy rats that climbed my legs. I did not
dare make for the rigging, for without my bag I would have been worse
off than on deck, and at such a move he would have jumped on me. But in
the morning he had his first convulsion, and it left him a wreck. While
he lay gasping and choking on the deck, with equally afflicted rats
crawling over him and nipping where they felt flesh, I managed to get a
bite from the steward's storeroom, and it roused me up and strengthened
me. I came out, resolved to bind him down, but I was too late. He was
on his feet, the paroxysm gone, crazy as ever, and, though weak, still
able to master me.

"The ship was rolling heavily in the trough of a Biscay sea, which, no
matter how the wind, is a violent, troublesome heave of cross-forces.
The upper canvas was carried away, or hanging in the buntlines. Some of
the braces were adrift and the yards swinging. We had the courses
clewed up when the men were alive, and the lower yards were fairly
square; so the ship, with the aid of the head-sails, kept the canvas
full, and she sailed along, manned by a crew of rabid rats, a crazy
first mate, and a half-crazy second mate. I knew I was half-crazy, for
I had a fixed, insistent thought that would not go--that of a little
school-ma'am who had whipped me in childhood. I deserved the whipping,
but--Lord, how I hated her now!

"I feared the mate. He was again nosing me around the deck, glaring
murder at me and talking to himself. I feared him more than I feared
the rats, for I could brush them off. I could not get out of his sight;
but I did venture on grabbing a circular life-buoy from the
quarter-rail as I passed it, and slipping it over my head, and he did
not seem to notice the maneuver. I was resolved, as a last resort, to
jump into the sea with this scant protection against death by drowning,
hunger, or thirst, rather than risk another assault by this lunatic or
a bite from a rat. These were numbered now by the thousands. The deck
was black with them in places, and here and there a rope was as big
around as a stove-pipe.

"All was quiet this last day aboard. The mate busied himself in
following me around, talking to the rats and to himself, even as they
bit him, and I busied myself in quietly keeping out of his way and
brushing off rats that climbed my legs. I was dead tired, being on my
feet so long, and in sheer desperation and love of life I hoped for
another convulsion that would give me relief from the strain. But
before it came to him I was out of his way, and, I strongly suspect, he
was out of the way of the convulsion.

"He caught me on the forecastle deck and made for me, half mad from the
disease, but wholly mad from his mental state. There was no escape
except out the head-gear, and I went that way, with him after me. Out
the bowsprit, on to the jib foot-ropes, and out toward the end I went,
hoping to reach the martingale-stay and slip down it to the back-ropes.
I did so, but he scrambled down, tumbling and clutching, and gripped me
just abaft the dolphin-striker. His face was twisted in frenzy, and he
growled and barked like a dog, occasionally breaking into a horrible,
rat-like squeal. But he didn't bite me; he simply squeezed me in both
arms, and in that effort lost his hold on the back-rope and fell,
taking me with him. We struck the water together, and his grip
loosened, for he was now up against something too strong for him--the
sound and sight and feeling of cold water. When we came up, the
cutwater was between us, and I didn't see him again, though I heard his
convulsive gurgling and screaming from the other side of the ship. Then
the sounds stopped, and I think he must have gone under; but I was too
busy with myself to speculate much. I was trying to get a finger-nail
grip on that smooth, black side slipping by me, but could not. There
was nothing to get hold of, and no ropes were hanging over. Then I
thought of the rudder and the iron bumpkin on it that the rudder-chains
fastened to, and swam with all my strength under the quarter as it came
along. But it was no good. The life-buoy hampered me in swimming, and I
missed the rudder by an inch.

"The ship went on and left me alone on the sea. I remember very little
of it. I think my mind must have slowly gone out of me, leaving me
another person. I remember a few sensations--and it only seems like a
week ago to me--one, of being alone on the surface of the sea at night,
supported by the life-buoy; and then, I seemed to be back among the
rats, but that was just as I wakened on your floor here. The next
sensation was the sight of you, and the sound of your voice, speaking
to me, and then the knowledge that I was really alive and ashore."

"And the woman out the Boston Road?" I inquired at length.

"I will write to her as I promised. But I will not go there. Boston is
too close to the sea."




FROM THE DARKNESS AND THE DEPTHS


I had known him for a painter of renown--a master of his art, whose
pictures, which sold for high prices, adorned museums, the parlors of
the rich, and, when on exhibition, were hung low and conspicuous. Also,
I knew him for an expert photographer--an "art photographer," as they
say, one who dealt with this branch of industry as a fad, an amusement,
and who produced pictures that in composition, lights, and shades
rivaled his productions with the brush.

His cameras were the best that the market could supply, yet he was
able, from his knowledge of optics and chemistry, to improve them for
his own uses far beyond the ability of the makers. His studio was
filled with examples of his work, and his mind was stocked with
information and opinions on all subjects ranging from international
policies to the servant-girl problem.

He was a man of the world, gentlemanly and successful, about sixty
years old, kindly and gracious of manner, and out of this kindliness
and graciousness had granted me the compliment of his friendship, and
access to his studio whenever I felt like calling upon him.

Yet it never occurred to me that the wonderful and technically correct
marines hanging on his walls were due to anything but the artist's
conscientious study of his subject, and only his casual
mispronounciation of the word "leeward," which landsmen pronounce as
spelled, but which rolls off the tongue of a sailor, be he former dock
rat or naval officer, as "looward," and his giving the long sounds to
the vowels of the words "patent" and "tackle," that induced me to ask
if he had ever been to sea.

"Why, yes," he answered. "Until I was thirty I had no higher ambition
than to become a skipper of some craft; but I never achieved it. The
best I did was to sign first mate for one voyage--and that one was my
last. It was on that voyage that I learned something of the mysterious
properties of light, and it made me a photographer, then an artist. You
are wrong when you say that a searchlight cannot penetrate fog."

"But it has been tried," I remonstrated.

"With ordinary light. Yes, of course, subject to refraction, reflection,
and absorption by the millions of minute globules of water it encounters."

We had been discussing the wreck of the _Titanic_, the most terrible
marine disaster of history, the blunders of construction and
management, and the later proposed improvements as to the lowering of
boats and the location of ice in a fog.

Among these considerations was also the plan of carrying a powerful
searchlight whose beam would illumine the path of a twenty-knot liner
and render objects visible in time to avoid them. In regard to this I
had contended that a searchlight could not penetrate fog, and if it
could, would do as much harm as good by blinding and confusing the
watch officers and lookouts on other craft.

"But what other kind of light can be used?" I asked, in answer to his
mention of ordinary light.

"Invisible light," he answered. "I do not mean the Roentgen ray, nor the
emanation from radium, both of which are invisible, but neither of
which is light, in that neither can be reflected nor refracted. Both
will penetrate many different kinds of matter, but it needs reflection
or refraction to make visible an object on which it impinges.
Understand?"

"Hardly," I answered dubiously. "What kind of visible light is there,
if not radium or the Roentgen ray? You can photograph with either, can't
you?"

"Yes, but to see what you have photographed you must develop the film.
And there is no time for that aboard a fast steamer running through the
ice and the fog. No, it is mere theory, but I have an idea that the
ultraviolet light--the actinic rays beyond the violet end of the
spectrum, you know--will penetrate fog to a great distance, and in
spite of its higher refractive power, which would distort and magnify
an object, it is better than nothing."

"But what makes you think that it will penetrate fog?" I queried. "And
if it is invisible itself, how will it illumine an object?"

"As to your first question," he answered, with a smile, "it is well
known to surgeons that ultraviolet light will penetrate the human body
to the depth of an inch, while the visible rays are reflected at the
surface. And it has been known to photographers for fifty years that
this light--easily isolated by dispersion through prisms--will act on a
sensitized plate in an utterly dark room."

"Granted," I said. "But how about the second question? How can you see
by this light?"

"There you have me," he answered. "It will need a quicker development
than any now known to photography--a traveling film, for instance, that
will show the picture of an iceberg or a ship before it is too late to
avoid it--a traveling film sensitized by a quicker acting chemical than
any now used."

"Why not puzzle it out?" I asked. "It would be a wonderful invention."

"I am too old," he answered dreamily. "My life work is about done. But
other and younger men will take it up. We have made great strides in
optics. The moving picture is a fact. Colored photographs are possible.
The ultraviolet microscope shows us objects hitherto invisible because
smaller than the wave length of visible light. We shall ultimately use
this light to see through opaque objects. We shall see colors never
imagined by the human mind, but which have existed since the beginning
of light.

"We shall see new hues in the sunset, in the rainbow, in the flowers
and foliage of forest and field. We may possibly see creatures in the
air above never seen before.

"We shall certainly see creatures from the depths of the sea, where
visible light cannot reach--creatures whose substance is of such a
nature that it will not respond to the light it has never been exposed
to--a substance which is absolutely transparent because it will not
absorb, and appear black; will not reflect, and show a color of some
kind; and will not refract, and distort objects seen through it."

"What!" I exclaimed. "Do you think there are invisible creatures?"

He looked gravely at me for a moment, then said: "You know that there
are sounds that are inaudible to the human ear because of their too
rapid vibration, others that are audible to some, but not to all. There
are men who cannot hear the chirp of a cricket, the tweet of a bird, or
the creaking of a wagon wheel.

"You know that there are electric currents much stronger in voltage
than is necessary to kill us, but of wave frequency so rapid that the
human tissue will not respond, and we can receive such currents without
a shock. And _I know_"--he spoke with vehemence--"that there are
creatures in the deep sea of color invisible to the human eye, for I
have not only felt such a creature, but seen its photograph taken by
the ultraviolet light."

"Tell me," I asked breathlessly. "Creatures solid, but invisible?"

"Creatures solid, and invisible because absolutely transparent. It is
long since I have told the yarn. People would not believe me, and it
was so horrible an experience that I have tried to forget it. However,
if you care for it, and are willing to lose your sleep to-night, I'll
give it to you."

He reached for a pipe, filled it, and began to smoke; and as he smoked
and talked, some of the glamor and polish of the successful artist and
clubman left him. He was an old sailor, spinning a yarn.

"It was about thirty years ago," he began, "or, to be explicit,
twenty-nine years this coming August, at the time of the great Java
earthquake. You've heard of it--how it killed seventy thousand people,
thirty thousand of whom were drowned by the tidal wave.

"It was a curious phenomenon; Krakatoa Island, a huge conical mountain
rising from the bottom of Sunda Strait, went out of existence, while in
Java a mountain chain was leveled, and up from the bowels of the earth
came an iceberg--as you might call it--that floated a hundred miles on
a stream of molten lava before melting.

"I was not there; I was two hundred miles to the sou'west, first mate
of one of those old-fashioned, soft-pine, centerboard barkentines--three
sticks the same length, you know--with the mainmast stepped on the port
side of the keel to make room for the centerboard--a craft that would
neither stay, nor wear, nor scud, nor heave to, like a decent vessel.

"But she had several advantages; she was new, and well painted, deck,
top-sides, and bottom. Hence her light timbers and planking were not
water-soaked. She was fastened with 'trunnels,' not spikes and bolts,
and hemp rigged.

"Perhaps there was not a hundredweight of iron aboard of her, while her
hemp rigging, though heavier than water, was lighter than wire rope,
and so, when we were hit by the back wash of that tidal wave, we did
not sink, even though butts were started from one end to the other of
the flimsy hull, and all hatches were ripped off.

"I have called it the back wash, yet we may have had a tidal wave of
our own; for, though we had no knowledge of the frightful catastrophe
at Java, still there had been for days several submarine earthquakes
all about us, sending fountains of water, steam bubbles, and mud from
the sea bed into the air.

"As the soundings were over two thousand fathoms in that neighborhood,
you can imagine the seismic forces at work beneath us. There had been
no wind for days, and no sea, except the agitation caused by the
upheavals. The sky was a dull mud color, and the sun looked like
nothing but a dark, red ball, rising day by day in the east, to move
overhead and set in the west. The air was hot, sultry, and stifling,
and I had difficulty in keeping the men--a big crew--at work.

"The conditions would try anybody's temper, and I had my own troubles.
There was a passenger on board, a big, fat, highly educated German--a
scientist and explorer--whom we had taken aboard at some little town on
the West Australian coast, and who was to leave us at Batavia, where he
could catch a steamer for Germany.

"He had a whole laboratory with him, with scientific instruments that I
didn't know the names of, with maps he had made, stuffed beasts and
birds he had killed, and a few live ones which he kept in cages and
attended to himself in the empty hold; for we were flying light, you
know, without even ballast aboard, and bound to Batavia for a cargo.

"It was after a few eruptions from the bottom of the sea that he got to
be a nuisance; he was keenly interested in the strange dead fish and
nondescript creatures that had been thrown up. He declared them new,
unknown to science, and wore out my patience with entreaties to haul
them aboard for examination and classification.

"I obliged him for a time, until the decks stank with dead fish, and
the men got mutinous. Then I refused to advance the interests of
science any farther, and, in spite of his excitement and pleadings,
refused to litter the decks any more. But he got all he wanted of the
unclassified and unknown before long.

"Tidal wave, you know, is a name we give to any big wave, and it has no
necessary connection with the tides. It may be the big third wave of a
series--just a little bigger than usual; it may be the ninth, tenth,
and eleventh waves merged into one huge comber by uneven wind pressure;
it may be the back wash from an earthquake that depresses the nearest
coast, and it may be--as I think it was in our case--a wave sent out by
an upheaval from the sea bed. At any rate, we got it, and we got it
just after a tremendous spouting of water and mud, and a thick cloud of
steam on the northern horizon.

"We saw a seeming rise to the horizon, as though caused by refraction,
but which soon eliminated refraction as a cause by its becoming visible
in its details--its streaks of water and mud, its irregular upper edge,
the occasional combers that appeared on this edge, and the terrific
speed of its approach. It was a wave, nothing else, and coming at forty
knots at least.

"There was little that we could do; there was no wind, and we headed
about west, showing our broadside; yet I got the men at the downhauls,
clewlines, and stripping lines of the lighter kites; but before a man
could leave the deck to furl, that moving mountain hit us, and buried
us on our beam ends just as I had time to sing out: 'Lash yourselves,
every man.'

"Then I needed to think of my own safety and passed a turn of the
mizzen gaff-topsail downhaul about me, belaying to a pin as the
cataclysm hit us. For the next two minutes--although it seemed an hour,
I did not speak, nor breathe, nor think, unless my instinctive grip on
the turns of the downhaul on the pin may have been an index of thought.
I was under water; there was roaring in my ears, pain in my lungs, and
terror in my heart.

"Then there came a lessening of the turmoil, a momentary quiet, and I
roused up, to find the craft floating on her side, about a third out of
water, but apt to turn bottom up at any moment from the weight of the
water-soaked gear and canvas, which will sink, you know, when wet.

"I was hanging in my bight of rope from a belaying pin, my feet clear
of the perpendicular deck, and my ears tortured by the sound of men
overboard crying for help--men who had not lashed themselves. Among
them I knew was the skipper, a mild-mannered little fellow, and the
second mate, an incompetent tough from Portsmouth, who had caused me
lots of trouble by his abuse of the men and his depending upon me to
stand by him.

"Nothing could be done for them; they were adrift on the back wall of a
moving mountain that towered thirty degrees above the horizon to port;
and another moving mountain, as big as the first, was coming on from
starboard--caused by the tumble into the sea of the uplifted water.

"Did you ever fall overboard in a full suit of clothes? If you did, you
know the mighty exercise of strength required to climb out. I was a
strong, healthy man at the time, but never in my life was I so tested.
I finally got a grip on the belaying pin and rested; then, with an
effort that caused me physical pain, I got my right foot up to the
pinrail and rested again; then, perhaps more by mental strength than
physical--for I loved life and wanted to live--I hooked my right foot
over the rail, reached higher on the rope, rested again, and finally
hove myself up to the mizzen rigging, where I sat for a few moments to
get my breath, and think, and look around.

"Forward, I saw men who had lashed themselves to the starboard rail,
and they were struggling, as I had struggled, to get up to the
horizontal side of the vessel. They succeeded, but at the time I had no
use for them. Sailors will obey orders, if they understand the orders,
but this was an exigency outside the realm of mere seamanship.

"Men were drowning off to port; men, like myself, were climbing up to
temporary safety afforded by the topsides of a craft on her beam ends;
and aft, in the alleyway, was the German professor, unlashed, but safe
and secure in his narrow confines, one leg through a cabin window, and
both hands gripping the rail, while he bellowed like a bull, not for
himself, however--but for his menagerie in the empty hold.

"There was small chance for the brutes--smaller than for ourselves,
left on the upper rail of an over-turned craft, and still smaller than
the chance of the poor devils off to port, some of whom had gripped the
half-submerged top-hamper, and were calling for help.

"We could not help them; she was a Yankee craft, and there was not a
life buoy or belt on board; and who, with another big wave coming,
would swim down to looward with a line?

"Landsmen, especially women and boys, have often asked me why a wooden
ship, filled with water, sinks, even though not weighted with cargo.
Some sailors have pondered over it, too, knowing that a small boat,
built of wood, and fastened with nails, will float if water-logged.

"But the answer is simple. Most big craft are built of oak or hard
pine, and fastened together with iron spikes and bolts--sixty tons at
least to a three-hundred-ton schooner. After a year or two this hard,
heavy wood becomes water-soaked, and, with the iron bolts and spikes,
is heavier than water, and will sink when the hold is flooded.

"This craft of ours was like a small boat--built of soft light wood,
with trunnels instead of bolts, and no iron on board except the anchors
and one capstan. As a result, though ripped, twisted, broken, and
disintegrated, she still floated even on her beam ends.

"But the soaked hemp rigging and canvas might be enough to drag the
craft down, and with this fear in my mind I acted quickly. Singing out
to the men to hang on, I made my way aft to where we had an ax, lodged
in its beckets on the after house. With this I attacked the mizzen
lanyards, cutting everything clear, then climbed forward to the main.

"Hard as I worked I had barely cut the last lanyard when that second
wave loomed up and crashed down on us. I just had time to slip into the
bight of a rope, and save myself; but I had to give up the ax; it
slipped from my hands and slid down to the port scuppers.

"That second wave, in its effect, was about the same as the first,
except that it righted the craft. We were buried, choked, and half
drowned; but when the wave had passed on, the main and mizzenmasts,
unsupported by the rigging that I had cut away, snapped cleanly about
three feet above the deck, and the broad, flat-bottomed craft
straightened up, lifting the weight of the foremast and its gear, and
lay on an even keel, with foresail, staysail, and jib set, the fore
gaff-topsail, flying jib, and jib-topsail clewed down and the wreck of
the masts bumping against the port side.

"We floated, but with the hold full of water, and four feet of it on
deck amidships that surged from one rail to the other as the craft
rolled, pouring over and coming back. All hatches were ripped off, and
our three boats were carried away from their chocks on the house.

"Six men were clearing themselves from their lashings at the fore
rigging, and three more, who had gone overboard with the first sea, and
had caught the upper gear to be lifted as the craft righted, were
coming down, while the professor still declaimed from the alley.

"'Hang on all,' I yelled; 'there's another sea coming.'

"It came, but passed over us without doing any more damage, and though
a fourth, fifth, and sixth followed, each was of lesser force than the
last, and finally it was safe to leave the rail and wade about, though
we still rolled rails under in what was left of the turmoil.

"Luckily, there was no wind, though I never understood why, for
earthquakes are usually accompanied by squalls. However, even with
wind, our canvas would have been no use to us; for, waterlogged as we
were, we couldn't have made a knot an hour, nor could we have steered,
even with all sail set. All we could hope for was the appearance of
some craft that would tow the ripped and shivered hull to port, or at
least take us off.

"So, while I searched for the ax, and the professor searched into the
depths under the main hatch for signs of his menagerie--all drowned,
surely--the remnant of the crew lowered the foresail and jibs, stowing
them as best they could.

"I found the ax, and found it just in time; for I was attacked by what
could have been nothing but a small-sized sea serpent, that had been
hove up to the surface and washed aboard us. It was only about six feet
long, but it had a mouth like a bulldog, and a row of spikes along its
back that could have sawed a man's leg off.

"I managed to kill it before it harmed me, and chucked it overboard
against the protests of the professor, who averred that I took no
interest in science.

"'No, I don't,' I said to him. 'I've other things to think of. And you,
too. You'd better go below and clean up your instruments, or you'll
find them ruined by salt water.'

"He looked sorrowfully and reproachfully at me, and started to wade
aft; but he halted at the forward companion, and turned, for a scream
of agony rang out from the forecastle deck, where the men were coming
in from the jibs, and I saw one of them writhing on his back,
apparently in a fit, while the others stood wonderingly around.

"The forecastle deck was just out of water, and there was no wash; but
in spite of this, the wriggling, screaming man slid head-first along
the break and plunged into the water on the main deck.

"I scrambled forward, still carrying the ax, and the men tumbled down
into the water after the man; but we could not get near him. We could
see him under water, feebly moving, but not swimming; and yet he shot
this way and that faster than a man ever swam; and once, as he passed
near me, I noticed a gaping wound in his neck, from which the blood was
flowing in a stream--a stream like a current, which did not mix with
the water and discolor it.

"Soon his movements ceased, and I waded toward him; but he shot swiftly
away from me, and I did not follow, for something cold, slimy, and firm
touched my hand--something in the water, but which I could not see.

"I floundered back, still holding the ax, and sang out to the men to
keep away from the dead man; for he was surely dead by now. He lay
close to the break of the topgallant forecastle, on the starboard side;
and as the men mustered around me I gave one my ax, told the rest to
secure others, and to chop away the useless wreck pounding our port
side--useless because it was past all seamanship to patch up that
basketlike hull, pump it out, and raise jury rigging.

"While they were doing it, I secured a long pike pole from its beckets,
and, joined by the professor, cautiously approached the body prodding
ahead of me.

"As I neared the dead man, the pike pole was suddenly torn from my
grasp, one end sank to the deck, while the other raised above the
water; then it slid upward, fell, and floated close to me. I seized it
again and turned to the professor.

"'What do you make of this, Herr Smidt?' I asked. 'There is something
down there that we cannot see--something that killed that man. See the
blood?'

"He peered closely at the dead man, who looked curiously distorted and
shrunken, four feet under water. But the blood no longer was a thin
stream issuing from his neck; it was gathered into a misshapen mass
about two feet away from his neck.

"'Nonsense,' he answered. 'Something alive which we cannot see is
contrary to all laws of physics. Der man must have fallen und hurt
himself, which accounts for der bleeding. Den he drowned in der water.
Do you see?--mine Gott! What iss?'

"He suddenly went under water himself, and dropping the pike pole, I
grabbed him by the collar and braced myself. Something was pulling him
away from me, but I managed to get his head out, and he spluttered:

"'Help! Holdt on to me. Something haf my right foot.'

"'Lend a hand here,' I yelled to the men, and a few joined me, grabbing
him by his clothing. Together we pulled against the invisible force,
and finally all of us went backward, professor and all, nearly to drown
ourselves before regaining our feet. Then, as the agitated water
smoothed, I distinctly saw the mass of red move slowly forward and
disappear in the darkness under the forecastle deck.

"'You were right, mine friend,' said the professor, who, in spite of
his experience, held his nerve. 'Dere is something invisible in der
water--something dangerous, something which violates all laws of
physics und optics. Oh, mine foot, how it hurts!'

"'Get aft,' I answered, 'and find out what ails it. And you fellows,' I
added to the men, 'keep away from the forecastle deck. Whatever it is,
it has gone under it.'

"Then I grabbed the pike pole again, cautiously hooked the barb into
the dead man's clothing, and, assisted by the men, pulled him aft to
the poop, where the professor had preceded, and was examining his
ankle. There was a big, red wale around it, in the middle of which was
a huge blood blister. He pricked it with his knife, then rearranged his
stocking and joined us as we lifted the body.

"'Great God, sir!' exclaimed big Bill, the bosun. 'Is that Frank? I
wouldn't know him.'

"Frank, the dead man, had been strong, robust, and full-blooded. But he
bore no resemblance to his living self. He lay there, shrunken,
shortened, and changed, a look of agony on his emaciated face, and his
hands clenched--not extended like those of one drowned.

"'I thought drowned men swelled up,' ventured one of the men.

"'He was not drowned,' said Herr Smidt. 'He was sucked dry, like a
lemon. Perhaps in his whole body there is not an ounce of blood, nor
lymph, nor fluid of any kind.'

"I secured an iron belaying pin, tucked it inside his shirt, and we
hove him overboard at once; for, in the presence of this horror, we
were not in the mood for a burial service. There we were, eleven men on
a water-logged hulk, adrift on a heaving, greasy sea, with a dark-red
sun showing through a muddy sky above, and an invisible _thing_ forward
that might seize any of us at any moment it chose, in the water or out;
for Frank had been caught and dragged down.

"Still, I ordered the men, cook, steward, and all, to remain on the
poop and--the galley being forward--to expect no hot meals, as we could
subsist for a time on the cold, canned food in the storeroom and
lazaret.

"Because of an early friction between the men and the second mate, the
mild-mannered and peace-loving skipper had forbidden the crew to wear
sheath knives; but in this exigency I overruled the edict. While the
professor went down into his flooded room to doctor his ankle and
attend to his instruments, I raided the slop chest, and armed every man
of us with a sheath knife and belt; for while we could not see the
creature, we could feel it--and a knife is better than a gun in a
hand-to-hand fight.

"Then we sat around, waiting, while the sky grew muddier, the sun
darker, and the northern horizon lighter with a reddish glow that was
better than the sun. It was the Java earthquake, but we did not know it
for a long time.

"Soon the professor appeared and announced that his instruments were in
good condition, and stowed high on shelves above the water.

"'I must resensitize my plates, however,' he said. 'Der salt water has
spoiled them; but mine camera merely needs to dry out; und mine
telescope, und mine static machine und Leyden jars--why, der water did
not touch them.'

"'Well,' I answered. 'That's all right. But what good are they in the
face of this emergency? Are you thinking of photographing anything
now?'

"'Perhaps. I haf been thinking some.'

"'Have you thought out what that creature is--forward, there?'

"'Partly. It is some creature thrown up from der bottom of der sea, und
washed on board by der wave. Light, like wave motion, ends at a certain
depth, you know; und we have over twelve thousand feet beneath us. At
that depth dere is absolute darkness, but we know that creatures live
down dere, und fight, und eat, und die.'

"'But what of it? Why can't we see that thing?'

"'Because, in der ages that haf passed in its evolution from der
original moneron, it has never been exposed to light--I mean visible
light, der light that contains der seven colors of der spectrum. Hence
it may not respond to der three properties of visible light--reflection,
which would give it a color of some kind; absorption, which would make
it appear black; or refraction, which, in der absence of der other two,
would distort things seen through it. For it would be transparent, you
know.'

"'But what can be done?' I asked helplessly, for I could not understand
at the time what he meant.

"'Nothing, except that der next man attacked must use his knife. If he
cannot see der creature, he can feel it. Und perhaps--I do not know
yet--perhaps, in a way, we may see it--its photograph.'

"I looked blankly at him, thinking he might have gone crazy, but he
continued.

"'You know,' he said, 'that objects too small to be seen by the
microscope, because smaller than der amplitude of der shortest wave of
visible light, can be seen when exposed to der ultraviolet light--der
dark light beyond der spectrum? Und you know that this light is what
acts der most in photography? That it exposes on a sensitized plate new
stars in der heavens invisible to der eye through the strongest
telescope?'

"'Don't know anything about it,' I answered. 'But if you can find a way
out of this scrape we're in, go ahead.'

"'I must think,' he said dreamily. 'I haf a rock-crystal lens which is
permeable to this light, und which I can place in mine camera. I must
have a concave mirror, not of glass, which is opaque to this light, but
of metal.'

"'What for?' I asked.

"'To throw der ultraviolet light on der beast. I can generate it with
mine static machine.'

"'How will one of our lantern reflectors do? They are of polished tin,
I think.'

"'Good! I can repolish one.'

"We had one deck lantern larger than usual, with a metallic reflector
that concentrated the light into a beam, much as do the present day
searchlights. This I procured from the lazaret, and he pronounced it
available. Then he disappeared, to tinker up his apparatus.

"Night came down, and I lighted three masthead lights, to hoist at the
fore to inform any passing craft that we were not under command; but,
as I would not send a man forward on that job, I went myself, carefully
feeling my way with the pike pole. Luckily, I escaped contact with the
creature, and returned to the poop, where we had a cold supper of
canned cabin stores.

"The top of the house was dry, but it was cold, especially so as we
were all drenched to the skin. The steward brought up all the blankets
there were in the cabin--for even a wet blanket is better than none at
all--but there were not enough to go around, and one man volunteered,
against my advice, to go forward and bring aft bedding from the
forecastle.

"He did not come back; we heard his yell, that finished with a gurgle;
but in that pitch black darkness, relieved only by the red glow from
the north, not one of us dared to venture to his rescue. We knew that
he would be dead, anyhow, before we could get to him; so we stood
watch, sharing the blankets we had when our time came to sleep.

"It was a wretched night that we spent on the top of that after house.
It began to rain before midnight, the heavy drops coming down almost in
solid waves; then came wind, out of the south, cold and biting, with
real waves, that rolled even over the house, forcing us to lash
ourselves. The red glow to the north was hidden by the rain and spume,
and, to add to our discomfort, we were showered with ashes, which, even
though the surface wind was from the south, must have been brought from
the north by an upper air current.

"We did not find the dead man when the faint daylight came; and so
could not tell whether or not he had used his knife. His body must have
washed over the rail with a sea, and we hoped the invisible killer had
gone, too. But we hoped too much. With courage born of this hope a man
went forward to lower the masthead lights, prodding his way with the
pike pole.

"We watched him closely, the pole in one hand, his knife in the other.
But he went under at the fore rigging without even a yell, and the pole
went with him, while we could see, even at the distance and through the
disturbed water, that his arms were close to his sides, and that he
made no movement, except for the quick darting to and fro. After a few
moments, however, the pike pole floated to the surface, but the man's
body, drained, no doubt, of its buoyant fluids, remained on the deck.

"It was an hour later, with the pike pole for a feeler, before we dared
approach the body, hook on to it, and tow it aft. It resembled that of
the first victim, a skeleton clothed with skin, with the same look of
horror on the face. We buried it like the other, and held to the poop,
still drenched by the downpour of rain, hammered by the seas, and
choked by ashes from the sky.

"As the shower of ashes increased it became dark as twilight, and
though the three lights aloft burned out at about midday, I forbade a
man to go forward to lower them, contenting myself with a turpentine
flare lamp that I brought up from the lazaret, and filled, ready to
show if the lights of a craft came in view. Before the afternoon was
half gone it was dark as night, and down below, up to his waist in
water, the German professor was working away.

"He came up at supper time, humming cheerfully to himself, and
announced that he had replaced his camera lens with the rock crystal,
that the lantern, with its reflector and a blue spark in the focus,
made an admirable instrument for throwing the invisible rays on the
beast, and that he was all ready, except that his plates, which he had
resensitized--with some phosphorescent substance that I forget the name
of, now--must have time to dry. And then, he needed some light to work
by when the time came, he explained.

"'Also another victim,' I suggested bitterly; for he had not been on
deck when the last two men had died.

"'I hope not,' he said. 'When we can see, it may be possible to stir
him up by throwing things forward; then when he moves der water we can
take shots.'

"'Better devise some means of killing him,' I answered. 'Shooting won't
do, for water stops a bullet before it goes a foot into it.'

"'Der only way I can think of,' he responded, 'is for der next man--you
hear me all, you men--to stick your knife at the end of the
blood--where it collects in a lump. Dere is der creature's stomach, and
a vital spot.'

"'Remember this, boys,' I laughed, thinking of the last poor devil,
with his arms pinioned to his side. 'When you've lost enough blood to
see it in a lump, stab for it.'

"But my laugh was answered by a shriek. A man lashed with a turn of
rope around his waist to the stump of the mizzenmast, was writhing and
heaving on his back, while he struck with his knife, apparently at his
own body. With my own knife in my hand I sprang toward him, and felt
for what had seized him. It was something cold, and hard, and leathery,
close to his waist.

"Carefully gauging my stroke, I lunged with the knife, but I hardly
think it entered the invisible fin, or tail, or paw of the monster; but
it moved away from the screaming man, and the next moment I received a
blow in the face that sent me aft six feet, flat on my back. Then came
unconsciousness.

"When I recovered my senses the remnant of the crew were around me, but
the man was gone--dragged out of the bight of the rope that had held
him against the force of breaking seas, and down to the flooded main
deck, to die like the others. It was too dark to see, or do anything;
so, when I could speak I ordered all hands but one into the flooded
cabin where, in the upper berths and on the top of the table, were a
few dry spots.

"I filled and lighted a lantern, and gave it to the man on watch with
instructions to hang it to the stump of the mizzen and to call his
relief at the end of four hours. Then, with doors and windows closed,
we went to sleep, or tried to go to sleep. I succeeded first, I think,
for up to the last of consciousness I could hear the mutterings of the
men; when I awakened, they were all asleep, and the cabin clock, high
above the water, told me that, though it was still dark, it was six in
the morning.

"I went on deck; the lantern still burned at the stump of mizzenmast
but the lookout was gone. He had not lived long enough to be relieved,
as I learned by going below and finding that no one had been called.

"We were but six, now--one sailor and the bos'n, the cook and steward,
the professor and myself."

The old artist paused, while he refilled and lighted his pipe. I
noticed that the hand that held the match shook perceptibly, as though
the memories of that awful experience had affected his nerves. I know
that the recital had affected mine; for I joined him in a smoke, my
hands shaking also.

"Why," I asked, after a moment of silence, "if it was a deep-sea
creature, did it not die from the lesser pressure at the surface?"

"Why do not men die on the mountaintops?" he answered. "Or up in
balloons? The record is seven miles high, I think; but they lived. They
suffered from cold, and from lack of oxygen--that is, no matter how
fast, or deeply they breathed, they could not get enough. But the lack
of pressure did not trouble them; the human body can adjust itself.

"Conversely, however, an increase of pressure may be fatal. A man
dragged down more than one hundred and fifty feet may be crushed; and a
surface fish sent to the bottom of the sea may die from the pressure.
It is simple; it is like the difference between a weight lifted from us
and a weight added."

"Did this thing kill any more men?" I asked.

"All but the professor and myself, and it almost killed me. Look here."

He removed his cravat and collar, pulled down his shirt, and exposed
two livid scars about an inch in diameter, and two apart.

"I lost all the blood I could spare through those two holes," he said,
as he readjusted his apparel; "but I saved enough to keep me alive."

"Go on with the yarn," I asked. "I promise you I will not sleep
to-night."

"Perhaps I will not sleep myself," he answered, with a mournful smile.
"Some things should be forgotten, but as I have told you this much I
may as well finish, and be done with it.

"It was partly due to a sailor's love for tobacco, partly to our cold,
drenched condition. A sailor will starve quietly, but go crazy if
deprived of his smoke. This is so well known at sea that a skipper, who
will not hesitate to sail from port with rotten or insufficient food
for his men, will not dare take a chance without a full supply of
tobacco in the slop chest.

"But our slop chest was under water, and the tobacco utterly useless. I
did not use it at the time, but I fished some out for the others. It
did not do; it would not dry out to smoke, and the salt in it made it
unfit to chew. But the bos'n had an upper bunk in the forward house, in
which was a couple of pounds of navy plug, and he and the sailor talked
this over until their craving for a smoke overcame their fear of death.

"Of course, by this time, all discipline was ended, and all my commands
and entreaties went for nothing. They sharpened their knives, and,
agreeing to go forward, one on the starboard rail, the other on the
port, and each to come to the other's aid if called, they went up into
the darkness of ashes and rain. I opened my room window, which
overlooked the main deck, but could see nothing.

"Yet I could hear; I heard two screams for help, one after the
other--one from the starboard side, the other from the port, and knew
that they were caught. I closed the window, for nothing could be done.
What manner of thing it was that could grab two men so far apart nearly
at the same time was beyond all imagining.

"I talked to the steward and cook, but found small comfort. The first
was a Jap, the other a Chinaman, and they were the old-fashioned
kind--what they could not see with their eyes, they could not believe.
Both thought that all those men who had met death had either drowned or
died by falling. Neither understood--and, in fact, I did not
myself--the theories of Herr Smidt. He had stopped his cheerful humming
to himself now, and was very busy with his instruments.

"'This thing,' I said to him, 'must be able to see in the dark. It
certainly could not have heard those two men, over the noise of the
wind, sea, and rain.'

"'Why not?' he answered, as he puttered with his wires. 'Cats and owls
can see in the dark, und the accepted explanation is that by their
power of enlarging der pupils they admit more light to the retina. But
that explanation never satisfied me. You haf noticed, haf you not, that
a cat's eyes shine in der dark, but only when der cat is looking at
you?--that is, when it looks elsewhere you do not see der shiny eyes.'

"'Yes,' I answered, 'I have noticed that.'

"'A cat's eyes are searchlights, but they send forth a visible light,
such as is generated by fireflies, und some fish. Und dere are fish in
der upper tributaries of der Amazon which haf four eyes, der two upper
of which are searchlights, der two lower of which are organs of
percipience or vision. But visible light is not der only light. It is
possible that the creature out on deck generates the invisible light,
and can see by it.'

"'But what does it all amount to?' I asked impatiently.

"'I haf told you,' he answered calmly. 'Der creature may live in an
atmosphere of ultraviolet light, which I can generate mineself. When
mine plates dry, und it clears off so I can see what I am doing, I may
get a picture of it. When we know what it is, we may find means of
killing it.'

"'God grant that you succeed,' I answered fervently. 'It has killed
enough of us.'

"But, as I said, the thing killed all but the professor and myself. And
it came about through the other reason I mentioned--our cold, drenched
condition. If there is anything an Oriental loves above his ancestors,
it is his stomach; and the cold, canned food was palling upon us all.
We had a little light through the downpour of ashes and rain about
mid-day, and the steward and cook began talking about hot coffee.

"We had the turpentine torch for heating water, and some coffee, high
and dry on a shelf in the steward's storeroom, but not a pot, pan, or
cooking utensil of any kind in the cabin. So these two poor heathen,
against my expostulations--somewhat faint, I admit, for the thought of
hot coffee took away some of my common sense--went out on the deck and
waded forward, waist-deep in the water, muddy now, from the downfall of
ashes.

"I could see them as they entered the galley to get the coffeepot, but,
though I stared from my window until the blackness closed down, I did
not see them come out. Nor did I hear even a squeal. The thing must
have been in the galley.

"Night came on, and, with its coming, the wind and rain ceased, though
there was still a slight shower of ashes. But this ended toward
midnight, and I could see stars overhead and a clear horizon. Sleep, in
my nervous, overwrought condition, was impossible; but the professor,
after the bright idea of using the turpentine torch to dry out his
plates, had gone to his fairly dry berth, after announcing his
readiness to take snapshots about the deck in the morning.

"But I roused him long before morning. I roused him when I saw through
my window the masthead and two side lights of a steamer approaching
from the starboard, still about a mile away. I had not dared to go up
and rig that lantern at the mizzen stump; but now I nerved myself to go
up with the torch, the professor following with his instruments.

"'You cold-blooded crank,' I said to him, as I waved the torch. 'I
admire your devotion to science, but are you waiting for that thing to
get me?'

"He did not answer, but rigged his apparatus on the top of the cabin.
He had a Wimshurst machine--to generate a blue spark, you know--and
this he had attached to the big deck light, from which he had removed
the opaque glass. Then he had his camera, with its rock-crystal lens.

"He trained both forward, and waited, while I waved the torch, standing
near the stump with a turn of rope around me for safety's sake in case
the thing seized me; and to this idea I added the foolish hope, aroused
by the professor's theories, that the blinding light of the torch would
frighten the thing away from me as it does wild animals.

"But in this last I was mistaken. No sooner was there an answering
blast of a steam whistle, indicating that the steamer had seen the
torch, than something cold, wet, leathery, and slimy slipped around my
neck. I dropped the torch, and drew my knife, while I heard the whir of
the static machine as the professor turned it.

"'Use your knife, mine friend,' he called. 'Use your knife, und reach
for any blood what you see.'

"I knew better than to call for help, and I had little chance to use
the knife. Still, I managed to keep my right hand, in which I held it,
free, while that cold, leathery thing slipped farther around my neck
and waist. I struck as I could, but could make no impression; and soon
I felt another stricture around my legs, which brought me on my back.

"Still another belt encircled me, and, though I had come up warmly clad
in woolen shirts and monkey jacket, I felt these garments being torn
away from me. Then I was dragged forward, but the turn of rope had
slipped down toward my waist, and I was merely bent double.

"And all the time that German was whirling his machine, and shouting to
strike for any blood I saw. But I saw none. I felt it going, however.
Two spots on my chest began to smart, then burn as though hot irons
were piercing me. Frantically I struck, right and left, sometimes at
the coils encircling me, again in the air. Then all became dark.

                     *      *      *      *      *

"I awakened in a stateroom berth, too weak to lift my hands, with the
taste of brandy in my mouth and the professor standing over me with a
bottle in his hand.

"'Ach, it is well,' he said. 'You will recover. You haf merely lost
blood, but you did the right thing. You struck with your knife at the
blood, and you killed the creature. I was right. Heart, brain, und all
vital parts were in der stomach.'

"'Where are we now?' I asked, for I did not recognize the room.

"'On board der steamer. When you got on your feet und staggered aft, I
knew you had killed him, and gave you my assistance. But you fainted
away. Then we were taken off. Und I haf two or three beautiful
negatives, which I am printing. They will be a glorious contribution to
der scientific world.'

"I was glad that I was alive, yet not alive enough to ask any more
questions. But next day he showed me the photographs he had printed."

"In Heaven's name, what was it?" I asked excitedly, as the old artist
paused to empty and refill his pipe.

"Nothing but a giant squid, or octopus. Except that it was bigger than
any ever seen before, and invisible to the eye, of course. Did you ever
read Hugo's terrible story of Gilliat's fight with a squid?"

I had, and nodded.

"Hugo's imagination could not give him a creature--no matter how
formidable--larger than one of four feet stretch. This one had three
tentacles around me, two others gripped the port and starboard
pin-rails, and three were gripping the stump of the mainmast. It had a
reach of forty feet, I should think, comparing it with the beam of the
craft.

"But there was one part of each picture, ill defined and missing. My
knife and right hand were not shown. They were buried in a dark lump,
which could be nothing but the blood from my veins. Unconscious, but
still struggling, I had struck into the soft body of the monster, and
struck true."




NOAH'S ARK


Sam Rogers told me the story that follows, as we sat in the coils of
the foremain and topsail braces--easy chairs aboard ship--and,
sheltered from the blast of wind and spume by the high-weather rail,
killed time in the night-watch by yarn-spinning.

For neither of us had a wheel or lookout that night; and as he and I
were the only Americans in the forward end of the ship, we naturally
sought each other for communion and counsel--he, a tall, straight, and
slim man of fifty, an ex-man-of-war's man; I, a boy, beginning the
battle of life.

Sam was an inveterate reader; and, while his diction embraced a choice
stock of profanity, which he used when aroused, it also expressed
itself in the choicest of English, his sentences full of commas,
semicolons, and periods. He reeled off his stories as though reading
from a book.

I had mentioned my boyish terror of bears, wolves, and other bugaboos
of childhood, and Sam responded with his yarn. Here it is, just as he
told it:

"She was a menagerie ship--Noah's Arks, as we called them. One of these
craft that sail out to the Orient in ballast; and, stopping at Anjer
Point for monkeys; Calcutta, Bombay, and Rangoon for elephants, tigers,
lions, and cobras; Cape Town for orang-utans and African snakes, and
over at Montevideo and Rio for wild hogs, pythons, boa-constrictors,
porcupines, and other South American jungle denizens.

"I don't know just where this craft had been to get the assorted cargo
that I saw when I shipped for the run from Rio to New York; but I found
a mess of trouble in that hold that made me think a lot, and a limited
skipper and mates that made me worry a lot. For they had stowed a mad
elephant under the fore-hatch; and this gentleman kept all hands awake
when he liked, snorting and trumpeting, with no regard for eight bells
or the watch below.

"There were Hindoo keepers aboard, but these fellows are useless in
cold weather; they shrivel up and move slowly, paralyzed by the cold.
We got the cold up in the north latitudes, just above the trades; and
it was about this time that the trouble began.

"We had the ordinary mixed crew of a Yankee ship--only, this craft was
a bark; and we had the usual bull-headed and ignorant Yankee skipper
and mates; men with no understanding of human or brute nature; men who
would rather hit you than listen to your proposition of peace. They hit
us all, and got us into a condition of mind that discounted that of the
elephant under the hatch.

"Besides that elephant there were stowed in that hold cages containing
wolves, hyenas, wild hogs, wild asses, monkeys, porcupines, and zebras.
There were three or four cages full of poisonous snakes, one variety of
which I recognized, the curse of India--the hooded cobra. Then there
was a big python, picked up at Rio, and a boa-constrictor, taken aboard
at one of the Pacific islands.

"There was a huge Nubian lion; a big, striped Bengal tiger; a
hippopotamus, and a rhinoceros, to complete the list. I tell you, it
made me creepy to go down among them, as we had to on occasions, to
wash down.

"The elephant was moored to a stanchion by a short length of chain
shackled around his hind leg, but it gave him a radius of action equal
to his length and that of his hind leg and trunk. This precluded our
using the fore-hatch to reach the hold, so we used the main-hatch; and,
as there was daily use of it, this hatch was fitted with steps, and
always kept open, even in bad weather.

"The immediate cause of the trouble was the carrying away of the
foretop-gallant-yard, due to rotten halyards, and braces and lifts,
when we were scudding before a gale off Hatteras. The yard came down on
the whirl, but when it hit the deck it hit like a pile-driver--a
straight, perpendicular blow--directly over the partners that held the
upper end of the stanchion to which that crazy elephant was moored.

"It weakened it. We heard the big brute's protest, and then we heard
the crash as he carried away the stanchion.

"Then we heard other noises as he raced aft among the cages--the mad
squealing of the elephant, the growling and roaring of the lion and the
tiger, the barking of the wolves and hyenas, the gruntings of the wild
hogs, the heehaws of the wild asses and zebras, and the terrible,
mumbling snorts of the hippopotamus and rhinoceros, as their cages were
upset and destroyed.

"That mad elephant smashed them all, as we learned when the whole
bunch, according to their acceptance of the situation, appeared on
deck, growling or whining, looking for something to do or to kill. All
hands were up, and we all took to the rigging, even the skipper and
mates and the man at the wheel.

"The ship broached to, and away went the upper spars and yards. The
canvas slatted and thrashed and, one by one, the sails went to ribbons
and rags; but we could not help it. Down on deck were a big yellow lion
and striped tiger wandering round, swishing their tails to starboard
and port, looking for trouble.

"Also a python and a boa-constrictor, a half-dozen wolves from the
Russian plateaus, the zebras and wild asses, the hyenas, with their
ugly faces; the porcupines, and some of the small venomous snakes. We
could see them as they climbed up the steps of the main-hatch.

"Even the rhinoceros and the hippopotamus came up; but, when the mad
elephant tried, the steps broke under his weight, and he remained
below. Still, we had a problem.

"There wasn't a gun among us, and to go down and face those beasts with
handspikes was out of the question.

"I was in the mizzen crosstrees with the skipper, the second mate, the
helmsman, and a couple of Sou'wegians who had been working aft. In the
maintop were the first mate and three or four of the crew, and in the
foretop were the rest, all bunched together and waiting for
instructions.

"The skipper gave them.

"'Go down out o' that,' he yelled, 'and drive them down the hatch!'

"But not a man moved. Who would? He told me to go over and lash the
wheel amidships, and I declined, as politely as I could. The wheel was
spinning back and forth, the ship rolling in the trough, and the upper
spars, hanging by their gear, slatting back and forth as the ship
rolled.

"Down on deck were those murderous wild beasts, nosing round, and only
waiting for the chance of getting together. I told this to the skipper.

"'Right,' he said. 'Perhaps they'll kill each other.'

"This seemed possible a few minutes later, when the tiger and the lion
met face to face. They glared and growled and spit, just like two huge
tomcats, then they sailed into each other.

"It was a lively scrap. They fenced and dodged and nipped as they
could, but their motions were too swift to give either a good chance at
a bite. They were in the air half the time, on their backs the other
half, and it seemed an even fight until the tiger, in one of his
plunges, bumped into the python, who had been squirming around the
deck.

"Now, a python is not poisonous; but, nevertheless, he has a strong
grip of jaw. He closed his jaws on the tiger's nose, and then began a
funny sight. The big, striped brute could not shake him off; but he
backed away, snarling and screaming with rage and pain, forward round
the house, and aft on the other side to the space abaft the main-hatch,
the snake writhing like a whip-lash, and the tiger never making an
effort to use his forepaws.

"It seemed as though hereditary fear had seized him, for with a few
digs and blows he could have clawed him off. This fight ended by the
writhing python getting too close to the boa-constrictor, who happened
to be nosing his way across the deck amidships. In the twinkling of an
eye, the boa wrapped himself around the python, and the tiger got away.

"Then, while the two big snakes thrashed around the deck, Mr. Bengal
slunk away like a cat scared by a dog--his tail between his legs, and
the fur on his back raised up so that it looked like that of a
razor-backed hog.

"He went forward of the house to think it over, and the two snakes
fought it out, while the lion, thinking that he had won the fight,
roared and growled his defiance to the rest.

"He was too confident; the big rhinoceros looked him in the face, and
the trouble was resumed.

"Mr. Lion charged; but the rhino lowered his head, caught him between
the forepaws with his horn, and sent him flying over his head, with a
big gash in his body. That was enough for the lion, king of beasts
though he was.

"Leaving a trail of blood, he slunk forward of the house, and there
must have met his enemy, the tiger. We could not see, but we could
hear, and we knew the fight between the two was resumed.

"The snakes were thrashing it out all this time, but neither seemed to
get the better of it. The boa's instincts were to crush, the python's
to swallow; but this swallowing pertained also to the boa, and it came
about that the boa got about three inches of the python's tail into his
mouth, and later the python got a grip on the boa's tail.

"They held fast and ceased their struggles, their efforts now being
centered in the desire to swallow each other. This seemed a good
solution of our problem, and we wished them well.

"Meanwhile, the hyenas and the Russian wolves got mixed up, and--talk
about your dog fights--you never saw anything like it. Those beasts
fought and snarled and wrestled round the deck in a way to make you
glad you were up aloft, out of harm's way.

"It was a strange fight; both the hyenas and the wolves are cowards,
each afraid of the other. And it was only when two wolves got at a
hyena, or two hyenas got at a wolf that there was any real scrapping.
But it came about that these two breeds destroyed each other.

"One after the other crawled away to die from loss of blood.

"The wild asses and zebras had got busy. Something about the
arrangement of the zebra's stripes must have offended the artistic
sensibilities of the wild asses, for pretty soon there was a lively
kicking-match going on round the deck--a zebra against a donkey,
kicking out, stern to stern, like prize-fighters sparring. It was
funny, the way they looked round at each other while backing up to a
fresh reach.

"Now, the tiger and the lion were having it out forward of the house;
the wolves and the hyenas were scrapping, as they could, two against
one; the python and the cobra were trying to swallow each other, and
the asses and zebras were kicking the ribs out of each other. And, as
if this were not enough to complete the circus, the hippo and the rhino
must get together.

"Hippo made a plunging charge upon rhino and met that formidable tusk.
But the hide of a hippo is something akin to armor-plate, and there was
no damage, though the big brute was lifted and turned over. He came
back, and in some manner got a grip on that big horn with his teeth;
and from that on, their fight was simply a wrestling-match, neither
able to hurt the other.

"And over their grunts and groanings, over the noise of the wolves and
hyenas, the tiger and lion, and the slatting and bumping of the broken
gear against the mast, and the sounds of sea and wind, rose supreme to
our ears the blatant squealing and trumpeting of that mad elephant in
the 'tween-decks.

"Added to this were the insane orders to us fellows of the skipper and
the two mates. They demanded that we go down and quell the disturbance.
Well, we did not go down. We did other things.

"It was I who suggested to the skipper the advisability of cutting away
the connections that held those spars and sails aloft, so that they
would drop down and free the ship of the extra top-hamper. He was badly
rattled, but accepted my suggestion; so, at his orders, men went aloft
on all three masts, and soon the wreck came down, the mizzen top-hamper
falling overboard and the main diving down the open main-hatch. We
hoped it hit the elephant.

"It was only chance, of course; but the foretop-gallantmast, with the
royal yard attached, did hit the tiger a smashing blow on the head that
ended his troubles. We could see him, just clear of the forward house,
with the lion at his throat. There wasn't much of it. The lion bit in;
then, satisfied that he had done the job, he left the dead tiger and
came aft, still bleeding from the hole between the forelegs, and
pounced upon rhino, who had made that hole.

"It roused the rhino. With a mighty upheaval, he shook off the hippo
and charged on the lion. But this fighter had grown wary; he dodged and
jumped, growling and snarling the while, but apparently in no mood to
again risk the puncturing of his hide by that upright horn.

"Meanwhile the stupid old hippo, who usually wanted nothing more than
his grub and his bath, lumbered around looking for further trouble. He
found it; he interfered between the wild asses and the zebras, and soon
the whole bunch, both sides, were bombarding him with their hind feet.
He squealed and groaned and growled, but to no end.

"They backed up to him and thumped him with their hoofs, as many as
could get near him. It was a beautiful exhibition of the law of the
brotherhood of man and the brotherhood of beast. Those equine
propagandists of the law of the survival of the fittest kicked that
poor, peaceful old hippo into a condition of coma.

"At last he lay down, with his head between his paws, and gave it up;
then the kickers ceased kicking him and resumed their kicking of each
other.

"By this time the python and the boa had gathered in about three feet
of each other; the wolves and hyenas--two against one, understand--had
reduced their number by half, and the lion was still pretending to
fight the rhino.

"He still found it best to dodge that upright tusk, while his claws and
teeth couldn't even scratch the rhino's impervious hide.

"Then he got it from another quarter. The porcupines had climbed up,
and one was nosing round the deck, attending to his own affairs--which
seemed to be nothing more than an intention to find out where he
was--when he got between these two. He suddenly balled himself up,
turned round a couple of times, and then fired a volley of his quills.

"They went, straight and true, right into that open hole between the
lion's forelegs. He stood on his hindfeet for a moment, bellowing and
roaring, while he tried to brush them out; then he slunk forward again
and hid behind the house. But we heard his occasional snarls of pain.

"Meanwhile the porcupine had opened fire on the rhino, but did him no
harm; and rhino was too big-minded to notice him. He lumbered round,
looking for a match with something, but not finding it; even the
kickers got out of his way, and the poor old hippo wandered forward to
commune with the lion.

"Not finding an antagonist worthy of his horn, the rhino began nosing
the two mutual-minded snakes. He tossed them 'round, and they were
helpless to resist--only the rough handling seemed to induce increased
swallowing power. We could see their jaws working convulsively; and
inch by inch, foot by foot, they rapidly disappeared from sight.

"The rhino soon got tired and tackled the wolves and hyenas--what was
left of them. They had reduced their number to two of each kind; but
this was too small to admit of two against one, so they were now
dodging each other, snarling bravely enough, but not fighting.

"The rhino caught a hyena on his tusk, tossed him in air, caught him as
he fell, sent him flying again, and then stamped his life out. This
seemed to settle the fate of the other hyena, for immediately the two
remaining wolves got at him. But rhino's next victim was a wolf, which
he disposed of as quickly.

"This left two cowards to fight for the supremacy; but the fight was
taken out of them. They slunk apart and did not meet again.

"Now, here was the condition of things when a new factor intruded upon
the problem: the lion was nursing his hurts, forward of the house, out
of sight; the hippo had gone to sleep from sheer weariness and disgust;
the last wolf and hyena were prowling round, avoiding each other; the
python and the boa had swallowed two-thirds of each other's length; the
rhino was wandering round, looking for a scrap; the kicking zebras and
wild asses had grown tired and called it a draw, and the porcupines,
three or four of them, had finished their inspection of their
environment and had snuggled down in various places to await
developments.

"The new factor was a green sea that lifted aboard amidships and
flooded the waist of the ship. Of course, the quick movers of the lot
got forward or aft, out of the way of the water surging back and forth
across the deck; but the poor porcupines were drowned before the water
ran out the scuppers. And when it had gone out, we saw what we had not
seen before--the small, poisonous cobras.

"They had come up, but had kept out of sight until that sea washed them
round; then, as the water shallowed on the deck, they made for the
masts or the rigging and began to climb. It's hard to drown a snake,
you know.

"There were at least two dozen of the reptiles, and it looked bad for
us fellows aloft. Did you ever see a snake climb a rope? He goes up in
a sort of wriggling spiral, wrapped loosely round it, but shifting his
different sections up for a fresh grip. The other fellows climbed to
the topmast-crosstrees and looked down; but the snakes stopped at the
eyes of the rigging, or the tops, and rested.

"Then came a second new factor in our problem: a sea came aboard from
the other side and washed about; another with the next roll, and still
another. The rolls were long and heavy, and I, who had once been on a
sinking ship, sensed the reason.

"'We're sinking, captain,' I said. 'That main-topgallantmast going down
that hatch has punched a hole or started a butt.'

"'Maybe you're right,' he exclaimed. 'What can we do?'

"That was too hard a question at the time for a skipper to ask of a
foremast-hand, so I said nothing, but did a lot of thinking. The
flywheel-pump was amidships at the main fife-rail. We could not go down
to it without danger from the wounded lion, the rhino, and possibly the
wolf, though, with these out of the way, we might dodge or kill the
cobras and fight off the hyena.

"As it was, we were caught. I suggested to the skipper that he go down
the mizzentopmast-backstay, dart into his cabin, and get his rifle.
Then he could pot the brutes from the forward windows. But he declined
and forbade me going. I had no business in his cabin.

"I saw that he had lost his nerve. Now, when a skipper loses his nerve,
he loses his rights; so I didn't hesitate to sing out to the mate in
the main-topmast-crosstrees to clear away downhaul-blocks,
quarter-blocks, or anything handy and heavy, and try and drop them on
the lion and the rhino, the two most dangerous of the bunch. He seemed
to be much in the same condition as the skipper, for he answered and
passed the word forward to the fellows on the fore.

"In a few minutes things began raining down onto the deck--blocks,
bulls'-eyes, and sea-boots. The bombardment raised a commotion, though
none of the brutes was hit.

"Yet the sick and sore lion responded to the extent of bounding aft and
mounting the poop. Here he came within range of us fellows up the
mizzen, and I had the disconnected mizzen-staysail halyard-block in my
hand ready for him. He gained the space abaft the house near the wheel
and stood still, lashing his tail and nosing the air as though he
smelled us up aloft.

"He was only about forty feet down; and when young I had been a good
ball-player. I leaned over and let that block go with all my strength.
It wasn't the ordinary shell-block, but a solid carving of _lignum-vitae_;
and it fetched that lion a smash on the head that must have cracked his
skull, for he sank down, then got up and wabbled, rather than walked,
forward along the alley to the poop-steps.

"There he blindly fell off the poop; and the rhino, whom he had dodged
on the run aft, was ready for him. It wasn't a fight. The lion was
dying, and the rhino simply hastened the job, goring him relentlessly
until the bleeding carcass lay still.

"Then the rhino, flushed with victory, went for the nearest brute, a
wild ass, and soon he had the whole of them--asses and zebras--kicking
the stomach out of him, or into him, perhaps, by the way he bellowed.

"It was funny, in a way, for they were all too quick for him; they
could dodge that plunging beast with his murderous horn, and turn for a
kick before he got by.

"But there was nothing funny about that water in the hold, nor in the
prospective job of stopping the leak, pumping her out, and bending new
canvas, in case we could get that rhinoceros out of the way. He was the
only thing we feared now, for the rest were not really dangerous unless
you got too close.

"We knew the wolf and the hyena would run from a man with a handspike,
and the zebras and asses would run from a man without one. To make
matters worse, darkness closed down. So, lashing ourselves to the
crosstrees, we slept more or less sweetly until daylight.

"When we took stock of things, we knew that all was up with that bark.
Her plank-sheer amidships was awash, and the water rolling in a green
body from starboard to port and back again.

"The crazy elephant stood under the hatch, squealing and trumpeting in
fright. He must have smashed the monkeys' cages during the night, for
the rigging was dotted with chimpanzees, orangs, and the small fellows.
The hyena and the wolf had gained the forecastle-deck, and stood, side
by side, looking aft, with no thought of quarreling in this emergency.

"The sleepy old hippo was lumbering round in the flooded waist as
though he enjoyed his salt-water bath; and the rhino was forward on the
main deck, looking at the water as it washed up to him and receded.
Amidships was a thick, black ring of about two feet diameter, sliding
round in the wash.

"It was the two big snakes, each a sheath for the other, but each dead
as a door-nail; either they had died from the strain, or the water had
drowned them. The zebras and wild asses were also forward, but mostly
out of sight behind the house. Not a cobra could be seen, however, and
the skipper displayed sudden energy.

"'Something must be done,' he said vehemently. 'You men stay here while
I make the attempt to get to the top of the forward house. If I can
make it without trouble, the rest of you can follow. We must clear away
the boats, for there is no saving this ship.'

"So saying, he gripped the mizzen-stay and slid down it to where it
ended at a band on the main-mast just above the fife-rail. From there
he dropped to the deck and made a bee-line for the starboard side of
the house to avoid the rhino, who was forward on the port side.

"But the rhino saw him coming down the stay and lumbered aft into the
washing-water to investigate, rounding the port corner of the house
just as the skipper reached the starboard. From there he charged; and
you cannot imagine the velocity of a rhino's charge. It is like that of
a locomotive. The skipper scrambled on top of a water-tank alongside
the house just in time to escape that tusk, and from there he got to
the top, where he sat down to recover himself.

"He was a badly scared man. The rhino grunted and snorted at him and
tried to climb the tank, but failed to get a grip on the smooth-painted
staves. So he stood guard abaft the house, looking up.

"There were two other roads to the deck--the port and starboard mizzen
rigging, I still had in mind that rifle of the skipper's, and as the
second mate, a young fellow just out of the forecastle, made no
objections, I slid down the after-swifter of the port rigging and got
into the cabin before the skipper or the rhino noticed me.

"I found the cabin flooded, and waded waist-deep to the skipper's room,
where I found his Winchester hanging to the bulkhead. Making sure that
the magazine was full, I scrambled to the forward companion, where
there was a window that gave me a good view of the deck. The skipper
was calling the men on the main to come down by the maintopmast stay to
the top of the house, and to those on the fore to come down by the
backstays to the rail, and then to jump to the water-tanks; and the men
were coming down, one by one, even though the rigging swarmed with big
monkeys and the corners and hollow spots possibly held poisonous
snakes.

"A yell from the mizzen called my attention to one of these, a big
fellow of four feet in length whom the skipper had frightened out of
his hiding-place on the fife-rail, and he was climbing the mizzen-stay.
He rested about six feet up, but completely blocked this path to the
deck for the men in the mizzen. However, when I had cleared the deck of
the rhino, they could come down my way. I cocked the gun, took careful
aim at the big brute's left eye, and let go.

"I missed the eye, but attracted his attention, and he came charging
aft through the water. I ducked, knowing that he couldn't climb the
flimsy steps to the short length of poop forward of the house without
breaking them down with his weight, and, after a moment, peeped out.

"He was just turning to go forward, and, as I knew that a Winchester
bullet wouldn't puncture his hide, I saved my shots.

"Meanwhile, all hands but the boys in the mizzen-crosstrees had gained
the forward house and were clearing away the two boats, lashed in their
chocks, right side up--one to starboard, the other to port. I could see
the work going on--saw them smash the skylight over the galley for a
man to go down to pass up grub, and saw a man dive down.

"Then I saw another fellow take a beaker from the starboard boat, and,
watching his chance when the rhino wasn't looking, drop over and into
the starboard forecastle, to fill it from the water-barrel. He passed
it up and also the bread-barge. There was some of the cabin stores in
the galley, and these they secured easily through the skylight; but I
noticed they packed it all in the starboard-boat, though they had
cleared away the other.

"I knew I had just fifteen shots in that rifle; but I hadn't looked for
further ammunition, and I thought that fifteen would finish the rhino,
somehow; so, when the boys above shinned down and joined me, I
neglected to ask them to hunt for more, but just peppered away when I
thought I saw a good chance, but never hit the one vulnerable spot.

"The second mate wanted to try it, but I wouldn't resign the gun to
him. In extreme emergencies, you know, an officer loses his
superiority; he becomes a mere man, like the rest. Every time I tickled
the brute with a bullet he would come charging aft, but never stopped
still when within easy range. Not seeing anyone, he would wheel and go
back to his duty at the forward house. To tell the truth, I was a
little nervous lest he should be able to mount the poop and get at us.

"The old hippo was happy, swimming and snorting round in the water; and
the rhino seemed to have forgotten his grudge, busying himself with his
real enemies, human beings. There were about sixteen of these on the
forward house, and I noticed that they had ceased the work of stocking
the boat, and judged that there was no more grub forward.

"'I say, cap'n,' I called out, 'put some grub and water in the other
boat. One boat won't hold us all.'

"'You go to the dickens!' he answered. 'What are you doing in my cabin?
Didn't I tell you to keep out of it?'

"'Go yourself!' I yelled. Then I said to the men with me: 'Raid the
steward's storeroom and fill your pockets with what you can find. Pack
the inside of your shirts.'

"They could find nothing eatable except soda biscuits, and they cleaned
out the locker. But there was no water aft.

"Meanwhile the bark was getting lower and lower, and the rhino, to
escape the wash, had drifted farther forward. I had wasted twelve
bullets by this time, and had but three left. It was best, of course,
to kill him before the bark foundered, so that we could get into that
port boat and induce the rest to pass over some grub and water. But
this was not to be.

"I killed him, all right, but only after we had rushed out at the death
flurry of the old craft, floundered forward, seizing handspikes from
the racks on the way, and gained the vicinity of the house. Here that
murder-minded rhino met us, and I jammed the muzzle into one eye.

"The bullet touched some part of his brain, for he sagged down and grew
quiet. And while we mounted the house, the asses and zebras were
hee-hawing, the wolf was barking, and the mad elephant, waving his
trunk up through the hatch, was trumpeting like a high-pressure
exhaust.

"We were just in time. The others had got into the starboard boat, and
we bundled into the port. There was no time for a decent launching over
the rail, but there was time to sing out for grub and water. The
skipper and mate consigned us to the infernal regions.

"'There's not enough to go round,' he declared. 'Take your chance. It's
better that part should starve than all.'

"I still had the gun, and had there been time I could have coerced
them; but there was no time. In a minute the water had reached the top
of the house.

"Then, as the boats floated in the creamy turmoil, we pushed with the
oars, and, though half swamped, managed to clear the fore-braces as
they went under. There was a mighty roaring of water, and a mighty
suction, but the two boats floated, though half full.

"Then we saw that blooming old hippo rise out of the depths and head
for us. We shipped the oars and pulled like mad, but we'd gone a
quarter of a mile through that heavy sea before we dropped him.

"We couldn't have helped him; he'd have swamped us in a jiffy if he'd
got his nose and forepaws over the gunwale. We chewed dry soda biscuits
for three days, and were then picked up."

"But the others, Sam?" I asked. "Were they picked up?"

"No," answered Sam with a perceptible quaver in his voice. "They were
not. The wolf, the zebras, and the asses could swim, and so could the
monkeys, and snakes, after a fashion.

"I don't know what trouble they may or may not have had with these.
What I did see, though, as I pulled stroke oar in the race with the
hippo, was the big head of the elephant showing occasionally as we rode
over the crest of a wave.

"He was waving his trunk in the air, and making for the other boat.
They were pulling as hard as we were, but to less avail. They were
overladen with men and grub. Each lift of a sea showed them nearer
together.

"Then we sank into a hollow.

"When we came up I saw nothing but that waving trunk."




THE FINISHING TOUCH


He was born with a nature as simple and primitive as the physical
conditions surrounding him, and endowed with a body so frail and
delicate that he barely survived these conditions--which were of frost,
and snow, and ice, with winter hurricanes straight from Greenland and
summer fogs fed by the Gulf Stream to breed pneumonia and kindred
diseases into stronger lungs than his.

But he survived to reach the age of eighteen, a tall, flat-chested,
weak-witted butt of the local school, who, while able to struggle along
with the ordinary studies at the foot of the class, was yet so poorly
endowed with the mathematical sense that he could only master the first
four rules of arithmetic. Fractions and decimals were unsolvable
mysteries to him. His name was Quinbey--first name John, later Jack.

He was of American birth, the only son of a fisherman, who had taken
his smack to an isolated village on the Nova Scotian coast. Here the
fisherman did well, and before the boy was half grown owned the finest
cottage in the village--which he bought cheap because it was perched on
the crest of the hill, exposed to every storm that blew, a nest that
none but a sailor could live in. With increasing prosperity he
installed a big base-burner, good for the anaemic boy, but bad for
himself.

The boy rid himself of coughs and colds; but the father, changing from
the chill and the wet of fishing to the warmth and ease of home life,
contracted pneumonia and died, leaving the boy in possession of the
house and the smack, but not enough ready money to last for a month.

Young Quinbey closed up the house, took in a partner with money, and
went fishing for a season, at the end of which the partner--a shrewd
business man--owned the smack.

The boy acquired a wonderful increase of health and strength, and a
consuming love for a pretty girl of the village, a trader's daughter
named Minnie, who repulsed him firmly and emphatically because of his
poverty--for the house and base-burner were not desirable assets--and
because of his weak mental and physical equipment.

But there is a school for weak mentality and physique--the Seven Seas.
And to this school went John Quinbey, first, however, putting in one
season on the Georges Bank, where, in a lucky craft, he made money.
Richer than ever before in his life, he returned home, to try again for
the heart and hand of Minnie, but found her married to the minister, a
man as weak, flat-chested, and anaemic as he himself had been.

He reasoned crudely. He did not meet Minnie, but took stock and measure
of the minister, a gentleman named Simpson; then, feeling his own
expanding chest and enlarging muscles, decided that Minnie would soon
be a widow, and he a strong man with money; for he could work, and,
having no vices, could save. So, for love of Minnie, he went back to
sea, resolved to become a captain, resolved to save every cent he
earned, and resolved to balk at no hardship that would lead him to
success.

At Boston, he shipped before the mast as able seaman in a big
deep-water ship. He was not an able seaman, nor did he become one on
this voyage; it required several; but each one marked a steady advance
in muscular strength, mental activity, and bank account; and, at the
end of the fifth, he signed as boatswain--an able man who knew his
work.

He was strong, broad-shouldered, and active; the slightly vacant look
in his face that had come from his boyhood incapacity had changed to a
frank stare that demanded consideration and respect. He seldom asked a
question twice now--once was usually enough. He had a fist that could
smash the panels of a door, a voice that he could not modulate to
conversational tones--so used was he to sending it against the wind. He
did not use tobacco, nor did he drink, for these things cost money, and
he was thinking of Minnie, most precious of all things in the world.

At the end of each voyage he visited home, deposited the money he had
brought, and waited in the street just long enough for a sight of
Minnie, sweet and matronly, and for a sight of the minister, who was
holding on to life with a remarkable tenacity. Then he would work his
way to Boston, and sign again.

Soon he became a second mate, but never a first, nor a captain. His
limitations in arithmetic prevented him from mastering navigation, a
necessary acquirement in a first mate or a skipper, and he remained in
the position he had reached, close to the sailors, but not of them;
sharing their hardships and hard work--for with every reefing or
furling match a second mate must go aloft with the men--standing watch
with them, washing down decks with them, getting drenched to the skin
as often as they, and differing from them only in increase of pay,
cabin food, and a dryer bed to sleep in.

But the dryer bed preserved him from the rheumatism and pulmonary
troubles that kill all sailors who do not drown, the better food
preserved his now iron physique, and the increased pay went into the
bank at home.

And so it continued until he was forty years old, when he went home to
find Minnie a widow with a grown-up son--a fat, weak-chinned,
pale-faced parody on manhood, who never had done a day's work in his
life--a "mamma's boy," who was destined for the ministry.

The dark, seamy-faced man of storm and strength, of stress and strain,
asked her again to be his wife. He asked her as he would have asked a
sailor to sign articles; and the frightened little woman accepted in
about the same spirit that would have influenced the sailor; but she
made one condition--that he would educate her son for the ministry.

He agreed. Her husband had left her almost nothing, while Quinbey had
about ten thousand dollars in the bank. From this he drew the expense
of a four years' course at Andover; and, taking the youth to this
famous theological college, arranged for his stay there in such a
manner as would insure his completing the course--that is, he paid to
the president for everything in advance, including, beside tuition and
board, a moderate amount of spending money, and traveling expense home
and back in vacation.

Then, with Sammy Simpson off his mind for four years at least, Quinbey
returned, and married the woman he loved, feeling that he had now
earned happiness and the right to remain on land--and smoke.

But he was not born for happiness, and did not recognize it when it
came to him. He opened up his house on the hill, fired up the
base-burner, and the two sat around it for a month trying to assimilate
each other; but they could not. He knew nothing of women; she nothing
of such men as him. He never smiled; and, when he joked, the joke was
lost in the rumble and grumble of his voice. He caressed her with the
gentleness of a grizzly fondling the hunter, and was nonplussed and set
back when she cried out in pain.

Afraid of him at first, she soon realized that he knew no better, and
responded with the weapons of woman. The man, inured to cold and pain
and fatigue, yet was sensitive as a child when it came to his feelings.
When she learned this, she kept his nerves quivering with quiet smiles,
soft and sarcastic little speeches, and deadening silences, the meaning
of which did not strike him at the time because of his transparent
frankness and honesty.

He became afraid of her; and she, following up her advantage, wheedled
him out of money for clothes, which, though he could not see the need
of them, he cheerfully gave her. He loved her devotedly; and, though he
never smiled, yet he never frowned, nor spoke a harsh word to her.

But she thought him harsh, and, justified by the thought, continued the
marital loot until she grew brave enough to demand a gold watch for
Sammy's birthday.

This was not in his program, and he told her so. Then followed a
lecture on the duties and shortcomings of fathers, which lasted an
hour, and left him shaking like a sick man, sprawled out in the big
chair by the fire, and smoking like a high-pressure tug. But she had
brought him around, and he had arisen to go out to the town's one
jeweler, when she lost all she had won.

"Where are you going?" she asked sharply, as he put on his hat.

"Going out, Minnie," he said, in his jokeless voice, "to get some
catnip for you."

He meant it good-humoredly; but it was taken otherwise. The jeweler had
no gold watches; but, after a two hours' search, he dug up a
wholesaler's catalogue, and, with this in his pocket, Quinbey returned
to have Minnie select a watch from it; but she, her trunks, and her
belongings were gone, while a note on the table apprised him that she
would live with no man who called her a cat.

Troubled in mind, he followed her to the home of her parents, but he
was not admitted--nor given a chance to show her the catalogue.

He slept on the problem, and in the morning resolved that a little
absence would be good for her; so, as the season had opened, he packed
his bag and went out on a fishing trip with friends of his, expecting
to be back in a month. It was eight years later when he returned.

His adventures during those eight years can only be summarized. The
fishing schooner was cut down by a big ship out of Halifax bound around
the Horn; and Quinbey alone of her crew succeeded in springing to her
martingale-stay as the smaller craft went under. No one else was saved,
though the ship hove to and put out boats to search. Then the ship went
on, and, as she met no inbound craft, Quinbey was forced to go with
her.

But she did not round Cape Horn. A strong current threw her onto the
Patagonian coast near Cape Virgins in a dead calm, and a sudden gale of
wind and heavy sea ground her to pieces.

Only John Quinbey was a swimmer of sufficient strength to reach the
beach, and here he lay, half dead, for a day, when he arose and struck
inland, knowing that Punta Arenas was about a hundred and fifty miles
along the coast of the Magellan Strait, and hoping to reach it.

He did not at once. The giant savages of this region caught him and
made him one of them, preventing his escape. He was accustomed to
hardship, and lived their life, tormented only by the thought that the
money at home was deposited in his name, and that he had made no
provision whereby the foolish little wife could draw from the bank.

But he still hoped to escape; and, as the tribe drifted inland, he was
allowed more liberty. He never abused it, waiting for a final dash,
always returning from a jaunt in reasonable time, and earning the
confidence of his captors.

When over seven years had passed, he found, in the foothills of the
Latorre Mountains, a large, heavy lump of dark metal, which he scraped
with his knife and recognized as gold. It was fully the size of a draw
bucket, but of what value he could not determine, except that it
represented a fortune.

Strong man though he was, he could not carry it a hundred yards without
resting, yet he carried it, not back to the tribe, but in a
southwesterly direction, toward Punta Arenas. When forced to return, he
hid it, taking careful bearings, and rejoined his masters. He waited a
few days before the next trip, then moved it a few miles farther on.

In this way, exciting no suspicion, he shifted his find, step by step,
until he had it on a well-defined trail that could lead nowhere but to
the lonely port he was making for. Then, after a few days' rest, he
packed a bundle of dried meat, took with him a native-made rope by
which to drag the heavy nugget, and left the camp in the dark of night.

He reached his treasure by daylight, and started along the trail. He
was not pursued, and ten days later, half starved, half mad, his
shoulders bleeding from the chafe of the rope, and every bone in his
body aching with the pain of fatigue, he dragged his burden onto a
rickety wharf at Punta Arenas where an eastbound steamer was coaling.
Her captain was an honest man. He took Quinbey on board, took him to
Boston, and helped him turn the nugget into cash--fifty thousand
dollars. Then Quinbey went home.


II

Quinbey had been right about the money in the bank. It was a tidy sum
to retain on deposit, and the bank officials had heartlessly refused to
pay any of it out to Mrs. Quinbey. She did not attempt to draw until
her sulks left her, which occurred after the jeweler, intent upon the
sale of a watch, had called upon her, and when the villagers had
informed her that Quinbey had gone fishing. Then, disappointed, and
somewhat worried over the future, she returned to the house on the
hill, and, as it was still cold, lit up the big base-burner from the
scanty stock of coal.

As the weeks grew into months and the fishing schooner did not return,
she did not, like the rest of the villagers, give her husband up as
lost--rather, she believed him alive, hoped for his return, and revised
her opinion of him.

Soon--yet long before the grocer, the butcher, and the coal man had
refused further credit--she realized that she loved the crude man she
had known but a month, but who had loved her for twenty years; and,
with tears streaming down her face, she prayed for his safety and
return with more fervency than for the beloved son at Andover. This
person wrote filial letters home, assuring her of protection and
support when he returned; but they brought her small comfort, for the
time was at hand when she must pay cash or go without the necessities
of life.

Then Sammy came home on his first vacation, and, learning of the money
in the bank, used his prestige and address to such advantage that he
persuaded the local authorities to declare Quinbey legally dead--an
easy matter on that coast of many wrecks.

Righteously indignant at the selfishness of the bank officials, he
induced his mother to withdraw the money--shrunk to eight thousand
dollars--from the bank, and allow him to take it to Boston, where, in a
larger and safer bank, it would draw interest, and on which she could
write checks in payment of her bills.

She consented, and Sammy departed with the money. But at Boston, before
reaching the bank, he traversed the highways and the byways of the big
city, imbibed certain and sundry liquids known to him only by name,
loved his fellow men, and met fellow men of like state of mind, who,
seeing a stranger, took him in.

He was stripped to empty pockets, spent a night in a cell, and only by
the help of another clergyman was he shipped back to Andover with a
letter to the president.

From here he wrote to his mother a garbled account of his adventures;
and, as the president of the college mercifully forbore writing her the
truth, the poor woman merely wept a little, prayed a little, and took
up her burden.

Her parents were old and indigent, unable to more than house her for a
few days at a time. As minister's wife, she had made no friends that
would help her now in a way befitting her position. As for herself,
with only a village education, she could not even teach, even though
able to found a school.

But every mother and daughter, sister and grand-ma'am in the village
was willing to give her work by the day for the mere pleasure of
gloating; and at this work she went bravely.

The sneers and insults she received soon limited her journeyings from
home, and she finally became the village wash-woman. The kitchen of the
house was turned into a laundry, and the big base-burner allowed to
grow cold; for she could not afford two fires.

In her laundry she worked, and in wintertime slept, and only on
Saturdays was she seen on the street, when, with deepening lines in her
face and a growing gray tinge to her hair, she struggled back and forth
with her basket of clothes. But she earned her living, and looked
forward hopefully to the return of her husband and assuredly to the
return of her son, who would care for her.

Sammy only came home on the first vacation; the next three he spent at
the homes of classmates. But at last the four years' course was ended,
and, with nowhere else to go, he appeared, an ordained minister of the
Gospel, but unattached.

The Reverend Samuel Simpson, as we must know him now, was twenty-four
years old, as pale as ever, fatter than ever, with a chin that, because
of the fat, seemed to recede still farther into his neck. His mother
rejoiced over him, was proud of him, and believed that her troubles
were now ended.

The villagers welcomed him, and the gray old pastor of the church once
presided over by his father invited him to preach. He did so,
delivering his one sermon; but the delivery and the sermon were not of
a character that would inspire the congregation to empty the pulpit for
him, so the young preacher went home to wait, as Quinbey had waited,
for that pulpit to become vacant by death.

But he deplored the coldness of the house, and ordered coal on credit
for the base-burner; also he deplored the hard labor of his mother,
assured her that the necessity for it would soon end, but did nothing
himself toward this end; for, in truth, there was nothing he could do
but preach; and the gray old pastor seemed as tenacious of life as his
own father had been.

The mother was content, however, except for the always present, but
lessening, hope that her husband would return, and happy in the company
of her educated and accomplished son. And so, as bravely as ever, she
carried her burden through the streets, not only on Saturdays now, but
on Wednesdays, because, with another mouth to feed, she must of needs
wash more clothes.

And so the time went on, the Reverend Samuel Simpson growing seedier of
raiment and fatter of body, enduring patiently the sneers and sarcasms
of the indignant men of the village, while the mother's face grew
thinner, her body weaker, and her once blond hair so gray that she
looked ten years beyond her age. Then, four years after the son's
return, the breaking point came. With the front of her garments
dripping wet, she stood erect from her tub, looked at him where he sat
near the kitchen fire--the base-burner had long been cold--and said:

"Sammy, you must go to work. I can do no more. It is killing me."

"But what can I do, mother dear?" he answered kindly.

"I do not know," she said weariedly. "Something, maybe, that will help.
You are educated. You might write for the Boston papers, or the
magazines. Or you might find a pulpit somewhere else, and send me some
money once in a while."

"What, and leave you alone, mother? Not for the world would I desert
you. You are my mother, and have cared for me. But I have thought of
writing. I have been thinking for years of a literary career, only I
have not been able to decide which branch of literature I am best
fitted for."

"Well, Sammy," said the mother, as she bent over her tub, "I cannot
decide for you; but something must be done."

"And I will do it, mother," he shouted loudly--so loudly that neither
heard the opening of the front door, nor the sound of heavy footsteps
coming toward the kitchen.

Then a big, dark-faced man, with hair as gray as her own, seized her
around the waist, lifted her into his arms, and rained kisses on her
face and lips while she screamed, then, as she recognized him, fainted
away. Still holding her, he lifted his foot, exerted a slight effort of
strength, and pushed the tubful of suds and clothes off its base,
upsetting it squarely over the head of the Reverend Samuel Simpson, who
nearly choked before getting himself clear.

"I've been hearing things about you down at the store," said Quinbey,
"and I'll 'tend to your case directly."

Then he carried the limp little woman into the bedroom, stripped off
her wet garments, and covered her warmly, while he kissed her back to
consciousness.

"Oh, John," she said, when she could speak, "I knew you'd come back,
but, oh, the long waiting! I've been punished, John, punished
bitterly."

"There'll be no more of it, Minnie," he said. "I've come home
rich--that is, rich for this town. Your work is ended. They told me at
the store about your son loafing on you all these years while you took
in washing. But how about the money in the bank? Couldn't you get it?"

"Oh, yes, John," she answered simply. "But Sammy took it to Boston to
deposit, and was robbed of it."

"Um-hum-m-m," grunted Quinbey. "The savings of twenty years at sea!"
Briefly she recounted Sammy's story of the wrong done him; but he made
no comment beyond saying that he would look into it.

"He's got to go to work," he added grimly. "I don't know what he can do
except preach, and perhaps he can't do that. I'll write to Andover and
get his record. But how about the house? It's cold. Out of coal?"

"We've got very little, John. We couldn't afford two fires."

Quinbey left her, and found his stepson in his room, changing his wet
clothing for dry.

"Take this money," he said, handing him a bill, "and go down to the
coal dock. Order a ton up here at once."

"I will, sir," answered Sammy, with dignity, "when I've recovered
somewhat from your extremely brutal treatment of me. I must be dry
before I go out on this cold day."

But he went out, shirtless and coatless, at the end of Quinbey's arm;
and, as it really was cold, he hurried on his errand, and returned.
Before long the base-burner was roaring, and Quinbey was recounting his
adventures to his happy-faced wife; while Sammy, in the kitchen,
finished up the wash. Later on he delivered it; but no more washing of
other folks' clothing was ever done in that house.

Quinbey wrote to Andover, and in a few days received a reply, which he
read to his wife. It was a true account of Sammy's mishap in Boston;
and, while Quinbey grinned--he could not smile--the mother wept
silently, but asked no forgiveness for her wayward son. And when he
rummaged a bureau, and brought forth an old jeweler's catalogue, asking
her to choose a watch for Sammy, she felt that it was granted; but she
did not yet know Quinbey.

Sammy wore the watch proudly; and for the rest of the cold weather the
three sat about the base-burner, while the color came back to the
little woman's face, and self-confidence to the shaken mind of Sammy.
He actually began to like his rough stepfather; and only an outsider
might have guessed, by the somber light in Quinbey's dark eyes when
they rested upon him, that he did not like his stepson.

In the spring, as soon as the frost and snow were gone, Quinbey
employed laborers to flatten the ground near his house to the extent of
a hundred feet by ten; then, with stakes, he laid out the plan of a
ship's deck. Next he contracted with spar makers, ship carpenters, and
ship chandlers for material and labor; and before June three masts were
erected, each with topmast, top-gallant, and royal mast, the standing
rigging of which was set up to strong posts driven into the ground;
then followed yards, canvas, and running gear, and soon a complete ship
of small dimensions, but without a hull, adorned the crest of the hill.

As Quinbey explained to the questioning villagers, he would go to sea
no more, but, having spent his life at sea, wanted a reminder--something
to look at--a plaything.

Sammy was an interested spectator of the work, and Quinbey was kind to
him, answering his questions, and even betraying some solicitude that
he should understand the rig of a ship, the names of the ropes and
sails, and the manner of handling them. He even went so far as to hire
a couple of sailors to climb aloft, to loose and furl canvas, again and
again, until Sammy understood.

Then the cold weather came on, and the base-burner was lit; and with
the cold weather came the snow, and the icy sleet, and the hurricane
gales from Greenland, striking the crest of that hill with a force that
threatened to tear the dummy ship from the ground. And on particularly
stormy nights, the villagers, snug in their warm beds, would waken for
a moment at a sound louder than the gale--the sound of Quinbey's voice,
which, in a calm, would carry a mile. And the voice would cry:

"All hands on deck to make sail. Out wi' you, you blasted lubber, and
lay aloft. Up wi' you, and loose that mainsail, and, when you've got it
loose, furl it. I'll show you how I earned that money. Up wi' you,
'fore I give you a rope's end."

And sometimes, in the lulls, they could hear Sammy's shrieks of pain,
and the thwack of the rope's end.




THE ROCK


"I tell ye I saw it--wi' these eyes I saw it!"

"You think you seen it."

"Now I quit. Ye talk like every mate or skipper or Consul I've told
this to. Just the same, I never git to the end o' the third day out,
either way,--I'm in a six-day boat, ye know--but what the nervousness
gits me, an' I'm no good for twelve hours, until I know we're past the
spot."

"A rock, you say, in the middle o' the Atlantic? Why isn't it known and
charted?"

"Because it's awash an' visible only at the fall o' the spring tides."

"How is it that no one else saw it but you?"

"I was the only man aloft. She was a hemp-rigged old ballyhoo out o'
Quebec, an' gear was chafin' through all the time. I was passin' a new
seizin' on the collar o' the foretopmast stay, when I squinted ahead
through the fog, and there it was black an' shiny, an' murderous, about
forty feet long, I should judge, and five feet or so out o' water,
right dead under the bow. I could see the lift o' the water where the
current pushed ag'in' it, and the swirl on t'other side, showin' it was
no derelict, bottom up. No, it was a rock. 'Starboard!' I yells to the
felly at the wheel. 'Starboard! Hard up!' Well, the skipper was below,
an' the second mate, who had the deck, was mixin' paint under the
fo'c'sle; so the wheel went up an' the old wagon payed off 'fore the
wind. Then I lost it myself in the fog, an', as I couldn't point out
anything to the skipper when he come up, I was called down an' damned
for a fool. But I saw it, just the same, a big rock halfway across, and
squarely between the lane routes!"

"How do you know that?"

"The skipper wasn't above givin' me the ship's position--forty-seven
north; thirty-seven twenty west. That's between the lanes, an' I'll bet
the _Narconic_ is at the base o' that rock, to say nothin' o' the
_Pacific_, the _President_, and t'others."

The wabbly little West Street horse car had reached the White Star dock
by this and the two men stepped off. Steamship sailors, I knew. I had
never seen them before, and have never seen them since; but their
conversation produced a marked impression upon me, and I could not
shake off a feeling--not of itself a remembrance, however--that I had
heard something of the kind before. A submerged rock in mid-Atlantic.
But it was incredible, and at last I put it from my mind as a "galley
yarn."

But next morning it was back, in company with another galley yarn, one
I barely remembered as having heard ten years before from an old
Confederate man-o'-war'sman who had sailed with Semmes in the
_Alabama_. The yarn pertained to the pursuit of a Northern merchant
ship, and I give only the conclusion.

"We were gaining fast," he had said, "and hoped to bring her to before
breakfast; for at daylight she was but three miles or so ahead, every
sail drawing and every detail of spar, canvas, and hull showing clear
in the morning light. And then, while we looked at her, she quickly
settled under, not head first or stern first, as is usual, but on an
even keel. They had no time to start a brace or a halyard; there was
not time for her to answer to her wheel, if it had been shifted. She
just went down as though something had hooked onto her keel and dragged
her under. I never learned her name; but she must have been bound out
of New York or Boston, for some French port in the Channel. We picked
up one of her men, a Dago who couldn't tell her name, and only this
much as to what happened. A ripping, crashing sound began forward and
worked its way aft, ending at the stern, and we could only surmise that
something--a submerged derelict, perhaps--had scraped the bottom out of
her."

Memory is treacherous. In a few days I had forgotten this yarn with the
other, and might never have recalled it had I not ascended to an upper
floor in the lofty Flatiron Building, and looked out of a window at the
loftier, but unfinished, tower of the Metropolitan Building across the
park. It was a damp, dismal day of fog; but at my elevation I could see
clear of it. I was above it, looking over an undulating sea of cloud
bank from which the tower rose, massive and mighty, apparently floating
on end, like an immense spar buoy at the turn of the tide. The rest of
New York lay hidden beneath that silent gray ocean of fog.

Interesting as it was of itself, it was not the spectacle before me
that gripped and held me, but an associated idea. As it was the first
time I had ever seen a skyscraper lift itself above the clouds, so it
naturally reminded me of the first time I had seen a mountaintop above
the clouds. This was Krakatoa Island, a conical mountain rising from
the sea in the Straits of Sunda, but since submerged in the Java
earthquake.

With this mental picture before me, my thoughts touched upon other
happenings of that boyhood voyage--the long, tedious beat through the
straits against light head winds and a continuous head tide; the
man-killing log windlass, round which we hove, and lightened, chain of
an eight-inch link; the natives, with their welcome fruit in exchange
for trinkets; and, lastly, the white-haired old pilot, who came forward
to visit me one evening on anchor watch.

And then, like an inspired flash, there surged into my mind, not only
the two galley yarns, but the story told by the pilot--a story of such
burning power and horror that, though forgotten for a generation, it
spelled itself out, word for word, as I stared into the fog from the
window, exactly as the old man had told it.

He had heard from the skipper that I was from the same part of New York
State as himself, and he had come forward for news of home. I could
give him little. I knew no one that he knew; the small town that give
him birth was not far from my own, but was only a name to me. Still he
remained to talk. My up-State accent pleased him, he said, and reminded
him of home, which he had not seen for forty years, and which he hardly
hoped to see. He was sixty-five; two shocks had come, and the third
would finish him.

"But I'm an old, experienced man, my boy," he said, "and I can give you
my life's wisdom in three short rules, easy to remember and easy to
follow. Stick to your skipper; leave liquor alone; and never, under any
provocation, engage in mutiny. I broke every one of these, and here
I've been, for half a lifetime, an exile, afraid to go home."

Not realizing how sorely I needed this wisdom, but keenly interested in
mutiny, piracy, and such fancies of boyhood, I asked for light, and he
gave it to me.

"I won't tell you the name of the ship," he said; "for you'll be a boy
for some time to come, and you might talk about it. Nor will I give you
the real names of the men engaged in that mutiny; for it is only forty
years back, and there may be men alive yet who will be interested in
the fate of the ship; though none, I expect, who would care much about
her crew. But I'll tell you that her crew was the toughest gang I ever
saw in a forecastle, and her skipper and mate the most inhuman brutes I
ever saw aft. I was second mate, and, having won my berth in deep
water, thought I was something of a bucko; but I found my masters
there. The ship, I may as well say, was one of the packets that traded
between New York and Liverpool, sometimes carrying passengers, but not
always. We had none this trip.

"Before we were two days out from Sandy Hook I got a taste of the
skipper's caliber. A man aloft--a big, red-headed fellow, gave me an
insolent answer from the cro'-jack yard, and I called him down. When he
reached the deck I was ready, and sent him reeling over the break of
the poop with one smash on the jaw. He was satisfied to go aloft again
and answer civilly when spoken to; but the skipper, who had watched the
performance, was not. He called me over to the lee alley and faced me,
his face fairly alive with rage and contempt.

"'Say, you--you--you Sunday school teacher! Is that the way you expect
to handle men in these packets? Hey?'

"'I didn't hit him hard, sir,' I answered. 'I didn't hurt him. He's
aloft now, at work.'

"'You didn't hurt him? No, I'll warrant you didn't! Why didn't you
follow him up, watch for his knife, and take it away from him? 'Fraid
of him? Hey? How do you expect to get along wi' this kind of a crew if
you're content with one smash? Follow it up, man! Follow up your first
blow with another, and another, till you're sure of him.'

"'Oh, I understand, Captain,' I said. 'Well, sir, I'm not worrying over
any further trouble with that fellow. He's had enough.'

"'Make sure of it. You'll get no sympathy from me if he wins out.'

"It seems that the way of deep water was not the way of the packets.
Somewhat impressed by this, I waited until eight bells, when the
red-head came down--his job was merely the passing of new ribbons in
place of old--and tackled him amidships, as he went forward.

"'Well,' I said. 'What do you think? The skipper says I didn't give you
enough. Have you had enough, or do you want more?'

"He looked me squarely in the eyes, and his hand wandered toward his
sheath knife in his belt. Mine wandered toward a pistol in my hip
pocket.

"'I'm 'fore the mast, sir,' he said; 'and as a man 'fore the mast--yes,
of course I've had enough. But I've been aft, and I may be aft again.
Then, too, you may be 'fore the mast. Well, sir, I know the law.'

"'Forecastle lawyer, are you?' I asked derisively.

"'Yes, and more,' he exploded. 'Your superior in seamanship, you
blanked whitewashed son of a ship owner!'

"My fist shot out; but he dodged it, and ran forward. I sent a belaying
pin after him, and it hit him on the shoulder; but I doubt that it hurt
him.

"In the next twenty-four hours four men came aft to the skipper for
medical treatment from the medicine chest. Red-head had disabled them,
in one way or another. One had a broken rib, the result of a punch; the
skipper set it. Another had lost some teeth, and showed a few more that
were loose. The skipper called upon the carpenter and his pliers to
remove these, and sent the man forward. Another was carried aft,
unconscious from a fist blow under the ear; and the skipper could only
lay him out on a cabin transom to wait until he came to. The last was a
case of asthma. Red-head had planted his fist plumb upon his throat,
and the resultant inflammation threatened to strangle the man. But the
skipper gave him a porous plaster for his chest, and a big cathartic
pill by means of which the man came around. You know the Yankee
skipper's formula: break your leg or lose your mother--take a pill.

"Well, the outcome of this was that the skipper held a conference of
himself, the first mate, and myself. He stated the situation: a man
forward was a menace to the tranquillity and the safety of the ship.
Who would take him down?

"The first mate, with a look of patronizing pity at me, said to the
captain, 'I'll do this, if nobody else can,' again the look of pity.
'I'll show him who's who, and what, and which.'

"'Well,' said the skipper, 'do so, or I'll be afraid of my officers.'

"I looked on while the mate called that troublesome malcontent down
from aloft, where he had reported the paral seizing of the fore royal
yard adrift without saying sir to Mr. Parker. I watched tranquilly,
while the big, whiskered first mate, meeting the man as he dropped from
the fore-rigging to the deck, received a threshing of fists and kicks
that laid him out. We carried him aft, while Red-head retired to the
forecastle. And, as we nursed the mate back to self-respect, we heard
the profane vows of Red-head to clean us up, all of us.

"The skipper was furious. 'Have I got to go forrard and lick that
fellow?' he said. 'Haven't I got a mate aft able to do his duty?'

"'Why not put him in irons, captain?' I asked. 'I knocked him off the
poop once, and made him run next time. That seems to be enough as far
as I'm concerned.'

"The skipper glared at me. 'And do you think,' he said sneeringly,
'that he ran because he was afraid of you? He's afraid of the irons and
of the law. But that's just why we don't appeal to the irons and the
law in these packets. It's a point of honor with us; and--yes, a matter
of policy. We couldn't get crews after a time if we ironed and jailed
'em for each offense. No, that man must be properly licked, and if you
can't do it, I'll have to do it myself.'

"'I can do it,' I answered quietly, and went forward.

"Mike--for that was the name he gave--was in my watch, and should have
remained on deck. I found him in the empty starboard forecastle and
called him out. He came, with a bad look in his eyes.

"'Put your knife on the water tank alongside my gun,' I said, 'and come
aft where there's a clear space. We'll find out who runs this ship, you
or the afterguard.'

"'That sounds fair,' he said; 'but how about the after clap? This is
not my proposition.'

"'You mean darbies? There'll be none. The skipper wants you licked into
shape, so you'll be useful. Come on.'

"We laid our weapons on the tank as we passed it, and faced each other
abreast of the main hatch. The skipper looked on from the poop; the
carpenter and cook came out of their shops to witness; and of course
the watch, working aloft, stopped work to look down on us. The sea was
smooth, the wind mild and fair, and the ship slid along with very
little pitching or rolling; so it was a fair fight.

"Mike was a game fighter; but I was just a little heavier, just a
little more skilled, and had just a little longer reach; so I soon had
him going. I backed him completely round the hatch, and when I had him
up to windward again, both his eyes were half closed and his nose
broken and bleeding. So far I had not been struck, and I decided now to
finish him. I put all my strength and the whole weight of my body into
that smash, aiming for the point of his chin; but he saw it coming and
attempted to duck. My closed fist brought up with a crash on the top of
his big bullet head; for he was slow and groggy, and didn't duck low
enough. However, it didn't hurt him, while the effect upon me was to
break every small bone in my hand. It was like slugging a windlass
bitt; for he leaned partly forward, and hardly budged under the blow.

"I could not repress a slight grunt of pain, and I simply had to stop,
and rub my sore hand with the other. He saw and heard; then he came for
me, and the rest of the fight was the other way. I fought as I could,
one-handed, for I couldn't even guard with my right; but it was no use.
He soon had me going, and the last I remember of the fight was a
sickening smash under the ear. I don't remember hitting the deck; but
when I came to my senses I was laid out in the weather scuppers, and
the skipper was down off the poop, talking to Mike.

"'So,' the skipper was saying, 'you are Red Macklin, are you? I've
heard of you.' I also had heard of him; for Red Macklin's fame was
international. He was a bullying, murderous scoundrel who had perhaps
killed more sailors than any other first mate on the western ocean, and
who, about five years previous, had foolishly shot his captain. To kill
a sailor is one thing, to shoot a skipper is another.

"'Yes, sir,' answered Mike respectfully. 'I've just finished my time
for that gun play on Captain Blaine, and am not likely to repeat it.
But my prospects were done for, and I had to ship 'fore the mast.'

"'You're a navigator, of course. Bring your dunnage into the first
mate's room and take his place. Put his dunnage into the second mate's
room, and make that duffer in the scuppers bundle his traps into the
forecastle. I want no weaklings aft with me.'

"I scrambled to my feet at this; but--Well, there's no use detailing
the argument that followed. I had to go forward peaceably or lose my
prospects, like Red Macklin. And I had chosen the western ocean trade
because of what I thought my fitness for it, and because in these short
trips a man can the more quickly attract the notice of an owner. And I
understood now why Macklin had run from me when he knew I had a gun;
why he had licked his shipmates; and the reason of his studied
insolence to Mr. Parker and myself. He knew the ways of the packets,
and, while avoiding guns and irons, he sought to attract the skipper's
attention to his prowess. I thought it somewhat severe that Mr. Parker,
who had put up no kind of a fight, should be kept aft instead of me,
until I reflected that Mr. Parker, with two whole fists, might still be
good for any man on board except Macklin; while I, with only one,
couldn't lick anybody. It was merely the survival of the fittest, and I
was not fit.

"However, I drew comfort from the thought that when my hand got well I
could win back my berth in the same manner, and to this end applied at
once to the captain for bandages and splints from the medicine chest.
He responded like a brother; but earned none of my gratitude, for I
considered the medicine chest as furnished out of the Marine Hospital
dues, which I had paid for years.

"I had noticed that my pistol and Macklin's knife had disappeared from
the water tank, and supposed that he, as the first act in his new
position, had confiscated them. So, as I had no use for a gun while
'fore the mast, I put the matter from my mind. I meant to sing small,
until my hand was well.

"But what followed in that ship shows how little we can depend upon our
good resolutions. I was still in the starboard watch, having taken
Macklin's place forward, while he, as mate, had charge of the port
watch, and Mr. Parker as second, became my watch officer. So far there
had been no friction between Mr. Parker and myself; but now I found the
man dead down on me, as though he blamed me for his licking and his
change of office.

"One-handed, I was almost useless around decks, and could not steer
except in the finest of weather; but this made no difference. I was
hounded, cursed, and struck, not only by Parker, but by the skipper and
Macklin. Some kind of armed neutrality must have sprung up between
Macklin and Parker with regard to me; but I could only ascribe the
skipper's new personal attitude to a distrust of my philosophy, which,
while impelling me to make the best of matters, may have seemed to him
the calm before the storm. I escaped Macklin's abuse, however, except
in the dog watches, when all hands were on deck.

"They damned, deviled, and degraded me, keeping me all night on
lookout, and rousing me from sleep at any time of the day watch below
to climb aloft and loose a royal stop buntlines, or remove an Irish
pennant--a loose rope yarn, you know--from any part of the rigging. My
nerves went back on me from loss of sleep and futile anger and
brooding; and once, when Macklin stripped off the sling I had rigged to
hold my sore fist, and knocked me down for protesting, I saw red for a
moment.

"Even so, nothing might have happened--had not the crew been included
in the drill they were serving me. As an old hand in deep-water ships,
I knew the absolute necessity of preserving discipline, and that this
can be done only by occasionally knocking down a malcontent; but no
such considerations demanded the wholesale clubbing with heavers and
handspikes which the men got from the trio. Belaying pins were not
used--they were too small and light for the gentlemen. Macklin had four
deadly enemies when he went aft, and soon every man forward had a
grievance, and voiced it in muttered profanity that held many a threat
of death. I fancy that it was my presence in the forecastle that
inspired all this ill treatment; no doubt I was regarded as a bad
example, whose influence over the men must be offset by stern,
repressive measures, but whom they would not remove because of their
dislike of the law. For the law could reach a skipper or mate, as
Macklin well knew.

"And the crew? Never was a wild, half-crazy herd of Liverpool Irishmen
kept under control as that crowd was by a bad example. While aft I had
treated them well, and they liked me for my scrap with Macklin; so,
they listened while I counseled submission and avoidance of legal
consequences--which last was the only point I made. They feared neither
man, God, nor devil; but they did fear the law, and grew quiet when I
talked of jail and the gallows. And this fear possibly accounted for my
finding my pistol--a newly invented Colt revolver--lying in my bunk,
one morning when I came in from a long night's lookout to get my
breakfast.

"'Who put this here?' I demanded. 'Who had my gun?'

"No one would acknowledge the gift; but the state of mind behind it was
given in the remark of one, 'Now ye've got it again, use it!'

"I tucked it under my mattress, resolved not to use it; but a little
later put it into my trousers pocket. Fear of the law, forward and aft,
began to yield to fear of death. Men openly sharpened their knives, and
the afterguard ostentatiously showed their pistols. Their pistols were
not so good as mine--they were double-barreled, muzzle-loading
derringers, with only two shots.

"Things culminated on a moonlight night when we were charging along
before a quartering whole sail breeze, making, I should judge, about
eleven knots. I was on lookout, as usual, and keeping a good one I
know, even though my eyes would half close at times from sheer need of
sleep. It was about seven bells of the first watch and for some reason
or other--perhaps the strong moonlight, which keeps some people
awake--both the skipper and the first mate were on deck, and standing
aft near the wheel, while Mr. Parker stood his watch on the poop
forward of the after house. The men walked up and down between the fore
and main rigging.

"A faint light showed up ahead and to leeward. I opened my eyes wide to
make sure, and saw the faint shadowy outlines of hull and canvas--a
ship close hauled across our bows. Then I sang out:

"'Light ho! Ship on the port tack two points off the starboard bow,
sir!'

"'Light ho, is it?' bellowed the skipper. 'Put another man on lookout
and send that scow bunker aft here, Mr. Parker!'

"A man came and relieved me. Wondering what was up now, I went aft, and
the skipper and two mates met me at the break of the poop.

"'You get up there to the weather maintopsail yard arm, you ----
blind-eyed farmer,' snarled the skipper, 'and keep your lookout there!
D'ye hear? I saw that light ten minutes before you sang out.'

"'I reported it as soon as I saw it, sir,' I answered civilly.

"'None o' your lip! Get up there! And say--'

"I had answered and turned, in no way bothered by the change. I was to
put in the rest of the night on the yard; but I could sit down and rest
my bones.

"The skipper modified this. 'You keep your lookout there, and when the
bell strikes, you call out, "All's well, weather maintopsail yard arm!"
Then you flap your arms like wings, and crow like a rooster, and, you
say, "God bless Captain Black, and Mr. Macklin, and Mr. Parker!" D'you
hear?'

"'Yes, sir,' I said, and went aloft, boiling over with humiliation and
rage. Of what use was life, I thought, and success at sea if it was to
be bought at such a price in manhood and self-respect? The more I
thought of it the stronger grew my resolve to end it in some way.

"It was the man at the wheel who showed me the way. He was a
hot-tempered Irishman, a good seaman; but an indifferent helmsman. He
had put the ship off a couple of points at the skipper's order, so as
to pass under the stern of the ship ahead, and had some trouble in
steadying to the new course. He came in for a round of abuse from the
three, and at last was relieved, while the skipper gave him
instructions similar to mine. He was to take the lee maintopsail yard,
call out the bells when struck on deck, and conclude with the cock-crow
and blessing on his lords and masters. I heard his furious curses as he
reached the yard and slid out to leeward.

"We passed under the stern of the other ship, and I judged by her rig
that she was beating her way west, possibly to New York or Boston. As
she dropped out of sight astern, eight bells struck on deck. The
lookout on the forecastle called out, 'Eight bells, t'gallant
fo'cas'le! All's well!' in the peculiar singsong they have in that
trade. I repeated my call from the weather yard arm; but I left out the
crow and the prayer for blessings. The skipper and mates were looking
up at me, and I saw that the first was about to sing out something; but
Casey over to leeward interrupted.

"'Eight bells!' he called. 'See maintopsail yard arm. All's well, an'
blankety blank yer black hearts and cowardly sools to damnation,
Captain Black, Mister Macklin, an' Mister Parker!'

"'What's that--what?' stuttered the skipper. 'Weather yard arm there!
What do _you_ say?'

"'Go to hell!' I answered furiously.

"The skipper was near his cabin window, and I saw him reach within.
Casey, over to leeward, filled the night with his imprecations. He
called down, not blessings, but the tortures of the damned on his
tormentors, and attracted the skipper's attention from me. When he
stood up he held a short-barreled rifle, and with this he took careful
aim at Casey. Then there was a spat of flame, a report, a puff of smoke
floating over the house, and Casey, an oath stopped on his lips,
sprawled downward into the sea.

"The watch had been called, and appeared in time to see this. I heard
the explosive but muttered comments, and then a concerted snarl of
hatred and rage as they rushed aft. But I paid no present attention to
it. I had drawn my pistol, and was taking careful aim with my left hand
at the captain, not so much determined by fear that I should be next as
by a resolve, born of my emotions before the shooting, to bring things
to an end.

"The skipper looked up at me and got the bullet, fairly in the face, I
think, but I never was sure just where I hit him. He dropped, however,
and lay still, while the two mates made a dive for the forward
companion.

"Macklin got in; but not so Parker. The enraged men caught him just
outside the door, slammed in his face by Macklin, and I had one glimpse
of him as I scrambled in along the footrope. He was in the center of a
circle of flourishing sheath knives, his voice of command nearly
silenced by the vengeful shouts and oaths of the men, and when I looked
again, as I dropped into the rigging, he was prone on his back, while
the men were surging aft to enter the cabin by the after companion. But
Macklin was ahead of them, and had bolted it as he had the other.

"I descended and mounted to the poop.

"'Ye'll have to take command, sir,' said a big, red-eyed fellow, named
Finnegan. 'Yer the shipped sicond mate, an' it b'langs to ye.'

"'Is the skipper dead?' I asked.

"'Dead, as he ought to be, the murderer! Ye did well, sir!'

"'And Mr. Parker?' I glanced at the quiet, bleeding form at my feet.

"'He's in small pieces, hild togither be his bones.'

"'Not a pleasant prospect for me,' I said; 'but I'm in for it, same as
all of us. We'll have to stand trial; for there's no escape. But
there's a rat down in his hole that we'll have to catch. Look out, or
he'll pot one of you through his window!'

"I spoke at random, yet none too soon. A pistol exploded in the mate's
window, and a man went down, shot through the heart--the last one to
join the rush over to starboard. But the rush continued to the capstan
bar rack amidships, and, armed with these handy clubs, they came back
to batter in the companion. Macklin did not fire again, and I was on
the point of asking him out, to surrender on terms of amnesty and
deposition, when a crashing, grinding jar shook the ship from bow to
stern, and all three topgallant masts went out of her, snapping at the
caps and falling forward. We had struck a rock in midocean.

"There was no more thought of Macklin. As we jumped to the main deck
and ran forward like sheep, the jars and jolts were resumed, working
aft, while the ship reeled far over to leeward. Chips was on deck, and
I got him to sound the well. 'Four feet, and coming in fast!' he
called, and the men rushed for the boats on the forward house, while I
went aft to the wheel. I had never heard of a rock in this part of the
Atlantic, and thought for a moment that we might have hit a submerged
derelict; but soon put that thought away; nothing but solid and jagged
rock could so tear into a ship's bottom.

"'No steerage way, sir,' said the man at the wheel. 'She's fallen off
due south.'

"'Drop your wheel,' I said, 'and lend a hand with the boats.'

"I waited a few moments before following him, looking around at the
prospect. Since I had gone aloft the wind had hauled to the north and
died down to a gentle breeze, which barely ruffled the very slight
ground swell. It was not the pressure of this wind that had driven the
ship over the rock until she hung, pivoted, at a point near the stern;
it was the ship's momentum. The wind, however, had swung her head to
the south, and it was bringing down on us a cold, damp fog out of the
north, which already had shut out the moon and rendered indistinct the
forms of the men at work on the boats. I could see, however, that the
bow had settled nearly under, and knew that it was only a question of
moments when the ship would slide, head first, down the declivity. I
ran forward, and just as I started a report rang out from the after
companion and a bullet furrowed my hair. I had forgotten Macklin, but
had moved just in time.

"Furious with anger and hatred, I halted in the alley and reached for
my revolver; but it was gone from my pocket--jolted out, perhaps, as we
jumped off the poop. So, I left Macklin to his own problem, and joined
the men.

"There were two whaleboats, which we had carried upside down on the
forward house, and when I got there I found that the men, sailors all
from head to foot, had turned them over, fitted in the bottom plugs,
and bent long painters that led forward outside the rigging. There was
no time to rig hoisting tackles aloft, nor was there need, as a gang to
each could launch them bodily over, one on either side.

"Sailors all, from head to feet, but wild 'packet rats' whose necks
were already in their halters! I considered my chance in an open boat
with that crowd, and thought of my gun, lying somewhere aft on the main
deck. Resolved to risk another shot from Macklin rather than my chance
unarmed among the men, I turned back, watching the cabin windows with
one eye and searching the deck with the other; but I saw no gun, and
perhaps Macklin did not see me, for there was no more shooting.

"Giving it up at last, I ran forward as both boats went over the side
and the men were tumbling into them. As I ran I noticed the steeper
incline to the deck, and that the forecastle was submerged; but I was
not prepared for the sudden launch of the ship into the sea, nor the
sickening crash of riven timbers as her after body was torn away, and
which drowned my shouts to the men.

"In a roaring, yeasty froth of tumultuous water, I went under, and when
I at last came to the surface, half drowned, I was alone on the sea,
hidden from the boats by the thick envelope of fog. I shouted, and was
answered faintly; but not able to determine the direction the sound
came from, I could only shout again and tread water, hoping to make
sure.

"But I could not make sure; sound is twisted around amazingly in fog,
and little by little the calls grew fainter. I was tired out already,
and my useless right arm ached with the hard usage it had lately
received. In the next few minutes, while my chin sank lower and lower
in the water, I thought of about every incident of my life; but just as
the first mouthful went down my throat my right foot hit something, and
the next moment I was standing on it--a hard, firm substance which
could be nothing but the rock.

"At first I found difficulty in holding my footing until I realized
that I must breast a current of about half a knot; but when I had
mastered the knack I found no trouble. Feeling carefully with my feet,
I explored the ground under foot, and following a rise to where it
ended found myself waist high out of water. This was better than
nothing, and I resumed my shouts to the men in the boats. At times they
answered; but very faintly, and after a while they grew silent. And
then, from somewhere out of the fog came the faint stroke of a small
bell. I shouted again; but was not answered.

"There was very little wind, and but a perceptible heave of the ground
swell; so I was bothered at first only by the dense fog and the
current. But after a time I had other troubles, of a mental nature. The
water was unquestionably rising, and whether or not it would rise above
my chin was an unsolvable problem. I did not know the time of low tide
in that part of the world on that night. Then, too, that bell sounded
again. And again and again I shouted into the silence. It struck twice
this time; but it was not until another half-hour had gone by, and it
struck three times with an interval between the second and third
strokes, that I realized that somewhere at hand was a ship's bell
clock. I yelled for help, calling 'Ship ahoy! Give me a hand here! I'm
standing on bottom--on a reef! Lower a boat!'

"Nothing answered me, and I suppose I went more or less crazy as the
night went on and that infernal ghostly bell struck off the half-hours.
It seemed to have the correct time; but it was hard to realize that a
ship had gone through a successful mutiny and shipwreck in the
half-hour between eight bells and one bell.

"But it ended at last, when, from the cold and the wet and the strain
on my voice, I found myself unable to call out any more. And it struck
me as rather hard, too; for at daylight the fog lifted a bit, and
there, about a mile and a half to the nor'ard, showed the lug sail of
one of the boats. The current must have drifted it to the north during
the night, and when the fog lifted I suppose they set the lug and
sailed 'fore the wind as the easiest and fastest way to sail.

"But another sight met my eyes! Over to the east about fifty yards was
the stern of the ship, taffrail and cabin out, and the mizzentop and
topmast. She was just hung there, canted to an angle of forty-five, and
ready to slide down with the first shift of a sea. And there was where
that clock was, high and dry in the cabin! The tide had reached my
shoulders by now, and perhaps this was what did the job; for I suppose
there was some air in that wreck, and when an extra heavy pulse of the
ground swell came along, there was a slight wrenching sound, as though
the sternpost had carried away; then, with a very little flurry, the
stern and mizzen sank out of sight.

"But up into the froth and the bubbles caused by the plunge came the
red head, anxious face, and big shoulders of Macklin. He sighted me,
and came on, breasting the water with all the vigor of a strong man in
good form, and with a new look in his face that meant trouble for me. I
looked for the boat; but the fog had thickened again, blotting her out.

"'What you got there?' he demanded, as he puffed up close to me.

"'Rock bottom,' I answered. 'Keep off! There's room for only one.'

"'And that one is me!'

"I squared myself as I could, with my bad right hand tucked into my
shirt out of the way, and my legs as far apart as I could get them. I
struck at him, and pushed him under; but the reacting force of the blow
sent me backward, and then it was a mad scramble under water to get my
foothold again. Macklin came up, saw me, and swam under water until he
had reached my legs; then he hove me off and took my place.

"But he wasn't used to the push of the current, and the next moment he
was off and swimming again, while I was on, breasting the current, and
waiting for him. He came back under water again; but this time I met
him with a kick that sent him so far down as to give me hope he would
stay there; but he didn't. He came up, swam around to the south, came
down with the current, and brushed me off. I did the same; but he met
me with his feet, and I drifted by. However, I had him by the leg with
my one good hand, and he came with me. We swam, side by side; but he
beat me, and scrambled to his feet on the small spur of rock that meant
life to each of us, but not to both. I swam weakly around to the south,
and then down on him; realizing that my strength was giving out. But
the fight went on, and I soon realized that his gun was soaked, or left
behind; otherwise he would have used it before this.

"I have often wondered if God and the angels watched that fight in
mid-ocean, or only hell and the devils. The nearest land to the west
must have been Cape Race, the nearest to the east the Azores, each
about five hundred miles away. I did not know the longitude; but I did
know that we had sailed due east since I was disrated, and that then we
were on the forty-seventh parallel.

"And so, in latitude forty-seven north, longitude unknown, two weakened
human brutes unable to strike a heavy and telling blow, yet animated by
a fear of death and love of life that twisted their features into
frenzied contortions (I judged mine by Macklin's), struggled feebly for
the possession of a mountaintop rising from the sea bed, on the
diminishing chance that some ship would come along to the rescue before
hunger, thirst, or a rising sea overcame them.

"I hardly know how it ended; I only knew that I found myself too weak
to breast the current, and then I gave up, and drifted. I went under
twice, I remember, and waited calmly for the end; but before the last
sinking I heard voices; then I was clutched by the hair, and as I was
dragged bodily into a boat I lost my senses. When I came to, the men
lifted me up, and I saw big Finnegan at the tiller, standing erect and
declaiming to something astern:

"'Stay there an' think it over, ye man-killin' shlave driver! Stay
there, ye devil out o' hell, an' may the min ye've killed come back to
kape ye company till yer master comes fur ye!'

"I took one look at Macklin. He was standing erect, breasting the
current with his arms folded, secure in the possession of the foothold
he had won from me. But he sent no call for help, and soon went out of
sight in the thinning fog as the boat sailed away.

"There is little more to this yarn. We never saw the other boat again,
and did not know the story they told if rescued. But among ourselves we
agreed to say nothing about the mutiny or the shooting or the
rock--only that we had struck something submerged, that the ship had
sunk, and that the captain, first mate, and three sailors had been
drowned. We were picked up in a few days, told this lie, and were not
questioned closely. Then I realized why the men had stood by me; they
wanted a shipped officer to justify the story.

"But I knew the long arm of the law, and I did not know the fate of the
other boat, or the tale they might tell. So, I shipped for the East,
found and learned this strait, and have been here since, afraid to go
home."

                     *      *      *      *      *

This is the yarn I listened to on anchor watch thirty years ago. It
pertains to events forty years farther back in the past. If that
white-haired, mild-mannered old pilot is still alive, he is over
ninety-five years old, and immune from earthly punishment.

But, before deciding to give this story to the world, I visited the
United States Hydrographic Office for some corroborative data, and on a
pilot chart of 1896 read that one Captain Lloyd, of the British ship
_Crompton_, had lately reported seeing in latitude forty-seven north
and longitude thirty-seven degrees twenty minutes west, a rock sixty
feet long and eight or ten feet high in the middle. It was at a time of
low spring tides, and such a menace to navigation could easily elude
observation under ordinary conditions. Captain Lloyd averred that he
saw it at twenty minutes to eight on a fine, sunshiny morning, so close
and clear to him that he forbore lowering a boat.

Yet, as I learned from further inquiry, he was the subject of much
ridicule, and his story was generally disbelieved.

Should it be disbelieved?




THE ARGONAUTS


A few months ago I attended a banquet and left it as I always leave
such functions, hungry. Entering an all-night lunch room I took a seat,
and gave my order to a waiter, who, when he had filled it, sat down at
the table with me. It was very late, and his duties were light.

"You're looking well," he remarked, as his glance traveled over my
evening clothes. "You're dead swell, but the last time I saw you, you
were covered with mud, carrying a stern line ashore in the Welland
Canal."

I took stock of him. He was white-haired, but had the keen, intelligent
face of a man of forty-five who had not yet given up the fight; a
lively, hopeful face, one that comes to those who win oftener than
lose. His skin was brown, as though the sun and wind of all the zones
had smitten it. His eyes, gray, steadfast and humorous, had in them
when half closed the twinkle of self-confidence, but also, in their
wide-open stare, the intensity of a man of initiative and sudden
action. In his voice were character, individuality, and the habit of
command; yet he wore the short jacket of a waiter, and might have
accepted a tip. I could not recall having met him.

"You seem to have the advantage of me," I said. "I know the Welland
Canal, however, though I am trying to forget that ditch."

"You can't," he laughed. "No man can who ever went through it. That
trip with you in the old _Samana_ was my first and last. I struck
for salt water again when the old man paid me off at Port Colborne.
Don't you remember going to school with me?" He mentioned his name, and
with a little effort I recalled him--a schoolmate a little older than
myself, who had gone to sea early in life, and returned a full-fledged
salt-water navigator, to ship, on his record, as first mate in the
schooner that carried me before the mast, and to meet his Waterloo in
the Welland Canal, the navigation of which demands qualities never
taught nor acquired in the curriculum of sea-faring. After grounding
the schooner several times, parting every line on board, and driving us
to open revolt by the extra work coming of his mistakes, he was
discharged by the skipper. As I thought of all this the grumbling
sailor rose within me, and there at the table, he a waiter, I a writer,
we fought out a grudge of twenty years' standing. But it ended
amicably; I called him a farmer, he called me a soldier, and we shook
hands.

"I've learned," he said, as we settled back, "only in the last month or
so, that you're the fellow that writes these rotten sea stories. Why
don't you write real sea stories?"

"For the same reason that you don't serve a real Welsh rabbit," I
answered, tapping the now cold concoction he had served me. "I couldn't
sell a real story. Truth is too strange to pose as fiction."

"That's so," he answered, slowly. "Who'd think that you could have
become a writer, and I a hash slinger? Making lots of money, I
suppose."

"No, I'm not, or I wouldn't be in your society to-night."

"We're all bluffers, I guess. You are, here in this beanery with your
glad rags on. I am, too--no, not now. I'm slinging hash, and glad of
the chance. But I was a millionaire for a time. Not long. But while it
lasted I had dreams--big dreams."

I asked him about this, and there followed his story. It was
interrupted every few moments by calls for "ham and--," "corn beef
and--," "mystery and white wings," and it kept me at the table until
daylight. He preluded it by the advice to write it up as a real sea
story, but asked that I suppress his name until he had saved enough to
get him to Cuba, where he had new plans for advancement. And now, after
months of thought, I am following his advice; for no effort of the
creative mind, and no flight of conventional fancy, can equal the
weird, grim yarn that he reeled off between orders.

"You must have read in the papers a few weeks back," he began, "about
that bunch of college men that chartered the old racer _Mayflower_,
filled her up with diving gear and dynamite, and went down after the
treasure in the _Santa Margherita_."

I nodded assent. "Yes, and a hurricane hit them and they barely
escaped."

"They're keeping mum," he said, "and mean to try again; but it's no
use. That treasure is seven hundred miles to the nor-nor'east now, and
I was about the last man to look at it. It's resting in the hold of a
small schooner, sunk in four hundred fathoms. I never heard of that
treasure ship until about three years ago, when I quit a brigantine at
Cedar Keys and mixed in with the boarding-house crowd. There was a
fellow out of a job named Gleason, and he had a chart in his pocket
that he talked about, but never showed. He told us all about that old
Spanish ship that went down with all hands in the sixteenth century,
carrying with her about seven millions' worth of gold, silver, and
jewels; and he knew the location. He had got it from a drunken diver
who had seen her on the sea bottom, spelled her dingy old name on the
stern, and saved the news to himself while he wormed out of the skipper
the latitude and longitude of the place. And now he wanted to enlist
capital, or make up a crew of men that would do the work. Dead easy, he
said. Just to get there, drag the bottom with two boats and a length of
chain until the wreck was located, then to go down in a diving suit,
hook on to the chests and hoist them up.

"Well, in the crowd that he talked to there wasn't a dollar. We were
all dead broke, but we were all ambitious. There was Pango Pete, a
nigger six foot tall, who couldn't write his name, but he was a seaman
from his feet up; and a Dago named Pedro Pasqualai. These two were the
kind that will choke you before they ask the time of night. Then there
was Sullivan, old man Sullivan, a decrepit old codger who had sailed
second mate all his life, and never got a first mate's berth because he
couldn't master navigation. And there was Peters, a young fellow filled
up with the romance and the glory of the life at sea--rot, as you and I
know, but he was enthusiastic, and that was enough. A trio of Dutchmen
were taken in--Wagner, Weiss, and Myers, three good fellows down on
their luck. A Portuguese named Christo, and two Sou'wegian brothers
named Swanson completed the bunch. We talked it over down at the end of
the fruit dock, where the oyster boats come in and make fast, and where
the downs-and-outs congregate to smoke and boast of the prosperous
past.

"But this crowd talked of the prosperous future. Seven millions, said
Gleason, lay down there off Turks Island in less than sixty fathoms,
and all we needed was some kind of a craft to get us there, a diving
suit, and a storage battery to light up a bulb to search for the
treasure. These things seemed beyond our reach, until a schooner came
in for supplies. We sized her up, and Gleason went wild as her
different fittings and appliances showed up. There were the diving
dresses we needed; there was the storage battery; there were the extra
anchors for mooring a craft over a certain spot, and the air pumps and
paraphernalia for diving operations, scattered about the deck. She was
a small craft, and was manned by men who did not act and talk like
sailors. There seemed to be no skipper, and they smoked on deck while
working, and talked back and forth as though all were equal.

"'A company,' said Gleason, 'just like us, only they've got the money,
and possibly the secret. Well, the company that gets the loot owns it
and such matters as the ownership of the schooner and the outfit can be
settled afterwards, possibly out of court. What do you say? Are you
game?'

"We were. We laid low, but watched, and when that schooner was filled
up with grub, we were ready to raid her and chuck the crew overboard;
but it wasn't necessary to do the latter. They filled up too late for
the tide and went ashore for the evening, leaving no one aboard but a
Japanese cook. We remembered, as we climbed aboard after dark, that we
hadn't a man among us who could cook, and so, instead of dropping that
Jap over the rail, we simply locked him into a stateroom and made sail.

"Naturally, as Gleason originated the scheme, he was elected captain,
but, as I was the only navigator in the crowd, I was made first mate,
and the big nigger, Pango Pete, second mate. It looked good for
discipline, for even pirates recognize the need of it, and the first
man that growled or kicked had to deal with Pete. He whaled a few
before we'd got around the Florida Cape, but he also whaled the Jap for
bad cooking and insolence--which was a mistake. That Jap was an
educated man, a college graduate and a member of the Japanese Samurai,
a curious class in that country that never yield, never forgive, and
kill themselves when defeated. We didn't know this; we only knew that
he was a mighty poor cook.

"After we were around the Cape, Gleason gave me the latitude and
longitude of the spot, and I made for it. It took me two or three days
of careful observations and calculations before I announced that we
were within six seconds of the spot, which is all that navigation will
do. Then we dropped anchor and began to drag. We knotted together every
line we had, and in the middle we had a length of mooring chain that
would stick to the bottom. We kept two small boats, to which this was
attached, a quarter of a mile apart and pulled on parallel lines, and
at last felt a drag; then we pulled together, gathering in the slack,
and when we met, the schooner, under charge of Gleason, came up and
anchored, over the spot.

"I was the only man there who had any diving experience, so I went
down. Say, have you ever been under water in a diving suit, trusting
your life to the fellows above who pump the air into your helmet? No?
Well, it's a curious experience. I had the feeling as I went down that
I was number thirteen of that bunch, and that they only needed to shut
off my air supply to make their number twelve instead of thirteen. But
that didn't happen; they pumped, and I breathed and saw the old
galleon, the _Santa Margherita_. She lay there, heeled over to
starboard, covered with the ooze and the slime of the sea, with
barnacles everywhere.

"I signaled for slack and walked around her, taking note of her rig.
She had three masts, and three tops very much like the fighting tops of
our modern battleships. There were no royal masts, but she had two
sprit-sail yards under the bowsprit and jib boom, and a huge lateen
yard on the mizzen that took the place of the cro'-jack. But her poop
deck was a wonder; five tiers of windows one above the other, and on
top three big lanterns much like the ordinary street lamp. Of course,
all canvas and running gear had rotted away, but here and there was a
leg of standing rigging, preserved by the tar. She was a big craft in
her day, no doubt, but not so big compared with present-day ships; at
any rate I could reach up to her channels, and by this means climbed
aboard.

"The deck and rail were a foot thick with mud, and the small, spar-deck
guns could hardly be distinguished. I saw at once that I would need
help, and signaled to be hauled up. On deck I told the news and all
hands, even the Jap, went crazy over it. We got out two more diving
suits, rigged a bulb for each, and Pango, Peters, and myself went down
again.

"Now, this isn't a yarn of the finding of that treasure. Anyone can
invent such yarns, and I've read dozens of them. They all wind up
successfully, with each man wealthy and happy. This is a yarn of the
men who found that treasure, and what happened to them. So, I'll just
say that we didn't find a skeleton or a ghost when we got below decks.
All hands were up, I suppose, when that ship went down, and the rush of
water as she plunged, washed them off. We found seven big chests in the
'tween-decks forward of the cabin, and in them all were coins, and
jewelry, and here and there in the mess, what might have been an opal,
or some kind of jewel. All the stuff was black from the action of the
salt water; but we knew we had the real thing, and hooked on tackles.
We had to come up to help each time we lifted a chest, for, after the
chest was out of water, it was too heavy for the crowd above; but at
last they were all up, and stowed snugly on the floor of the cabin.
Then, after final search for other loot worth taking, we picked up our
anchor and cleared out, not yet having decided where we were going.

"We were pirates under the law, and didn't know but what all the
revenue cutters on the coast were looking for us, for the theft of that
schooner. But with seven millions of bullion and jewels, melted down,
counted up, and translated into cash in some bank, we didn't care for
the charge of piracy. The real trouble was to get that stuff
translated, and while we argued we sailed due east, out into the broad
Atlantic. Peters, the young enthusiast, had been a jeweler, and he told
us that nothing short of a blast of air in conjunction with the heat of
a fire would melt gold and silver. Well, where could we set up a blast
furnace with not a dollar in the party? My suggestion--and I was backed
by Gleason, Peters, and old man Sullivan--was that we count out the
loot, separate every salable jewel, and make some big port like New
York, Liverpool, or Rio Janeiro, sell the jewels and get ready money
with which to plan for the disposal of the rest; but we had to deal
with men like Pango, Christo, Pedro, and the three Dutchmen, who didn't
know what they were up against. They wanted an immediate count up and
division; then, each man to go his way. The nonsense of it did not
strike them; thirteen men to divide up seven heavy chests--each one
shouldering seven-thirteenths of a load that took the whole thirteen to
lift with a four-fold tackle. We asked the Jap cook what he thought,
but he had no opinion.

"It's somewhat curious how the different men of that bunch had
different ideas of what they wanted. Young Peters wanted to go back to
his native town and win the girl that had soured on him because he was
poor. Pango, Pedro, and the two Sou'wegians only wanted a big drunk.
Old man Sullivan wanted a course in a Nautical School and a first
mate's certificate. The three Germans wanted to get to New York and set
up in the saloon business. Gleason wanted to study law, and I wanted to
study medicine and be a doctor, a gentleman who could enter any society
in the world. The Jap didn't give out his aspirations.

"And so, growling like an unhappy family in a menagerie, we sailed
east, with the question unsettled. But at last we won over the Dagoes
and the Dutchmen, and agreed upon New York as a port, and the selling
of the jewels in some Bowery pawnshop, where no questions are asked.
Then we shook hands all round, gave the Jap hell about his cooking--for
we had been too worried to attend to that matter before--and squared
away before the trade wind for Sandy Hook and a market.

"From jealousy and mutual distrust, we all slept in the cabin. There
were plenty of staterooms for the crowd, though some of us doubled up.
None of us wanted to remain away from the seven chests of treasure, and
the Japanese cook, who might have slept in the cook's room next the
galley, still showed a preference for his room in the cabin, and we did
not contest it. But now we were millionaires and easy--dead easy. We
stood watch, steered and trimmed sail with no man for boss, for now the
work was done, Gleason and myself and the nigger Pango gave up our
false positions. We were a democracy, and loved and trusted one
another, only, when we roused out the watch below and found that old
man Sullivan did not come, and on investigation found him stone dead in
his berth without a sign of violence, we forgot our brotherly love and
began to wonder.

"We did not know what he died of, but we gave him sea burial that day,
and Gleason read a chapter from the book. We concluded that the old man
had died of heart failure, or old age, and thought no more about it
after the day had passed. But, when we called the watch at eight bells
next mornin', we couldn't get one of the Swanson brothers up. He was
cold and stiff; and there was nothing wrong with him either. That is,
he had turned in cheerful and healthy and died during sleep, leaving no
sign.

"The other Swanson raised merry hell that day, raving about the deck,
mourning for his dead brother. But his grief was short-lived, for when
we tried to waken him next watch he was cold and stiff. We buried him
with the ceremonies, and began to think--all of us. We wondered whether
men may rake up ill-gotten treasure from a dead past without coming
under influences of that dead past. We thought of the conquered and
enslaved natives, laboring in the mines for the aggrandizement and
enrichment of Spain, and giving up their lives in the work,
unrecognized and forgotten, while their exploiters, the children and
relatives of Ferdinand and Isabella, sat back in luxury and
self-satisfaction. We wondered as to what was killing our shipmates,
ghosts or poison.

"Naturally, we suspected the cook, and Pango, the Dagoes, and the
surviving Sou'wegian were for tossing him overboard; but the rest of us
wouldn't have it. There was no evidence of poison, and as we'd done no
killing so far in our piratical venture, we'd better keep clear of it
now, with so much at stake. A court that would acquit us as soldiers of
fortune that had merely borrowed a schooner might hang us as pirates
and murderers; but we watched the Jap. We kept him away from the grub
while we ate it. He brought it on in two or more big dishes, and there
was no chance of his poisoning one without the rest. We weren't afraid
of that.

"I examined Swanson thoroughly before we buried him, and there wasn't a
mark on him, or a sign of anything out of the way, except what didn't
seem in any way important, just below each ear, and back of the corner
of the cheek bone, was a little pink spot; but there was no blood, and
no sign of finger prints on the throat.

"Peters, the romantic young fellow, got ghosts on his mind, and as he
thought about it, they got on his nerves. He couldn't sleep, and walked
around, up and down from the cabin to the deck. The others slept in
their watch below, and on that night nobody died. But the next night
Peters was too exhausted to stay awake, and he went to sleep on the
cabin floor alongside the chests. We couldn't waken him at eight bells,
and we knew his troubles were over. At daylight I examined his body.
Nothing wrong, only the two little pink spots under the ears. We buried
him at daylight, with scant pretense of a burial service. Things were
looking serious.

"All this time we were plowing along before the trade wind, but it soon
panned out and we had light, shifty airs from all directions, with
rain--regular Gulf Stream weather. It made us bad-tempered, and Pango
and Gleason had a fight. It was a bad fight, and we couldn't stop them;
both were powerful men, and as they brushed into me in their whirling
lunge along the deck, locked tight, they knocked me six feet away. When
I got to my feet, Pango had Gleason down and was choking him. I got a
handspike and battered that coon's head with it; but he wouldn't let
go, and before others came up to help he had killed him. He went for
me, but had to stop before the handspikes of the crowd.

"Now, with Gleason dead, the command devolved upon me or Pango, and
this fellow was in a mood to demand the place. He could lick any three
of us, but not all hands; but, while we were growling about it and
cooling down, we found other troubles to keep us busy. We had piled
several tons' weight on the weak cabin floor timbers of an old
schooner, and of a sudden, down they crashed to the hold below, leaving
a yawning hole in the cabin floor and starting a butt or two in the
planking. It was pump, pump, pump, now, for we couldn't rig any kind of
a purchase to clear those busted chests away from the leak. Pango was a
good worker, and, under the pressure of extreme fatigue, we forgot our
grudges. I did not care for the cheap position of command over a bunch
of foreigners, and so we made Pango skipper, while I remained navigator
and mate. Pango promptly quit pumping, saying that skippers don't pump.
And that night he quit everything. As skipper he stood no watch, but at
breakfast time he was cold, with the same little marks under his ears.
On his skin, however, they showed a brownish black.

"Gleason had been choked to death, and I had examined the imprint of
Pango's fingers before we buried him. There was hardly a sign; nothing
at all to show that the little pink spots came from the pressure of a
strangler's grip. Besides, you cannot choke a man asleep without waking
him. He would make some kind of a fuss, and apprise others; but that
never happened.

"There were but seven of us now, three Germans, two Dagoes, the Jap,
and myself. I talked with that Jap. He was an educated man, highly
trained in one of our universities; but he couldn't tell me anything,
he said. It was all mysterious and horrible--this quiet taking off of
men while they slept. As for poisoning, of which he knew he was
suspected, it was absurd. There was no poison on board, to begin with;
and why should he, a landsman, seek to poison the men who could take
the ship and treasure to port? What could he do alone on the sea? This
was logical, and as he was a small, weak, and confiding sort of
creature, I exonerated him in my mind from any suspicion of choking the
victims.

"That night the two Dagoes, Pedro and Christo, passed into the land
beyond. There were the same little marks, but nothing else. Weiss,
Wagner, and Myers, the three Germans, got nutty about this time, and
talked together in their lingo while they pumped; and when they were
alone they talked to themselves. I confess that _I_ got nutty. Who
wouldn't, with this menace hanging over him? I walked around the deck
when I was off pump duty, and I remember that I planned a great school
where ambitious young sailor men could study medicine, and escape the
drudgery of a life 'fore the mast. Then I planned free eating-houses
for tramps, and I was going to use some of my wealth to investigate the
private life of a Sunday school superintendent, who, when I was a kid,
predicted that I would come to a bad end. You see, we never can judge
of our own mental condition at the time. It's only when you look back
that you can take stock of yourself. The result of this mental
disturbance upon me was insomnia. I couldn't get to sleep; but I kept
track of the ship, and worried the three Dutchmen and the Jap into
trimming sail when necessary.

"We'd got up to the latitude of the Bermudas, I think, and I was
beginning to hope that the curse had left us; for we had passed through
three nights without a man dying. But on a stormy morning, when the
gaff topsails were blown away, and we four men--for the Jap was useless
on deck--were trying to get a couple of reefs in the mainsail, Wagner
suddenly howled out a lot of Dutch language and jumped overboard. I
flung him a line, but he wouldn't take it, and passed astern. The poor
devil had taken the national remedy for trouble. Did you ever notice it
in Germans, even the best? When things go wrong they kill themselves.
They're something like the Chinese in this.

"There were only four of us now, counting the Jap, who still spoiled
good grub, and it took a long time to snug that schooner down to double
reefs and one head sail. The water in the hold had gained on us, and we
pumped while we could stand it, then knocked off, and dropped down on
deck for a snooze. We were dead beat, and told the cook to call us if
the wind freshened or if anything happened. He didn't call us, but
something happened. I wakened in time, and stood up, sleepy and stupid
and cold; for you can't sleep on deck, even in the tropics, without
getting chilled; and we were up to thirty-six north. The Jap was
fooling round the galley, and the schooner, with the wheel becketed,
was lifting up and falling off, practically steering herself,
by-the-wind. Of course, I thought of the water in the hold, and sounded
the well. There was four feet of wet line, and I knew that things were
bad. Then I went to the two Dutchmen, to call them to the pumps, and
found them cold and stiff, each with the little pink marks under the
ears.

"Well, I naturally went more or less crazy. I took that Jap by the
throat and asked him what had happened. He did not know, he said. He
had left us to sleep, and rest, sorry for us, and trying to cook us a
good meal when we wakened. He was in a shaking fright, trembling and
quavering, and I eased up. What was the use of anger and suspicion in
the face of this horrible threat of death while you slept? We hove the
two bodies overboard, and made a stagger at the pump; but we could not
lessen the water in the hold, and at last I gave up, cleared away a
boat, and stocked it with water and grub for two. Meanwhile I shaped a
course for the Bermudas, and steered it after a fashion, hoping that I
might beach the schooner and get, out of some court of salvage, a part
of that seven millions down in the hold.

"But I had to steer, and keep the deck, for the Jap was useless. I kept
it up until we sighted land, and then flopped, done up, tired out,
utterly exhausted by work, and yet unable to sleep. I sang out to the
cook, as I lay down on the hatch, to try and steer toward that blot of
blue on the horizon, and then passed into a semi-dazed state of mind
that was not sleep, nor yet wakefulness. I could hear, and, through my
half-opened eyelids, could see; yet I was not awake, for I could not
guard myself. I saw that Jap creeping toward me. I saw the furtive,
murderous glint in his beady eyes. I heard the soft pat of his feet on
the wet deck, and I heard his suppressed breathing. But I could not
move or speak.

"He came and stood over me, then reached down and softly pressed the
tips of his forefingers into my throat, just below the ears and back of
the cheek bones. Softly at first, so that I hardly felt it, then more
strongly, and a sense of weakness of body came over me, something
distinct from the weakness that I had felt while sinking down to try
and sleep. It seemed a stopping of breath. I could not move, as yet,
but could see, out of the corners of my eye, and a more hateful,
murderous face never afflicted me than the face of that Japanese cook.

"He kept it up, steadily increasing the pressure, and soon I realized
that I was not breathing. Then, I do not know why, there came to me the
thought of that Sunday school superintendent, and his advice, to pray
when in trouble. I forgot my grouch. I said to myself, 'God help me,
God help me,' and I wakened. I found that I could move. I shook off the
Jap, and he staggered back, chuckling and cluttering in his language. I
rose to my feet, weak and shaky, and he ran away from me; but I found
myself without power to follow. I was more than weak; I was just alive,
just able to breathe, but I could not speak. I tried to, but the words
would not come. He shut himself into his galley, and, with regard to
the condition of the schooner, and my own helplessness, I painfully
climbed into the boat I had stocked and cleared away the davit falls.
Then I lay down.

"I have a dim remembrance of that sleep in the boat, of waking
occasionally to drive that cowardly Jap off with an upraised oar; of my
utter inability to speak to him, and the awful difficulty of taking a
long breath. But the final plunge of the schooner stands out. I was
awake, or as nearly awake as I could be. The Jap was forward, and the
decks were awash. I knew that she was going down, and got out my knife
to cut the falls when the boat floated. I did this successfully, for,
though I could not speak, I could move, and as the schooner plunged
under, and the screams of that heathen rang in my ears, I cut the bow
tackle, then the stern tackle, and found myself adrift in a turmoil of
whirlpools.

"I was picked up a few days later by a fruiter, and taken into New
York. I found my hair had turned white. I've been working as waiter
most of the time since, hoping to enlist somebody's interest toward
salving that schooner; but it's no go. I'm going to Cuba, where I've
heard of a pot of money in the Santiago hills. Want to go along?"

"No," I answered. "But, tell me, what killed those men?"

"The Jap must have been an expert in jiu jitsu, the wrestling game of
that country. I've made a stagger at studying medicine since then, and
learned a little. The pneumogastric nerve did the business. It passes
from the base of the brain, down past the heart and lungs and ends near
the stomach. It is motor, sensory, and sympathetic, all in one. Gentle
pressure inhibits breathing, continued pressure, or stimulus, paralyzes
the vocal chords; a continuance of the stimulus renders you
unconscious, and a strong pressure brings about stoppage of the heart
action, and death."




THE MARRIED MAN


He told the story while he and I smoked at one end of his veranda, and
his kindly faced wife talked with "the only girl on earth" at the other
end, beyond reach of his voice. He was a large, portly, and benign old
gentleman, with an infinite experience of life, whom I had long known
as a fellow-tenant in the studio building. He was not an artist, but an
editorial-writer on one of the great dailies, who worked, cooked, and
slept in his studio, until Saturday evening came, when he regularly
disappeared, until Monday morning.

There was nothing in this to surprise me, until he invited the only
girl and myself to visit his country home over Sunday, incidentally
informing us that he was a married man, and had been for more than
twenty years.

And we found him most happily married. Indeed, he and his white-haired
wife were so foolishly fond of each other that their caresses would
have seemed absurd had they not been so genuine.

These old lovers had made much of us; and they seemed so sincerely
interested in our coming marriage that, in the evening, as night
settled over the quiet little suburb, and we sought the veranda for
coolness, I ventured to comment to my host on his mode of life.

"Best plan in the world," he answered. "You'll find it so, after a year
or two of creative work at home. Don't give up your studio. If you do,
you will suffer--as I did before I began my double life--from nervous
prostration. I was writing when I married--long-winded essays, sermons,
editorials, and arguments about nothing at all, simply built up from
the films of my imagination. The thousand-and-one distractions of
household life interfered too much, and the more I tried to force my
brain the more I fatigued it. The result was that I had a bad six
months with myself, and then gave out, just on the verge of insanity.

"Yes, my home life nearly maddened me, as I have said. Then, I took a
studio, lived in it, and visited my wife twice a week. The result was
that I got my work done, and found my wife as glad to see me as I was
to see her. It was like a lad's going to see his girl; and, talk as you
like about conjugal bliss, a woman gets tired of a man about the house
all day long. Still, there is a danger attached to this dual residence.
One must walk straight, for he is a marked man. I had an experience at
the beginning that taught me the need of prudence.

"It was while I was mentally convalescent, but yet a very weak man,
nervous, irritable, and of unsound judgment. There was about the same
kind of a crowd in the building as now--artists, musicians, actors, and
actresses. There were women coming and going at all hours, and all
sorts of shady characters had access to the place. One day a neighbor
named Bunker brought a pleasing young person in black into my place,
and introduced us. She was the widow, she informed me, of a newspaper
man, who often, when alive, had spoken of me. So hearing that I was in
the building, she had asked her friend, Mr. Bunker, to bring us
together, as she wished to know her dear husband's friends. She wiped
away a tear at this point--genuine, too.

"Now, I had no remembrance of her husband, but, feeling kindly toward
any newspaper man's widow, I welcomed her, and Bunker left us together.
She was intelligent, with literary aspirations, and we chatted a while
very agreeably. Then she borrowed a book, and left.

"I had noticed that, though neatly dressed, her clothing was palpably
cheap in quality, and, when she came again--without Bunker, this
time--it seemed a little more worn than was consistent with good times.
So I questioned her gently, and learned that she had eaten nothing that
day. She was trying to make her way by writing short stories, and that
fact aroused my pity--a pity that grew when I saw her eat the luncheon
I provided from my ice-box.

"She did not come again for a month, and then she appeared with the
blackest eye I had ever seen on a woman. She was seedier than ever, and
looked hungry. I was deeply sorry for her, believing her clothing a
sure index of an honest woman's struggle to remain honest. Partly from
the delicacy of feeling due to this belief, and partly because I had
but thirty-five cents in my pocket, I made no offer of pecuniary
assistance. But, after giving me a conventional explanation of the
cause of the black eye, she hinted plainly that, unless she could raise
ten dollars before night, she would be turned out of her room. This was
serious, and I took thought.

"It was Friday, and a holiday. I knew that there was no one in the
building but Bunker and myself, and Bunker was one of those rollicking
souls who are in a continuous condition of cheerful impecuniosity.
There was not a place open in the neighborhood except the saloons, and
there I was not known. Clearly, I could not raise any money for her
that day; but I promised her the use of my studio for the two following
nights, when I should be home in the country, and I agreed to induce
Bunker, who slept in his boarding-house, to put her up in his place for
that night. This would provide sleeping quarters and the use of my
gas-stove and ice-box for three nights and two days, by which time
something might turn up. She expressed herself as satisfied, and I went
out to interview Bunker.

"'No,' he declared, vehemently, 'I can't take any woman to my place.'
'Bunker,' I interrupted, solemnly, 'you brought this young woman here,
you have pretended to be her friend, and her claim upon you is enough
to warrant her in expecting help at this critical moment. Remember,
Bunker, this is a crisis with her. If she is helped, she may pull
through; if not, she may lose heart and courage, and go to ruin.'

"My words impressed him. 'All right,' he said; 'I don't know much about
her lately--knew her family well, out West--that's all. I'll give you
my key, before I go home--want to lock myself in and work for a while
now. Have a drink. Got some good stuff here.'

"I declined, and went back to my visitor, picking up on the way a
telegraph messenger, who had arrived with a dispatch for me.

"Unwearied in well-doing, glad that I was an instrument in helping this
worthy young woman, I assured her of the success of my mission--before
opening the telegram. And she thanked me, with tears--genuine again.
Then, slightly affected myself, I broke the envelope, and read:

    "'Meet me 5.30 Pennsylvania ferry. If miss you will come to your
    office.

    "'MAUD MILNER.'

"Now, Maud Milner was the wife of an old friend of mine; and, too, she
was my wife's old school chum. She had never been in New York, and she
did not know that my 'office' was a bachelor's apartment. But her visit
had been prearranged, and I had written the invitation on my studio
stationery, so that her response was quite innocent; yet, I had
peculiar reasons--aside from the presence there of my penniless and
interesting protegee--for not wishing her to visit my place in town.

"I had paid her fully as much attention before her marriage as I had my
wife; in fact, I courted them both at once, in order to arouse their
sense of pique. Not a strictly honorable thing to do, had either of
them cared for me, initially; but neither did care, and I might not
have won my wife by any other plan. The two were bad friends for a
while, and, to this day, my wife cannot rid herself of a very slight
jealousy. So, you see the reason for my anxiety to avoid any
possibility of complications.

"I had just enough time in which to get to the ferry, and, after
emphasizing to the widow the necessity of her getting Bunker's key
before he left, and of leaving my studio empty against the possible
arrival of Mrs. Milner without me, I rushed away.

"I reached the ferry on time; but Mrs. Milner was not there, nor did
she come, though I waited until seven o'clock. Then I inquired, and an
official informed that the five-thirty--the train boat--had met with an
accident, and had landed her passengers at the nearest dock, which was
a little further up. I hurried there, but Mrs. Milner was not visible.
At last, fearing lest she had gone to the studio, and had met the widow
with that picturesque black eye, I hastened uptown again.

"At the street-door I met Bunker--drunk as a lord.

"'Is she up there yet?' I asked, anxiously.

"'Who?' he answered, in a tone that told me he had forgotten.

"'Did you give her your key? Give me that key--the key of your studio.
Hurry up!'

"A dim light of intelligence flashed over his cheerful face, and he
grinned.

"'Oh, yesh--yesh; thash so!' He pulled out a bunch of keys. 'Here's
keys, ol' man--street-door key and studio key.'

"As he staggered off, I bounded up the stairs, with the two keys he had
pulled from his bunch.

"The widow met me at my door.

"'Has a lady called here?' I asked, hastily.

"'Somebody peeped in,' she said. 'It may have been a lady, but I
thought it was Mr. Bunker, and as soon as I could--I was dressing my
eye--I followed out; but he was gone.'

"'Oh, Lord!' I groaned. 'If it was she, she's gone out to my place, and
she will tell my wife.'

"Then I remembered that Mrs. Milner did not have my country address,
and was comforted.

"But I had been extremely agitated, and now my shattered nervous system
went back on me so completely that I practically turned that
interesting female out.

"'The lady may come back at any moment,' I said. 'Here are the
keys--this one for the outer door, this one for the studio. Don't let
her find you with me in this place.'

"I gave the widow the keys, and she left, saying that she would make a
call on someone who had promised her employment, and that she would not
annoy me further. She was extremely grateful for my kindness, and all
that.

"I hurried her out; and, after a while, settled down to my desk, and
worked through the evening--worked hard, to keep from worrying over the
whereabouts of Mrs. Milner, alone in that great city.

"Mrs. Milner quite failed to appear; but, at eleven o'clock the other
one came. I heard her in the hall, fumbling at the keyhole of Bunker's
door, and went out.

"'This key will not unlock the door,' she said, and I joined her.

"Trying the key, I found that it did not fit--in fact, that it was a
key shaped differently from all other door-keys in that building; and I
knew that the befuddled Bunker had made a mistake.

"'He gave you the right key for the street-door,' the widow whimpered;
'why did he give the wrong one for this door?'

"'Drunk,' I growled. 'Come in, and we'll talk it over.'

"'Oh, I cannot,' she complained. 'To think of it! the terrible position
I am in! Oh, to think of it!'

"'Don't think of it,' I answered; 'it's all right. Don't think of it,
and don't talk of it. I'll say nothing, and I'll go home as soon as
I've finished the page I'm on. Come in and sit down.'

"I led her in, and sat her down, but her plaint would not cease. I
fancied there was a smell of liquor in the air, but I could not be sure
that it was not the clinging odor left by Bunker. I turned to my work,
and endeavored to write, but could not; for now her mood changed to one
of patronage, and she advised me upon my methods, my style of writing,
my manner of living. She promised to be a friend to me all her life.
She would help me to reform my rather slap-dash style of writing, and
to give it the literary touch, and she would help me in my punctuation.
She had made a study of my editorials, and knew all my weak points.

"All this was enough to exasperate a steadier-nerved man than myself.
It drove me, barely convalescent from mental collapse, to distraction.

"'Here,' I said, rudely, standing up, 'you will not stop talking, so I
must stop work. I'll give it up and go home.'

"'Oh, don't let me disturb you,' she said, pleadingly, as she, too,
rose and approached me; 'I will be quiet, I really will.'

"But I smelt the odor of liquor again now plainly from her breath, and
I did not believe that she could stop talking if she tried. My
resolution to go was made stronger.

"I went to a cabinet at the far end of the studio, to get some papers I
wished to carry home with me. I returned quickly.

"But, in that short time, she had made changes; she had laid aside her
hat and jacket when she came in, but now she stood before my mirror,
shaking her hair down her back, and unbuttoning her collar. She smiled
sweetly as she turned to me.

"Without a word, I caught up my hat, and fled.

"Down in the street, I looked at my watch. It was nearly midnight. It
would take me until two in the morning to get home, where I would have
to wake my wife, and relate the whole truth--or else tell her a lie as
to why I was home a day ahead of time. I cared to do neither, and
thought of a hotel. But, though I had a commutation ticket in my
pocket, my money was now reduced to twenty-five cents--not enough to
pay for a night's lodging. There was not a soul left in that darkened
building to whom I could appeal.

"Then I bethought me of a friend of many years' standing, who lived on
the top floor of a bachelor apartment not far away. With my grip in my
hand, I hurried to his street, and was taken up by the elevator to the
top floor, dimly lighted and bordered with doors.

"I knew his door, and knocked on it. There was no answer. I knocked
again and again, but he did not respond. At last, in desperation, I
rang for the elevator, and asked the attendant where my friend was. The
boy did not know, but thought that the gentleman must be in, and
asleep.

"However, I went down, and waited for a half-hour at the door, hoping
that he had been out late and would soon appear. But he did not, and I
went up again, resolved to batter down his door, if necessary. I began
the attack at once, and, though I produced no effect on the door, I did
upon my knuckles and the repose of other tenants of the floor. Doors
opened, and tired, sleepy voices inquired the reason of the tumult. I
made no answer, but banged away.

"'Tom,' I shouted, at last; 'Tom, get up! Let me in! I want to see you;
it's important. Let me in!'

"A voice from a half-opened door informed me that if I did not stop the
noise I should be pitched down the stairs. Still, I banged away at
Tom's door. There was no response, and I grew sick at heart.

"Then, just as I was about to go away, a door leading up to the attic
opened, and Tom appeared, clad in street clothing--overcoat and all.

"'What's up?' he inquired, with chattering teeth.

"'Tom!' I exclaimed, reaching his side at a bound, 'I want to talk with
you. Take me into your place. I'm in trouble. I want to sleep in your
room with you. Take me in.'

"'Come upstairs,' he said, calmly.

"I followed him up to the bare and chilly attic, where he lighted a
candle, and offered me a seat--on the floor. I told him my agonized
tale of woe, but he did not show the sympathy I had anticipated; in
fact, he laughed, softly and long.

"'You can sleep with me, if you insist,' he said. 'I've a Persian rug
that will almost cover us both, and I'll share this pillow with you.
Then, here's a single portiere--not very warm--and two New York
_Heralds_ and a Sunday _Times_ that will help out. But, in fact, I'd
rather not entertain you to-night. I'd rather you'd go out and walk the
street, or sleep in the Park. I couldn't sleep a wink myself with you
alongside of me, and neither could you.'

"'But your room,' I gasped; 'what's the matter with your room?'

"'I've been turned out of my room,' he said. 'I'm allowed to sleep
here, to-night; and I don't know how it will be to-morrow night--can't
tell.'

"'Well, I'll bunk in with you, here.'

"'No,' he rejoined, heartlessly; 'on the whole, I don't want you. Get
out and walk the street, or try someone else.'

"'Then lend me some money. I'll go to a hotel.'

"'If I had any money, do you think I should be sleeping here,
to-night?'

"'I suppose not,' I sighed. 'Well, I think I'll go. You won't help me?'

"'Not this night,' he said, grimly. 'Get out! But I don't want you to
gabble about where you found me sleeping.'

"I left him, deeply grieved by his meanness, which I ascribed to an old
jealousy of the years gone by, when he had been attentive to the
unmarried Mrs. Milner, and had found me in his way. I had not thought
he would have cherished this spite through the years, but, resolved
never to ask a favor again, I left him, and went out into the street.
Finally, unable to think of another resource, I sought the nearest
square, and put in a cold and miserable night on a bench, with
vagrants, beggars, and outcasts for company.

"At daylight, I rose and wandered slowly back toward the studio
building, to await the down-coming of my charge.

"At the door I met a disheveled, weary, and bleary-eyed wreck, who eyed
me sourly, and broke forth.

"'You're a nice sort of duffer, you are,' he said. 'You knew I was
drunk. You knew I didn't know what key I gave you. Why didn't you make
sure? I couldn't get into my boarding-house. I walked the street all
night.'

"'You did!' I responded. 'You walked the street all night, did you? Oh,
I'm so glad! I'm _so_ glad, Bunker! You walked the street, did you?
Well, I slept in the square--thanks to your condition, you unholy
inebriate!'

"'Where's my key?' he demanded, angrily, 'my boarding-house key? I want
to get in before breakfast-time.'

"'Up in my studio,' I answered, fully as tartly. 'Go up there and trade
keys; and don't bring any more of your friends around to me.'

"I went to a restaurant, spent my twenty-five cents for breakfast, and
then climbed to the studio. The door was unlocked, but the bird had
flown.

"I spent a miserable day, doing no work at all, but worrying greatly
over the fate of Mrs. Milner.

"But, at nightfall, having replenished my pockets from the bank, as I
was about to leave the building, to take the train for home, I met her,
bag and baggage in a cab at the door.

"Did you ever get a thorough scolding from an angry woman, or, as in
this case, from a good-natured woman pretending to be angry? But, alas!
I did not know that she was pretending, and I suffered horribly--on the
ride to the station and on the train. I was an unfaithful, treacherous
scoundrel, leaving a trusting and loving wife alone for a whole week,
and giving the use of 'my office'--in which there was a couch and an
ice-box and a gas-stove and a bath-tub and a clothes-closet (_for
hiding purposes_)--to a shameless person with a black-and-blue eye,
who had stared at her most insolently when she had come to the door.

"'I mean to tell your wife,' Mrs. Milner said, before we had reached
the Grand Central Station; and she repeated the threat a dozen times,
before we arrived at my house. Then, on the walk home, I, who had
maintained a moody silence all the way, plucked up heart, in the effort
to compose myself for the meeting with my wife, and asked her how she
had managed herself.

"'I,' she answered, with feminine scorn, 'I was turned away from three
hotels, before I finally understood your generous metropolitan hotel
rules, which doom traveling women to the police-stations for lodging. I
should have walked the streets, if I had not met a friend who
generously took me home with her.'

"'I hope you slept well,' I ventured, miserably.

"'I did not! Her apartments were 'way up at the top of a big, high
building; and, just as I got to sleep, there was a frightful banging at
the door, and a man--a drunken man, evidently--shouted to be let in.
"Tom," he howled, "Tom, get up! Let me in! I want to see you; it's
important. Let me in!" Now, of course, there was no "Tom" there, so I
just lay quiet, frightened to death, however; and, at last, the drunken
brute went away. But I did not sleep a wink, thanks to you and your
indifference toward my safety, and your devotion to creatures who get
black eyes. Oh, I'll tell your wife! I'll let her know!'

"We were under a street-lamp, and I pulled her to a stop, turning her
around, so that the light shone squarely on her face.

"'Maud,' I said, and I shook my forefinger at her, 'you will not tell
my wife. You will be a good and humble young woman during your stay
with us; yes, you will. You will be very discreet and very forgiving.
If you are not, I shall tell your husband that you spent last night in
the apartments of my friend Tom, your old lover.'

"And did you ever see a woman blush, my boy?--not the blush she puts on
at will, but a blush that is genuinely in earnest--a blush she cannot
help. I had my revenge as I watched her blush. She blushed in seven
colors--every color in the spectrum. Then she turned loose on Tom--an
honorable fellow, poor devil, sleeping in that cold garret for her
sake--and scourged him for telling me.

"But I stopped her with the information that I was the drunken brute
who had banged on the door, to which I added the fiction that I had
seen her go in.

"Well, we patched up a truce before we reached home, and we are good
friends to-day. Tom married her, after her husband died; and, to this
day, he is somewhat embarrassed in my presence, feeling, no doubt, that
I do not forgive his heartlessness to me on that night. I cannot
explain, and, somehow, his wife will not. I don't know why, unless it
is because she has a generous streak in her makeup, and thinks that it
will involve revelations concerning the person with the black eye."

"And could you not convince Mrs. Milner of the truth of the affair?" I
asked.

"Tried to--tried hard--but she did not believe me; or, at least, said
she did not."

"And did you ever see the interesting widow again?"

"Many times--but she never saw me!"

We smoked, silently--he, straight-faced and reminiscent, I, smiling
over the story he had told.

"May I tell this experience to the girl over yonder?" I asked.

"Well, yes; but, as I never told my wife, put the girl on her honor not
to repeat it. It may help you in your adjustment of your married life;
it may convince her that a man can be trusted out of his home."




THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE


Two men walked side by side down the steps of the Criminal Court
Building. They were dressed in "store clothes"; and, while they were
alike in type, yet they were unlike: one could not be mistaken for the
other. But they had the same facial angle; they were of about the same
age, thirty-five; each was tall, square-shouldered, and erect, and each
had the same curious gait that betokens long experience in the saddle.
The man to the right had gray eyes; the one to the left black. The one
to the right was jubilant of face; the other downcast and chagrined. As
they reached the sidewalk a man hurried out of the crowd and confronted
them. His face was perspiring, and he breathed hard.

"I've got you, Bill!" he said, laying his hand on the shoulder of the
downcast man to the left. "You're my prisoner!"

"Not much, he isn't!" answered the man to the right. "He's mine. Here's
proof." He half turned, disclosing the butt of a large pistol under his
coat.

"Oh, I've got that kind of proof, too," rejoined the newcomer, stepping
back and eying them with anger and disgust in his face. It was a face
that must have been unused to such emotional expressions; it was smooth
shaved, pink, and healthy, with keen blue eyes, the face of a man not
yet grown up, or of a boy matured before his time. He was of about the
same age, size, and build as the other two, and with the same
horseman's gait.

"Who are you," he asked, "and what have you got that man for?"

"I'm Jack Quincy, Deputy Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona; and I've
got this man, Bill Rogers, for stage robbery. Who are you?"

"I'm Walter Benson, of the Northwest Mounted Police, and I want this
man for murder. I've just come from Washington with extradition papers,
and I don't see how you can hold him."

"Possession is nine points of the law in this country, Mr. Benson, and,
while I only went to Albany for extradition papers, they're good. Left
'em inside with the Judge."

"I'll contest this case. I've come down from Manitoba for this man. My
chief put the New York police onto him, and he's our meat. Why, man, we
want him for murder, a capital offense!"

"But I've got him for robbing the Wickenburg stage, a capital offense,
too."

While this confab was going on the prisoner had been keenly and
furtively looking about, and had caught the eye of a nearby policeman,
then had significantly reached his hand behind him and patted his hip
pocket while nodding almost imperceptibly toward the disputants. The
officer summoned another policeman by the same sign language, and at
this juncture they approached.

"What you two chewin' the rag about?" demanded one, passing his hands
rapidly up and down and around the rear clothing of Quincy, while the
other as quickly "frisked" Benson. "Got a gun, I see! Got a license?"

"Here's another gun man," said the second policeman, his hand on
Benson's collar. "Got a license?"

"Yes, where's yer license?" repeated the first officer, reaching for
Quincy's collar.

And now a surprising thing happened. First, Bill Rogers, wanted for
stage robbery and murder, took to his heels and sped down the street.
Then Benson wriggled under the policeman's grasp, and by some
lightning-like trick of jiu jitsu, sent him sprawling on his back, his
limbs waving in the air like the legs of a turtle similarly upset. Then
Benson started after Rogers. Quincy tried no jiu jitsu: instead he
whipped out his gun, a long, heavy Colt's forty-five, and jammed it
into the policeman's face before the hand had reached his collar.
Involuntarily the officer started back, away from that murderous blue
tube, and before he could recover from his surprise Quincy had started
after Benson. Then the policeman followed Quincy, and his fallen
compatriot, picking himself up, followed after; but neither for long;
they were fat, and these men of the West could run as well as ride.

Down Centre Street went the chase, pursued and pursuers bowling over
pedestrians who got in the way, dodging in front of and around trolley
cars as Rogers led the way diagonally across the street. He turned into
the first cross street and reached Park Row, Benson about a hundred
feet behind, and Quincy as far in the rear of Benson. Across Park Row
went Rogers, and down the eastern walk to Catharine Street, into which
he turned, Benson after him, and Quincy keeping Benson in sight. Rogers
seemed to know where he was going. He raced down Catharine Street into
Cherry, and when halfway to the next corner burst into a small saloon,
whose proprietor, a large, beetle-browed man, stood behind the bar.

"Sailors' boarding-house, isn't it?" panted Rogers. "Hide me and ship
me! I've been to sea. North America's too hot for me."

"Yes," responded the proprietor, with quick comprehension. "Into that
back room and up the stairs. Hide anywhere. I'll stall the police."

But before Rogers could reach the back room Benson burst in, his blue
eyes flashing with excitement, and in his hand a revolver as large and
heavy as Quincy's.

"Hold on, Bill!" he snapped. "Hands up! I've got a bead on you!"

Rogers halted and turned, his hands over his head and his features
drooping in despair. Benson, still covering him, advanced and laid hold
of his collar. Then in burst Quincy, also with drawn revolver.

"Got him, have you? Good enough! I'll take him."

"Oh, no, you won't," answered Benson. "He's mine. Possession's nine
points of the law, you say." With his hand still on Rogers's collar he
covered Quincy with his weapon.

Quincy had not raised his; and he stood still, leaning forward, his
pistol pointed to the floor, while he glared at Benson.

"Now, then, stop this!" said the proprietor, sternly, as he leveled a
bright, nickel-plated revolver at Benson. "Lower that gun--quick! Lower
it--"

Benson saw out of the corner of his eye, and slowly lowered the pistol.

"You, too," he said to Quincy, as he looked at him. "Don't you raise
that shootin' iron! I'm boss here. Put 'em both on the bar, handles
first, both of you!"

There was deadly earnestness in the big man's voice, and they obeyed
him. Handles first the weapons were placed on the bar. Then Quincy
said:

"You're makin' trouble for yourself. This man is my prisoner, and
you're interfering with an officer."

"You a p'liceman?" asked the big man, as he placed the weapons under
the bar.

"I'm Deputy Sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona."

"And I'm a member of the Northwest Mounted Police," said Benson.

"You're a long way from home, and you've got no friends here. This man
has. He says he's a sailor, and I'm a friend o' sailors. Been one
myself, and I make my livin' off 'em. And when a sailor runs into my
place askin' to hide from anyone, police or not, I'm on his side every
time."

"He's no sailor," said Quincy. "He's Bill Rogers, an outlaw I came East
for."

"How about it?" asked the proprietor, turning to Rogers. "You a
sailor?"

"Have been. Can be again," answered Rogers calmly.

"Box the compass."

"North, nor'-an'-by-east, nor'-nor'east, nor'east-an'-by--"

"That's good. Which side does the main topgallant halyards lead down?"

"Port side. Fore and mizzen to starboard."

"This man's a sailor, all right. And he's not goin' out o' my place
under any man's gun, 'less he's a policeman with a warrant."

"Well, we'll get the policeman with a warrant," said Quincy, "unless
this will do." He drew forth a receipt made out by the clerk of the
court for extradition papers.

Benson stiffened up. "Here's something better," he said: "Extradition
papers issued by the authorities at Washington. It's a warrant, if
anything is." He drew forth his evidence of official integrity.

The big man examined both. "Beyond me, just now," he commented.
"However, I'm not goin' to see a sailor railroaded out o' my place till
I'm sure it's all right. Come into the back room. We'll all have a
drink and talk it over. Casey!" he yelled at the top of his voice, and
when a voice from upstairs answered he added: "Come down here an' tend
bar."

Casey, a smaller edition of the proprietor, appeared, and the three men
were led to the back room, where they seated themselves at a round
table, while the proprietor himself took their orders. The drinks were
soon served, the big man bringing one for himself, and joining them.

"Now, then," he said, lifting his glass, "we'll drink to a good-natured
settlement o' this job. What's this man done out West?"

They all drank.

"Robbed the Wickenburg stage of the first cleanup of Jim Mahar's placer
mine. About ten thousand dollars he got away with."

"Jim Mahar!" said Benson. "Why, that's the name of the man he murdered
in Manitoba."

"How about it, mate?" said the big man, turning to Rogers.

"Same man," he said quietly. "I shot him; but I never robbed him."

"You didn't?" answered Quincy, derisively. "You were recognized!"

"The mine was mine, and the dust I took I had washed out with my own
hands. He got that mine away from me on a technicality, Quincy, and you
know it."

"Oh, I know there was some dispute; but that's not my business. I'm
here to take you back, and I've got to do it."

"What's the use," said Benson, "if you haven't got a clear case against
him? Now, I have. He shot Mahar on sight, in the presence of a dozen
witnesses."

"You mean," said Rogers, "that I was quickest. He pulled first; but I
beat him to it, that's all."

"Well," said the big proprietor, "we'll have to think on this a little.
So, let's do a little thinking."

They responded to the extent of doing no more talking. Yet it could
hardly be said that they were thinking. A fog closed down on their
faculties, the room and its fittings grew misty, and in a few moments
Benson's head sagged to the table, Quincy lay back in his chair, and
Rogers slid to the floor.

"Casey," called the big man, and Casey appeared. "You needn't go to
South Brooklyn for the three men we need for the crew to-morrow
mornin'. Here's three. One's a sure sailorman, anxious to ship, and the
other two'll do. Get Tom to help you upstairs with 'em and get 'em
ready. You know the trick. Change their clothes, give 'em a bagful
each, and dip their hands in that tar bucket, then wipe most of it off
with grease. Get some from the kitchen."

And so were shanghaied a Deputy Sheriff of Arizona, a member of the
Northwest Mounted Police, and a desperate outlaw and fugitive from
justice.

They wakened about ten next morning with throbbing headaches, and clad
in greasy canvas rags, each stretched out in a forecastle bunk with a
bag of other greasy rags for a pillow. Rogers was the first to roll
out, and after a blear-eyed inspection of the forecastle, which
included the other two, he ejaculated, "Well, I'll be blanked!" Then he
shook each into sitting posture, listened to their groaning protests,
and sat down on a chest, shaking with silent laughter, while the other
two resumed the horizontal.

But he did not laugh long. Certain sounds from on deck indicated that
he would soon be wanted, and certain indications of wintry weather in
the shape of snow flurrying into the forecastle reminded him of his
raiment. He hauled out the clothes bag from his bunk and opened it. To
his surprise he found, neatly folded, his suit of store clothes; but as
this would not do for shipboard wear he sought farther, and found a
warm monkey jacket and guernsey, the property, no doubt, of some sailor
who had died in the boarding-house or run away from his board bill. He
also found a note addressed to Bill Rogers, which he read, and again
ejaculated, "I'll be blanked!" adding to it, however, the comment, "A
square boarding master." Then he punched and felt of the bag's
contents, and smiled.

Donning the guernsey and jacket, he went on deck just in time to meet a
big, bearded man who was hurrying to the forecastle door.

"So, you've sobered up, have you?" he said. "Got the whisky out o'
you?"

"Wasn't whisky, Sir," answered Rogers, recognizing an officer. "I was
doped and shanghaied, even though willing to ship. I'm an able seaman,
Sir."

"You don't look it."

"Fifteen years at sea, Sir, though the last ten ashore. I'm a bit
tender; but I know my work."

"How about the other two? Are they sailors?"

"I don't think they are, Sir," answered Rogers, with a slight grin.
"They were with me when I was doped; but I don't know much about them."

"Go aft and take the wheel. There's a farmer there that can't steer.
Let's see what you can do. I'll tend to your friends."

Rogers went to the wheel, received the spokes and the course from the
rather distressed incumbent, and, even though the ship was riding along
before a stiff quartering breeze and following sea, steered a course
good enough to win silence from the skipper--another big, bearded
man--when he next looked into the binnacle. Silence, on such occasions,
is a compliment.

The cold, fresh breeze soon cleared Rogers's head of its aches and
throbs, and he took stock of the ship and her people. She seemed to be
about twelve hundred tons' register, with no skysails, stunsails, or
other kites to make work for her crew, an easy ship, as far as wind and
weather were concerned. Rogers counted her crew--sixteen men scattered
about the decks and rigging, lashing casks, stowing lines and fenders,
and securing chafing gear aloft. The big man that had spoken to him was
undoubtedly the first mate, as was evidenced by his louder voice. The
second mate, a short, broad, square-jawed man with a smooth face, spoke
little to the men, but struck them often. Rogers saw three floored
before six bells. As for the crew, they were of all nations and types,
and by these signs he knew that she was an American ship; but nothing
yet of her name or destination. Astern was a blue spot on the horizon
which he recognized as the Highlands of Navesink, and scattered about
at various distances were out- and in-bound craft, sail and steam. But
none was within hailing range.

Just before noon he saw two men thrown out of the forecastle by the
huge first mate, and in spite of their canvas rags he recognized his
two enemies. Involuntarily Rogers smiled; but the smile left his face
when he saw that they were showing fight, and that in the fight they
were being sadly bested by the mate, aided by his confrere, the second
officer. Yet they fought as they could, and as the whirl of battle
drifted aft Rogers could hear their voices.

"I want to see the Captain!" they each declared explosively, whenever a
moment's respite enabled them to speak, and in time the reiterated
demand bore results. The Captain himself appeared, watched the conflict
for a moment, then roared out:

"Mr. Billings, that'll do! Send those men up here, and let's see what
they want."

The two mates stood back, and the disfigured Sheriff of Maricopa and
the almost unrecognizable mounted policeman climbed the poop steps and
faced the Captain in the weather alley. They were game--still full of
fight, and in no way abashed by the autocrat of the ship.

"You the Captain o' this boat?" demanded Quincy, his eyes flaming green
from the rage in his soul. "If you are, put me ashore, or I'll make you
sweat!"

"Steady as you go," answered the Captain, quietly. "I'm too big a man
to sweat. It's dangerous to make me sweat. What's on your mind?"

"Put us ashore!" yelled Benson, insanely. "Those fellows that hammered
us just now said we shipped in this boat. We did not. We were drugged
and abducted."

"Whew!" whistled the big skipper, turning his back on them for the
moment. Then he turned back and said, "What d'you want?"

"To go ashore and take our prisoner with us. We'll settle between
ourselves as to which one gets him."

"Your prisoner? Where is he?"

"That fellow standing there--steering, I suppose," answered Quincy.

The skipper turned toward Rogers. "You a prisoner?" he asked, with the
good humor coming of size and self-confidence.

"I'm wanted, Sir," said Rogers, grimly, "in Arizona and in Manitoba.
These men are what they say, officers of the law."

"What crime have you committed?"

"None, Sir," answered Rogers; "though I'm indicted in one place for
stage robbery and in the other place for murder."

"Well, well!" commented the big man. "You seem to be a dangerous
character. What are you doing aboard my ship?"

"These fellows chased me, and I went to a boarding master to get a
ship. They followed and were shanghaied with me--though I do not see
why he drugged me, Sir; I was willing to ship."

"But did you," demanded the skipper, his voice growing tense and
forceful, "rob a stage and kill a man, somewhere in the West?"

"I robbed a stage of what I owned--my own gold-dust. I killed the man
who thought I robbed him; but he pulled his gun first, and I shot in
self-defense."

"And I've come all the way from Arizona," interrupted Quincy, "to bring
this man back for trial. And--I want him!"

"And I've come from Manitoba," added Benson, "where he's wanted for
murder."

The skipper turned to Rogers and said calmly, "By your own admission
you are a fugitive from justice; hence, entitled to no sympathy from
me." Then he turned to the two others and said, "You men put up a
plausible story of being shanghaied. If you told it at the dock where I
could get two men to replace you, I might put you ashore. As it is,
fifty miles outside of Sandy Hook, I can do nothing of the kind. This
ship's time is valuable, worth about a hundred dollars a day, and I
can't stop to signal and put you aboard an inbound craft. You're signed
on my articles--John Quincy and Walter Benson; though I don't know
which is which. But the fact is that here you stay, and you work, and
earn your grub and what pay I choose to put you on."

"But we did not agree," yelled Quincy. "You have no warrant in law for
this procedure."

"I have my articles. I did not ship you, as I was not in the shipping
office; but I bargained with a crimp for sixteen men, and he gave me
fourteen and you two."

"Well," said Quincy, quietly, "you seem to be in power here, and
responsible to no one that we can reach. But I'll tell you that the
State of Arizona will swarm about your ears, and that you'll sweat, big
as you are!"

"And I'll tell you," spoke up Benson, "that the Secretary of State at
Washington will hear from the Governor General at Ottawa!"

"Get out o' this!" exploded the Captain. "Get off the poop, you
four-legged farmers! Sweat, will I? All right; but you'll sweat, the
both of you, before you see your friends again! Here, Mr. Billings," he
roared to the first mate amidships, "and Mr. Snelling! Come up here,
and turn these men to!"

The two mates answered and appeared.

"Turn them to," said the Captain, speaking slowly and softly. "Take the
starch out of 'em, and make 'em sweat."

The scene that ensued was too painful even for Rogers to witness or
describe, except in its salient points. Billings and Snelling pounced
upon the two insurgents, struck, buffeted, kicked, and vilified them
with foul-mouthed abuse, until they had borne them off the poop,
forward along the main deck, and to the vicinity of the forecastle,
where the two victims, subdued and quiescent, were willing to dart for
cover, when the two mates gave over and went aft.

Rogers at the wheel had watched the scene, at first with a smile; but
the smile grew less as he saw the battered men hurled right and left
under the blows of the mates, and when at last the punishment was ended
his face was serious and resentful. Some criminals do not lose the
qualities of forgiveness and mercy. His mood was increased when the big
skipper faced him and said:

"A fugitive from justice, are you? Well, I'll see that the Consul at
Melbourne gets you. I want no jailbirds in my ship."

Which gave Rogers occasion to think.

Rogers was relieved at one bell (half-past twelve), and went forward to
his dinner. As he descended the poop steps he met the big first mate,
coming out of the forward companion picking his teeth.

"So," he said to Rogers, "you're a bad man from the West, I hear. Held
up a stage and then killed the man you robbed!"

"You've got things wrong, Sir," answered Rogers respectfully.

"None o' your lip!" thundered the officer. "You may be a bad man from
the West; but I'm a bad man from the East, and I'm here to take the
badness out o' bad men!"

Then, before Rogers could dodge, he launched forth his fist and struck
him. The blow knocked him off his feet, and he rose with nose bleeding
and eyes closing.

"Just to show you," commented the mate, "that I'm a badder man than
you."

Rogers did not answer; in fact, no answer was necessary or wise. He
walked forward, and, partly from his half-blindness, partly from his
disorganized state of mind, passed to windward of Snelling, the second
mate, who was coming aft to dinner. Snelling said nothing in the way of
prelude, but crashed his fist on Rogers's already mutilated face, and
sent him again to the deck. As Rogers struggled to his feet he said:

"You pass to looward o' me when we meet, or I'll make you jump
overboard!"

And again Rogers saw the wisdom of silence and went on to the
forecastle.

The watches had not yet been chosen; but half the crew had eaten, and
he joined the other half, finding in his clothes bag a new sheath knife
and belt, a tin pan, pannikin, and spoon, which articles are always
furnished to a shipped man by the boarding masters, no matter how he
has been shipped. To his surprise, as he attacked the dinner, he found
Quincy and Benson, each with a similar outfit of tinware, toying with
the food, and paying no attention to the polyglot discourse of the
other men regarding the ship, the mates, and the food. But they glared
menacingly at Rogers as he entered.

"This your work, Rogers?" demanded Quincy. "Were you in cahoots with
that saloonkeeper?"

"Shut up!" answered Rogers, stabbing at a piece of salt beef with his
knife.

"We won't shut up!" said Benson, spooning up pea soup with his brand
new tin spoon. "This increases your sentence to the extent of a shorter
shrift."

"Go to the devil, the pair of you! I was doped and shanghaied myself,
and I've run foul o' the mates, same as you did--and for less reason,
too."

"Well, they'll sweat for this, and you, too, Rogers!" said Quincy.

"Shut up! You're up against something now that gunplay doesn't figure
in. You're aboard a Yankee hell ship, and you've got to make the best
of it."

"I wouldn't if I had my gun," said Quincy, moodily.

"Yes," added Benson, "with a gun I could have my own way."

Rogers straightened back, looked them steadily in their faces, and
said, "If you had your guns, what would you do?"

"Make this ship put back and land us," answered Quincy.

"Benson," said Rogers, "what would you do with a gun?"

"Shoot 'em full of holes until they turned this boat back."

"Are you game?" said Rogers. "Understand that you'll be alone. I
wouldn't help you; for, having been a sailor, I know what mutiny means
in the courts. I'd rather go back with either of you to stand trial
than to engage in open mutiny."

"Hang your mutiny!" said Quincy. "We're not sailors; we never agreed to
make this voyage. I'm an officer of the law."

"Feel the same way, Benson?" asked Rogers.

"The same. Give me a gun, and I'll make that Captain and his two
assistants walk a chalkline."

The rest of the men, engaged with their dinner, had paid no attention
to this discourse, and Rogers rose up, reached into his bag, and
produced the note he had found there on wakening. "Listen," he said:

    "'BILL ROGERS:--You seem to be a square fellow and up against it. I
    had to dope you because you would not have signed if you knew the
    other two would have gone along. But I needed just three men; so I
    doped you all. You'll find their guns and belts in your bag. Of
    course, you will know what to do if you get in trouble. Good luck.'

"Now," said Rogers, "those guns are not now in my bag, and you can't
find them without my say-so; but, if I put you onto them, will you call
it off? Will you let up, and go back reporting that I had escaped? If
you get ashore by any means, will you take me with you and turn me
loose?"

They each looked steadily at Rogers for a moment or two; then Quincy
spoke.

"If you can furnish me my gun, Bill, it's all off. I'll resign my job,
if necessary; but I won't hunt you any more."

"Benson?" asked Rogers.

"The Canadian Mounted Police and the whole Colonial Government can go
hang. Give me a gun, Rogers, and I'll trouble you no more!"

Rogers was about to speak, when the big first mate appeared at the
forecastle door, and said in the forceful manner of deep-water mates:

"Turn to. Where's that bloody-minded stage robber? Hey! Here you are!
Get aft to the wheel again. You can steer, if you are a murderer."

"All right, Sir," answered Rogers, deferentially, and then, in a
whisper to the two, he said, "In my bag, halfway down. Two guns and two
belts."

Then Bill Rogers, desperado, outlaw, and fugitive from justice, went to
the wheel, and as he steered he smiled again, grimly and painfully, for
his nose hurt.

Billings had followed him aft, up on the poop, and to the vicinity of
the after companion, where he stood, waiting for the Captain. Snelling,
having finished his dinner, had gone forward to oversee the men, all of
whom were now on deck and scattering to their various tasks. That is,
all but two. Quincy and Benson, each one girdled with a beltful of
cartridges, each carrying a heavy revolver, each scowling wickedly,
were marching up to Snelling.

"Hands up!" said Quincy, sternly. "Up with 'em and go back to the other
end of the boat!"

Involuntarily, it seemed, the second mate obeyed. Up went his hands
over his head. Then, remembering that he was second mate, he answered,
"What's this? Mutiny! Put them guns down!"

Quincy's gun spat out a red tongue, and Snelling's cap left his head.

"Next time I'll aim lower," said Quincy. "Right about face! March!"

Snelling was impressed. With his hands aloft he wheeled and preceded
them to the poop steps, up which he climbed.

But Billings had noticed, and acted. With a shout down the companion to
the Captain, he whipped out a pocket revolver and hurried forward in
the alley to meet the procession. But he did not use that revolver.
Benson took quick aim and fired, and coincident with the report the
nickel-plated weapon left his hand, whirling high in air before falling
overboard. Billings whinnied in pain, and, rubbing his benumbed hand,
backed aft before the advancing Snelling.

Then, up the companion on a run, came the Captain, a fat cigar in his
mouth and a look of wonder and astonishment on his face. Benson and
Quincy were now in the alley, and again a pistol spoke--Quincy's, this
time--and the fat cigar left the Captain's mouth in two pieces.

"Hands up, all three of you," yelled Quincy, "or we'll shoot to kill!
Found out, haven't you, that we can shoot--some? That's our trade. Up
with your hands!"

Both Captain and mate raised their hands, but the former protested.

"This is mutiny, you scoundrels! D'you know the penalty? Ten years!"

"It won't be ten minutes," answered Quincy. "Call it what you like,
mutiny, burglary, or pistol practice. But I'll tell you what it sure
will be, if you don't come to time. It'll be a pig killing, and
justifiable manslaughter in the courts. I know something about law, and
I've got you for abduction. A man abducted has a right to defend
himself, and I'll kill you if you don't head this boat for land and put
us ashore."

"Yes," added Benson, "and we'll take our prisoner with us, too!"

"Sure," said Quincy. "Bill Rogers goes, too. Come, now, what do you
say?"

"I say, by Gawd," roared the Captain, red in the face with rage and the
strain on his muscles, "that I won't! If this ship goes back, you'll
take her back yourself, with me and my mates under duress. It's ruinous
to agree to such a proposition. I'd lose this ship and never get
another."

"Very well," said Quincy, quietly. "Then we'll put you fellows under
arrest. And if you resist we'll shoot you to pieces. Rogers," he turned
to the smiling helmsman, "can you steer this boat back to the United
States?"

"I can't find New York," answered Rogers; "but the United States is due
west."

"Can you steer due west?"

"Yes; but the yards must be braced. The wind is hauling to the north,
and we could make a fair wind of it."

"Can you attend to this--bracing of the yards?"

"Yes. I've been second mate."

"Right, Benson, go through them all and take away their guns, if they
have any!" Then he raised his voice and called forward to the men, who
had stopped work and were watching curiously the strange scene on the
poop. "One of you fellows get a piece of small rope cord. Bring it up
here and tie these fellows' hands behind their backs."

While Benson searched the pockets of the trio--finding no weapons,
however--a man had secured a ball of spun yarn from the booby hatch and
ran up the poop steps with it. Then, under the influence of those long,
blue tubes, the Captain and the two mates lay down on their faces,
while the sailor securely bound their wrists behind them.

"Now, then," said Quincy, "you're in command, Rogers. We'll police this
boat, and make these men obey all your orders."

"Take the wheel here!" said Rogers to the sailor. "Stand by to wear
ship!" Then he mounted the cabin, and emitted a sailorly yell to the
crew. "All hands down from aloft! Weather main and lee crowjack
braces!"

                     *      *      *      *      *

In the dawn of the following morning some early rising fishermen of the
Jersey coast saw a black ship with all canvas set resting quietly on
the sands about two hundred yards from the beach, a white boat, empty
of everything but oars, hauled out above high-water mark, and on
boarding the ship they found and released three chilled, hungry, and
angry men from the lazaret. But not a sign of her crew did they see.




SHOVELS AND BRICKS


Mr. John Murphy, boarding master, was on bad terms with himself. He had
been kicked off the poop-deck of Captain Williams's big ship, the
_Albatross_, lying off Tompkinsville, waiting to dock, thence to the
gangway, and from there shoved, struck in the face, and further kicked
and maltreated until he had flopped into the boat at the foot of the
steps. Williams was a six-footer, a graduate "bucko" now in charge of
this big skysail-yarder, and he had resented Murphy's appearance on
board with whisky and kind words for his men before he was through with
them. Not caring to dock his ship with the help of riggers at five
dollars a day, he had called Murphy aft, lectured him on the ethics and
proprieties of seafaring, and then had punished him for an indiscreet
reference to the rights of boarding masters who must needs solicit
boarders in order to make a living. All that Murphy could do under the
circumstances was to shout up from the boat his defiance of Captain
Williams, and a threat to prevent his getting a new crew when ready to
sail--which was clearly within his power as a member of the Association
of Boarding and Shipping Masters. But Williams, red-bearded,
angry-faced, and victorious, replied with injunctions to descend to the
infernal regions and remain there, and Murphy pulled ashore and took
the boat to New York, bent upon vengeance.

At the door of his boarding-house in Front Street he met Hennesey, his
runner. Hennesey was a small man, sly, shrewd, and persuasive, and so
far had given satisfaction in the difficult business of soliciting
incoming crews to board at Murphy's house instead of the Sailors' Home,
the Provident Seamen's Mission, and other like institutions. But
Murphy's mood was strong upon him, and he asked, peremptorily:

"Well, what did ye git?"

"Nothin'; the Mission launch wuz on hand and the bunch wint in a body."

"Dom yer soul, what do I pay ye fur, anyhow?" stormed Murphy. "Are ye
no good? Tell me thot. Are ye no good at all? What are ye takin' my
money fur?"

"To git sailors to come to yer house on commission," retorted Hennesey,
hotly; "an' fur fear I'd be makin' too much, ye sind me to a bloody
coaster, whose min are in the union, while you go down to the
_Albatross_, in from deep water."

"I got no wan from the _Albatross_."

"No fault o' yours or mine. I'd ha' got 'em."

"None o' yer shlack."

"To hill wi' ye."

"Ye're discharged. Come in an' I'll pay ye off."

"Right ye are. From this on I'll work fur mesilf and git your business,
ye skin."

Hennesey's estimate of Murphy was not far wrong, though it might also
apply to himself. The profits of a sailors' boarding-house depend not
upon the cash paid in by men with money, who choose their own ship and
come and go as they please, but upon the advance or allotment of pay
which the law allows to deep-water seamen in order that they may
purchase an outfit of clothing before sailing. To get this allotment,
Murphy and others of his kind would take in and feed any penniless
sailor long enough to run up an inflated bill for board, money lent,
and clothing, then find him a ship and walk him to the shipping-office,
more or less drugged or drunk. Here the penniless sailor dared not,
even if suspicious, contest the claim, for, should he do so, he would
find himself not only out of a ship, but out of a boarding-house; so he
would sign away his allotment, and go aboard with what clothing his
benefactor had allowed him. As deep-water men on shore are invariably
drunk, drugged, or penniless, the boarding-masters, to whom the
skippers must apply for men, easily control the situation. And, as
machinery for such control, nearly all boarding-houses have the front
ground floor divided into barroom and clothing-store, while in the rear
is the dining-room and upstairs the bedrooms, each with as many beds as
there is room for. Thus, a man may be housed, fed, clothed, drugged,
and shipped from the same address. The remedy for this has no place in
this story.

A boarding-master, or crimp, without the machinery, becomes a
shipping-master, a go-between between the skipper and the
boarding-master, whose income is the blood-money paid by skippers for
men. Murphy, strolling along South Street a few days later, saw a new
sign over a doorway--Timothy Hennesey, Shipping-Master. He ascended the
wooden stairs, and in a dingy room with one desk and chair found his
former aid.

"Well, what the hill is this, Hennesey--tryin' to take the brid out of
honest min's mouths?"

"I've me livin' to make, Murphy, an' I'm a-doin' it. I got the crew of
the _Albatross_."

"An' what did ye do wid 'em?"

"Put 'em wid Stillman, over beyant. Ye might ha' had 'em had ye played
fair."

Stillman was Murphy's most important rival, and the news did not cheer
him. He glared darkly at Hennesey.

"An' I've got the shippin' o' Williams's new crew whin he sails,"
continued Hennesey, "an' I'll not go to you for 'em, Murphy."

"Ye'll not?" responded Murphy, luridly. "After all the wark I've given
ye."

"I'll not. I told ye I'd git yer business, an' I'll do it."

Murphy's fist shot out and Hennesey went down. Arising with bleeding
nose, he shook his small fist at his chuckling assailant passing
sidewise out of his door.

"I'll not forgit thot, John Murphy," he spluttered.

"I don't want ye to. Remember it while ye live; an' there's more where
thot cum from, too, ye scab."

At a meeting of the brotherhood that evening, Murphy posted the name of
Timothy Hennesey, scab, and Captain Williams, outlaw; then, somewhat
easier in his mind, took account of the immediate business situation.
It was bad; he had three cash boarders, of no use when their money was
gone, as they signed in coasters, and there was but one ship in port,
the _Albatross_, and none expected for a fortnight. So, leaving
orders with his wife to watch the cash register in the bar, and to
evict the boarders when they asked for trust, he took the train for
Chicago, where lived a prosperous brother, for whom he had a sincere
regard, and to whom he owed a long-promised visit. Brother Mike
welcomed him, and under the softening influence of brotherly love he
forgave Hennesey, but not Williams. It is so much easier to warm toward
a fellow man you have punched than toward one who has punched you.

Mike took John down to his coal-docks, with which he was amassing a
fortune, and explained their workings. A schooner lay at one, and his
gang was unloading her. It was a cold day in November, and their warm
overcoats felt none too warm; yet down in the hold of the schooner were
men bare to the waist, black as negroes with coal dust, save where the
perspiration cleared white channels as it ran down their backs and
breasts--keeping themselves warm with the violence of their exertions.
There were two to each of the three hatches; and there were six others
on the dock runway, wheeling the coal away; they had nearly unloaded
the schooner, having cleared away the coal directly under the hatch,
and were now loading their buckets at the two piles farther back,
between the hatches. These buckets stood as high as their waists, and
held, according to Brother Mike, five hundred pounds when full. But a
man, having filled it to the brim, would seize the bale and drag it
along the flooring to the hatch, unhook a descending bucket, hook on
the full one, sing out an inarticulate cry, and drag the empty back to
the coal to be filled in its turn--all with a never-lessening display
of extravagant muscular force.

"Heavens! what wark!" said John, as they peered down the hatch. "An'
how long do they kape this up?"

"Tin hours a day, and not a minute longer," answered Mike; "that is,
barrin' fifteen minutes at tin in the mornin' and three in the
afternoon, whin they knock off for a bite and a drink up at me place on
the corner. They go up and ate up me free lunch and soak in about a
pint of whisky at one drink."

"The divil! and don't it kill thim?"

"Naw. They come back and sweat it out. They couldn't wurruk like this
widout it."

"It's great work, Mike. Look at the devilopment. Did ye iver see a
prize-fighter with such muscles?"

"A prize-fighter!" said Mike. "Jawn Murphy, luk at them. They're all
sizes, big and little, in my two gangs; but give the littlest a month's
trainin' in the science o' boxin' and he'd lick any heavyweight in the
wurruld. Ye see, ye simply can't hurt 'em."

"Can't hurt 'em?"

"Ye can't hurt 'em. They're not human. They're wild beasts. They come
from the hills and bogs of Limerick and Galway, and they can't speak
the language, but call themselves Irishmin. Well, Jawn, they're Irish,
mebbe, as the American Injun's an American; but they're not like you
and me, dacent min from Dublin."

"But if they can't speak the language, how do ye git on wid 'em?"

"Once in a while, when they're cool and tranquil, I get on to a word or
two, but usually I fall back on moral suasion and the sign language."

"Moral suasion?"

"I swear at 'em. And thin, whin that fails, I use the sign language.
That's good in talkin' to any foreigner, Jawn."

"But what is it, the sign language?"

"A brick. See this, Jawn?" Mike held up one side of his coat, and John
felt of an oblong protuberance in the right-hand pocket. "I carry a
brick at all times, Jawn, for it's the only thing that appeals to their
sinsibilities. I used to carry a club, but it didn't wurruk; they'd get
back at me wid their shovels, and it's domned inconvanient, Jawn, to be
sliced up wid a shovel. So, I carry a brick."

"Do they git that way often?"

"Yis; it's their natural condition. They'd rather fight than ate, and I
don't dare hire a man from another county in one gang, for fear they'll
kill him; so this is the Galway gang, and up the dock a bit is the
Limerick gang, twilve min to each. They're all alike, but think they're
different, so I have to be careful. But, while they'd rather fight than
ate, they'd rather wurruk than fight, and that's where I come in. I
kape 'em apart, and stir up their jealousy. Each gang 'll wurruk like
hill to bate the other."

"And what do ye pay thim?"

"By the job. They stick to factory hours, and won't wurruk overtime,
but at tin hours a day they make about eight dollars."

"The divil! But that's big pay."

"Yis; but I have to pay it, for no other class o' min can do the
wurruk. Why, it 'ud kill an American or a Dootchman!"

"They must have money saved up."

"All that they don't spind at me bar up on the corner. They have to
save some, for in the nature o' things I can't git it all back. And
they're all goin' back to the old sod whin navigation closes--in about
two weeks. This'll be about their last job."

"They'll come to New York and take passage, I suppose."

"Yis; and I'll have to buy their tickets and ship thim. They don't know
much about American money, and wid a new man I have to pay him in
English money at first, until he finds it's no good; thin I exchange at
a discount."

"Fine, Mike; ye'll be rich before long."

"That I will, if the supply of bog-trottin' savages holds out."

At this juncture one of the men in the hold lifted his sooty
countenance and, with the vehemence of a lunatic, delivered this:

"Whythilldonye'veaharseut'lldothwark?"

"Dry up," said Mike, pulling the brick from his pocket. "Dry up or I'll
hurt yer feelin's."

The man shrank back out of sight, and Mike put the brick back in his
pocket.

"What did he say?" queried John.

"He objicts to the speed o' the harse on the dock. He can fill buckets,
ye see, faster than the harse can h'ist 'em. That's what ails him."

"And he's afraid o' the brick?"

"Yis; but o' nothin' else. Thim fellers don't fear a gun, so I don't
carry one. Why, a while back, there was a bad time at the corner whin
the two gangs got mixed up, and the police cum down. They used their
guns, but--hill! the bullets just punctured their skins, and they
picked thim out wid their fingers and wint for the coppers and done
thim up. I tell ye, Jawn, that a wild Irishman, frish from the bogs and
the hills, can outwork, outfight, and outeat any man alive."

"Outeat?"

"I give thim mate three times a day. If it wuzn't for the profits o'
the bar, it wud brek me. And, say, Jawn, they can't say 'mate' whin
they ask for more. They say 'mate.'"

"'Mate'? And can't they say 'mate,' whin they ate it so much?"

"No, Jawn, they sing out for mate. It's no use; they can't spake the
language, and it's no use t'achin' thim. They're good min to
wurruk--all bone and sole leather, but ye can't refine thim."

"You can't, Mike, but I kin."

"How, ye skeptic? Luk at 'em. Scratch 'em, and they won't bleed. Shoot
'em, and they'll pick out the bullets and paste ye wid 'em. Reason wid
'em, and they'll insult ye. Refine 'em, Jawn! Ye're crazy. Luk at thot
felly down there under the hatch. He's here on his weddin' trip, but he
lift his wife behind in the old country."

"That makes no difference," answered John, ruminatively; "I can refine
'em. Make sure, Mike, that whin they come to New York they come to my
house in Front Street. I'll feed 'em mate three times a day again' the
time they take the ship for the old sod. I'll be good to thim, Mike.
Send thim to me."

"Ay, John, I will thot. But ye'll nade to square yerself wid yer
butcher in advance if ye think to feed thim wolfs. They're hungry and
they're thirsty be nature."

"Never mind. Send thim on, both factions. I'll take care o' thim.
They're a fine lot o' min, and I'll be good to 'em."

John verified Mike's description of them when they met, both gangs, at
their afternoon recess in Mike's barroom. They conversed in shouts and
whoops, uttering words that, while they bore a slight resemblance to
English, were in the main unintelligible. Murphy endeavored to find
those whose sole-leather flesh had stopped a bullet, but could not.
However, digging his fingers into the breasts and shoulders of a few of
the quietest convinced him that the story could not be far wrong. The
stiffened muscles felt like bones.

He treated them all, and was glad, when he saw them drink, that he had
not promised them free whisky at his house; but he reiterated his
promise of "mate" three times a day, and secured their promise to board
at his house while waiting for sailing-day. This done, he finished his
visit and returned to New York.

His first task was to estimate the business situation; it was the same,
except that his boarders had gone at the request of Mrs. Murphy. This
was good, almost as good as the news that Williams's old crew had
scattered and that there was not a deep-water man in port to aid
Hennesey in his first job in the shipping business. He cautiously
hunted for Hennesey, meeting him by accident, as he said, in the street
at daytime, safe from possible bricks or clubs coming out of the dark.

"And how are ye, Tim?" he said, exuberantly, as he extended his hand.

"So so," answered Hennesey, ignoring the greeting and eying his late
employer suspiciously. "And how is it wid you?"

"Fine, Hennesey, fine. In a week I'll have as fine a crew of min in me
house as iver ye laid eyes on. Lake sailors, every wan o' thim. And
I'll be after havin' to find thim a ship."

"That's easier than to find the min," said Hennesey, still watching for
a sudden demonstration of Murphy's fist. "I'll be goin' to Philadelphy,
I think, or Boston."

"And it'll cost ye a hundred, Hennesey. I've done it. It takes a cool
hundred to bring a crew on from either port. Don't be a fule, Hennesey.
I'm domned sorry I slugged ye. I wuz put out, ye see, but I felt bad
about it nixt day. I can't deal wid Williams, the dog, but I can wid
you, and you can wid him."

"Speak up. What do ye want, John Murphy?"

"That we git together, Hennesey, for our mutual advantage. Give up this
idee of gittin' me business away from me. Ye can't do it. I'm too well
established, and the only skipper I've blacklisted is Williams, and
he's all ye've got."

"What do I git out of it?"

"Ye git your blood-money from Williams, widout huntin' up yer min. I
git the allotment agin' the expense I'm put to in feedin' thim. The
regular thing, except thot ye make more than ye would as a runner--only
ye've got to muster 'em into the shippin'-office and sign 'em. I can't
appear. Williams might be there, and cold-deck the deal."

"Murphy, gimme me job back and I'm wid ye. But I want me priveleges--a
drink whin I nade it, and access to the bar for me frinds."

"Right, Hennesey; let bygones be bygones. Put this job through as
shippin'-master, and thin go on wid me as runner. Shake hands."

They shook, Murphy joyous and forgiving, Hennesey cold, suspicious, and
unforgiving. A handshake is a poor auditing of a fist blow.

"Whin does Williams want his min?" asked Murphy.

"In two weeks, about. Twinty-four able seamen."

"Thot's good. I'll have to feed 'em a week, and thot's dead loss; but
I'll be contint; yes, I'll be contint, Hennesey, if I can furnish
Williams wid the right kind of a crew, God d--bliss him!"

"Ye're gittin' religion, are ye not?" asked Hennesey. "I heard he
slugged ye around decks and bundled ye down into yer boat.'"

"Yes"--and Murphy's eyes shone--"but thot's all past, Hennesey. I'm not
the man to hold a grudge. Ye know thot."

"But I am," muttered Hennesey, as they parted.

And thus did Murphy plan his dark vengeance upon Captain Williams. It
went through without a hitch; the twenty-four wild men from Galway and
Limerick, shipped on by Brother Mike, arrived at Murphy's house in a
few days, and were housed and fed--"mate" with every meal--to the
scandal of Mrs. Murphy, who averred that she "niver seed such min."

"Fur they have no table manners, John," she said. "What's the use
givin' thim knives and forks, whin they don't know how to use thim?
Foor o' thim cut their mouths."

"Niver mind, Norah," said Murphy, kindly. "Give thim spoons; for a
spoon is like a shovel, ye know, and they're accustomed to shovels. And
give 'em bafe stew and mashed praties."

"I'll give 'em rat pizen, if I have to sarve 'em much longer,"
responded the good lady. "I was a silf-respictin' woman before I
married you, John Murphy, and didn't have to consort wid lunatics."

"Niver mind, Norah," answered Murphy, soothingly. "I'll be rid o' thim
in a few days, and ye'll have a new driss out o' the proceeds."

The proceeds were secured. Murphy collected a week's board in advance
from each, and induced them to deposit their money with him for
safe-keeping. Then he got them drunk on his tried and true whisky, and
kept them so; then he collected ten dollars from each for a ticket to
Queenstown on the ship which would sail in a few days; and then he
audited an account for each, charging them with money advanced as they
asked for it. As he always trebled the amount that they asked for, and
as they were too drunk and befuddled to contest the word of so good and
kind a man, Murphy had a tidy sum due him when the allotments were
signed.

This happened in due time and form. Captain. Williams, knowing by
experience that no crew would sign with him if he showed himself,
remained away from the shipping-office and took his ship down to the
Horseshoe with the help of his two mates, cook, steward, and a tug,
leaving his articles in the care of Hennesey, and trusting to him to
sign the crew and bring them down in the tug that would tow him out
past the light-ship.

Hennesey did his part. As the _Albatross_ was bound for Liverpool _via_
Queenstown in ballast, there was only part deception in walking the
twenty-four to the shipping-office to sign their names (or marks) on
the ship's articles, which they cheerfully did, under the impression
that it was a necessary matter of form connected with their purchase of
tickets; and while the Shipping Commissioner marveled somewhat at the
hilarity and the ingenuous self-assertiveness of this crew of
sailormen, he forebore to express himself, and left the matter to
Captain Williams and Providence. So, with all their allotment or
advance signed away to Murphy against the entertainment they had
received, and with their pockets depleted from their sublime trust in
Murphy's bookkeeping, they went back to the boarding-house, the signed
slaves of Bucko Bill Williams, a man they had not met.

It was a wild night, that last night in the boarding-house. The Galways
and the Limericks got to fighting, and only Murphy's "pull" with the
police prevented a raid. Mrs. Murphy quit the scene early in the
evening, going back to her mother with unkind comments on the company
that Murphy kept, and Murphy, with a brick in his pocket, and sometimes
in his hand, was busy each minute in settling a dispute between this
man and that. At last he and Hennesey agreed that it was time to quiet
them; so Hennesey, behind the bar, filled twenty-four pint flasks, each
with a moderate addition of "knockout drops," and with much flourish of
oratory brought the crowd up to the bar for a last drink and the
presentation of the flasks. The drinks were also seasoned, and soon
Murphy and Hennesey had a long hour's work in lifting the twenty-four
able seamen up to the bedrooms, to sleep until the express wagons came
to take them and their dunnage to the tug. They came at ten o'clock,
and the unconscious men were carried down with their grips and boxes,
and loaded in like so many bags of potatoes.

"It's done, Hennesey," said Murphy, as, perspiring and fatigued, he
fetched back into the barroom. "Now, Hennesey, let's you and me have a
drink, and we'll drink to the health and the happiness of Bucko Bill
Williams, the dog."

"Right," said Hennesey, going behind the bar and bringing out the
bottle and the glasses; "but we'll need to hurry, Murphy, for I've got
to go down wid the tug, ye know." As he spoke he passed his hand over
the glass he had placed for Murphy, and Murphy, glancing out through
the door at the departing express wagons, did not see.

But Hennesey had another express wagon in reserve, and when Murphy
sagged down and sought the nearest chair and table, too stupefied to
even wonder at his sleepiness, Hennesey called this wagon from the
corner and, with the help of the driver, bundled Murphy into it,
climbed in himself, and rode down to the dock and the waiting tug.

                     *      *      *      *      *

It was broad daylight when Murphy woke, in a forecastle bunk, with a
dull, dragging pain in his head which he knew from experience was the
after effects of a drug. He rolled out, noticing that each bunk held a
sleeping man, and, examining a few, recognized his boarders. The plan
had succeeded, but why was he there? Then he remembered that last
drink, and calling down silent curses upon Hennesey, went out on deck.

The big ship was plowing along before the wind with not a rag set
except the foretopmast-staysail and jib. Amidships was a man coiling up
ropes, at the wheel was another man, and pacing the top of the
after-house was Captain Williams, red-bearded, red-eyed, and truculent
of gesture and expression. These three bore marks of hard usage,
bruises, black eyes, swollen noses, and contusions. Murphy climbed the
forecastle deck and looked astern. The land was a thin line of blue on
the horizon.

He descended and went aft. The man coiling ropes, whom Murphy learned
later was the first mate, looked furtively at him as he passed, and
turned in his tracks so as not to show him his back. Murphy judged that
he was nervous over something that had happened--something connected
with his injuries. Climbing the poop steps, he was stopped by Captain
Williams, who descended from the house and faced him.

"Well, Murphy, what the hell are _you_ doing here? Are you in on this
deal?"

"What deal, Captain?" asked Murphy, meekly, for it was no place for
self-respect.

"This deal I got from your discharged runner, Hennesey. I only dealt
with the fellow because he told me he had quit you. And look at what he
gave me for a crew--twenty-four wild Micks that, let alone the ropes,
can't speak English or understand it. Are you a party to this trick,
Murphy?"

"I'm not," declared Murphy, stoutly. "The domned villain doped me last
night, and must ha' put me aboard wid the crew he shipped for you. What
for, I don't know. He had yer full count, as he told me."

"Guess you're the man he hoisted up himself, saying you were willing to
work your passage without pay. So I let you come and sleep it off."

"He did!" stormed Murphy, "the dirty, ungrateful dog! I took him in and
gave him wark, and I took him back after I'd discharged him. And now I
git this! O' course, Captain, ye'll put me aboard the first ship me
meet bound in."

"Not much, I won't. If you took Hennesey back you're in on this deal."

"I'm not in it. Where's Hennesey now, Captain Williams?"

"Went back in the tug, I suppose. He didn't stop to get his receipt
signed for the men he delivered. So, he gets no money for this kind of
a crew. They're not sailors, and he loses. Moreover, Murphy, you lose.
Hennesey brought me the articles, and every man Jack o' them signed his
allotment over to you as favored creditor. That means that Hennesey got
this bunch out of your house. As they're not sailors, I mean to disrate
them to boys at five dollars a month. That's the allotment you get, if
you care to sue for it; but I told the tug captain to notify the owners
to pay no allotment notes."

"Ye did?" spluttered Murphy. "Well, Williams, I'll sue, don't ye fear.
I'll sue."

"That's as may be," said Williams, coldly. "Meanwhile, you'll sing
small, do what you're told, and work your passage; and any time that
you forget where you are, call on me and I'll tell you."

"Ye want me to wark me passage, do ye? And what'll I do? It's gone
twinty years since I've been to sea. I can't go aloft, wi' the fat on
me."

"I see," said the skipper, seriously, "that your displacement is more
than your dimensions call for. Can you boss that bunch of Kollkenny
cats?"

"I can," said Murphy, mournfully and hopelessly, "if ye'll do yer
share. Give me a brick to carry in me pocket, and I'll make 'em wark.
They're rival factions from Limerick and Galway, and each side'll wark
like hill to bate the other. I can stir 'em up to this, but I can't
control thim widout a brick."

"All right. Dig a brick out of the galley floor. Anything in reason to
get sail on this ship. The topsails 'll do till they learn."

"All right, Captain," said Murphy, meekly. "I'm in for it, and I've got
to make the best of it. Shall I rouse 'em out now?"

"No; they're no good till sober. But steal their bottles before they
wake. You fitted them out with some pretty strong stuff, I take it.
They wakened at daylight, just as the tug came, mobbed the faces off me
and the two mates, and only manned the windlass at last when I told
them it made the boat go. Well, I can understand the rivalry. They took
sides, each gang together, and hove on the brakes, faster than I ever
saw a windlass go round before. When they'd got the anchor apeak and
the mate told them to stop it made no difference. They hove the anchor
up to the hawse-pipes, and would have parted the chain if it had been
weaker. Then they took another drink out of their bottles and went to
sleep. The tug pushed us out past the light-ship and left us. So, here
we are."

"Well, Captain," said the subdued Murphy, "I'll git me brick, and let
me ask ye. If ye've any shovels lyin' loose, stow 'em away. A shovel is
a deadly weapon in the hands o' wan o' these fellys."

Murphy went forward to the galley, and soon had pried out a solid,
well-preserved brick from under the stove in the galley floor, against
the aggrieved protest of the Chinese cook.

"Dry up, ye Chink," said Murphy. "Tell me, though, what's the bill o'
fare for the forecastle. Mate three times a day?"

"Meat foul timey one week," answered the Chinaman.

"God help ye, doctor!" said Murphy, kindly. "Kape well widin yer
galley, and have a carvin'-knife sharp; or better still, dig out
another brick for yersilf. I've troubles o' me own."

Stepping out of the galley, Murphy met Hennesey emerging from the port
forecastle door.

"Well, ye rakin's o' Newgate, and what are _you_ doin' here?" he
demanded, fiercely. "Ye doped me successfully, Hennesey, and here I am
wid our account unsettled. But what brings _you_ here?"

"Kape yer hands off me, John Murphy, and I'll tell ye. The dope in the
bottles was too strong for me, but not for thim. When they wakened at
daylight they found me among 'em with the tug alongside, and insisted
that I drink wid thim 'fore goin' aboard the tug."

"And ye did?"

"I did. They had their fingers at me throat, Murphy. So I drank. I git
this for tryin' to help you out in your schemes, John Murphy."

"And I git this for not watchin' you, Tim Hennesey. Gwan aft; the old
man 'll make ye a bosun like me; then come forrard and git yerself a
brick agin' the time whin they wake up. Our lives are in danger whin
they find out they've got to wark a wind-jammer across to the old sod.
We'll settle our private account later on."

Murphy accompanied Hennesey aft and listened to his explanations to
Captain Williams. They were glib and apologetic.

"I didn't know," he said, "that they weren't sailormin. And they were
the only min in port, and Murphy had 'em; so I shipped 'em."

"Exactly," answered the captain, coldly; "and they shipped you. You two
fellows are caught in the plant you prepared for me, and you've got to
stand for it. Ever been to sea, Hennesey?"

"Tin years, Captain. I'm an able seaman, though not a heavy man."

"Heavy enough. Get a brick out of the galley, and I'll make you a bosun
without pay. You two will make those tarriers work. Come aft to the
wheel, the pair of you. Mr. Baker"--this to the man coiling ropes, who
dropped his task and followed--"Mr. Baker," said the captain, "and Mr.
Sharp"--he turned to the man at the wheel--"these two men have some
influence over the crew, and I've made them acting bosuns. They've been
to sea, and their part is to loose canvas and put ropes into the hands
of the others. Your part is to see that they do it."

The two officers turned their swollen faces toward Murphy and Hennesey,
and inspected them through closed and blackened eyelids. Then they
nodded, and the introduction was complete.

"Come, Hennesey," said Murphy, briskly, now that the situation was
defined. "We'll be gettin' a brick for ye, and wan each for the skipper
and the mates. We'll need 'em. Thin we'll go through 'em for the dope,
and then we'll loose the canvas."

For this short run across the Atlantic Captain Williams had shipped
neither carpenter, sailmaker, nor boatswains, he and his two mates, a
weakling steward and the Chinese cook representing the afterguard until
the advent of Murphy and Hennesey. To properly equip this afterguard,
Murphy pried out six more bricks from under the galley stove, solemnly
distributed them with instructions as to their use, and then he and
Hennesey replevined the half-empty bottles from the sleepers, an easy
task for such skilled craftsmen.

About noon the twenty-four awakened and clamored for their dinner. It
was served, and as it contained meat in plenty it was satisfactory;
then, smoking their clay pipes, they mustered on deck and, more or less
unconsciously, divided into two parts, the Galways separate from the
Limericks.

"Loose the foretopsail, Hennesey," said Murphy, as he looked at them.
"Overhaul the gear and stop it so ye can come down. Thin take the
halyards to the fo'c'stle capstan. I'll take the main."

The first mate was content to remain out of the proceedings for the
present. Murphy and Hennesey went aloft, performed their part, and came
down; then, when the two falls of the halyards were led to the two
capstans, Murphy, with his hand in his pocket and his heart in his
mouth, went among them.

"I want," he said, sourly, "twilve good min, but I don't know that I
can git them. Ye're a lot o' bog-trotters that don't know enough to
heave on a capstan."

"The hill we don't!" uttered a Galway man close to him.

"We l'arned thot in Checa-a-go."

"Ye mane," said Murphy, "that the Limerick boys _tried_ to l'arn, but
they couldn't. The wark's too hard."

"Fwat's too ha-a-rd?" answered the Galway. "Ye domned murderer, fwat's
too hard? D'y' think we can't wurruk?"

"D'ye think ye _can_ wark?" said Murphy. "Thin git at that capstan, you
Galway min. And git busy, quick, or I'll give the job to the Limerick
boys. They're passably good min, I think."

"To hill wi' thim! Hurrah, here, b'ys. C'm'an and pull the mon's rope.
Who says we can't wurruk?"

They joyously and enthusiastically surrounded the forecastle capstan,
shipped the brakes, and began to heave, with black looks at the envious
Limericks, to whom Murphy now addressed himself.

"Are yez lookin' for wark?" he demanded.

"Yis," they chorused.

"Man that 'midship capstan, thin. Beat these Galway sogers and I'll
give ye wark right along."

With whoops and shouts they flocked to the capstan amidships, and began
to compete, shoving on the bars, cheering and encouraging each other
and deriding those on the forecastle deck, who responded. It was a tie;
the Galways had about a minute start, but the Limericks finished only a
minute behind. Murphy and Hennesey nippered the falls at the pinrail,
and belayed when they slacked.

"It goes, Hennesey," said Murphy, wiping the perspiration from his
brow. "By puttin' wan gang agin' the other, maybe we won't need to show
the bricks."

"Yes," replied Hennesey, "that's all right; but I oncet heard an old,
wise skipper say that any farmer can make sail, but it takes a sailor
to take it in. What'll we do if it comes on to blow?"

"That's the least o' your troubles, and mine, Tim Hennesey. Put yer
trust in Jasus and loose that mizzentopsail, while I get 'em to steady
the braces."

But the demoralized first mate had so far aroused himself as to attend
to the loosing of the mizzentopsail and topgallantsail; so Murphy with
a little cajolery and ridicule induced the crew to sheet home and
tauten the braces, then mustered them aft to the mizzentopsail halyards
and asked them if they could, the whole lazy two dozen of them,
masthead that yard by hand, without the aid of the capstan. They
noisily averred that they could, and they did, nearly parting the
halyards when the yard could go no higher. The chain-sheets they could
not break, hard as they tried.

"It's not according to seamanship, Hennesey," said Murphy, "to man yer
halyards before ye sheet home; but--any way at all with this bunch. Now
git up to the foreto'gallant and the royal, while I take the main. The
poor mate's done his stunt on the mizzen."

And so, by doing the seamanly work themselves and putting ropes into
the hands of the crew, the mate and the two boatswains got sail on the
ship, even to the jib-topsail and the mainroyal staysail. Captain
Williams discreetly remained in the background, only asserting himself
once, when he knocked an Irishman off the poop. For this indiscretion
he was menaced by violent death, and only saved himself by an appeal to
Murphy, respect for whose diplomacy was fast overcoming Captain
Williams's dislike of him.

"What do ye think?" stormed Murphy, as he faced the angry men at the
break of the poop. "Whin ye came over in the steamer did they allow ye
up in the bridge, or aft o' the engine-room hatch? Stay forrard where
ye belong, and don't git presumptions, just 'cause ye've been a year in
a free country. Yer goin' back to Ireland now, to eat praties and drink
water. There's no whisky on this boat, and no mate three times a day.
No mate, d'ye understand?"

"No mate!" they vociferated. "No whusky!"

"No, ye bundle o' bad min, no whisky. Ye've drunk up what ye had, and
that was in America. Yer not in America now, and ye'll git no whisky,
nor mate, barrin' four times a week."

"We paid fur ut," they declaimed. "How kin a mon wurruk widout it?"

"Ye _can_ wark widout it and ye will. Ye'll pull ropes as I tell you,
and as ye l'arn ye'll steer the boat in yer turn."

"We'll shteer, will we?"

"Yes, ye'll steer, straight for old Ireland and praties."

"Hurrah! We'll git to the ould sod, will we?"

"Yes, but ye'll do it yerselves, mind ye. No kicks, no scraps. Ye'll do
as yer told, and pull ropes, and wark."

"We'll wurruk," they declared, noisily. "It's not the loikes o' you
th't'll foind the wurruk we can't do, nayther."

"We'll see," said Murphy, nodding his head portentously.

"Meanwhile, take yerself away from this end o' the boat, and stay away
from it; and don't ye ever raise yer hands agin' any man that lives in
this end o' the boat, or things'll happen to ye. Now git."

He drew forth the brick, and they left his vicinity.

"Captain Williams," said Murphy, solemnly, "that was a close call. If
ye'll take my advice, Captain, ye won't lay hands on 'em."

"Why?" answered the skipper. "Do you think I'm going to have them
trooping around my cabin?"

"No, not at all; but show 'em the brick, only don't use it, or they'll
throw it back. And don't make any gun-play, for they don't know what it
means, and it's no good, for ye can't shoot into thim. They're that
hard that they'll turn a bullet, I'm told."

"Possibly," said the captain, looking at his hand. "I hurt myself when
I hit him. Well, Murphy, all right, if you can control them. I can see
that I might have to shoot them all if I shot one, and that wouldn't
do."

"No, of course not, sir. I'll l'arn a few of them to steer, and the
mates'll be rid of it."

So, under these conditions they worked the ship across the western
ocean. By tact and "sign language" Murphy induced them to stand their
tricks at the wheel; but they would stand no tutelage, and steered in
their own way--a zizzag track over the sea. Another limitation which
they imposed upon their usefulness was their emphatic refusal to stand
watch, though from inward impulse they divided themselves into watches.
They would work factory hours, or not at all, so Captain Williams had
to be content with the loss of most of his light sails before the
passage was half over. For a sudden increase of wind at night would
occasionally prove too much for Murphy or Hennesey, with the mate on
watch. As for going aloft, day or night, their case was too hopeless,
even for the optimistic Murphy, even had they been willing to leave the
deck--which, most decidedly, they were not.

Even so, this passage might have reached a successful termination, the
homeward-bound Irishmen safely landed at Queenstown, and the others
graduated in a much-needed schooling in the doctrine of the brotherhood
of man; but Captain Williams, against Murphy's urgent and earnest plea
for more meat on the forecastle menu, persisted in sticking to the
original diet. The _Albatross_ was a "full-and-plenty" ship--that
is, one in which, with the supposed consent of the crew, the government
scale was discarded in favor of one containing more vegetables and less
meat. But these men knew nothing of this, or the reasons for it; and
while believing that there was no whisky in the ship, they had accepted
this deprivation, they were firmly assured that there was plenty of
meat; so day by day their discontent grew, until by the time the ship
had reached soundings they were ripe for open revolt. And it was the
small, weakling steward that brought it about.

The passage had been good for all except this steward. It had brought
to Captain Williams and his two mates, now recovered in mind and body
from the first friction, the unspoken but fixed conception that there
were men in the world not afraid of them. It had reduced Murphy's fat,
and his resentment against Hennesey and Captain Williams. It had
increased Hennesey's respect for Murphy and lessened his respect for
himself; for without Murphy's moral support he could not have done his
part. It had eliminated the alcohol from the veins and the brains of
the twenty-four wild men, and lessened the propensity to kill at the
same time that it lessened their fear of a brick. It had lessened the
sublime, ages-old contempt for white men that the Chinese cook shared
with his countrymen, and which simply _had_ to yield to the fear of
death inspired by three or four frenzied Irish faces at the galley
door, their owners demanding "mate." But the small steward, busy with
his cabin dishes, his cabin carpets, only visiting the galley to obtain
the cabin meals, had seen nothing, felt nothing, and learned nothing.
And, with the indifference of ignorance, he had left his brick in the
galley--the fatal spot where it ought not to have been, in view of what
was to happen.

For three stormy days the ship had been charging along before a wind
that had increased to a gale, and a following sea that threatened to
climb aboard. The jib-topsail, the skysails and royals, the lighter
middle staysails, and the fore and mizzen topgallantsails had been
blown away, and the ship was practically under topsails, a bad
equipment of canvas with which to claw off a lee shore. The lee shore
developed at daylight of the fourth stormy morning, a dim blue
heightening of the horizon to the east, dead ahead; and Captain
Williams, who had been unable to get a sight with his sextant for six
days, could only determine that his dead reckoning, based upon the wild
steering of his crew, had brought him too far to the north, and that
the land he saw was the coast above Mizen Head.

After breakfast, when factory hours began, he called all hands to the
braces; and they came, bracing the yards for the starboard tack, to
keep away from that menacing lee shore; but, during the work, Murphy,
by way of encouragement, called the crew's attention to the dim blot of
blue to leeward.

"The Imerald Isle, boys," he declared. "Wark, ye watchmakers, wark, and
git home."

They worked nobly, but wondered why the ship was heading away from the
Emerald Isle, and expressed their wonder loudly and profanely. In vain
did Murphy explain that Queenstown was around the corner to the south,
and it was to Queenstown that they were bound. Their dissatisfaction
grew, and at dinner-time lifted them above the weakening influence of
the "sign language."

They had never taken account of the days when meat was due, ascribing
the fixed hiatuses to the unkindness of the Chinese cook; and when they
mustered at the galley door at noon and the cook handed them a huge pan
of bean soup they raged at him, incoherently, but vehemently.

"Whaur's th' mate--the mate? Giv's the mate, ye haythen! giv's the
mate, domyersool!"

The cook shrank back before their gleaming eyes and threatening fists,
and they crowded into the galley, where, as fate determined, the mild
little steward was gathering up the cabin dinner. He seized his brick.

"Now, here, you men," he said, bravely, "you get right out of this
galley. Do you hear?" And he waved his brick threateningly.

"Whaur's the mate? Giv's the mate, ye man-killers."

"The mate is aft. You know that well as I do. Go right out of this
galley."

"Whaur's the mate?"

"Aft in the cabin, I told you. Get out of here."

Even now things might have been well, for a few of them showed a
willingness to go aft for the "mate." But the men of the other county
came to the other galley door, and, menaced from both sides, the
steward unwisely threw his brick. It struck the head of the foremost
Irishman (it was the man on his wedding trip) and almost knocked him
down. The cook frantically followed suit, and carnage began. The two
gangs crowded into the narrow apartment, and the cook and steward soon
went underfoot before the shower of fist-blows and kicks. They would
assuredly have been injured in the _melee_ had not a Limerick face
approached too temptingly close to a Galway fist and diverted the
storm. In utter fear of death the two crawled to the stove and pried up
a couple of bricks while the rival factions fought each other. But
their action was observed, and with whoops and oaths the combatants
armed themselves, while the cook and steward crawled under the galley
table for safety.

The captain and first mate were in the cabin, waiting for their dinner.
The second mate was near the wheel, admonishing the Irish helmsman, as
he dared, in the way of better steering "by-the-wind." Hennesey was in
the port forecastle, just turning out after his forenoon watch below,
and Murphy was amidships; but the sound of oaths, shrieks of rage and
pain, and the incessant hammering of bricks upon the bulkheads and the
pots and pans of the galley brought all to the scene, the captain and
mates with their pistols.

"Hold on, Captain," said Murphy; "don't shoot any wan. Just let 'em
fight it out, then they'll be more tractable."

This seemed reasonable, and the group watched from the main-hatch.
There was a steady flight of bricks out through each galley door, some
impacting upon the rails and falling to the deck, others going
overboard. Occasionally an Irishman would reel out in company with the
brick that had impelled him; but, after crawling around on all-fours
for a moment, he would go back with a brick gleaned from the deck. At
last, however, one came out with a little more momentum than
usual--enough to carry him over to the rail; and from this point of
view he could see the group at the hatch. He glared at them from under
his tousled hair, then uttered a war-whoop.

"Ei-hei-ee, in thaur!" he yelled, "quit yer foolin' an' c'm'an out.
Here be the bloody murders, the man-killers, the domned sons uv a
landlord. C'm'an out, ye divils."

They heard, and they came, from both doors, with bloody faces and
blackened eyes, and, seeing the captain and his aids, charged as one
man. In vain Murphy's poised brick and Hennesey's persuasive voice. In
vain the leveled pistols of the captain and mates and their thundering
orders to stop or be shot down. There came a volley of bricks, and the
captain's pistol was knocked from his hand, while a second brick,
striking him on the head, robbed him of sense and volition. Each of the
mates fired his pistol once, but not again; the bullets flew wide, and
the firearms were twisted from their hands, while they were tripped up,
struck, and kicked about until helpless to rise or resist. Hennesey and
Murphy were also borne to the deck and punished. Some might have been
killed had not one inspired Celt given voice to an original idea.

"Lock 'em up!" he shouted. "Lock 'em up in the kitchen, an' nail the
dures on thim!"

They joyously accepted the suggestion. The four weak and stricken
conscious men were dragged or shoved into the galley by some, while
others lifted the unconscious captain after them. Then the doors were
closed, and soon they heard the hammering of nails over the jangle of
voices. Then the jangle of voices took on a new and distinct note of
unanimity.

"Turn the boat, Denny," they shouted to the man at the wheel. "Turn the
boat around. We'll go home in sphite o' thim, the vilyuns."

Their footfalls sounded fainter and fainter as they rushed aft; and
Murphy picked himself up from the floor, now almost denuded of its
brick paving.

"For the love of Gawd," he groaned, wiping the blood from his eyes,
"are they goin' to beach her in this gale?"

The galley was lighted by two large deadlights, one each side, too
small to crawl through, but large enough for a man's head. Murphy
reached his head through one of them and looked aft. They had
surrounded the wheel, and their war-cries were audible. As many as six
were handling the spokes, and the big ship was squaring away before the
wind, heading for that dim spot of blue in the murk and smoke to
leeward. Murphy could see it when the ship pitched into a hollow--about
forty miles away.

"And us locked up like rats in a trap," he muttered. "She'll strike in
four hours, and Gawd help us all if we can't git out of here."

But there was no getting out, and they made the best of it. The cook
and steward emerged from beneath the table, and made more or less
frivolous comments on the condition of the galley and the ruin of the
dinner, until silenced by the irate Murphy. The two mates took their
hands from their aching heads and showed interest in life; and in time
Captain Williams came to his senses and sat up on the floor, smeared
with bean soup and cluttered with dented pots, pans, and
stove-fittings. He was told the situation, and wisely accepted it; for
nothing could be done.

And from aft came to their ears the joyous whoops of the homeward-bound
men, close to their native land and anxious to get to it by the
shortest route. Murphy occasionally looked out at them; they were all
near the wheel, cursing and berating those handling the spokes, and
being cursed in return. But they were not quarreling.

"Me brother Mike was right," muttered Murphy, as he drew his head in
after a look at them. "They've forgotten their dinner. They'd rather
fight than ate, but rather wark than fight."

The big, light ship, even with upper canvas gone and the yards braced
to port, was skimming along over the heaving seas at a ten-knot rate,
and Murphy's occasional glimpses of that growing landfall showed him
details of rock and wood and red sandy soil that bespoke a steep beach
and a rocky bottom. The air was full of spume and the gale whistled
dismally through the rigging with a sound very much like that of
Murphy's big base-burner in his Front Street boarding-house, when the
chill wintry winds whistled over the housetops. He wondered if he would
ever return.

"God help us, Skipper," he said, solemnly, "if we don't strike at high
tide. For at low tide we'll go to pieces an' be drowned as the water
rises."

"I looked it up this morning," said the captain, painfully; for he was
still dazed from the effects of the brick. "It is high tide on this
coast at four this afternoon."

"All to the good, as far as our lives are consarned," said Murphy; "and
mebbe for your ship, Skipper. It'll be hard to salve her, of course;
but she won't git the poundin' she'd get at low-water mark."

"I don't care. It's a matter for the underwriters. Don't bother me. I
may kill you, Murphy, and your man Hennesey, some day, but not now. I'm
too sick."

They waited in silence until the crash came--a sickening sound of riven
timbers and snapping wire rope. Then, from the sudden stopping of the
ship, there came a heightening and a strengthening of the song of the
wind in the rigging, and the thumping of upper spars, jolted clear of
their fastenings by the shock. Looking out, Murphy saw that the
topgallantmasts, with their yards, were hanging by their gear,
threatening to fall at any heave of the ship on her rocky bed. And he
saw that the beach was not a hundred yards distant. Also, that the crew
was flocking forward.

"Let us out of here," he called, as they came within hearing. "What
more do ye want, ye bogtrotters? Ye've wrecked the man's boat, but d'ye
want to kill us?"

"Yis," they chorused. "Why not, ye divils? Ye've nearly killed us all,
dom yez. No mate, no whusky, no money. Tell us the road to Galway."

"An' the road to Limerick," said another. "An' whin do we git paid
aff?"

"I'll have ye in jail, ye hyeenas," said Murphy. "That's yer pay, and
that's the road to Galway and Limerick. Wait till the coast guard comes
along. They'll git ye."

He drew back to avoid a brick that threatened to enter the deadlight,
and the conversation ended.

Meanwhile the ship was slowly swinging around broadside to the beach.
She was too high out of water for the seas to board her, though they
pounded her weather side with deafening noise, and with each impact she
was lifted shoreward a few feet more. Finally the crashings ceased, and
they knew that, with water in the hold, she had gone as high as the
seas could drive her. Then, with the going down of the tide, the heavy
poundings of the sea grew less and the voices of the crew on the
forecastle deck more audible.

"Can we make it in three jumps, Terrence?" they heard.

"No, ye fule. The wather's goin' down. Howld yer whist."

Murphy, looking out through the deadlight, could see nothing of the
water between the ship and the beach; but far down to the south he
discerned a team of horses dragging a wagon holding a boat, and this he
explained to the skipper.

"The coast guard," explained the latter. "God grant that they get here
before that bunch gets away. English law is severe upon mutineers."

But in this Captain Williams was doomed to disappointment. The coast
guard arrived in time and released them. But before this each man of
the twenty-four had passed before the open deadlight, derided and
jeered the unlucky prisoners, called them unprintable names, and slid
down the side on a rope to dry land.

Murphy looked at them climbing the hills inland, their whoops and yells
coming back to him like paeans of victory.

"And what county do ye think this is, Skipper?" he asked.

"The county of Cork, of course," answered the captain.

"Well," said Murphy, "an enemy's country. We'll hope that the county o'
Cork 'll take care o' thim. They're beyand you and me and Hennesey,
Skipper."




EXTRACTS FROM NOAH'S LOG


While exploring the rocky gullies and canyons in the foothills of Mount
Ararat last summer, I found a roughly symmetrical mass of pure copper.
Oxidized and honeycombed as it was, I recognized the metal immediately,
and repressing a strong inclination to hunt for the lead and stake out
my claim, I took my find home with me. Surprised at its diminishing
weight as the moisture dried out of the spongy mass, I endeavored to
saw into it. The pure metal inside tore off every tooth of the saw, and
now convinced that it was a hollow cylinder of hardened copper, I
brought it to America and gave it to a machinist to open. He ruined two
dozen finely-tempered saws in the job, which I cheerfully settled for,
as the cylinder contained a papyrus roll of manuscript of certainly
great antiquity.

My efforts to decipher it were baffled, as it was written in neither
ancient nor modern Egyptian, new nor old Pali, nor in Greek, Latin,
Sanscrit, nor in any other language with which I am acquainted. So I
called in the services of two reverend friends of mine--able, eminent,
and renowned professors of biology, bibliology, ethnology, and
sockdology--who at once pronounced it ancient Cush and proceeded to
translate it; one remarking with a levity which but indifferently
became his calling, as I thought, that the exceeding toughness of the
yarn no doubt accounted for the difficulty of sawing into it--in which
view his collaborator, to my surprise, was inclined to coincide.

However, I cheerfully give them credit for the translation, but am free
to maintain that the elegance of diction, force of expression, and
choiceness of synonyms are my own.

Besides, I found it.


THE LOG.

_Mon., 7 days out._ Raining yet, very hard--A few sinners still on
deck; a bunch got washed off last night; kinder sorry for them--Ham
will get a rope's-end if he don't look out; he skylarks too much with
the animals; put all the dogs in the cats' cage last night, and the
whole menagerie got excited at the row they made; couldn't hear
ourselves think for two hours; every brute in the outfit sung his
song--Roof leaks--Women say it's washday and have started in on the
week's wash; just like women; how'll they dry clothes this weather?

Course E. B. S. Ham at the wheel, Shem on the lookout.

_Tues., 8 days out. 4 bells._ Women are growling because the sun don't
shine so the wash can dry; told them such murmuring as they indulged in
was flying straight in the face of Providence; told me to mind my own
business; remarked that I was captain here and wouldn't take back talk
from anyone; hove a bucket of water over me, durn them. _6 bells_. Got
my log line strung up along 'tween decks and the whole blamed wash
triced up in everybody's way. If I want to heave the log at 8 bells,
overboard goes the wash, and don't care who likes it; I'm boss here. _8
bells_. Didn't heave the log--Guess we're making four knots; wind
fresh.

Course E. S. E. Shem at the wheel, Japheth on the lookout.

_Wed., 9 days out._ Ironing day; blowing a gale of wind; women are
making hard work of it and getting seasick--Hove to at 8 bells this
morning; lays easy; kicked Ham away from the wheel and steered his
trick; afraid I can't make a sailor of him; wish I'd saved a few
sinners to work ship; could have drowned them afterwards.

Heading N. E. by N. Japheth at the wheel.

_Thurs., 10 days out._ Wish I knew who drinks my whiskey--Made sail at
daylight; difficult work, this handling sail below decks; can't see
aloft, must feel when sheets are home; don't like these new fangled
rolling topsails that furl themselves; they're not shipshape, but we're
too short-handed for the old style--Wind going down.

Course due E. Shem at the wheel, Ham on the lookout.

_Fri., 11 days out._ Foggy; can't see two lengths; two of us on the
lookout--Ham is under the scuttlebutt, drunk; whiskey lower; slight
connection here, maybe--Women are quarreling among themselves; they're
a heap of trouble; never quiet till they're seasick; found out they get
seasick in a head sea; will remember this--The lion got out last night
and made a lunch out of my wife's pet dog Beauty; chased him back to
his cage with a handspike; sorry I had to hurt him; seven pugs left
now; we started with a pair to each woman.

No wind and nobody at the wheel.

_Sat., 12 days out._ Wish it would clear up; sinners must be all dead
by this time--Have had a hard day of it; that boy Ham let go the port
anchor, and the whole range of chain, 45 fathoms, went out the
hawse-pipe and fetched up with a jerk that carried away the windlass
bitts and nearly tore the bows off her; kicked him up on deck in the
rain while we mended the windlass; hunted him up to help heave in chain
and found he'd sneaked down, got at my jug, and was dead drunk
alongside the same; don't see what the Lord wanted to save him
for--Must be clear of soundings now, so will keep her hove to for a
while under short sail, with the wheel lashed down.

_Sun., 13 days out._ Held religious exercises at 4 bells; Ham attended,
very devout and penitent, with a head as big as the jug--Women have
tricked themselves out and are mincing around showing off; made me put
on a white shirt; will get rid of it directly--Dead calm all day--Found
the ark had a slight list to starboard; investigated, and discovered
about three tons of stones, dead cats, and garbage stuck fast to the
pitch outside; these things are what the sinners threw at the ark after
we came aboard--Have locked up my whiskey.

_Wed., 16 days out._ Made a great mistake when we started; was puzzled
how to feed the spiders, mosquitoes, bedbugs, and such; turned them
loose to hustle for themselves, and that's what they've done ever
since--Another pug disappeared last night; six left; gave Ham a talking
to about getting drunk; was sassy and I boxed his ears; told him if I
ever saw him drunk again aboard my ship I'd log him; he don't seem to
care, but that's what I'll do every time--Still hove to.

_Sun., 20 days out._ Ham broke into my locker last night, and is
roaring drunk again; can't find the jug; will log him every time
now--No religious exercises to-day; women are complaining of my
impiety, but a man can't feel resigned when he has just lost a
four-gallon jug of the best Egyptian corn whiskey.

_Mon., 21 days out._ Ham's drunk.

_Tues., 22 days out._ Ditto's ditto.

_Wed., 23 days out._   Do.    do.

_Thurs., 24 days out._ Do. blind do.

_Fri., 25 days out._ Do. dead do.

_Sat., 26 days out._ Do. got snakes; got 'em bad; wish I could
find that jug.

_Sun., 27 days out._ Two more pugs missing; must keep away from the
lion's cage when the women are around; he seems too pleased to see me,
and they are getting suspicious; four of the ugly brutes left
now--found my jug; Ham stowed it in my own bunk; he's smarter than I
thought--Had religious exercises; women wanted to mourn for their pugs;
am willing they should mourn--Took a cast of the lead at noon; thirty
fathoms, mud bottom; made sail and squared away due E.

_Mon., 28 days out._ My wife has confiscated the jug and means to keep
it; we'll see about that; says it is the cause of poor, dear Ham's
sickness; undoubtedly; should have let it alone--Shem at the wheel,
Japheth on the lookout.

Course E.

_Wed., 30 days out._ Mutiny! Bloody Mut---- d----n! ----!! (Note--Here
the manuscript bears evidence that Captain Noah was suddenly
interrupted while writing.--Translator.)

_Fri., 32 days out._ Have had a lively time; discipline is restored,
but the whiskey jug is gone--smashed over my head--all on account of
the pugs; had hoped to rid the world of these parodies on the canine
race, and would have succeeded if my wife hadn't overhauled my pockets
when I was asleep and read this log. Certain references to the pugs put
her on the lookout and she and the other women watched me; one of the
brutes littered that night; I couldn't resist the temptation, and so
fed the whole batch, mother and all, to the lion; in a minute had four
furious women afoul of me, biting and clawing; sung out for help, and
Shem and Japheth bore down and rescued me; Ham helped the women and
made a majority for them; his mother had the jug, that's why; managed
to floor him with a pump-brake, but they were still too many for us and
chased us around decks till they got tired and sat down to cry; got to
my room and began writing them down in the log when they started in
again; my wife smashed the whiskey jug over my head--then we all
escaped on deck and went aloft; couldn't follow us, but sat down and
said things--Had a council of war, then Shem shinned over to the
foremast and cut away all the jib halliards and sheets and halliards on
the fore--Ark had broached to in trough sea when Japheth left the wheel
to help me, and had laid there with yards square and rolling
considerable; women could stand that motion, but not a head sea, so now
when she came up to the wind and began pounding up and down and
drifting astern, they got qualmish and in twenty minutes were sprawled
out helpless; Ham didn't know enough to take the wheel and throw her
off, so we came down, tied the women hand and foot, and then went for
Ham; triced him up and rope's-ended him till his nose bled; begged and
howled, but had to take it and learn that mutiny is unsafe aboard my
ship--Kept her head to the sea till we had spliced and rove off the
gear, then set canvas and squared away again--Women got better; read
the articles to them; were penitent and promised to behave, but before
turning them loose we went on a pug hunt and passed two of them in to
the lion; only one left now, but we haven't found it yet; women howled
a good deal and called us heartless, cruel fiends--that's all right.

My wife had lost the log-book in her excitement, and I only found it
to-day.

Course N. E. by E. Shem at the wheel. Jap. on the lookout.

_Sun., 34 days out._ No religious services to-day; women are talking
about me--don't talk _to_ me; if they do, I'll speak of that jug.

Course due E. Blowing fresh. J. at the wheel, S. on lookout.

_Mon., 35 days out._ Wash day, but there is no washing going on; won't
have it; am captain here; they were ugly at first, but I hauled her on
a wind and said nothing; can't find that pug--Keep Ham at work on the
menagerie now, feeding the animals and cleaning the cages--Dead calm.

_Wed., 37 days out._ Nothing new; pug still missing; good mind to turn
the lion loose; he'll find the cur.

_Fri., 39 days out._ If I don't find that pug to-day, will let the lion
out first thing to-morrow.

_Sat., 40 days out._ Stopped raining--We all went on deck this morning;
it was a frightful picture--sun shining, not a cloud in the sky and not
a sign of land nor ship, nor even a bird, in all this expanse of
desolation; no life nor joyousness, nothing but muddy water; the dead
world fathoms underneath, and we alone, with our ark, all that was
left; and whiskey gone--not a shot in the locker.

At noon locked up the women and turned the lion loose; he didn't find
the pug, but found most everything else; smashed some bird cages and a
raven and dove got away; dove came back at sundown, but the raven
didn't; let all the birds out to get the air and roost up aloft.

_Sat., 47 days out._ Chicken missing this morning; suspect Ham of
stealing it--A pigeon fluttered down on deck with a green leaf fast in
its gullet and half choked; pulled leaf out; pigeon must have been
somewhere else and got it; will keep to the eastward and look out for
land.

_Tues., 50 days out._ Blowing great guns, and dismasted; under double
reefs, storm spanker, and foretopmast staysail at daylight; blew away
the staysail; set jib; that went too and took jibboom; cut away the
wreck; she came up to the wind, caught aback, and away went the
mizzenmast at the deck; cut that away, paid off in the trough of the
sea, and rolled the fore and mainmast out; cleared away everything,
rigged out a sea anchor, and now were riding it out comfortable--that
is, for us; women are all sick.

Land to the eastward, small island.

_60 days out._ Land still in sight; gets bigger; suppose the water is
going down; nothing to do now but eat, sleep, and hunt for that
pug--Still riding at the sea anchor.

_100 days out._ Pug must be dead--More land showing up.

_150 days out. Noon_--Driving on a lee shore stern foremost; getting
anchors ready; _sundown_--let go both anchors as we got close in;
dragged, and here we are, with every sea making a clean sweep over us;
ark won't last long; getting out liferaft and turning animals loose.

_Next morning._ Floated ashore all right; ark is breaking up and
animals swimming in; last to come were that missing pug and seven
half-grown pups; submit to the will of Providence, but still think
women had the durned brute hid in the lower hold.

_Next day._ Poor place to live on this island--Nothing grown, but a
grapevine I found on the beach; will take care of it; it means grapes,
and grapes mean juice, and it's been a long time between drinks--Ham is
quite useful now; takes a deep interest in the vine and helps me 'tend
it.

_Month later._ Grapevine is doing well.

_Four months later._ Grapes appearing.

_Two months later._ Picked the grapes; now for some wine--Ham is a
model boy; did him good to rope's-end him.

_Five months later._ Wine has worked; will serve grog to-morrow and
celebrate the anniversary of our shipwreck.

_Next day._ (The manuscript of this last day's entry is obscure, and so
incoherent, as to make it strongly probable that Captain Noah served
the grog as indicated, and that he wrote while under the influence of
the same. There are, however, some legible references to certain "pugs"
which would go to show that he still had those animals in mind and
perhaps regretted his failure to effect their extinction.--Translator.)





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