Michael left the Makambo as he had come on board, through a port-hole. Likewise, the affair occurred at night, and it was Kwaque’s hands that received him. It had been quick work, and daring, in the dark of early evening. From the boat-deck, with a bowline under Kwaque’s arms and a turn of the rope around a pin, Dag Daughtry had lowered his leprous servitor into the waiting launch.
On his way below, he encountered Captain Duncan, who saw fit to warn him:
“No shannigan with Killeny Boy, Steward. He must go back to Tulagi with us.”
“Yes, sir,” the steward agreed. “An’ I’m keepin’ him tight in my room to make safe. Want to see him, sir?”
The very frankness of the invitation made the captain suspicious, and the thought flashed through his mind that perhaps Killeny Boy was already hidden ashore somewhere by the dog-stealing steward.
“Yes, indeed I’d like to say how-do-you-do to him,” Captain Duncan answered.
And his was genuine surprise, on entering the steward’s room, to behold Michael just rousing from his curled-up sleep on the floor. But when he left, his surprise would have been shocking could he have seen through the closed door what immediately began to take place. Out through the open port-hole, in a steady stream, Daughtry was passing the contents of the room. Everything went that belonged to him, including the turtle-shell and the photographs and calendars on the wall. Michael, with the command of silence laid upon him, went last. Remained only a sea-chest and two suit-cases, themselves too large for the port-hole but bare of contents.
When Daughtry sauntered along the main deck a few minutes later and paused for a gossip with the customs officer and a quartermaster at the head of the gang-plank, Captain Duncan little dreamed that his casual glance was resting on his steward for the last time. He watched him go down the gang-plank empty-handed, with no dog at his heels, and stroll off along the wharf under the electric lights.
Ten minutes after Captain Duncan saw the last of his broad back, Daughtry, in the launch with his belongings and heading for Jackson Bay, was hunched over Michael and caressing him, while Kwaque, crooning with joy under his breath that he was with all that was precious to him in the world, felt once again in the side-pocket of his flimsy coat to make sure that his beloved jews’ harp had not been left behind.
Dag Daughtry was paying for Michael, and paying well. Among other things, he had not cared to arouse suspicion by drawing his wages from Burns Philp. The twenty pounds due him he had abandoned, and this was the very sum, that night on the beach at Tulagi, he had decided he could realize from the sale of Michael. He had stolen him to sell. He was paying for him the sales price that had tempted him.
For, as one has well said: the horse abases the base, ennobles the noble. Likewise the dog. The theft of a dog to sell for a price had been the abasement worked by Michael on Dag Daughtry. To pay the price out of sheer heart-love that could recognize no price too great to pay, had been the ennoblement of Dag Daughtry which Michael had worked. And as the launch chug-chugged across the quiet harbour under the southern stars, Dag Daughtry would have risked and tossed his life into the bargain in a battle to continue to have and to hold the dog he had originally conceived of as being interchangeable for so many dozens of beer.
* * * * *
The Mary Turner, towed out by a tug, sailed shortly after daybreak, and Daughtry, Kwaque, and Michael looked their last for ever on Sydney Harbour.
“Once again these old eyes have seen this fair haven,” the Ancient Mariner, beside them gazing, babbled; and Daughtry could not help but notice the way the wheat-farmer and the pawnbroker pricked their ears to listen and glanced each to the other with scant eyes. “It was in ’52, in 1852, on such a day as this, all drinking and singing along the decks, we cleared from Sydney in the Wide Awake. A pretty craft, oh sirs, a most clever and pretty craft. A crew, a brave crew, all youngsters, all of us, fore and aft, no man was forty, a mad, gay crew. The captain was an elderly gentleman of twenty-eight, the third officer another of eighteen, the down, untouched of steel, like so much young velvet on his cheek. He, too, died in the longboat. And the captain gasped out his last under the palm trees of the isle unnamable while the brown maidens wept about him and fanned the air to his parching lungs.”
Dag Daughtry heard no more, for he turned below to take up his new routine of duty. But while he made up bunks with fresh linen and directed Kwaque’s efforts to cleaning long-neglected floors, he shook his head to himself and muttered, “He’s a keen ’un. He’s a keen ’un. All ain’t fools that look it.”
The fine lines of the Mary Turner were explained by the fact that she had been built for seal-hunting; and for the same reason on board of her was room and to spare. The forecastle with bunk-space for twelve, bedded but eight Scandinavian seamen. The five staterooms of the cabin accommodated the three treasure-hunters, the Ancient Mariner, and the mate—the latter a large-bodied, gentle-souled Russian-Finn, known as Mr. Jackson through inability of his shipmates to pronounce the name he had signed on the ship’s articles.
Remained the steerage, just for’ard of the cabin, separated from it by a stout bulkhead and entered by a companionway on the main deck. On this deck, between the break of the poop and the steerage companion, stood the galley. In the steerage itself, which possessed a far larger living-space than the cabin, were six capacious bunks, each double the width of the forecastle bunks, and each curtained and with no bunk above it.
“Some fella glory-hole, eh, Kwaque?” Daughtry told his seventeen-years-old brown-skinned Papuan with the withered ancient face of a centenarian, the legs of a living skeleton, and the huge-stomached torso of an elderly Japanese wrestler. “Eh, Kwaque! What you fella think?”
And Kwaque, too awed by the spaciousness to speak, eloquently rolled his eyes in agreement.
“You likee this piecee bunk?” the cook, a little old Chinaman, asked the steward with eager humility, inviting the white man’s acceptance of his own bunk with a wave of arm.
Daughtry shook his head. He had early learned that it was wise to get along well with sea-cooks, since sea-cocks were notoriously given to going suddenly lunatic and slicing and hacking up their shipmates with butcher knives and meat cleavers on the slightest remembered provocation. Besides, there was an equally good bunk all the way across the width of the steerage from the Chinaman’s. The bunk next on the port side to the cook’s and abaft of it Daughtry allotted to Kwaque. Thus he retained for himself and Michael the entire starboard side with its three bunks. The next one abaft of his own he named “Killeny Boy’s,” and called on Kwaque and the cook to take notice. Daughtry had a sense that the cook, whose name had been quickly volunteered as Ah Moy, was not entirely satisfied with the arrangement; but it affected him no more than a momentary curiosity about a Chinaman who drew the line at a dog taking a bunk in the same apartment with him.
Half an hour later, returning, from setting the cabin aright, to the steerage for Kwaque to serve him with a bottle of beer, Daughtry observed that Ah Moy had moved his entire bunk belongings across the steerage to the third bunk on the starboard side. This had put him with Daughtry and Michael and left Kwaque with half the steerage to himself. Daughtry’s curiosity recrudesced.
“What name along that fella Chink?” he demanded of Kwaque. “He no like ’m you fella boy stop ’m along same fella side along him. What for? My word! What name? That fella Chink make ’m me cross along him too much!”
“Suppose ’m that fella Chink maybe he think ’m me kai-kai along him,” Kwaque grinned in one of his rare jokes.
“All right,” the steward concluded. “We find out. You move ’m along my bunk, I move ’m along that fella Chink’s bunk.”
This accomplished, so that Kwaque, Michael, and Ah Moy occupied the starboard side and Daughtry alone bunked on the port side, he went on deck and aft to his duties. On his next return he found Ah Moy had transferred back to the port side, but this time into the last bunk aft.
“Seems the beggar’s taken a fancy to me,” the steward smiled to himself.
Nor was he capable of guessing Ah Moy’s reason for bunking always on the opposite side from Kwaque.
“I changee,” the little old cook explained, with anxious eyes to please and placate, in response to Daughtry’s direct question. “All the time like that, changee, plentee changee. You savvee?”
Daughtry did not savvee, and shook his head, while Ah Moy’s slant eyes betrayed none of the anxiety and fear with which he privily gazed on Kwaque’s two permanently bent fingers of the left hand and on Kwaque’s forehead, between the eyes, where the skin appeared a shade darker, a trifle thicker, and was marked by the first beginning of three short vertical lines or creases that were already giving him the lion-like appearance, the leonine face so named by the experts and technicians of the fell disease.
As the days passed, the steward took facetious occasions, when he had drunk five quarts of his daily allowance, to shift his and Kwaque’s bunks about. And invariably Ah Moy shifted, though Daughtry failed to notice that he never shifted into a bunk which Kwaque had occupied. Nor did he notice that it was when the time came that Kwaque had variously occupied all the six bunks that Ah Moy made himself a canvas hammock, suspended it from the deck beams above and thereafter swung clear in space and unmolested.
Daughtry dismissed the matter from his thoughts as no more than a thing in keeping with the general inscrutability of the Chinese mind. He did notice, however, that Kwaque was never permitted to enter the galley. Another thing he noticed, which, expressed in his own words, was: “That’s the all-dangdest cleanest Chink I’ve ever clapped my lamps on. Clean in galley, clean in steerage, clean in everything. He’s always washing the dishes in boiling water, when he isn’t washing himself or his clothes or bedding. My word, he actually boils his blankets once a week!”
For there were other things to occupy the steward’s mind. Getting acquainted with the five men aft in the cabin, and lining up the whole situation and the relations of each of the five to that situation and to one another, consumed much time. Then there was the path of the Mary Turner across the sea. No old sailor breathes who does not desire to know the casual course of his ship and the next port-of-call.
“We ought to be moving along a line that’ll cross somewhere northard of New Zealand,” Daughtry guessed to himself, after a hundred stolen glances into the binnacle. But that was all the information concerning the ship’s navigation he could steal; for Captain Doane took the observations and worked them out, to the exclusion of the mate, and Captain Doane always methodically locked up his chart and log. That there were heated discussions in the cabin, in which terms of latitude and longitude were bandied back and forth, Daughtry did know; but more than that he could not know, because it was early impressed upon him that the one place for him never to be, at such times of council, was the cabin. Also, he could not but conclude that these councils were real battles wherein Messrs. Doane, Nishikanta, and Grimahaw screamed at each other and pounded the table at each other, when they were not patiently and most politely interrogating the Ancient Mariner.
“He’s got their goat,” the steward early concluded to himself; but, thereafter, try as he would, he failed to get the Ancient Mariner’s goat.
Charles Stough Greenleaf was the Ancient Mariner’s name. This, Daughtry got from him, and nothing else did he get save maunderings and ravings about the heat of the longboat and the treasure a fathom deep under the sand.
“There’s some of us plays games, an’ some of us as looks on an’ admires the games they see,” the steward made his bid one day. “And I’m sure these days lookin’ on at a pretty game. The more I see it the more I got to admire.”
The Ancient Mariner dreamed back into the steward’s eyes with a blank, unseeing gaze.
“On the Wide Awake all the stewards were young, mere boys,” he murmured.
“Yes, sir,” Daughtry agreed pleasantly. “From all you say, the Wide Awake, with all its youngsters, was sure some craft. Not like the crowd of old ’uns on this here hooker. But I doubt, sir, that them youngsters ever played as clever games as is being played aboard us right now. I just got to admire the fine way it’s being done, sir.”
“I’ll tell you something,” the Ancient Mariner replied, with such confidential air that almost Daughtry leaned to hear. “No steward on the Wide Awake could mix a highball in just the way I like, as well as you. We didn’t know cocktails in those days, but we had sherry and bitters. A good appetizer, too, a most excellent appetizer.”
“I’ll tell you something more,” he continued, just as it seemed he had finished, and just in time to interrupt Daughtry away from his third attempt to ferret out the true inwardness of the situation on the Mary Turner and of the Ancient Mariner’s part in it. “It is mighty nigh five bells, and I should be very pleased to have one of your delicious cocktails ere I go down to dine.”
More suspicious than ever of him was Daughtry after this episode. But, as the days went by, he came more and more to the conclusion that Charles Stough Greenleaf was a senile old man who sincerely believed in the abiding of a buried treasure somewhere in the South Seas.
Once, polishing the brass-work on the hand-rails of the cabin companionway, Daughtry overheard the ancient one explaining his terrible scar and missing fingers to Grimshaw and the Armenian Jew. The pair of them had plied him with extra drinks in the hope of getting more out of him by way of his loosened tongue.
“It was in the longboat,” the aged voice cackled up the companion. “On the eleventh day it was that the mutiny broke. We in the sternsheets stood together against them. It was all a madness. We were starved sore, but we were mad for water. It was over the water it began. For, see you, it was our custom to lick the dew from the oar-blades, the gunwales, the thwarts, and the inside planking. And each man of us had developed property in the dew-collecting surfaces. Thus, the tiller and the rudder-head and half of the plank of the starboard stern-sheet had become the property of the second officer. No one of us lacked the honour to respect his property. The third officer was a lad, only eighteen, a brave and charming boy. He shared with the second officer the starboard stern-sheet plank. They drew a line to mark the division, and neither, lapping up what scant moisture fell during the night-hours, ever dreamed of trespassing across the line. They were too honourable.
“But the sailors—no. They squabbled amongst themselves over the dew-surfaces, and only the night before one of them was knifed because he so stole. But on this night, waiting for the dew, a little of it, to become more, on the surfaces that were mine, I heard the noises of a dew-lapper moving aft along the port-gunwale—which was my property aft of the stroke-thwart clear to the stern. I emerged from a nightmare dream of crystal springs and swollen rivers to listen to this night-drinker that I feared might encroach upon what was mine.
“Nearer he came to the line of my property, and I could hear him making little moaning, whimpering noises as he licked the damp wood. It was like listening to an animal grazing pasture-grass at night and ever grazing nearer.
“It chanced I was holding a boat-stretcher in my hand—to catch what little dew might fall upon it. I did not know who it was, but when he lapped across the line and moaned and whimpered as he licked up my precious drops of dew, I struck out. The boat-stretcher caught him fairly on the nose—it was the bo’s’n—and the mutiny began. It was the bo’s’n’s knife that sliced down my face and sliced away my fingers. The third officer, the eighteen-year-old lad, fought well beside me, and saved me, so that, just before I fainted, he and I, between us, hove the bo’s’n’s carcass overside.”
A shifting of feet and changing of positions of those in the cabin plunged Daughtry back into his polishing, which he had for the time forgotten. And, as he rubbed the brass-work, he told himself under his breath: “The old party’s sure been through the mill. Such things just got to happen.”
“No,” the Ancient Mariner was continuing, in his thin falsetto, in reply to a query. “It wasn’t the wounds that made me faint. It was the exertion I made in the struggle. I was too weak. No; so little moisture was there in my system that I didn’t bleed much. And the amazing thing, under the circumstances, was the quickness with which I healed. The second officer sewed me up next day with a needle he’d made out of an ivory toothpick and with twine he twisted out of the threads from a frayed tarpaulin.”
“Might I ask, Mr. Greenleaf, if there were rings at the time on the fingers that were cut off?” Daughtry heard Simon Nishikanta ask.
“Yes, and one beauty. I found it afterward in the boat bottom and presented it to the sandalwood trader who rescued me. It was a large diamond. I paid one hundred and eighty guineas for it to an English sailor in the Barbadoes. He’d stolen it, and of course it was worth more. It was a beautiful gem. The sandalwood man did not merely save my life for it. In addition, he spent fully a hundred pounds in outfitting me and buying me a passage from Thursday Island to Shanghai.”
“There’s no getting away from them rings he wears,” Daughtry overheard Simon Nishikanta that evening telling Grimshaw in the dark on the weather poop. “You don’t see that kind nowadays. They’re old, real old. They’re not men’s rings so much as what you’d call, in the old-fashioned days, gentlemen’s rings. Real gentlemen, I mean, grand gentlemen, wore rings like them. I wish collateral like them came into my loan offices these days. They’re worth big money.”
“I just want to tell you, Killeny Boy, that maybe I’ll be wishin’ before the voyage is over that I’d gone on a lay of the treasure instead of straight wages,” Dag Daughtry confided to Michael that night at turning-in time as Kwaque removed his shoes and as he paused midway in the draining of his sixth bottle. “Take it from me, Killeny, that old gentleman knows what he’s talkin’ about, an’ has been some hummer in his days. Men don’t lose the fingers off their hands and get their faces chopped open just for nothing—nor sport rings that makes a Jew pawnbroker’s mouth water.”
Before the voyage of the Mary Turner came to an end, Dag Daughtry, sitting down between the rows of water-casks in the main-hold, with a great laugh rechristened the schooner “the Ship of Fools.” But that was some weeks after. In the meantime he so fulfilled his duties that not even Captain Doane could conjure a shadow of complaint.
Especially did the steward attend upon the Ancient Mariner, for whom he had come to conceive a strong admiration, if not affection. The old fellow was different from his cabin-mates. They were money-lovers; everything in them had narrowed down to the pursuit of dollars. Daughtry, himself moulded on generously careless lines, could not but appreciate the spaciousness of the Ancient Mariner, who had evidently lived spaciously and who was ever for sharing the treasure they sought.
“You’ll get your whack, steward, if it comes out of my share,” he frequently assured Daughtry at times of special kindness on the latter’s part. “There’s oodles of it, and oodles of it, and, without kith or kin, I have so little time longer to live that I shall not need it much or much of it.”
And so the Ship of Fools sailed on, all aft fooling and befouling, from the guileless-eyed, gentle-souled Finnish mate, who, with the scent of treasure pungent in his nostrils, with a duplicate key stole the ship’s daily position from Captain Doane’s locked desk, to Ah Moy, the cook, who kept Kwaque at a distance and never whispered warning to the others of the risk they ran from continual contact with the carrier of the terrible disease.
Kwaque himself had neither thought nor worry of the matter. He knew the thing as a thing that occasionally happened to human creatures. It bothered him, from the pain standpoint, scarcely at all, and it never entered his kinky head that his master did not know about it. For the same reason he never suspected why Ah Moy kept him so at a distance. Nor had Kwaque other worries. His god, over all gods of sea and jungle, he worshipped, and, himself ever intimately allowed in the presence, paradise was wherever he and his god, the steward, might be.
And so Michael. Much in the same way that Kwaque loved and worshipped did he love and worship the six-quart man. To Michael and Kwaque, the daily, even hourly, recognition and consideration of Dag Daughtry was tantamount to resting continuously in the bosom of Abraham. The god of Messrs. Doane, Nishikanta, and Grimshaw was a graven god whose name was Gold. The god of Kwaque and Michael was a living god, whose voice could be always heard, whose arms could be always warm, the pulse of whose heart could be always felt throbbing in a myriad acts and touches.
No greater joy was Michael’s than to sit by the hour with Steward and sing with him all songs and tunes he sang or hummed. With a quantity or pitch even more of genius or unusualness in him than in Jerry, Michael learned more quickly, and since the way of his education was singing, he came to sing far beyond the best Villa Kennan ever taught Jerry.
Michael could howl, or sing, rather (because his howling was so mellow and so controlled), any air that was not beyond his register that Steward elected to sing with him. In addition, he could sing by himself, and unmistakably, such simple airs as “Home, Sweet Home,” “God save the King,” and “The Sweet By and By.” Even alone, prompted by Steward a score of feet away from him, could he lift up his muzzle and sing “Shenandoah” and “Roll me down to Rio.”
Kwaque, on stolen occasions when Steward was not around, would get out his Jews’ harp and by the sheer compellingness of the primitive instrument make Michael sing with him the barbaric and devil-devil rhythms of King William Island. Another master of song, but one in whom Michael delighted, came to rule over him. This master’s name was Cocky. He so introduced himself to Michael at their first meeting.
“Cocky,” he said bravely, without a quiver of fear or flight, when Michael had charged upon him at sight to destroy him. And the human voice, the voice of a god, issuing from the throat of the tiny, snow-white bird, had made Michael go back on his haunches, while, with eyes and nostrils, he quested the steerage for the human who had spoken. And there was no human . . . only a small cockatoo that twisted his head impudently and sidewise at him and repeated, “Cocky.”
The taboo of the chicken Michael had been well taught in his earliest days at Meringe. Chickens, esteemed by Mister Haggin and his white-god fellows, were things that dogs must even defend instead of ever attack. But this thing, itself no chicken, with the seeming of a wild feathered thing of the jungle that was fair game for any dog, talked to him with the voice of a god.
“Get off your foot,” it commanded so peremptorily, so humanly, as again to startle Michael and made him quest about the steerage for the god-throat that had uttered it.
“Get off your foot, or I’ll throw the leg of Moses at you,” was the next command from the tiny feathered thing.
After that came a farrago of Chinese, so like the voice of Ah Moy, that again, though for the last time, Michael sought about the steerage for the utterer.
At this Cocky burst into such wild and fantastic shrieks of laughter that Michael, ears pricked, head cocked to one side, identified in the fibres of the laughter the fibres of the various voices he had just previously heard.
And Cocky, only a few ounces in weight, less than half a pound, a tiny framework of fragile bone covered with a handful of feathers and incasing a heart that was as big in pluck as any heart on the Mary Turner, became almost immediately Michael’s friend and comrade, as well as ruler. Minute morsel of daring and courage that Cocky was, he commanded Michael’s respect from the first. And Michael, who with a single careless paw-stroke could have broken Cocky’s slender neck and put out for ever the brave brightness of Cocky’s eyes, was careful of him from the first. And he permitted him a myriad liberties that he would never have permitted Kwaque.
Ingrained in Michael’s heredity, from the very beginning of four-legged dogs on earth, was the defence of the meat. He never reasoned it. Automatic and involuntary as his heart-beating and air-breathing, was his defence of his meat once he had his paw on it, his teeth in it. Only to Steward, by an extreme effort of will and control, could he accord the right to touch his meat once he had himself touched it. Even Kwaque, who most usually fed him under Steward’s instructions, knew that the safety of fingers and flesh resided in having nothing further whatever to do with anything of food once in Michael’s possession. But Cocky, a bit of feathery down, a morsel-flash of light and life with the throat of a god, violated with sheer impudence and daring Michael’s taboo, the defence of the meat.
Perched on the rim of Michael’s pannikin, this inconsiderable adventurer from out of the dark into the sun of life, a mere spark and mote between the darks, by a ruffing of his salmon-pink crest, a swift and enormous dilation of his bead-black pupils, and a raucous imperative cry, as of all the gods, in his throat, could make Michael give back and permit the fastidious selection of the choicest tidbits of his dish.
For Cocky had a way with him, and ways and ways. He, who was sheer bladed steel in the imperious flashing of his will, could swashbuckle and bully like any over-seas roisterer, or wheedle as wickedly winningly as the first woman out of Eden or the last woman of that descent. When Cocky, balanced on one leg, the other leg in the air as the foot of it held the scruff of Michael’s neck, leaned to Michael’s ear and wheedled, Michael could only lay down silkily the bristly hair-waves of his neck, and with silly half-idiotic eyes of bliss agree to whatever was Cocky’s will or whimsey so delivered.
Cocky became more intimately Michael’s because, very early, Ah Moy washed his hands of the bird. Ah Moy had bought him in Sydney from a sailor for eighteen shillings and chaffered an hour over the bargain. And when he saw Cocky, one day, perched and voluble, on the twisted fingers of Kwaque’s left hand, Ah Moy discovered such instant distaste for the bird that not even eighteen shillings, coupled with possession of Cocky and possible contact, had any value to him.
“You likee him? You wanchee?” he proffered.
“Changee for changee!” Kwaque queried back, taking for granted that it was an offer to exchange and wondering whether the little old cook had become enamoured of his precious jews’ harp.
“No changee for changee,” Ah Moy answered. “You wanchee him, all right, can do.”
“How fashion can do?” Kwaque demanded, who to his bêche-de-mer English was already adding pidgin English. “Suppose ’m me fella no got ’m what you fella likee?”
“No fashion changee,” Ah Moy reiterated. “You wanchee, you likee he stop along you fella all right, my word.”
And so did pass the brave bit of feathered life with the heart of pluck, called of men, and of himself, “Cocky,” who had been birthed in the jungle roof of the island of Santo, in the New Hebrides, who had been netted by a two-legged black man-eater and sold for six sticks of tobacco and a shingle hatchet to a Scotch trader dying of malaria, and in turn had been traded from hand to hand, for four shillings to a blackbirder, for a turtle-shell comb made by an English coal-passer after an old Spanish design, for the appraised value of six shillings and sixpence in a poker game in the firemen’s forecastle, for a second-hand accordion worth at least twenty shillings, and on for eighteen shillings cash to a little old withered Chinaman—so did pass Cocky, as mortal or as immortal as any brave sparkle of life on the planet, from the possession of one, Ah Moy, a sea-cock who, forty years before, had slain his young wife in Macao for cause and fled away to sea, to Kwaque, a leprous Black Papuan who was slave to one, Dag Daughtry, himself a servant of other men to whom he humbly admitted “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” and “Thank you, sir.”
One other comrade Michael found, although Cocky was no party to the friendship. This was Scraps, the awkward young Newfoundland puppy, who was the property of no one, unless of the schooner Mary Turner herself, for no man, fore or aft, claimed ownership, while every man disclaimed having brought him on board. So he was called Scraps, and, since he was nobody’s dog, was everybody’s dog—so much so, that Mr. Jackson promised to knock Ah Moy’s block off if he did not feed the puppy well, while Sigurd Halvorsen, in the forecastle, did his best to knock off Henrik Gjertsen’s block when the latter was guilty of kicking Scraps out of his way. Yea, even more. When Simon Nishikanta, huge and gross as in the flesh he was and for ever painting delicate, insipid, feministic water-colours, when he threw his deck-chair at Scraps for clumsily knocking over his easel, he found the ham-like hand of Grimshaw so instant and heavy on his shoulder as to whirl him half about, almost fling him to the deck, and leave him lame-muscled and black-and-blued for days.
Michael, full grown, mature, was so merry-hearted an individual that he found all delight in interminable romps with Scraps. So strong was the play-instinct in him, as well as was his constitution strong, that he continually outplayed Scraps to abject weariness, so that he could only lie on the deck and pant and laugh through air-draughty lips and dab futilely in the air with weak forepaws at Michael’s continued ferocious-acted onslaughts. And this, despite the fact that Scraps out-bullied him and out-scaled him at least three times, and was as careless and unwitting of the weight of his legs or shoulders as a baby elephant on a lawn of daisies. Given his breath back again, Scraps was as ripe as ever for another frolic, and Michael was just as ripe to meet him. All of which was splendid training for Michael, keeping him in the tiptop of physical condition and mental wholesomeness.
So sailed the Ship of Fools—Michael playing with Scraps, respecting Cocky and by Cocky being bullied and wheedled, singing with Steward and worshipping him; Daughtry drinking his six quarts of beer each day, collecting his wages the first of each month, and admiring Charles Stough Greenleaf as the finest man on board; Kwaque serving and loving his master and thickening and darkening and creasing his brow with the growing leprous infiltration; Ah Moy avoiding the Black Papuan as the very plague, washing himself continuously and boiling his blankets once a week; Captain Doane doing the navigating and worrying about his flat-building in San Francisco; Grimshaw resting his ham-hands on his colossal knees and girding at the pawnbroker to contribute as much to the adventure as he was contributing from his wheat-ranches; Simon Nishikanta wiping his sweaty neck with the greasy silk handkerchief and painting endless water-colours; the mate patiently stealing the ship’s latitude and longitude with his duplicate key; and the Ancient Mariner, solacing himself with Scotch highballs, smoking fragrant three-for-a-dollar Havanas that were charged to the adventure, and for ever maundering about the hell of the longboat, the cross-bearings unnamable, and the treasure a fathom under the sand.
Came a stretch of ocean that to Daughtry was like all other stretches of ocean and unidentifiable from them. No land broke the sea-rim. The ship the centre, the horizon was the invariable and eternal circle of the world. The magnetic needle in the binnacle was the point on which the Mary Turner ever pivoted. The sun rose in the undoubted east and set in the undoubted west, corrected and proved, of course, by declination, deviation, and variation; and the nightly march of the stars and constellations proceeded across the sky.
And in this stretch of ocean, lookouts were mastheaded at day-dawn and kept mastheaded until twilight of evening, when the Mary Turner was hove-to, to hold her position through the night. As time went by, and the scent, according to the Ancient Mariner, grow hotter, all three of the investors in the adventure came to going aloft. Grimshaw contented himself with standing on the main crosstrees. Captain Doane climbed even higher, seating himself on the stump of the foremast with legs a-straddle of the butt of the fore-topmast. And Simon Nishikanta tore himself away from his everlasting painting of all colour-delicacies of sea and sky such as are painted by seminary maidens, to be helped and hoisted up the ratlines of the mizzen rigging, the huge bulk of him, by two grinning, slim-waisted sailors, until they lashed him squarely on the crosstrees and left him to stare with eyes of golden desire, across the sun-washed sea through the finest pair of unredeemed binoculars that had ever been pledged in his pawnshops.
“Strange,” the Ancient Mariner would mutter, “strange, and most strange. This is the very place. There can be no mistake. I’d have trusted that youngster of a third officer anywhere. He was only eighteen, but he could navigate better than the captain. Didn’t he fetch the atoll after eighteen days in the longboat? No standard compasses, and you know what a small-boat horizon is, with a big sea, for a sextant. He died, but the dying course he gave me held good, so that I fetched the atoll the very next day after I hove his body overboard.”
Captain Doane would shrug his shoulders and defiantly meet the mistrustful eyes of the Armenian Jew.
“It cannot have sunk, surely,” the Ancient Mariner would tactfully carry across the forbidding pause. “The island was no mere shoal or reef. The Lion’s Head was thirty-eight hundred and thirty-five feet. I saw the captain and the third officer triangulate it.”
“I’ve raked and combed the sea,” Captain Doane would then break out, “and the teeth of my comb are not so wide apart as to let slip through a four-thousand-foot peak.”
“Strange, strange,” the Ancient Mariner would next mutter, half to his cogitating soul, half aloud to the treasure-seekers. Then, with a sudden brightening, he would add:
“But, of course, the variation has changed, Captain Doane. Have you allowed for the change in variation for half a century! That should make a grave difference. Why, as I understand it, who am no navigator, the variation was not so definitely and accurately known in those days as now.”
“Latitude was latitude, and longitude was longitude,” would be the captain’s retort. “Variation and deviation are used in setting courses and estimating dead reckoning.”
All of which was Greek to Simon Nishikanta, who would promptly take the Ancient Mariner’s side of the discussion.
But the Ancient Mariner was fair-minded. What advantage he gave the Jew one moment, he balanced the next moment with an advantage to the skipper.
“It’s a pity,” he would suggest to Captain Doane, “that you have only one chronometer. The entire fault may be with the chronometer. Why did you sail with only one chronometer?”
“But I was willing for two,” the Jew would defend. “You know that, Grimshaw?”
The wheat-farmer would nod reluctantly and Captain would snap:
“But not for three chronometers.”
“But if two was no better than one, as you said so yourself and as Grimshaw will bear witness, then three was no better than two except for an expense.”
“But if you only have two chronometers, how can you tell which has gone wrong?” Captain Doane would demand.
“Search me,” would come the pawnbroker’s retort, accompanied by an incredulous shrug of the shoulders. “If you can’t tell which is wrong of two, then how much harder must it be to tell which is wrong of two dozen? With only two, it’s a fifty-fifty split that one or the other is wrong.”
“But don’t you realize—”
“I realize that it’s all a great foolishness, all this highbrow stuff about navigation. I’ve got clerks fourteen years old in my offices that can figure circles all around you and your navigation. Ask them that if two chronometers ain’t better than one, then how can two thousand be better than one? And they’d answer quick, snap, like that, that if two dollars ain’t any better than one dollar, then two thousand dollars ain’t any better than one dollar. That’s common sense.”
“Just the same, you’re wrong on general principle,” Grimshaw would oar in. “I said at the time that the only reason we took Captain Doane in with us on the deal was because we needed a navigator and because you and me didn’t know the first thing about it. You said, ‘Yes, sure’; and right away knew more about it than him when you wouldn’t stand for buying three chronometers. What was the matter with you was that the expense hurt you. That’s about as big an idea as your mind ever had room for. You go around looking for to dig out ten million dollars with a second-hand spade you call buy for sixty-eight cents.”
Dag Daughtry could not fail to overhear some of these conversations, which were altercations rather than councils. The invariable ending, for Simon Nishikanta, would be what sailors name “the sea-grouch.” For hours afterward the sulky Jew would speak to no one nor acknowledge speech from any one. Vainly striving to paint, he would suddenly burst into violent rage, tear up his attempt, stamp it into the deck, then get out his large-calibred automatic rifle, perch himself on the forecastle-head, and try to shoot any stray porpoise, albacore, or dolphin. It seemed to give him great relief to send a bullet home into the body of some surging, gorgeous-hued fish, arrest its glorious flashing motion for ever, and turn it on its side slowly to sink down into the death and depth of the sea.
On occasion, when a school of blackfish disported by, each one of them a whale of respectable size, Nishikanta would be beside himself in the ecstasy of inflicting pain. Out of the school perhaps he would reach a score of the leviathans, his bullets biting into them like whip-lashes, so that each, like a colt surprised by the stock-whip, would leap in the air, or with a flirt of tail dive under the surface, and then charge madly across the ocean and away from sight in a foam-churn of speed.
The Ancient Mariner would shake his head sadly; and Daughtry, who likewise was hurt by the infliction of hurt on unoffending animals, would sympathize with him and fetch him unbidden another of the expensive three-for-a-dollar cigars so that his feelings might be soothed. Grimshaw would curl his lip in a sneer and mutter: “The cheap skate. The skunk. No man with half the backbone of a man would take it out of the harmless creatures. He’s that kind that if he didn’t like you, or if you criticised his grammar or arithmetic, he’d kick your dog to get even . . . or poison it. In the good old days up in Colusa we used to hang men like him just to keep the air we breathed clean and wholesome.”
But it was Captain Doane who protested outright.
“Look at here, Nishikanta,” he would say, his face white and his lips trembling with anger. “That’s rough stuff, and all you can get back for it is rough stuff. I know what I’m talking about. You’ve got no right to risk our lives that way. Wasn’t the pilot boat Annie Mine sunk by a whale right in the Golden Gate? Didn’t I sail in as a youngster, second mate on the brig Berncastle, into Hakodate, pumping double watches to keep afloat just because a whale took a smash at us? Didn’t the full-rigged ship, the whaler Essex, sink off the west coast of South America, twelve hundred miles from the nearest land for the small boats to cover, and all because of a big cow whale that butted her into kindling-wood?”
And Simon Nishikanta, in his grouch, disdaining to reply, would continue to pepper the last whale into flight beyond the circle of the sea their vision commanded.
“I remember the whaleship Essex,” the Ancient Mariner told Dag Daughtry. “It was a cow with a calf that did for her. Her barrels were two-thirds full, too. She went down in less than an hour. One of the boats never was heard of.”
“And didn’t another one of her boats get to Hawaii, sir?” Daughtry queried with all due humility of respect. “Leastwise, thirty years ago, when I was in Honolulu, I met a man, an old geezer, who claimed he’d been a harpooner on a whaleship sunk by a whale off the coast of South America. That was the first and last I heard of it, until right now you speaking of it, sir. It must a-been the same ship, sir, don’t you think?”
“Unless two different ships were whale-sunk off the west coast,” the Ancient Mariner replied. “And of the one ship, the Essex, there is no discussion. It is historical. The chance is likely, steward, that the man you mentioned was from the Essex.”
Captain Doane worked hard, pursuing the sun in its daily course through the sky, by the equation of time correcting its aberrations due to the earth’s swinging around the great circle of its orbit, and charting Sumner lines innumerable, working assumed latitudes for position until his head grew dizzy.
Simon Nishikanta sneered openly at what he considered the captain’s inefficient navigation, and continued to paint water-colours when he was serene, and to shoot at whales, sea-birds, and all things hurtable when he was downhearted and sea-sore with disappointment at not sighting the Lion’s Head peak of the Ancient Mariner’s treasure island.
“I’ll show I ain’t a pincher,” Nishikanta announced one day, after having broiled at the mast-head for five hours of sea-searching. “Captain Doane, how much could we have bought extra chronometers for in San Francisco—good second-hand ones, I mean?”
“Say a hundred dollars,” the captain answered.
“Very well. And this ain’t a piker’s proposition. The cost of such a chronometer would have been divided between the three of us. I stand for its total cost. You just tell the sailors that I, Simon Nishikanta, will pay one hundred dollars gold money for the first one that sights land on Mr. Greenleaf’s latitude and longitude.”
But the sailors who swarmed the mast-heads were doomed to disappointment, in that for only two days did they have opportunity to stare the ocean surface for the reward. Nor was this due entirely to Dag Daughtry, despite the fact that his own intention and act would have been sufficient to spoil their chance for longer staring.
Down in the lazarette, under the main-cabin floor, it chanced that he took toll of the cases of beer which had been shipped for his especial benefit. He counted the cases, doubted the verdict of his senses, lighted more matches, counted again, then vainly searched the entire lazarette in the hope of finding more cases of beer stored elsewhere.
He sat down under the trap door of the main-cabin floor and thought for a solid hour. It was the Jew again, he concluded—the Jew who had been willing to equip the Mary Turner with two chronometers, but not with three; the Jew who had ratified the agreement of a sufficient supply to permit Daughtry his daily six quarts. Once again the steward counted the cases to make sure. There were three. And since each case contained two dozen quarts, and since his whack each day was half a dozen quarts, it was patent that, the supply that stared him in the face would last him only twelve days. And twelve days were none too long to sail from this unidentifiable naked sea-stretch to the nearest possible port where beer could be purchased.
The steward, once his mind was made up, wasted no time. The clock marked a quarter before twelve when he climbed up out of the lazarette, replaced the trapdoor, and hurried to set the table. He served the company through the noon meal, although it was all he could do to refrain from capsizing the big tureen of split-pea soup over the head of Simon Nishikanta. What did effectually withstrain him was the knowledge of the act which in the lazarette he had already determined to perform that afternoon down in the main hold where the water-casks were stored.
At three o’clock, while the Ancient Mariner supposedly drowned in his room, and while Captain Doane, Grimshaw, and half the watch on deck clustered at the mast-heads to try to raise the Lion’s Head from out the sapphire sea, Dag Daughtry dropped down the ladder of the open hatchway into the main hold. Here, in long tiers, with alleyways between, the water-casks were chocked safely on their sides.
From inside his shirt the steward drew a brace, and to it fitted a half-inch bit from his hip-pocket. On his knees, he bored through the head of the first cask until the water rushed out upon the deck and flowed down into the bilge. He worked quickly, boring cask after cask down the alleyway that led to deeper twilight. When he had reached the end of the first row of casks he paused a moment to listen to the gurglings of the many half-inch streams running to waste. His quick ears caught a similar gurgling from the right in the direction of the next alleyway. Listening closely, he could have sworn he heard the sounds of a bit biting into hard wood.
A minute later, his own brace and bit carefully secreted, his hand was descending on the shoulder of a man he could not recognize in the gloom, but who, on his knees and wheezing, was steadily boring into the head of a cask. The culprit made no effort to escape, and when Daughtry struck a match he gazed down into the upturned face of the Ancient Mariner.
“My word!” the steward muttered his amazement softly. “What in hell are you running water out for?”
He could feel the old man’s form trembling with violent nervousness, and his own heart smote him for gentleness.
“It’s all right,” he whispered. “Don’t mind me. How many have you bored?”
“All in this tier,” came the whispered answer. “You will not inform on me to the . . . the others?”
“Inform?” Daughtry laughed softly. “I don’t mind telling you that we’re playing the same game, though I don’t know why you should play it. I’ve just finished boring all of the starboard row. Now I tell you, sir, you skin out right now, quietly, while the goin’ is good. Everybody’s aloft, and you won’t be noticed. I’ll go ahead and finish this job . . . all but enough water to last us say a dozen days.”
“I should like to talk with you . . . to explain matters,” the Ancient Mariner whispered.
“Sure, sir, an’ I don’t mind sayin’, sir, that I’m just plain mad curious to hear. I’ll join you down in the cabin, say in ten minutes, and we can have a real gam. But anyway, whatever your game is, I’m with you. Because it happens to be my game to get quick into port, and because, sir, I have a great liking and respect for you. Now shoot along. I’ll be with you inside ten minutes.”
“I like you, steward, very much,” the old man quavered.
“And I like you, sir—and a damn sight more than them money-sharks aft. But we’ll just postpone this. You beat it out of here, while I finish scuppering the rest of the water.”
A quarter of an hour later, with the three money-sharks still at the mast-heads, Charles Stough Greenleaf was seated in the cabin and sipping a highball, and Dag Daughtry was standing across the table from him, drinking directly from a quart bottle of beer.
“Maybe you haven’t guessed it,” the Ancient Mariner said; “but this is my fourth voyage after this treasure.”
“You mean . . . ?” Daughtry asked.
“Just that. There isn’t any treasure. There never was one—any more than the Lion’s Head, the longboat, or the bearings unnamable.”’
Daughtry rumpled his grizzled thatch of hair in his perplexity, as he admitted:
“Well, you got me, sir. You sure got me to believin’ in that treasure.”
“And I acknowledge, steward, that I am pleased to hear it. It shows that I have not lost my cunning when I can deceive a man like you. It is easy to deceive men whose souls know only money. But you are different. You don’t live and breathe for money. I’ve watched you with your dog. I’ve watched you with your nigger boy. I’ve watched you with your beer. And just because your heart isn’t set on a great buried treasure of gold, you are harder to deceive. Those whose hearts are set, are most astonishingly easy to fool. They are of cheap kidney. Offer them a proposition of one hundred dollars for one, and they are like hungry pike snapping at the bait. Offer a thousand dollars for one, or ten thousand for one, and they become sheer lunatic. I am an old man, a very old man. I like to live until I die—I mean, to live decently, comfortably, respectably.”
“And you like the voyages long? I begin to see, sir. Just as they’re getting near to where the treasure ain’t, a little accident like the loss of their water-supply sends them into port and out again to start hunting all over.”
The Ancient Mariner nodded, and his sun-washed eyes twinkled.
“There was the Emma Louisa. I kept her on the long voyage over eighteen months with water accidents and similar accidents. And, besides, they kept me in one of the best hotels in New Orleans for over four months before the voyage began, and advanced to me handsomely, yes, bravely, handsomely.”
“But tell me more, sir; I am most interested,” Dag Daughtry concluded his simple matter of the beer. “It’s a good game. I might learn it for my old age, though I give you my word, sir, I won’t butt in on your game. I wouldn’t tackle it until you are gone, sir, good game that it is.”
“First of all, you must pick out men with money—with plenty of money, so that any loss will not hurt them. Also, they are easier to interest—”
“Because they are more hoggish,” the steward interrupted. “The more money they’ve got the more they want.”
“Precisely,” the Ancient Mariner continued. “And, at least, they are repaid. Such sea-voyages are excellent for their health. After all, I do them neither hurt nor harm, but only good, and add to their health.”
“But them scars—that gouge out of your face—all them fingers missing on your hand? You never got them in the fight in the longboat when the bo’s’n carved you up. Then where in Sam Hill did you get the them? Wait a minute, sir. Let me fill your glass first.” And with a fresh-brimmed glass, Charles Stough Greanleaf narrated the history of his scars.
“First, you must know, steward, that I am—well, a gentleman. My name has its place in the pages of the history of the United States, even back before the time when they were the United States. I graduated second in my class in a university that it is not necessary to name. For that matter, the name I am known by is not my name. I carefully compounded it out of names of other families. I have had misfortunes. I trod the quarter-deck when I was a young man, though never the deck of the Wide Awake, which is the ship of my fancy—and of my livelihood in these latter days.
“The scars you asked about, and the missing fingers? Thus it chanced. It was the morning, at late getting-up times in a Pullman, when the accident happened. The car being crowded, I had been forced to accept an upper berth. It was only the other day. A few years ago. I was an old man then. We were coming up from Florida. It was a collision on a high trestle. The train crumpled up, and some of the cars fell over sideways and fell off, ninety feet into the bottom of a dry creek. It was dry, though there was a pool of water just ten feet in diameter and eighteen inches deep. All the rest was dry boulders, and I bull’s-eyed that pool.
“This is the way it was. I had just got on my shoes and pants and shirt, and had started to get out of the bunk. There I was, sitting on the edge of the bunk, my legs dangling down, when the locomotives came together. The berths, upper and lower, on the opposite side had already been made up by the porter.
“And there I was, sitting, legs dangling, not knowing where I was, on a trestle or a flat, when the thing happened. I just naturally left that upper berth, soared like a bird across the aisle, went through the glass of the window on the opposite side clean head-first, turned over and over through the ninety feet of fall more times than I like to remember, and by some sort of miracle was mostly flat-out in the air when I bull’s-eyed that pool of water. It was only eighteen inches deep. But I hit it flat, and I hit it so hard that it must have cushioned me. I was the only survivor of my car. It struck forty feet away from me, off to the side. And they took only the dead out of it. When they took me out of the pool I wasn’t dead by any means. And when the surgeons got done with me, there were the fingers gone from my hand, that scar down the side of my face . . . and, though you’d never guess it, I’ve been three ribs short of the regular complement ever since.
“Oh, I had no complaint coming. Think of the others in that car—all dead. Unfortunately, I was riding on a pass, and so could not sue the railroad company. But here I am, the only man who ever dived ninety feet into eighteen inches of water and lived to tell the tale.—Steward, if you don’t mind replenishing my glass . . . ”
Dag Daughtry complied and in his excitement of interest pulled off the top of another quart of beer for himself.
“Go on, go on, sir,” he murmured huskily, wiping his lips, “and the treasure-hunting graft. I’m straight dying to hear. Sir, I salute you.”
“I may say, steward,” the Ancient Mariner resumed, “that I was born with a silver spoon that melted in my mouth and left me a proper prodigal son. Also, that I was born with a backbone of pride that would not melt. Not for a paltry railroad accident, but for things long before as well as after, my family let me die, and I . . . I let it live. That is the story. I let my family live. Furthermore, it was not my family’s fault. I never whimpered. I never let on. I melted the last of my silver spoon—South Sea cotton, an’ it please you, cacao in Tonga, rubber and mahogany in Yucatan. And do you know, at the end, I slept in Bowery lodging-houses and ate scrapple in East-Side feeding-dens, and, on more than one occasion, stood in the bread-line at midnight and pondered whether or not I should faint before I fed.”
“And you never squealed to your family,” Dag Daughtry murmured admiringly in the pause.
The Ancient Mariner straightened up his shoulders, threw his head back, then bowed it and repeated, “No, I never squealed. I went into the poor-house, or the county poor-farm as they call it. I lived sordidly. I lived like a beast. For six months I lived like a beast, and then I saw my way out. I set about building the Wide Awake. I built her plank by plank, and copper-fastened her, selected her masts and every timber of her, and personally signed on her full ship’s complement fore-and-aft, and outfitted her amongst the Jews, and sailed with her to the South Seas and the treasure buried a fathom under the sand.
“You see,” he explained, “all this I did in my mind, for all the time I was a hostage in the poor-farm of broken men.”
The Ancient Mariner’s face grew suddenly bleak and fierce, and his right hand flashed out to Daughtry’s wrist, prisoning it in withered fingers of steel.
“It was a long, hard way to get out of the poor-farm and finance my miserable little, pitiful little, adventure of the Wide Awake. Do you know that I worked in the poor-farm laundry for two years, for one dollar and a half a week, with my one available hand and what little I could do with the other, sorting dirty clothes and folding sheets and pillow-slips until I thought a thousand times my poor old back would break in two, and until I knew a million times the location in my chest of every fraction of an inch of my missing ribs.”
“You are a young man yet—”
Daughtry grinned denial as he rubbed his grizzled mat of hair.
“You are a young man yet, steward,” the Ancient Mariner insisted with a show of irritation. “You have never been shut out from life. In the poor-farm one is shut out from life. There is no respect—no, not for age alone, but for human life in the poor-house. How shall I say it? One is not dead. Nor is one alive. One is what once was alive and is in process of becoming dead. Lepers are treated that way. So are the insane. I know it. When I was young and on the sea, a brother-lieutenant went mad. Sometimes he was violent, and we struggled with him, twisting his arms, bruising his flesh, tying him helpless while we sat and panted on him that he might not do harm to us, himself, or the ship. And he, who still lived, died to us. Don’t you understand? He was no longer of us, like us. He was something other. That is it—other. And so, in the poor-farm, we, who are yet unburied, are other. You have heard me chatter about the hell of the longboat. That is a pleasant diversion in life compared with the poor-farm. The food, the filth, the abuse, the bullying, the—the sheer animalness of it!
“For two years I worked for a dollar and a half a week in the laundry. And imagine me, who had melted a silver spoon in my mouth—a sizable silver spoon steward—imagine me, my old sore bones, my old belly reminiscent of youth’s delights, my old palate ticklish yet and not all withered of the deviltries of taste learned in younger days—as I say, steward, imagine me, who had ever been free-handed, lavish, saving that dollar and a half intact like a miser, never spending a penny of it on tobacco, never mitigating by purchase of any little delicacy the sad condition of my stomach that protested against the harshness and indigestibility of our poor fare. I cadged tobacco, poor cheap tobacco, from poor doddering old chaps trembling on the edge of dissolution. Ay, and when Samuel Merrivale I found dead in the morning, next cot to mine, I first rummaged his poor old trousers’ pocket for the half-plug of tobacco I knew was the total estate he left, then announced the news.
“Oh, steward, I was careful of that dollar and a half. Don’t you see?—I was a prisoner sawing my way out with a tiny steel saw. And I sawed out!” His voice rose in a shrill cackle of triumph. “Steward, I sawed out!”
Dag Daughtry held forth and up his beer-bottle as he said gravely and sincerely:
“Sir, I salute you.”
“And I thank you, sir—you understand,” the Ancient Mariner replied with simple dignity to the toast, touching his glass to the bottle and drinking with the steward eyes to eyes.
“I should have had one hundred and fifty-six dollars when I left the poor-farm,” the ancient one continued. “But there were the two weeks I lost, with influenza, and the one week from a confounded pleurisy, so that I emerged from that place of the living dead with but one hundred and fifty-one dollars and fifty cents.”
“I see, sir,” Daughtry interrupted with honest admiration. “The tiny saw had become a crowbar, and with it you were going back to break into life again.”
All the scarred face and washed eyes of Charles Stough Greenleaf beamed as he held his glass up.
“Steward, I salute you. You understand. And you have said it well. I was going back to break into the house of life. It was a crowbar, that pitiful sum of money accumulated by two years of crucifixion. Think of it! A sum that in the days ere the silver spoon had melted, I staked in careless moods of an instant on a turn of the cards. But as you say, a burglar, I came back to break into life, and I came to Boston. You have a fine turn for a figure of speech, steward, and I salute you.”
Again bottle and glass tinkled together, and both men drank eyes to eyes and each was aware that the eyes he gazed into were honest and understanding.
“But it was a thin crowbar, steward. I dared not put my weight on it for a proper pry. I took a room in a small but respectable hotel, European plan. It was in Boston, I think I said. Oh, how careful I was of my crowbar! I scarcely ate enough to keep my frame inhabited. But I bought drinks for others, most carefully selected—bought drinks with an air of prosperity that was as a credential to my story; and in my cups (my apparent cups, steward), spun an old man’s yarn of the Wide Awake, the longboat, the bearings unnamable, and the treasure under the sand.—A fathom under the sand; that was literary; it was psychological; it smacked of the salt sea, and daring rovers, and the loot of the Spanish Main.
“You have noticed this nugget I wear on my watch-chain, steward? I could not afford it at that time, but I talked golden instead, California gold, nuggets and nuggets, oodles and oodles, from the diggings of forty-nine and fifty. That was literary. That was colour. Later, after my first voyage out of Boston I was financially able to buy a nugget. It was so much bait to which men rose like fishes. And like fishes they nibbled. These rings, also—bait. You never see such rings now. After I got in funds, I purchased them, too. Take this nugget: I am talking. I toy with it absently as I am telling of the great gold treasure we buried under the sand. Suddenly the nugget flashes fresh recollection into my mind. I speak of the longboat, of our thirst and hunger, and of the third officer, the fair lad with cheeks virgin of the razor, and that he it was who used it as a sinker when we strove to catch fish.
“But back in Boston. Yarns and yarns, when seemingly I was gone in drink, I told my apparent cronies—men whom I despised, stupid dolts of creatures that they were. But the word spread, until one day, a young man, a reporter, tried to interview me about the treasure and the Wide Awake. I was indignant, angry.—Oh, softly, steward, softly; in my heart was great joy as I denied that young reporter, knowing that from my cronies he already had a sufficiency of the details.
“And the morning paper gave two whole columns and headlines to the tale. I began to have callers. I studied them out well. Many were for adventuring after the treasure who themselves had no money. I baffled and avoided them, and waited on, eating even less as my little capital dwindled away.
“And then he came, my gay young doctor—doctor of philosophy he was, for he was very wealthy. My heart sang when I saw him. But twenty-eight dollars remained to me—after it was gone, the poor-house, or death. I had already resolved upon death as my choice rather than go back to be of that dolorous company, the living dead of the poor-farm. But I did not go back, nor did I die. The gay young doctor’s blood ran warm at thought of the South Seas, and in his nostrils I distilled all the scents of the flower-drenched air of that far-off land, and in his eyes I builded him the fairy visions of the tradewind clouds, the monsoon skies, the palm isles and the coral seas.
“He was a gay, mad young dog, grandly careless of his largess, fearless as a lion’s whelp, lithe and beautiful as a leopard, and mad, a trifle mad of the deviltries and whimsies that tickled in that fine brain of his. Look you, steward. Before we sailed in the Gloucester fishing-schooner, purchased by the doctor, and that was like a yacht and showed her heels to most yachts, he had me to his house to advise about personal equipment. We were overhauling in a gear-room, when suddenly he spoke:
“‘I wonder how my lady will take my long absence. What say you? Shall she go along?’
“And I had not known that he had any wife or lady. And I looked my surprise and incredulity.
“‘Just that you do not believe I shall take her on the cruise,’ he laughed, wickedly, madly, in my astonished face. ‘Come, you shall meet her.’
“Straight to his bedroom and his bed he led me, and, turning down the covers, showed there to me, asleep as she had slept for many a thousand years, the mummy of a slender Egyptian maid.
“And she sailed with us on the long vain voyage to the South Seas and back again, and, steward, on my honour, I grew quite fond of the dear maid myself.”
The Ancient Mariner gazed dreamily into his glass, and Dag Daughtry took advantage of the pause to ask:
“But the young doctor? How did he take the failure to find the treasure?”
The Ancient Mariner’s face lighted with joy.
“He called me a delectable old fraud, with his arm on my shoulder while he did it. Why, steward, I had come to love that young man like a splendid son. And with his arm on my shoulder, and I know there was more than mere kindness in it, he told me we had barely reached the River Plate when he discovered me. With laughter, and with more than one slap of his hand on my shoulder that was more caress than jollity, he pointed out the discrepancies in my tale (which I have since amended, steward, thanks to him, and amended well), and told me that the voyage had been a grand success, making him eternally my debtor.
“What could I do? I told him the truth. To him even did I tell my family name, and the shame I had saved it from by forswearing it.
“He put his arm on my shoulder, I tell you, and . . . ”
The Ancient Mariner ceased talking because of a huskiness in his throat, and a moisture from his eyes trickled down both cheeks.
Dag Daughtry pledged him silently, and in the draught from his glass he recovered himself.
“He told me that I should come and live with him, and, to his great lonely house he took me the very day we landed in Boston. Also, he told me he would make arrangements with his lawyers—the idea tickled his fancy—‘I shall adopt you,’ he said. ‘I shall adopt you along with Isthar’—Isthar was the little maid’s name, the little mummy’s name.
“Here was I, back in life, steward, and legally to be adopted. But life is a fond betrayer. Eighteen hours afterward, in the morning, we found him dead in his bed, the little mummy maid beside him. Heart-failure, the burst of some blood-vessel in the brain—I never learned.
“I prayed and pleaded with them for the pair to be buried together. But they were a hard, cold, New England lot, his cousins and his aunts, and they presented Isthar to the museum, and me they gave a week to be quit of the house. I left in an hour, and they searched my small baggage before they would let me depart.
“I went to New York. It was the same game there, only that I had more money and could play it properly. It was the same in New Orleans, in Galveston. I came to California. This is my fifth voyage. I had a hard time getting these three interested, and spent all my little store of money before they signed the agreement. They were very mean. Advance any money to me! The very idea of it was preposterous. Though I bided my time, ran up a comfortable hotel bill, and, at the very last, ordered my own generous assortment of liquors and cigars and charged the bill to the schooner. Such a to-do! All three of them raged and all but tore their hair . . . and mime. They said it could not be. I fell promptly sick. I told them they got on my nerves and made me sick. The more they raged, the sicker I got. Then they gave in. As promptly I grew better. And here we are, out of water and heading soon most likely for the Marquesas to fill our barrels. Then they will return and try for it again!”
“You think so, sir?”
“I shall remember even more important data, steward,” the Ancient Mariner smiled. “Without doubt they will return. Oh, I know them well. They are meagre, narrow, grasping fools.”
“Fools! all fools! a ship of fools!” Dag Daughtry exulted; repeating what he had expressed in the hold, as he bored the last barrel, listened to the good water gurgling away into the bilge, and chuckled over his discovery of the Ancient Mariner on the same lay as his own.
Early next morning, the morning watch of sailors, whose custom was to fetch the day’s supply of water for the galley and cabin, discovered that the barrels were empty. Mr. Jackson was so alarmed that he immediately called Captain Doane, and not many minutes elapsed ere Captain Doane had routed out Grimshaw and Nishikanta to tell them the disaster.
Breakfast was an excitement shared in peculiarly by the Ancient Mariner and Dag Daughtry, while the trio of partners raged and bewailed. Captain Doane particularly wailed. Simon Nishikanta was fiendish in his descriptions of whatever miscreant had done the deed and of how he should be made to suffer for it, while Grimshaw clenched and repeatedly clenched his great hands as if throttling some throat.
“I remember, it was in forty-seven—nay, forty-six—yes, forty-six,” the Ancient Mariner chattered. “It was a similar and worse predicament. It was in the longboat, sixteen of us. We ran on Glister Reef. So named it was after our pretty little craft discovered it one dark night and left her bones upon it. The reef is on the Admiralty charts. Captain Doane will verify me . . . ”
No one listened, save Dag Daughtry, serving hot cakes and admiring. But Simon Nishikanta, becoming suddenly aware that the old man was babbling, bellowed out ferociously:
“Oh, shut up! Close your jaw! You make me tired with your everlasting ‘I remember.’”
The Ancient Mariner was guilelessly surprised, as if he had slipped somewhere in his narrative.
“No, I assure you,” he continued. “It must have been some error of my poor old tongue. It was not the Wide Awake, but the brig Glister. Did I say Wide Awake? It was the Glister, a smart little brig, almost a toy brig in fact, copper-bottomed, lines like a dolphin, a sea-cutter and a wind-eater. Handled like a top. On my honour, gentlemen, it was lively work for both watches when she went about. I was super-cargo. We sailed out of New York, ostensibly for the north-west coast, with sealed orders—”
“In the name of God, peace, peace! You drive me mad with your drivel!” So Nishikanta cried out in nervous pain that was real and quivering. “Old man, have a heart. What do I care to know of your Glister and your sealed orders!”
“Ah, sealed orders,” the Ancient Mariner went on beamingly. “A magic phrase, sealed orders.” He rolled it off his tongue with unction. “Those were the days, gentlemen, when ships did sail with sealed orders. And as super-cargo, with my trifle invested in the adventure and my share in the gains, I commanded the captain. Not in him, but in me were reposed the sealed orders. I assure you I did not know myself what they were. Not until we were around old Cape Stiff, fifty to fifty, and in fifty in the Pacific, did I break the seal and learn we were bound for Van Dieman’s Land. They called it Van Dieman’s Land in those days . . . ”
It was a day of discoveries. Captain Doane caught the mate stealing the ship’s position from his desk with the duplicate key. There was a scene, but no more, for the Finn was too huge a man to invite personal encounter, and Captain Dome could only stigmatize his conduct to a running reiteration of “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” and “Sorry, sir.”
Perhaps the most important discovery, although he did not know it at the time, was that of Dag Daughtry. It was after the course had been changed and all sail set, and after the Ancient Mariner had privily informed him that Taiohae, in the Marquesas, was their objective, that Daughtry gaily proceeded to shave. But one trouble was on his mind. He was not quite sure, in such an out-of-the-way place as Taiohae, that good beer could be procured.
As he prepared to make the first stroke of the razor, most of his face white with lather, he noticed a dark patch of skin on his forehead just between the eyebrows and above. When he had finished shaving he touched the dark patch, wondering how he had been sunburned in such a spot. But he did not know he had touched it in so far as there was any response of sensation. The dark place was numb.
“Curious,” he thought, wiped his face, and forgot all about it.
No more than he knew what horror that dark spot represented, did he know that Ah Moy’s slant eyes had long since noticed it and were continuing to notice it, day by day, with secret growing terror.
Close-hauled on the south-east trades, the Mary Turner began her long slant toward the Marquesas. For’ard, all were happy. Being only seamen, on seamen’s wages, they hailed with delight the news that they were bound in for a tropic isle to fill their water-barrels. Aft, the three partners were in bad temper, and Nishikanta openly sneered at Captain Doane and doubted his ability to find the Marquesas. In the steerage everybody was happy—Dag Daughtry because his wages were running on and a further supply of beer was certain; Kwaque because he was happy whenever his master was happy; and Ah Moy because he would soon have opportunity to desert away from the schooner and the two lepers with whom he was domiciled.
Michael shared in the general happiness of the steerage, and joined eagerly with Steward in learning by heart a fifth song. This was “Lead, kindly Light.” In his singing, which was no more than trained howling after all, Michael sought for something he knew not what. In truth, it was the lost pack, the pack of the primeval world before the dog ever came in to the fires of men, and, for that matter, before men built fires and before men were men.
He had been born only the other day and had lived but two years in the world, so that, of himself, he had no knowledge of the lost pack. For many thousands of generations he had been away from it; yet, deep down in the crypts of being, tied about and wrapped up in every muscle and nerve of him, was the indelible record of the days in the wild when dim ancestors had run with the pack and at the same time developed the pack and themselves. When Michael was asleep, then it was that pack-memories sometimes arose to the surface of his subconscious mind. These dreams were real while they lasted, but when he was awake he remembered them little if at all. But asleep, or singing with Steward, he sensed and yearned for the lost pack and was impelled to seek the forgotten way to it.
Waking, Michael had another and real pack. This was composed of Steward, Kwaque, Cocky, and Scraps, and he ran with it as ancient forbears had ran with their own kind in the hunting. The steerage was the lair of this pack, and, out of the steerage, it ranged the whole world, which was the Mary Turner ever rocking, heeling, reeling on the surface of the unstable sea.
But the steerage and its company meant more to Michael than the mere pack. It was heaven as well, where dwelt God. Man early invented God, often of stone, or clod, or fire, and placed him in trees and mountains and among the stars. This was because man observed that man passed and was lost out of the tribe, or family, or whatever name he gave to his group, which was, after all, the human pack. And man did not want to be lost out of the pack. So, of his imagination, he devised a new pack that would be eternal and with which he might for ever run. Fearing the dark, into which he observed all men passed, he built beyond the dark a fairer region, a happier hunting-ground, a jollier and robuster feasting-hall and wassailing-place, and called it variously “heaven.”
Like some of the earliest and lowest of primitive men, Michael never dreamed of throwing the shadow of himself across his mind and worshipping it as God. He did not worship shadows. He worshipped a real and indubitable god, not fashioned in his own four-legged, hair-covered image, but in the flesh-and-blood image, two-legged, hairless, upstanding, of Steward.
Had the trade wind not failed on the second day after laying the course for the Marquesas; had Captain Doane, at the mid-day meal, not grumbled once again at being equipped with only one chronometer; had Simon Nishikanta not become viciously angry thereat and gone on deck with his rifle to find some sea-denizen to kill; and had the sea-denizen that appeared close alongside been a bonita, a dolphin, a porpoise, an albacore, or anything else than a great, eighty-foot cow whale accompanied by her nursing calf—had any link been missing from this chain of events, the Mary Turner would have undoubtedly reached the Marquesas, filled her water-barrels, and returned to the treasure-hunting; and the destinies of Michael, Daughtry, Kwaque, and Cocky would have been quite different and possibly less terrible.
But every link was present for the occasion. The schooner, in a dead calm, was rolling over the huge, smooth seas, her boom sheets and tackles crashing to the hollow thunder of her great sails, when Simon Nishikanta put a bullet into the body of the little whale calf. By an almost miracle of chance, the shot killed the calf. It was equivalent to killing an elephant with a pea-rifle. Not at once did the calf die. It merely immediately ceased its gambols and for a while lay quivering on the surface of the ocean. The mother was beside it the moment after it was struck, and to those on board, looking almost directly down upon her, her dismay and alarm were very patent. She would nudge the calf with her huge shoulder, circle around and around it, then range up alongside and repeat her nudgings and shoulderings.
All on the Mary Turner, fore and aft, lined the rail and stared down apprehensively at the leviathan that was as long as the schooner.
“If she should do to us, sir, what that other one did to the Essex,” Dag Daughtry observed to the Ancient Mariner.
“It would be no more than we deserve,” was the response. “It was uncalled-for—a wanton, cruel act.”
Michael, aware of the excitement overside but unable to see because of the rail, leaped on top of the cabin and at sight of the monster barked defiantly. Every eye turned on him in startlement and fear, and Steward hushed him with a whispered command.
“This is the last time,” Grimshaw muttered in a low voice, tense with anger, to Nishikanta. “If ever again, on this voyage, you take a shot at a whale, I’ll wring your dirty neck for you. Get me. I mean it. I’ll choke your eye-balls out of you.”
The Jew smiled in a sickly way and whined, “There ain’t nothing going to happen. I don’t believe that Essex ever was sunk by a whale.”
Urged on by its mother, the dying calf made spasmodic efforts to swim that were futile and caused it to veer and wallow from side to side.
In the course of circling about it, the mother accidentally brushed her shoulder under the port quarter of the Mary Turner, and the Mary Turner listed to starboard as her stern was lifted a yard or more. Nor was this unintentional, gentle impact all. The instant after her shoulder had touched, startled by the contact, she flailed out with her tail. The blow smote the rail just for’ard of the fore-shrouds, splintering a gap through it as if it were no more than a cigar-box and cracking the covering board.
That was all, and an entire ship’s company stared down in silence and fear at a sea-monster grief-stricken over its dying progeny.
Several times, in the course of an hour, during which the schooner and the two whales drifted farther and farther apart, the calf strove vainly to swim. Then it set up a great quivering, which culminated in a wild wallowing and lashing about of its tail.
“It is the death-flurry,” said the Ancient Mariner softly.
“By damn, it’s dead,” was Captain Doane’s comment five minutes later. “Who’d believe it? A rifle bullet! I wish to heaven we could get half an hour’s breeze of wind to get us out of this neighbourhood.”
“A close squeak,” said Grimshaw,
Captain Doane shook his head, as his anxious eyes cast aloft to the empty canvas and quested on over the sea in the hope of wind-ruffles on the water. But all was glassy calm, each great sea, of all the orderly procession of great seas, heaving up, round-topped and mountainous, like so much quicksilver.
“It’s all right,” Grimahaw encouraged. “There she goes now, beating it away from us.”
“Of course it’s all right, always was all right,” Nishikanta bragged, as he wiped the sweat from his face and neck and looked with the others after the departing whale. “You’re a fine brave lot, you are, losing your goat to a fish.”
“I noticed your face was less yellow than usual,” Grimshaw sneered. “It must have gone to your heart.”
Captain Doane breathed a great sigh. His relief was too strong to permit him to join in the squabbling.
“You’re yellow,” Grimshaw went on, “yellow clean through.” He nodded his head toward the Ancient Mariner. “Now there’s the real thing as a man. No yellow in him. He never batted an eye, and I reckon he knew more about the danger than you did. If I was to choose being wrecked on a desert island with him or you, I’d take him a thousand times first. If—”
But a cry from the sailors interrupted him.
“Merciful God!” Captain Doane breathed aloud.
The great cow whale had turned about, and, on the surface, was charging straight back at them. Such was her speed that a bore was raised by her nose like that which a Dreadnought or an Atlantic liner raises on the sea.
“Hold fast, all!” Captain Doane roared.
Every man braced himself for the shock. Henrik Gjertsen, the sailor at the wheel, spread his legs, crouched down, and stiffened his shoulders and arms to hand-grips on opposite spokes of the wheel. Several of the crew fled from the waist to the poop, and others of them sprang into the main-rigging. Daughtry, one hand on the rail, with his free arm clasped the Ancient Mariner around the waist.
All held. The whale struck the Mary Turner just aft of the fore-shroud. A score of things, which no eye could take in simultaneously, happened. A sailor, in the main rigging, carried away a ratline in both hands, fell head-downward, and was clutched by an ankle and saved head-downward by a comrade, as the schooner cracked and shuddered, uplifted on the port side, and was flung down on her starboard side till the ocean poured level over her rail. Michael, on the smooth roof of the cabin, slithered down the steep slope to starboard and disappeared, clawing and snarling, into the runway. The port shrouds of the foremast carried away at the chain-plates, and the fore-topmast leaned over drunkenly to starboard.
“My word,” quoth the Ancient Mariner. “We certainly felt that.”
“Mr. Jackson,” Captain Doane commanded the mate, “will you sound the well.”
The mate obeyed, although he kept an anxious eye on the whale, which had gone off at a tangent and was smoking away to the eastward.
“You see, that’s what you get,” Grimshaw snarled at Nishikanta.
Nishikanta nodded, as he wiped the sweat away, and muttered, “And I’m satisfied. I got all I want. I didn’t think a whale had it in it. I’ll never do it again.”
“Maybe you’ll never have the chance,” the captain retorted. “We’re not done with this one yet. The one that charged the Essex made charge after charge, and I guess whale nature hasn’t changed any in the last few years.”
“Dry as a bone, sir,” Mr. Jackson reported the result of his sounding.
“There she turns,” Daughtry called out.
Half a mile away, the whale circled about sharply and charged back.
“Stand from under for’ard there!” Captain Doane shouted to one of the sailors who had just emerged from the forecastle scuttle, sea-bag in hand, and over whom the fore-topmast was swaying giddily.
“He’s packed for the get-away,” Daughtry murmured to the Ancient Mariner. “Like a rat leaving a ship.”
“We’re all rats,” was the reply. “I learned just that when I was a rat among the mangy rats of the poor-farm.”
By this time, all men on board had communicated to Michael their contagion of excitement and fear. Back on top of the cabin so that he might see, he snarled at the cow whale when the men seized fresh grips against the impending shock and when he saw her close at hand and oncoming.
The Mary Turner was struck aft of the mizzen shrouds. As she was hurled down to starboard, whither Michael was ignominiously flung, the crack of shattered timbers was plainly heard. Henrik Gjertsen, at the wheel, clutching the wheel with all his strength, was spun through the air as the wheel was spun by the fling of the rudder. He fetched up against Captain Doane, whose grip had been torn loose from the rail. Both men crumpled down on deck with the wind knocked out of them. Nishikanta leaned cursing against the side of the cabin, the nails of both hands torn off at the quick by the breaking of his grip on the rail.
While Daughtry was passing a turn of rope around the Ancient Mariner and the mizzen rigging and giving the turn to him to hold, Captain Doane crawled gasping to the rail and dragged himself erect.
“That fetched her,” he whispered huskily to the mate, hand pressed to his side to control his pain. “Sound the well again, and keep on sounding.”
More of the sailors took advantage of the interval to rush for’ard under the toppling fore-topmast, dive into the forecastle, and hastily pack their sea-bags. As Ah Moy emerged from the steerage with his own rotund sea-bag, Daughtry dispatched Kwaque to pack the belongings of both of them.
“Dry as a bone, sir,” came the mate’s report.
“Keep on sounding, Mr. Jackson,” the captain ordered, his voice already stronger as he recovered from the shock of his collision with the helmsman. “Keep right on sounding. Here she comes again, and the schooner ain’t built that’d stand such hammering.”
By this time Daughtry had Michael tucked under one arm, his free arm ready to anticipate the next crash by swinging on to the rigging.
In making its circle to come back, the cow lost her bearings sufficiently to miss the stern of the Mary Turner by twenty feet. Nevertheless, the bore of her displacement lifted the schooner’s stern gently and made her dip her bow to the sea in a stately curtsey.
“If she’d a-hit . . . ” Captain Doane murmured and ceased.
“It’d a-ben good night,” Daughtry concluded for him. “She’s a-knocked our stern clean off of us, sir.”
Again wheeling, this time at no more than two hundred yards, the whale charged back, not completing her semi-circle sufficiently, so that she bore down upon the schooner’s bow from starboard. Her back hit the stem and seemed just barely to scrape the martingale, yet the Mary Turner sat down till the sea washed level with her stern-rail. Nor was this all. Martingale, bob-stays and all parted, as well as all starboard stays to the bowsprit, so that the bowsprit swung out to port at right angles and uplifted to the drag of the remaining topmast stays. The topmast anticked high in the air for a space, then crashed down to deck, permitting the bowsprit to dip into the sea, go clear with the butt of it of the forecastle head, and drag alongside.
“Shut up that dog!” Nishikanta ordered Daughtry savagery. “If you don’t . . . ”
Michael, in Steward’s arms, was snarling and growling intimidatingly, not merely at the cow whale but at all the hostile and menacing universe that had thrown panic into the two-legged gods of his floating world.
“Just for that,” Daughtry snarled back, “I’ll let ’m sing. You made this mess, and if you lift a hand to my dog you’ll miss seeing the end of the mess you started, you dirty pawnbroker, you.”
“Perfectly right, perfectly right,” the Ancient Mariner nodded approbation. “Do you think, steward, you could get a width of canvas, or a blanket, or something soft and broad with which to replace this rope? It cuts me too sharply in the spot where my three ribs are missing.”
Daughtry thrust Michael into the old man’s arm.
“Hold him, sir,” the steward said. “If that pawnbroker makes a move against Killeny Boy, spit in his face, bite him, anything. I’ll be back in a jiffy, sir, before he can hurt you and before the whale can hit us again. And let Killeny Boy make all the noise he wants. One hair of him’s worth more than a world-full of skunks of money-lenders.”
Daughtry dashed into the cabin, came back with a pillow and three sheets, and, using the first as a pad and knotting the last together in swift weaver’s knots, he left the Ancient Mariner safe and soft and took Michael back into his own arms.
“She’s making water, sir,” the mate called. “Six inches—no, seven inches, sir.”
There was a rush of sailors across the wreckage of the fore-topmast to the forecastle to pack their bags.
“Swing out that starboard boat, Mr. Jackson,” the captain commanded, staring after the foaming course of the cow as she surged away for a fresh onslaught. “But don’t lower it. Hold it overside in the falls, or that damned fish’ll smash it. Just swing it out, ready and waiting, let the men get their bags, then stow food and water aboard of her.”
Lashings were cast off the boat and the falls attached, when the men fled to holding-vantage just ere the whale arrived. She struck the Mary Turner squarely amidships on the port beam, so that, from the poop, one saw, as well as heard, her long side bend and spring back like a limber fabric. The starboard rail buried under the sea as the schooner heeled to the blow, and, as she righted with a violent lurch, the water swashed across the deck to the knees of the sailors about the boat and spouted out of the port scuppers.
“Heave away!” Captain Doane ordered from the poop. “Up with her! Swing her out! Hold your turns! Make fast!”
The boat was outboard, its gunwale resting against the Mary Turner’s rail.
“Ten inches, sir, and making fast,” was the mate’s information, as he gauged the sounding-rod.
“I’m going after my tools,” Captain Doane announced, as he started for the cabin. Half into the scuttle, he paused to add with a sneer for Nishikanta’s benefit, “And for my one chronometer.”
“A foot and a half, and making,” the mate shouted aft to him.
“We’d better do some packing ourselves,” Grimshaw, following on the captain, said to Nishikanta.
“Steward,” Nishikanta said, “go below and pack my bedding. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Mr. Nishikanta, you can go to hell, sir, and all the rest as well,” was Daughtry’s quiet response, although in the same breath he was saying, respectfully and assuringly, to the Ancient Mariner: “You hold Killeny, sir. I’ll take care of your dunnage. Is there anything special you want to save, sir?”
Jackson joined the four men below, and as the five of them, in haste and trepidation, packed articles of worth and comfort, the Mary Turner was struck again. Caught below without warning, all were flung fiercely to port and from Simon Nishikanta’s room came wailing curses of announcement of the hurt to his ribs against his bunk-rail. But this was drowned by a prodigious smashing and crashing on deck.
“Kindling wood—there won’t be anything else left of her,” Captain Doane commented in the ensuing calm, as he crept gingerly up the companionway with his chronometer cuddled on an even keel to his breast.
Placing it in the custody of a sailor, he returned below and was helped up with his sea-chest by the steward. In turn, he helped the steward up with the Ancient Mariner’s sea-chest. Next, aided by anxious sailors, he and Daughtry dropped into the lazarette through the cabin floor, and began breaking out and passing up a stream of supplies—cases of salmon and beef, of marmalade and biscuit, of butter and preserved milk, and of all sorts of the tinned, desiccated, evaporated, and condensed stuff that of modern times goes down to the sea in ships for the nourishment of men.
Daughtry and the captain emerged last from the cabin, and both stared upward for a moment at the gaps in the slender, sky-scraping top-hamper, where, only minutes before, the main- and mizzen-topmasts had been. A second moment they devoted to the wreckage of the same on deck—the mizzen-topmast, thrust through the spanker and supported vertically by the stout canvas, thrashing back and forth with each thrash of the sail, the main-topmast squarely across the ruined companionway to the steerage.
While the mother-whale expressing her bereavement in terms of violence and destruction, was withdrawing the necessary distance for another charge, all hands of the Mary Turner gathered about the starboard boat swung outboard ready for lowering. A respectable hill of case goods, water-kegs, and personal dunnage was piled on the deck alongside. A glance at this, and at the many men of fore and aft, demonstrated that it was to be a perilously overloaded boat.
“We want the sailors with us, at any rate—they can row,” said Simon Nishikanta.
“But do we want you?” Grimshaw queried gloomily. “You take up too much room, for your size, and you’re a beast anyway.”
“I guess I’ll be wanted,” the pawnbroker observed, as he jerked open his shirt, tearing out the four buttons in his impetuousness and showing a Colt’s .44 automatic, strapped in its holster against the bare skin of his side under his left arm, the butt of the weapon most readily accessible to any hasty dip of his right hand. “I guess I’ll be wanted. But just the same we can dispense with the undesirables.”
“If you will have your will,” the wheat-farmer conceded sardonically, although his big hand clenched involuntarily as if throttling a throat. “Besides, if we should run short of food you will prove desirable—for the quantity of you, I mean, and not otherwise. Now just who would you consider undesirable?—the black nigger? He ain’t got a gun.”
But his pleasantries were cut short by the whale’s next attack—another smash at the stern that carried away the rudder and destroyed the steering gear.
“How much water?” Captain Doane queried of the mate.
“Three feet, sir—I just sounded,” came the answer. “I think, sir, it would be advisable to part-load the boat; then, right after the next time the whale hits us, lower away on the run, chuck the rest of the dunnage in, and ourselves, and get clear.”
Captain Doane nodded.
“It will be lively work,” he said. “Stand ready, all of you. Steward, you jump aboard first and I’ll pass the chronometer to you.”
Nishikanta bellicosely shouldered his vast bulk up to the captain, opened his shirt, and exposed his revolver.
“There’s too many for the boat,” he said, “and the steward’s one of ’em that don’t go along. Get that. Hold it in your head. The steward’s one of ’em that don’t go along.”
Captain Doane coolly surveyed the big automatic, while at the fore of his consciousness burned a vision of his flat buildings in San Francisco.
He shrugged his shoulders. “The boat would be overloaded, with all this truck, anyway. Go ahead, if you want to make it your party, but just bear in mind that I’m the navigator, and that, if you ever want to lay eyes on your string of pawnshops, you’d better see that gentle care is taken of me.—Steward!”
Daughtry stepped close.
“There won’t be room for you . . . and for one or two others, I’m sorry to say.”
“Glory be!” said Daughtry. “I was just fearin’ you’d be wantin’ me along, sir.—Kwaque, you take ’m my fella dunnage belong me, put ’m in other fella boat along other side.”
While Kwaque obeyed, the mate sounded the well for the last time, reporting three feet and a half, and the lighter freightage of the starboard boat was tossed in by the sailors.
A rangy, gangly, Scandinavian youth of a sailor, droop-shouldered, six feet six and slender as a lath, with pallid eyes of palest blue and skin and hair attuned to the same colour scheme, joined Kwaque in his work.
“Here, you Big John,” the mate interfered. “This is your boat. You work here.”
The lanky one smiled in embarrassment as he haltingly explained: “I tank I lak go along cooky.”
“Sure, let him go, the more the easier,” Nishikanta took charge of the situation. “Anybody else?”
“Sure,” Dag Daughtry sneered to his face. “I reckon what’s left of the beer goes with my boat . . . unless you want to argue the matter.”
“For two cents—” Nishikanta spluttered in affected rage.
“Not for two billion cents would you risk a scrap with me, you money-sweater, you,” was Daughtry’s retort. “You’ve got their goats, but I’ve got your number. Not for two billion billion cents would you excite me into callin’ it right now.—Big John! Just carry that case of beer across, an’ that half case, and store in my boat.—Nishikanta, just start something, if you’ve got the nerve.”
Simon Nishikanta did not dare, nor did he know what to do; but he was saved from his perplexity by the shout:
“Here she comes!”
All rushed to holding-ground, and held, while the whale broke more timbers and the Mary Turner rolled sluggishly down and back again.
“Lower away! On the run! Lively!”
Captain Doane’s orders were swiftly obeyed. The starboard boat, fended off by sailors, rose and fell in the water alongside while the remainder of the dunnage and provisions showered into her.
“Might as well lend a hand, sir, seein’ you’re bent on leaving in such a hurry,” said Daughtry, taking the chronometer from Captain Doane’s hand and standing ready to pass it down to him as soon as he was in the boat.
“Come on, Greenleaf,” Grimshaw called up to the Ancient Mariner.
“No, thanking you very kindly, sir,” came the reply. “I think there’ll be more room in the other boat.”
“We want the cook!” Nishikanta cried out from the stern sheets. “Come on, you yellow monkey! Jump in!”
Little old shrivelled Ah Moy debated. He visibly thought, although none knew the intrinsicness of his thinking as he stared at the gun of the fat pawnbroker and at the leprosy of Kwaque and Daughtry, and weighed the one against the other and tossed the light and heavy loads of the two boats into the balance.
“Me go other boat,” said Ah Moy, starting to drag his bag away across the deck.
“Cast off,” Captain Doane commanded.
Scraps, the big Newfoundland puppy, who had played and pranced about through all the excitement, seeing so many of the Mary Turner’s humans in the boat alongside, sprang over the rail, low and close to the water, and landed sprawling on the mass of sea-bags and goods cases.
The boot rocked, and Nishikanta, his automatic in his hand, cried out:
“Back with him! Throw him on board!”
The sailors obeyed, and the astounded Scraps, after a brief flight through the air, found himself arriving on his back on the Mary Turner’s deck. At any rate, he took it for no more than a rough joke, and rolled about ecstatically, squirming vermicularly, in anticipation of what new delights of play were to be visited upon him. He reached out, with an enticing growl of good fellowship, for Michael, who was now free on deck, and received in return a forbidding and crusty snarl.
“Guess we’ll have to add him to our collection, eh, sir?” Daughtry observed, sparing a moment to pat reassurance on the big puppy’s head and being rewarded with a caressing lick on his hand from the puppy’s blissful tongue.
No first-class ship’s steward can exist without possessing a more than average measure of executive ability. Dag Daughtry was a first-class ship’s steward. Placing the Ancient Mariner in a nook of safety, and setting Big John to unlashing the remaining boat and hooking on the falls, he sent Kwaque into the hold to fill kegs of water from the scant remnant of supply, and Ah Moy to clear out the food in the galley.
The starboard boat, cluttered with men, provisions, and property and being rapidly rowed away from the danger centre, which was the Mary Turner, was scarcely a hundred yards away, when the whale, missing the schooner clean, turned at full speed and close range, churning the water, and all but collided with the boat. So near did she come that the rowers on the side next to her pulled in their oars. The surge she raised, heeled the loaded boat gunwale under, so that a degree of water was shipped ere it righted. Nishikanta, automatic still in hand, standing up in the sternsheets by the comfortable seat he had selected for himself, was staggered by the lurch of the boat. In his instinctive, spasmodic effort to maintain balance, he relaxed his clutch on the pistol, which fell into the sea.
“Ha-ah!” Daughtry girded. “What price Nishikanta? I got his number, and he’s lost you fellows’ goats. He’s your meat now. Easy meat? I should say! And when it comes to the eating, eat him first. Sure, he’s a skunk, and will taste like one, but many’s the honest man that’s eaten skunk and pulled through a tight place. But you’d better soak ’im all night in salt water, first.”
Grimshaw, whose seat in the sternsheets was none of the best, grasped the situation simultaneously with Daughtry, and, with a quick upstanding, and hooking out-reach of hand, caught the fat pawnbroker around the back of the neck, and with anything but gentle suasion jerked him half into the air and flung him face downward on the bottom boards.
“Ha-ah!” said Daughtry across the hundred yards of ocean.
Next, and without hurry, Grimshaw took the more comfortable seat for himself.
“Want to come along?” he called to Daughtry.
“No, thank you, sir,” was the latter’s reply. “There’s too many of us, an’ we’ll make out better in the other boat.”
With some bailing, and with others bending to the oars, the boat rowed frantically away, while Daughtry took Ah Moy with him down into the lazarette beneath the cabin floor and broke out and passed up more provisions.
It was when he was thus below that the cow grazed the schooner just for’ard of amidships on the port side, lashed out with her mighty tail as she sounded, and ripped clean away the chain plates and rail of the mizzen-shrouds. In the next roll of the huge, glassy sea, the mizzen-mast fell overside.
“My word, some whale,” Daughtry said to Ah Moy, as they emerged from the cabin companionway and gazed at this latest wreckage.
Ah Moy found need to get more food from the galley, when Daughtry, Kwaque, and Big John swung their weight on the falls, one at a time, and hoisted the port boat, one end at a time, over the rail and swung her out.
“We’ll wait till the next smash, then lower away, throw everything in, an’ get outa this,” the steward told the Ancient Mariner. “Lots of time. The schooner’ll sink no faster when she’s awash than she’s sinkin’ now.”
Even as he spoke, the scuppers were nearly level with the ocean, and her rolling in the big sea was sluggish.
“Hey!” he called with sudden forethought across the widening stretch of sea to Captain Doane. “What’s the course to the Marquesas? Right now? And how far away, sir?”
“Nor’-nor’-east-quarter-east!” came the faint reply. “Will fetch Nuka-Hiva! About two hundred miles! Haul on the south-east trade with a good full and you’ll make it!”
“Thank you, sir,” was the steward’s acknowledgment, ere he ran aft, disrupted the binnacle, and carried the steering compass back to the boat.
Almost, from the whale’s delay in renewing her charging, did they think she had given over. And while they waited and watched her rolling on the sea an eighth of a mile away, the Mary Turner steadily sank.
“We might almost chance it,” Daughtry was debating aloud to Big John, when a new voice entered the discussion.
“Cocky!—Cocky!” came plaintive tones from below out of the steerage companion.
“Devil be damned!” was the next, uttered in irritation and anger. “Devil be damned! Devil be damned!”
“Of course not,” was Daughtry’s judgment, as he dashed across the deck, crawled through the confusion of the main-topmast and its many stays that blocked the way, and found the tiny, white morsel of life perched on a bunk-edge, ruffling its feathers, erecting and flattening its rosy crest, and cursing in honest human speech the waywardness of the world and of ships and humans upon the sea.
The cockatoo stepped upon Daughtry’s inviting index finger, swiftly ascended his shirt sleeve, and, on his shoulder, claws sunk into the flimsy shirt fabric till they hurt the flesh beneath, leaned head to ear and uttered in gratitude and relief, and in self-identification: “Cocky. Cocky.”
“You son of a gun,” Daughtry crooned.
“Glory be!” Cooky replied, in tones so like Daughtry’s as to startle him.
“You son of a gun,” Daughtry repeated, cuddling his cheek and ear against the cockatoo’s feathered and crested head. “And some folks thinks it’s only folks that count in this world.”
Still the whale delayed, and, with the ocean washing their toes on the level deck, Daughtry ordered the boat lowered away. Ah Moy was eager in his haste to leap into the bow. Nor was Daughtry’s judgment correct that the little Chinaman’s haste was due to fear of the sinking ship. What Ah Moy sought was the place in the boat remotest from Kwaque and the steward.
Shoving clear, they roughly stored the supplies and dunnage out of the way of the thwarts and took their places, Ah Moy pulling bow-oar, next in order Big John and Kwaque, with Daughtry (Cocky still perched on his shoulder) at stroke. On top of the dunnage, in the sternsheets, Michael gazed wistfully at the Mary Turner and continued to snarl crustily at Scraps who idiotically wanted to start a romp. The Ancient Mariner stood up at the steering sweep and gave the order, when all was ready, for the first dip of the oars.
A growl and a bristle from Michael warned them that the whale was not only coming but was close upon them. But it was not charging. Instead, it circled slowly about the schooner as if examining its antagonist.
“I’ll bet it’s head’s sore from all that banging, an’ it’s beginnin’ to feel it,” Daughtry grinned, chiefly for the purpose of keeping his comrades unafraid.
Barely had they rowed a dozen strokes, when an exclamation from Big John led them to follow his gaze to the schooners forecastle-head, where the forecastle cat flashed across in pursuit of a big rat. Other rats they saw, evidently driven out of their lairs by the rising water.
“We just can’t leave that cat behind,” Daughtry soliloquized in suggestive tones.
“Certainly not,” the Ancient Mariner responded swinging his weight on the steering-sweep and heading the boat back.
Twice the whale gently rolled them in the course of its leisurely circling, ere they bent to their oars again and pulled away. Of them the whale seemed to take no notice. It was from the huge thing, the schooner, that death had been wreaked upon her calf; and it was upon the schooner that she vented the wrath of her grief.
Even as they pulled away, the whale turned and headed across the ocean. At a half-mile distance she curved about and charged back.
“With all that water in her, the schooner’ll have a real kick-back in her when she’s hit,” Daughtry said. “Lordy me, rest on your oars an’ watch.”
Delivered squarely amidships, it was the hardest blow the Mary Turner had received. Stays and splinters of rail flew in the air as she rolled so far over as to expose half her copper wet-glistening in the sun. As she righted sluggishly, the mainmast swayed drunkenly in the air but did not fall.
“A knock-out!” Daughtry cried, at sight of the whale flurrying the water with aimless, gigantic splashings. “It must a-smashed both of ’em.”
“Schooner he finish close up altogether,” Kwaque observed, as the Mary Turner’s rail disappeared.
Swiftly she sank, and no more than a matter of moments was it when the stump of her mainmast was gone. Remained only the whale, floating and floundering, on the surface of the sea.
“It’s nothing to brag about,” Daughtry delivered himself of the Mary Turner’s epitaph. “Nobody’d believe us. A stout little craft like that sunk, deliberately sunk, by an old cow-whale! No, sir. I never believed that old moss-back in Honolulu, when he claimed he was a survivor of the sinkin’ of the Essex, an’ no more will anybody believe me.”
“The pretty schooner, the pretty clever craft,” mourned the Ancient Mariner. “Never were there more dainty and lovable topmasts on a three-masted schooner, and never was there a three-masted schooner that worked like the witch she was to windward.”
Dag Daughtry, who had kept always footloose and never married, surveyed the boat-load of his responsibilities to which he was anchored—Kwaque, the Black Papuan monstrosity whom he had saved from the bellies of his fellows; Ah Moy, the little old sea-cook whose age was problematical only by decades; the Ancient Mariner, the dignified, the beloved, and the respected; gangly Big John, the youthful Scandinavian with the inches of a giant and the mind of a child; Killeny Boy, the wonder of dogs; Scraps, the outrageously silly and fat-rolling puppy; Cocky, the white-feathered mite of life, imperious as a steel-blade and wheedlingly seductive as a charming child; and even the forecastle cat, the lithe and tawny slayer of rats, sheltering between the legs of Ah Moy. And the Marquesas were two hundred miles distant full-hauled on the tradewind which had ceased but which was as sure to live again as the morning sun in the sky.
The steward heaved a sigh, and whimsically shot into his mind the memory-picture in his nursery-book of the old woman who lived in a shoe. He wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, and was dimly aware of the area of the numbness that bordered the centre that was sensationless between his eyebrows, as he said:
“Well, children, rowing won’t fetch us to the Marquesas. We’ll need a stretch of wind for that. But it’s up to us, right now, to put a mile or so between us an’ that peevish old cow. Maybe she’ll revive, and maybe she won’t, but just the same I can’t help feelin’ leary about her.”
Two days later, as the steamer Mariposa plied her customary route between Tahiti and San Francisco, the passengers ceased playing deck quoits, abandoned their card games in the smoker, their novels and deck chairs, and crowded the rail to stare at the small boat that skimmed to them across the sea before a light following breeze. When Big John, aided by Ah Moy and Kwaque, lowered the sail and unstepped the mast, titters and laughter arose from the passengers. It was contrary to all their preconceptions of mid-ocean rescue of ship-wrecked mariners from the open boat.
It caught their fancy that this boat was the Ark, what of its freightage of bedding, dry goods boxes, beer-cases, a cat, two dogs, a white cockatoo, a Chinaman, a kinky-headed black, a gangly pallid-haired giant, a grizzled Dag Daughtry, and an Ancient Mariner who looked every inch the part. Him a facetious, vacationing architect’s clerk dubbed Noah, and so greeted him.
“I say, Noah,” he called. “Some flood, eh? Located Ararat yet?”
“Catch any fish?” bawled another youngster down over the rail.
“Gracious! Look at the beer! Good English beer! Put me down for a case!”
Never was a more popular wrecked crew more merrily rescued at sea. The young blades would have it that none other than old Noah himself had come on board with the remnants of the Lost Tribes, and to elderly female passengers spun hair-raising accounts of the sinking of an entire tropic island by volcanic and earthquake action.
“I’m a steward,” Dag Daughtry told the Mariposa’s captain, “and I’ll be glad and grateful to berth along with your stewards in the glory-hole. Big John there’s a sailorman, an’ the fo’c’s’le ’ll do him. The Chink is a ship’s cook, and the nigger belongs to me. But Mr. Greenleaf, sir, is a gentleman, and the best of cabin fare and staterooms’ll be none too good for him, sir.”
And when the news went around that these were part of the survivors of the three-masted schooner, Mary Turner, smashed into kindling wood and sunk by a whale, the elderly females no more believed than had they the yarn of the sunken island.
“Captain Hayward,” one of them demanded of the steamer’s skipper, “could a whale sink the Mariposa?”
“She has never been so sunk,” was his reply.
“I knew it!” she declared emphatically. “It’s not the way of ships to go around being sunk by whales, is it, captain?”
“No, madam, I assure you it is not,” was his response. “Nevertheless, all the five men insist upon it.”
“Sailors are notorious for their unveracity, are they not?” the lady voiced her flat conclusion in the form of a tentative query.
“Worst liars I ever saw, madam. Do you know, after forty years at sea, I couldn’t believe myself under oath.”
* * * * *
Nine days later the Mariposa threaded the Golden Gate and docked at San Francisco. Humorous half-columns in the local papers, written in the customary silly way by unlicked cub reporters just out of grammar school, tickled the fancy of San Francisco for a fleeting moment in that the steamship Mariposa had rescued some sea-waifs possessed of a cock-and-bull story that not even the reporters believed. Thus, silly reportorial unveracity usually proves extraordinary truth a liar. It is the way of cub reporters, city newspapers, and flat-floor populations which get their thrills from moving pictures and for which the real world and all its spaciousness does not exist.
“Sunk by a whale!” demanded the average flat-floor person. “Nonsense, that’s all. Just plain rotten nonsense. Now, in the ‘Adventures of Eleanor,’ which is some film, believe me, I’ll tell you what I saw happen . . . ”
So Daughtry and his crew went ashore into ’Frisco Town uheralded and unsung, the second following morning’s lucubrations of the sea reporters being varied disportations upon the attack on an Italian crab fisherman by an enormous jellyfish. Big John promptly sank out of sight in a sailors’ boarding-house, and, within the week, joined the Sailors’ union and shipped on a steam schooner to load redwood ties at Bandon, Oregon. Ah Moy got no farther ashore than the detention sheds of the Federal Immigration Board, whence he was deported to China on the next Pacific Mail steamer. The Mary Turner’s cat was adopted by the sailors’ forecastle of the Mariposa, and on the Mariposa sailed away on the back trip to Tahiti. Scraps was taken ashore by a quartermaster and left in the bosom of his family.
And ashore went Dag Daughtry, with his small savings, to rent two cheap rooms for himself and his remaining responsibilities, namely, Charles Stough Greenleaf, Kwaque, Michael, and, not least, Cocky. But not for long did he permit the Ancient Mariner to live with him.
“It’s not playing the game, sir,” he told him. “What we need is capital. We’ve got to interest capital, and you’ve got to do the interesting. Now this very day you’ve got to buy a couple of suit-cases, hire a taxicab, go sailing up to the front door of the Bronx Hotel like good pay and be damned. She’s a real stylish hotel, but reasonable if you want to make it so. A little room, an inside room, European plan, of course, and then you can economise by eatin’ out.”
“But, steward, I have no money,” the Ancient Mariner protested.
“That’s all right, sir; I’ll back you for all I can.”
“But, my dear man, you know I’m an old impostor. I can’t stick you up like the others. You . . . why . . . why, you’re a friend, don’t you see?”
“Sure I do, and I thank you for sayin’ it, sir. And that’s why I’m with you. And when you’ve nailed another crowd of treasure-hunters and got the ship ready, you’ll just ship me along as steward, with Kwaque, and Killeny Boy, and the rest of our family. You’ve adopted me, now, an’ I’m your grown-up son, an’ you’ve got to listen to me. The Bronx is the hotel for you—fine-soundin’ name, ain’t it? That’s atmosphere. Folk’ll listen half to you an’ more to your hotel. I tell you, you leaning back in a big leather chair talkin’ treasure with a two-bit cigar in your mouth an’ a twenty-cent drink beside you, why that’s like treasure. They just got to believe. An’ if you’ll come along now, sir, we’ll trot out an’ buy them suit-cases.”
Right bravely the Ancient Mariner drove to the Bronx in a taxi, registered his “Charles Stough Greenleaf” in an old-fashioned hand, and took up anew the activities which for years had kept him free of the poor-farm. No less bravely did Dag Daughtry set out to seek work. This was most necessary, because he was a man of expensive luxuries. His family of Kwaque, Michael, and Cocky required food and shelter; more costly than that was maintenance of the Ancient Mariner in the high-class hotel; and, in addition, was his six-quart thirst.
But it was a time of industrial depression. The unemployed problem was bulking bigger than usual to the citizens of San Francisco. And, as regarded steamships and sailing vessels, there were three stewards for every Steward’s position. Nothing steady could Daughtry procure, while his occasional odd jobs did not balance his various running expenses. Even did he do pick-and-shovel work, for the municipality, for three days, when he had to give way, according to the impartial procedure, to another needy one whom three days’ work would keep afloat a little longer.
Daughtry would have put Kwaque to work, except that Kwaque was impossible. The black, who had only seen Sydney from steamers’ decks, had never been in a city in his life. All he knew of the world was steamers, far-outlying south-sea isles, and his own island of King William in Melanesia. So Kwaque remained in the two rooms, cooking and housekeeping for his master and caring for Michael and Cocky. All of which was prison for Michael, who had been used to the run of ships, of coral beaches and plantations.
But in the evenings, sometimes accompanied a few steps in the rear by Kwaque, Michael strolled out with Steward. The multiplicity of man-gods on the teeming sidewalks became a real bore to Michael, so that man-gods, in general, underwent a sharp depreciation. But Steward, the particular god of his fealty and worship, appreciated. Amongst so many gods Michael felt bewildered, while Steward’s Abrahamic bosom became more than ever the one sure haven where harshness and danger never troubled.
“Mind your step,” is the last word and warning of twentieth-century city life. Michael was not slow to learn it, as he conserved his own feet among the countless thousands of leather-shod feet of men, ever hurrying, always unregarding of the existence and right of way of a lowly, four-legged Irish terrier.
The evening outings with Steward invariably led from saloon to saloon, where, at long bars, standing on sawdust floors, or seated at tables, men drank and talked. Much of both did men do, and also did Steward do, ere, his daily six-quart stint accomplished, he turned homeward for bed. Many were the acquaintances he made, and Michael with him. Coasting seamen and bay sailors they mostly were, although there were many ’longshoremen and waterfront workmen among them.
From one of these, a scow-schooner captain who plied up and down the bay and the San Joaquin and Sacramento rivers, Daughtry had the promise of being engaged as cook and sailor on the schooner Howard. Eighty tons of freight, including deckload, she carried, and in all democracy Captain Jorgensen, the cook, and the two other sailors, loaded and unloaded her at all hours, and sailed her night and day on all times and tides, one man steering while three slept and recuperated. It was time, and double-time, and over-time beyond that, but the feeding was generous and the wages ran from forty-five to sixty dollars a month.
“Sure, you bet,” said Captain Jorgensen. “This cook-feller, Hanson, pretty quick I smash him up an’ fire him, then you can come along . . . and the bow-wow, too.” Here he dropped a hearty, wholesome hand of toil down to a caress of Michael’s head. “That’s one fine bow-wow. A bow-wow is good on a scow when all hands sleep alongside the dock or in an anchor watch.”
“Fire Hanson now,” Dag Daughtry urged.
But Captain Jorgensen shook his slow head slowly. “First I smash him up.”
“Then smash him now and fire him,” Daughtry persisted. “There he is right now at the corner of the bar.”
“No. He must give me reason. I got plenty of reason. But I want reason all hands can see. I want him make me smash him, so that all hands say, ‘Hurrah, Captain, you done right.’ Then you get the job, Daughtry.”
Had Captain Jorgensen not been dilatory in his contemplated smashing, and had not Hanson delayed in giving sufficient provocation for a smashing, Michael would have accompanied Steward upon the schooner, Howard, and all Michael’s subsequent experiences would have been totally different from what they were destined to be. But destined they were, by chance and by combinations of chance events over which Michael had no control and of which he had no more awareness than had Steward himself. At that period, the subsequent stage career and nightmare of cruelty for Michael was beyond any wildest forecast or apprehension. And as to forecasting Dag Daughtry’s fate, along with Kwaque, no maddest drug-dream could have approximated it.
One night Dag Daughtry sat at a table in the saloon called the Pile-drivers’ Home. He was in a parlous predicament. Harder than ever had it been to secure odd jobs, and he had reached the end of his savings. Earlier in the evening he had had a telephone conference with the Ancient Mariner, who had reported only progress with an exceptionally strong nibble that very day from a retired quack doctor.
“Let me pawn my rings,” the Ancient Mariner had urged, not for the first time, over the telephone.
“No, sir,” had been Daughtry’s reply. “We need them in the business. They’re stock in trade. They’re atmosphere. They’re what you call a figure of speech. I’ll do some thinking to-night an’ see you in the morning, sir. Hold on to them rings an’ don’t be no more than casual in playin’ that doctor. Make ’m come to you. It’s the only way. Now you’re all right, an’ everything’s hunkydory an’ the goose hangs high. Don’t you worry, sir. Dag Daughtry never fell down yet.”
But, as he sat in the Pile-drivers’ Home, it looked as if his fall-down was very near. In his pocket was precisely the room-rent for the following week, the advance payment of which was already three days overdue and clamorously demanded by the hard-faced landlady. In the rooms, with care, was enough food with which to pinch through for another day. The Ancient Mariner’s modest hotel bill had not been paid for two weeks—a prodigious sum under the circumstances, being a first-class hotel; while the Ancient Mariner had no more than a couple of dollars in his pocket with which to make a sound like prosperity in the ears of the retired doctor who wanted to go a-treasuring.
Most catastrophic of all, however, was the fact that Dag Daughtry was three quarts short of his daily allowance and did not dare break into the rent money which was all that stood between him and his family and the street. This was why he sat at the beer table with Captain Jorgensen, who was just returned with a schooner-load of hay from the Petaluma Flats. He had already bought beer twice, and evinced no further show of thirst. Instead, he was yawning from long hours of work and waking and looking at his watch. And Daughtry was three quarts short! Besides, Hanson had not yet been smashed, so that the cook-job on the schooner still lay ahead an unknown distance in the future.
In his desperation, Daughtry hit upon an idea with which to get another schooner of steam beer. He did not like steam beer, but it was cheaper than lager.
“Look here, Captain,” he said. “You don’t know how smart that Killeny Boy is. Why, he can count just like you and me.”
“Hoh!” rumbled Captain Jorgensen. “I seen ’em do it in side shows. It’s all tricks. Dogs an’ horses can’t count.”
“This dog can,” Daughtry continued quietly. “You can’t fool ’m. I bet you, right now, I can order two beers, loud so he can hear and notice, and then whisper to the waiter to bring one, an’, when the one comes, Killeny Boy’ll raise a roar with the waiter.”
“Hoh! Hoh! How much will you bet?”
The steward fingered a dime in his pocket. If Killeny failed him it meant that the rent-money would be broken in upon. But Killeny couldn’t and wouldn’t fail him, he reasoned, as he answered:
“I’ll bet you the price of two beers.”
The waiter was summoned, and, when he had received his secret instructions, Michael was called over from where he lay at Kwaque’s feet in a corner. When Steward placed a chair for him at the table and invited him into it, he began to key up. Steward expected something of him, wanted him to show off. And it was not because of the showing off that he was eager, but because of his love for Steward. Love and service were one in the simple processes of Michael’s mind. Just as he would have leaped into fire for Steward’s sake, so would he now serve Steward in any way Steward desired. That was what love meant to him. It was all love meant to him—service.
“Waiter!” Steward called; and, when the waiter stood close at hand: “Two beers.—Did you get that, Killeny? Two beers.”
Michael squirmed in his chair, placed an impulsive paw on the table, and impulsively flashed out his ribbon of tongue to Steward’s close-bending face.
“He will remember,” Daughtry told the scow-schooner captain.
“Not if we talk,” was the reply. “Now we will fool your bow-wow. I will say that the job is yours when I smash Hanson. And you will say it is for me to smash Hanson now. And I will say Hanson must give me reason first to smash him. And then we will argue like two fools with mouths full of much noise. Are you ready?”
Daughtry nodded, and thereupon ensued a loud-voiced discussion that drew Michael’s earnest attention from one talker to the other.
“I got you,” Captain Jorgensen announced, as he saw the waiter approaching with but a single schooner of beer. “The bow-wow has forgot, if he ever remembered. He thinks you an’ me is fighting. The place in his mind for one beer, and two, is wiped out, like a wave on the beach wipes out the writing in the sand.”
“I guess he ain’t goin’ to forget arithmetic no matter how much noise you shouts,” Daughtry argued aloud against his sinking spirits. “An’ I ain’t goin’ to butt in,” he added hopefully. “You just watch ’m for himself.”
The tall, schooner-glass of beer was placed before the captain, who laid a swift, containing hand around it. And Michael, strung as a taut string, knowing that something was expected of him, on his toes to serve, remembered his ancient lessons on the Makambo, vainly looked into the impassive face of Steward for a sign, then looked about and saw, not two glasses, but one glass. So well had he learned the difference between one and two that it came to him—how the profoundest psychologist can no more state than can he state what thought is in itself—that there was one glass only when two glasses had been commanded. With an abrupt upspring, his throat half harsh with anger, he placed both forepaws on the table and barked at the waiter.
Captain Jorgensen crashed his fist down.
“You win!” he roared. “I pay for the beer! Waiter, bring one more.”
Michael looked to Steward for verification, and Steward’s hand on his head gave adequate reply.
“We try again,” said the captain, very much awake and interested, with the back of his hand wiping the beer-foam from his moustache. “Maybe he knows one an’ two. How about three? And four?”
“Just the same, Skipper. He counts up to five, and knows more than five when it is more than five, though he don’t know the figures by name after five.”
“Oh, Hanson!” Captain Jorgensen bellowed across the bar-room to the cook of the Howard. “Hey, you square-head! Come and have a drink!”
Hanson came over and pulled up a chair.
“I pay for the drinks,” said the captain; “but you order, Daughtry. See, now, Hanson, this is a trick bow-wow. He can count better than you. We are three. Daughtry is ordering three beers. The bow-wow hears three. I hold up two fingers like this to the waiter. He brings two. The bow-wow raises hell with the waiter. You see.”
All of which came to pass, Michael blissfully unappeasable until the order was filled properly.
“He can’t count,” was Hanson’s conclusion. “He sees one man without beer. That’s all. He knows every man should ought to have a glass. That’s why he barks.”
“Better than that,” Daughtry boasted. “There are three of us. We will order four. Then each man will have his glass, but Killeny will talk to the waiter just the same.”
True enough, now thoroughly aware of the game, Michael made outcry to the waiter till the fourth glass was brought. By this time many men were about the table, all wanting to buy beer and test Michael.
“Glory be,” Dag Daughtry solloquized. “A funny world. Thirsty one moment. The next moment they’d fair drown you in beer.”
Several even wanted to buy Michael, offering ridiculous sums like fifteen and twenty dollars.
“I tell you what,” Captain Jorgensen muttered to Daughtry, whom he had drawn away into a corner. “You give me that bow-wow, and I’ll smash Hanson right now, and you got the job right away—come to work in the morning.”
Into another corner the proprietor of the Pile-drivers’ Home drew Daughtry to whisper to him:
“You stick around here every night with that dog of yourn. It makes trade. I’ll give you free beer any time and fifty cents cash money a night.”
It was this proposition that started the big idea in Daughtry’s mind. As he told Michael, back in the room, while Kwaque was unlacing his shoes:
“It’s this way Killeny. If you’re worth fifty cents a night and free beer to that saloon keeper, then you’re worth that to me . . . and more, my son, more. ’Cause he’s lookin’ for a profit. That’s why he sells beer instead of buyin’ it. An’, Killeny, you won’t mind workin’ for me, I know. We need the money. There’s Kwaque, an’ Mr. Greenleaf, an’ Cocky, not even mentioning you an’ me, an’ we eat an awful lot. An’ room-rent’s hard to get, an’ jobs is harder. What d’ye say, son, to-morrow night you an’ me hustle around an’ see how much coin we can gather?”
And Michael, seated on Steward’s knees, eyes to eyes and nose to nose, his jowls held in Steward’s hand’s wriggled and squirmed with delight, flipping out his tongue and bobbing his tail in the air. Whatever it was, it was good, for it was Steward who spoke.
The grizzled ship’s steward and the rough-coated Irish terrier quickly became conspicuous figures in the night life of the Barbary Coast of San Francisco. Daughtry elaborated on the counting trick by bringing Cocky along. Thus, when a waiter did not fetch the right number of glasses, Michael would remain quite still, until Cocky, at a privy signal from Steward, standing on one leg, with the free claw would clutch Michael’s neck and apparently talk into Michael’s ear. Whereupon Michael would look about the glasses on the table and begin his usual expostulation with the waiter.
But it was when Daughtry and Michael first sang “Roll me Down to Rio” together, that the ten-strike was made. It occurred in a sailors’ dance-hall on Pacific Street, and all dancing stopped while the sailors clamoured for more of the singing dog. Nor did the place lose money, for no one left, and the crowd increased to standing room as Michael went through his repertoire of “God Save the King,” “Sweet Bye and Bye,” “Lead, Kindly Light,” “Home, Sweet Home,” and “Shenandoah.”
It meant more than free beer to Daughtry, for, when he started to leave, the proprietor of the place thrust three silver dollars into his hand and begged him to come around with the dog next night.
“For that?” Daughtry demanded, looking at the money as if it were contemptible.
Hastily the proprietor added two more dollars, and Daughtry promised.
“Just the same, Killeny, my son,” he told Michael as they went to bed, “I think you an’ me are worth more than five dollars a turn. Why, the like of you has never been seen before. A real singing dog that can carry ’most any air with me, and that can carry half a dozen by himself. An’ they say Caruso gets a thousand a night. Well, you ain’t Caruso, but you’re the dog-Caruso of the entire world. Son, I’m goin’ to be your business manager. If we can’t make a twenty-dollar gold-piece a night—say, son, we’re goin’ to move into better quarters. An’ the old gent up at the Hotel de Bronx is goin’ to move into an outside room. An’ Kwaque’s goin’ to get a real outfit of clothes. Killeny, my boy, we’re goin’ to get so rich that if he can’t snare a sucker we’ll put up the cash ourselves ’n’ buy a schooner for ’m, ’n’ send him out a-treasure-huntin’ on his own. We’ll be the suckers, eh, just you an’ me, an’ love to.”
* * * * *
The Barbary Coast of San Francisco, once the old-time sailor-town in the days when San Francisco was reckoned the toughest port of the Seven Seas, had evolved with the city until it depended for at least half of its earnings on the slumming parties that visited it and spent liberally. It was quite the custom, after dinner, for many of the better classes of society, especially when entertaining curious Easterners, to spend an hour or several in motoring from dance-hall to dance-hall and cheap cabaret to cheap cabaret. In short, the “Coast” was as much a sight-seeing place as was Chinatown and the Cliff House.
It was not long before Dag Daughtry was getting his twenty dollars a night for two twenty-minute turns, and was declining more beer than a dozen men with thirsts equal to his could have accommodated. Never had he been so prosperous; nor can it be denied that Michael enjoyed it. Enjoy it he did, but principally for Steward’s sake. He was serving Steward, and so to serve was his highest heart’s desire.
In truth, Michael was the bread-winner for quite a family, each member of which fared well. Kwaque blossomed out resplendent in russet-brown shoes, a derby hat, and a gray suit with trousers immaculately creased. Also, he became a devotee of the moving-picture shows, spending as much as twenty and thirty cents a day and resolutely sitting out every repetition of programme. Little time was required of him in caring for Daughtry, for they had come to eating in restaurants. Not only had the Ancient Mariner moved into a more expensive outside room at the Bronx; but Daughtry insisted on thrusting upon him more spending money, so that, on occasion, he could invite a likely acquaintance to the theatre or a concert and bring him home in a taxi.
“We won’t keep this up for ever, Killeny,” Steward told Michael. “For just as long as it takes the old gent to land another bunch of gold-pouched, retriever-snouted treasure-hunters, and no longer. Then it’s hey for the ocean blue, my son, an’ the roll of a good craft under our feet, an’ smash of wet on the deck, an’ a spout now an’ again of the scuppers.
“We got to go rollin’ down to Rio as well as sing about it to a lot of cheap skates. They can take their rotten cities. The sea’s the life for us—you an’ me, Killeny, son, an’ the old gent an’ Kwaque, an’ Cocky, too. We ain’t made for city ways. It ain’t healthy. Why, son, though you maybe won’t believe it, I’m losin’ my spring. The rubber’s goin’ outa me. I’m kind o’ languid, with all night in an’ nothin’ to do but sit around. It makes me fair sick at the thought of hearin’ the old gent say once again, ‘I think, steward, one of those prime cocktails would be just the thing before dinner.’ We’ll take a little ice-machine along next voyage, an’ give ’m the best.
“An’ look at Kwaque, Killeny, my boy. This ain’t his climate. He’s positively ailin’. If he sits around them picture-shows much more he’ll develop the T.B. For the good of his health, an’ mine an’ yours, an’ all of us, we got to get up anchor pretty soon an’ hit out for the home of the trade winds that kiss you through an’ through with the salt an’ the life of the sea.”
* * * * *
In truth, Kwaque, who never complained, was ailing fast. A swelling, slow and sensationless at first, under his right arm-pit, had become a mild and unceasing pain. No longer could he sleep a night through. Although he lay on his left side, never less than twice, and often three and four times, the hurt of the swelling woke him. Ah Moy, had he not long since been delivered back to China by the immigration authorities, could have told him the meaning of that swelling, just as he could have told Dag Daughtry the meaning of the increasing area of numbness between his eyes where the tiny, vertical, lion-lines were cutting more conspicuously. Also, could he have told him what was wrong with the little finger on his left hand. Daughtry had first diagnosed it as a sprain of a tendon. Later, he had decided it was chronic rheumatism brought on by the damp and foggy Sun Francisco climate. It was one of his reasons for desiring to get away again to sea where the tropic sun would warm the rheumatism out of him.
As a steward, Daughtry had been accustomed to contact with men and women of the upper world. But for the first time in his life, here in the underworld of San Francisco, in all equality he met such persons from above. Nay, more, they were eager to meet him. They sought him. They fawned upon him for an invitation to sit at his table and buy beer for him in whatever garish cabaret Michael was performing. They would have bought wine for him, at enormous expense, had he not stubbornly stuck to his beer. They were, some of them, for inviting him to their homes—“An’ bring the wonderful dog along for a sing-song”; but Daughtry, proud of Michael for being the cause of such invitations, explained that the professional life was too arduous to permit of such diversions. To Michael he explained that when they proffered a fee of fifty dollars, the pair of them would “come a-runnin’.”
Among the host of acquaintances made in their cabaret-life, two were destined, very immediately, to play important parts in the lives of Daughtry and Michael. The first, a politician and a doctor, by name Emory—Walter Merritt Emory—was several times at Daughtry’s table, where Michael sat with them on a chair according to custom. Among other things, in gratitude for such kindnesses from Daughtry, Doctor Emory gave his office card and begged for the privilege of treating, free of charge, either master or dog should they ever become sick. In Daughtry’s opinion, Dr. Walter Merritt Emory was a keen, clever man, undoubtedly able in his profession, but passionately selfish as a hungry tiger. As he told him, in the brutal candour he could afford under such changed conditions: “Doc, you’re a wonder. Anybody can see it with half an eye. What you want you just go and get. Nothing’d stop you except . . . ”
“Except?”
“Oh, except that it was nailed down, or locked up, or had a policeman standing guard over it. I’d sure hate to have anything you wanted.”
“Well, you have,” Doctor assured him, with a significant nod at Michael on the chair between them.
“Br-r-r!” Daughtry shivered. “You give me the creeps. If I thought you really meant it, San Francisco couldn’t hold me two minutes.” He meditated into his beer-glass a moment, then laughed with reassurance. “No man could get that dog away from me. You see, I’d kill the man first. I’d just up an’ tell ’m, as I’m tellin’ you now, I’d kill ’m first. An’ he’d believe me, as you’re believin’ me now. You know I mean it. So’d he know I meant it. Why, that dog . . . ”
In sheer inability to express the profundity of his emotion, Dag Daughtry broke off the sentence and drowned it in his beer-glass.
Of quite different type was the other person of destiny. Harry Del Mar, he called himself; and Harry Del Mar was the name that appeared on the programmes when he was doing Orpheum “time.” Although Daughtry did not know it, because Del Mar was laying off for a vacation, the man did trained-animal turns for a living. He, too, bought drinks at Daughtry’s table. Young, not over thirty, dark of complexion with large, long-lashed brown eyes that he fondly believed were magnetic, cherubic of lip and feature, he belied all his appearance by talking business in direct business fashion.
“But you ain’t got the money to buy ’m,” Daughtry replied, when the other had increased his first offer of five hundred dollars for Michael to a thousand.
“I’ve got the thousand, if that’s what you mean.”
“No,” Daughtry shook his head. “I mean he ain’t for sale at any price. Besides, what do you want ’m for?”
“I like him,” Del Mar answered. “Why do I come to this joint? Why does the crowd come here? Why do men buy wine, run horses, sport actresses, become priests or bookworms? Because they like to. That’s the answer. We all do what we like when we can, go after the thing we want whether we can get it or not. Now I like your dog, I want him. I want him a thousand dollars’ worth. See that big diamond on that woman’s hand over there. I guess she just liked it, and wanted it, and got it, never mind the price. The price didn’t mean as much to her as the diamond. Now that dog of yours—”
“Don’t like you,” Dag Daughtry broke in. “Which is strange. He likes most everybody without fussin’ about it. But he bristled at you from the first. No man’d want a dog that don’t like him.”
“Which isn’t the question,” Del Mar stated quietly. “I like him. As for him liking or not liking me, that’s my look-out, and I guess I can attend to that all right.”
It seemed to Daughtry that he glimpsed or sensed under the other’s unfaltering cherubicness of expression a steelness of cruelty that was abysmal in that it was of controlled intelligence. Not in such terms did Daughtry think his impression. At the most, it was a feeling, and feelings do not require words in order to be experienced or comprehended.
“There’s an all-night bank,” the other went on. “We can stroll over, I’ll cash a cheque, and in half an hour the cash will be in your hand.”
Daughtry shook his head.
“Even as a business proposition, nothing doing,” he said. “Look you. Here’s the dog earnin’ twenty dollars a night. Say he works twenty-five days in the month. That’s five hundred a month, or six thousand a year. Now say that’s five per cent., because it’s easier to count, it represents the interest on a capital value of one hundred an’ twenty thousand-dollars. Then we’ll suppose expenses and salary for me is twenty thousand. That leaves the dog worth a hundred thousand. Just to be fair, cut it in half—a fifty-thousand dog. And you’re offerin’ a thousand for him.”
“I suppose you think he’ll last for ever, like so much land’,” Del Mar smiled quietly.
Daughtry saw the point instantly.
“Give ’m five years of work—that’s thirty thousand. Give ’m one year of work—it’s six thousand. An’ you’re offerin’ me one thousand for six thousand. That ain’t no kind of business—for me . . . an’ him. Besides, when he can’t work any more, an’ ain’t worth a cent, he’ll be worth just a plumb million to me, an’ if anybody offered it, I’d raise the price.”
“I’ll see you again,” Harry Del Mar told Daughtry, at the end of his fourth conversation on the matter of Michael’s sale.
Wherein Harry Del Mar was mistaken. He never saw Daughtry again, because Daughtry saw Doctor Emory first.
Kwaque’s increasing restlessness at night, due to the swelling under his right arm-pit, had began to wake Daughtry up. After several such experiences, he had investigated and decided that Kwaque was sufficiently sick to require a doctor. For which reason, one morning at eleven, taking Kwaque along, he called at Walter Merritt Emory’s office and waited his turn in the crowded reception-room.
“I think he’s got cancer, Doc.,” Daughtry said, while Kwaque was pulling off his shirt and undershirt. “He never squealed, you know, never peeped. That’s the way of niggers. I didn’t find our till he got to wakin’ me up nights with his tossin’ about an’ groanin’ in his sleep.—There! What’d you call it? Cancer or tumour—no two ways about it, eh?”
But the quick eye of Walter Merritt Emory had not missed, in passing, the twisted fingers of Kwaque’s left hand. Not only was his eye quick, but it was a “leper eye.” A volunteer surgeon in the first days out in the Philippines, he had made a particular study of leprosy, and had observed so many lepers that infallibly, except in the incipient beginnings of the disease, he could pick out a leper at a glance. From the twisted fingers, which was the anæsthetic form, produced by nerve-disintegration, to the corrugated lion forehead (again anæsthetic), his eyes flashed to the swelling under the right arm-pit and his brain diagnosed it as the tubercular form.
Just as swiftly flashed through his brain two thoughts: the first, the axiom, whenever and wherever you find a leper, look for the other leper; the second, the desired Irish terrier, who was owned by Daughtry, with whom Kwaque had been long associated. And here all swiftness of eye-flashing ceased on the part of Walter Merritt Emory. He did not know how much, if anything, the steward knew about leprosy, and he did not care to arouse any suspicions. Casually drawing his watch to see the time, he turned and addressed Daughtry.
“I should say his blood is out of order. He’s run down. He’s not used to the recent life he’s been living, nor to the food. To make certain, I shall examine for cancer and tumour, although there’s little chance of anything like that.”
And as he talked, with just a waver for a moment, his gaze lifted above Daughtry’s eyes to the area of forehead just above and between the eyes. It was sufficient. His “leper-eye” had seen the “lion” mark of the leper.
“You’re run down yourself,” he continued smoothly. “You’re not up to snuff, I’ll wager. Eh?”
“Can’t say that I am,” Daughtry agreed. “I guess I got to get back to the sea an’ the tropics and warm the rheumatics outa me.”
“Where?” queried Doctor Emory, almost absently, so well did he feign it, as if apparently on the verge of returning to a closer examination, of Kwaque’s swelling.
Daughtry extended his left hand, with a little wiggle of the little finger advertising the seat of the affliction. Walter Merritt Emory saw, with seeming careless look out from under careless-drooping eyelids, the little finger slightly swollen, slightly twisted, with a smooth, almost shiny, silkiness of skin-texture. Again, in the course of turning to look at Kwaque, his eyes rested an instant on the lion-lines of Daughtry’s brow.
“Rheumatism is still the great mystery,” Doctor Emory said, returning to Daughtry as if deflected by the thought. “It’s almost individual, there are so many varieties of it. Each man has a kind of his own. Any numbness?”
Daughtry laboriously wiggled his little finger.
“Yes, sir,” he answered. “It ain’t as lively as it used to was.”
“Ah,” Walter Merritt Emory murmured, with a vastitude of confidence and assurance. “Please sit down in that chair there. Maybe I won’t be able to cure you, but I promise you I can direct you to the best place to live for what’s the matter with you.—Miss Judson!”
And while the trained-nurse-apparelled young woman seated Dag Daughtry in the enamelled surgeon’s chair and leaned him back under direction, and while Doctor Emory dipped his finger-tips into the strongest antiseptic his office possessed, behind Doctor Emory’s eyes, in the midst of his brain, burned the image of a desired Irish terrier who did turns in sailor-town cabarets, was rough-coated, and answered to the full name of Killeny Boy.
“You’ve got rheumatism in more places than your little finger,” he assured Daughtry. “There’s a touch right here, I’ll wager, on your forehead. One moment, please. Move if I hurt you, Otherwise sit still, because I don’t intend to hurt you. I merely want to see if my diagnosis is correct.—There, that’s it. Move when you feel anything. Rheumatism has strange freaks.—Watch this, Miss Judson, and I’ll wager this form of rheumatism is new to you. See. He does not resent. He thinks I have not begun yet . . . ”
And as he talked, steadily, interestingly, he was doing what Dag Daughtry never dreamed he was doing, and what made Kwaque, looking on, almost dream he was seeing because of the unrealness and impossibleness of it. For, with a large needle, Doctor Emory was probing the dark spot in the midst of the vertical lion-lines. Nor did he merely probe the area. Thrusting into it from one side, under the skin and parallel to it, he buried the length of the needle from sight through the insensate infiltration. This Kwaque beheld with bulging eyes; for his master betrayed no sign that the thing was being done.
“Why don’t you begin?” Dag Daughtry questioned impatiently. “Besides, my rheumatism don’t count. It’s the nigger-boy’s swelling.”
“You need a course of treatment,” Doctor Emory assured him. “Rheumatism is a tough proposition. It should never be let grow chronic. I’ll fix up a course of treatment for you. Now, if you’ll get out of the chair, we’ll look at your black servant.”
But first, before Kwaque was leaned back, Doctor Emory threw over the chair a sheet that smelled of having been roasted almost to the scorching point. As he was about to examine Kwaque, he looked with a slight start of recollection at his watch. When he saw the time he startled more, and turned a reproachful face upon his assistant.
“Miss Judson,” he said, coldly emphatic, “you have failed me. Here it is, twenty before twelve, and you knew I was to confer with Doctor Hadley over that case at eleven-thirty sharp. How he must be cursing me! You know how peevish he is.”
Miss Judson nodded, with a perfect expression of contrition and humility, as if she knew all about it, although, in reality, she knew only all about her employer and had never heard till that moment of his engagement at eleven-thirty.
“Doctor Hadley’s just across the hall,” Doctor Emory explained to Daughtry. “It won’t take me five minutes. He and I have a disagreement. He has diagnosed the case as chronic appendicitis and wants to operate. I have diagnosed it as pyorrhea which has infected the stomach from the mouth, and have suggested emetine treatment of the mouth as a cure for the stomach disorder. Of course, you don’t understand, but the point is that I’ve persuaded Doctor Hadley to bring in Doctor Granville, who is a dentist and a pyorrhea expert. And they’re all waiting for me these ten minutes! I must run.
“I’ll return inside five minutes,” he called back as the door to the hall was closing upon him.—“Miss Judson, please tell those people in the reception-room to be patient.”
He did enter Doctor Hadley’s office, although no sufferer from pyorrhea or appendicitis awaited him. Instead, he used the telephone for two calls: one to the president of the board of health; the other to the chief of police. Fortunately, he caught both at their offices, addressing them familiarly by their first names and talking to them most emphatically and confidentially.
Back in his own quarters, he was patently elated.
“I told him so,” he assured Miss Judson, but embracing Daughtry in the happy confidence. “Doctor Granville backed me up. Straight pyorrhea, of course. That knocks the operation. And right now they’re jolting his gums and the pus-sacs with emetine. Whew! A fellow likes to be right. I deserve a smoke. Do you mind, Mr. Daughtry?”
And while the steward shook his head, Doctor Emory lighted a big Havana and continued audibly to luxuriate in his fictitious triumph over the other doctor. As he talked, he forgot to smoke, and, leaning quite casually against the chair, with arrant carelessness allowed the live coal at the end of his cigar to rest against the tip of one of Kwaque’s twisted fingers. A privy wink to Miss Judson, who was the only one who observed his action, warned her against anything that might happen.
“You know, Mr. Daughtry,” Walter Merritt Emory went on enthusiastically, while he held the steward’s eyes with his and while all the time the live end of the cigar continued to rest against Kwaque’s finger, “the older I get the more convinced I am that there are too many ill-advised and hasty operations.”
Still fire and flesh pressed together, and a tiny spiral of smoke began to arise from Kwaque’s finger-end that was different in colour from the smoke of a cigar-end.
“Now take that patient of Doctor Hadley’s. I’ve saved him, not merely the risk of an operation for appendicitis, but the cost of it, and the hospital expenses. I shall charge him nothing for what I did. Hadley’s charge will be merely nominal. Doctor Granville, at the outside, will cure his pyorrhea with emetine for no more than a paltry fifty dollars. Yes, by George, besides the risk to his life, and the discomfort, I’ve saved that man, all told, a cold thousand dollars to surgeon, hospital, and nurses.”
And while he talked on, holding Daughtry’s eyes, a smell of roast meat began to pervade the air. Doctor Emory smelled it eagerly. So did Miss Judson smell it, but she had been warned and gave no notice. Nor did she look at the juxtaposition of cigar and finger, although she knew by the evidence of her nose that it still obtained.
“What’s burning?” Daughtry demanded suddenly, sniffing the air and glancing around.
“Pretty rotten cigar,” Doctor Emory observed, having removed it from contact with Kwaque’s finger and now examining it with critical disapproval. He held it close to his nose, and his face portrayed disgust. “I won’t say cabbage leaves. I’ll merely say it’s something I don’t know and don’t care to know. That’s the trouble. They get out a good, new brand of cigar, advertise it, put the best of tobacco into it, and, when it has taken with the public, put in inferior tobacco and ride the popularity of it. No more in mine, thank you. This day I change my brand.”
So speaking, he tossed the cigar into a cuspidor. And Kwaque, leaning back in the queerest chair in which he had ever sat, was unaware that the end of his finger had been burned and roasted half an inch deep, and merely wondered when the medicine doctor would cease talking and begin looking at the swelling that hurt his side under his arm.
And for the first time in his life, and for the ultimate time, Dag Daughtry fell down. It was an irretrievable fall-down. Life, in its freedom of come and go, by heaving sea and reeling deck, through the home of the trade-winds, back and forth between the ports, ceased there for him in Walter Merritt Emory’s office, while the calm-browed Miss Judson looked on and marvelled that a man’s flesh should roast and the man wince not from the roasting of it.
Doctor Emory continued to talk, and tried a fresh cigar, and, despite the fact that his reception-room was overflowing, delivered, not merely a long, but a live and interesting, dissertation on the subject of cigars and of the tobacco leaf and filler as grown and prepared for cigars in the tobacco-favoured regions of the earth.
“Now, as regards this swelling,” he was saying, as he began a belated and distant examination of Kwaque’s affliction, “I should say, at a glance, that it is neither tumour nor cancer, nor is it even a boil. I should say . . . ”
A knock at the private door into the hall made him straighten up with an eagerness that he did not attempt to mask. A nod to Miss Judson sent her to open the door, and entered two policemen, a police sergeant, and a professionally whiskered person in a business suit with a carnation in his button-hole.
“Good morning, Doctor Masters,” Emory greeted the professional one, and, to the others: “Howdy, Sergeant;” “Hello, Tim;” “Hello, Johnson—when did they shift you off the Chinatown squad?”
And then, continuing his suspended sentence, Walter Merritt Emory held on, looking intently at Kwaque’s swelling:
“I should say, as I was saying, that it is the finest, ripest, perforating ulcer of the bacillus leprae order, that any San Francisco doctor has had the honour of presenting to the board of health.”
“Leprosy!” exclaimed Doctor Masters.
And all started at his pronouncement of the word. The sergeant and the two policemen shied away from Kwaque; Miss Judson, with a smothered cry, clapped her two hands over her heart; and Dag Daughtry, shocked but sceptical, demanded:
“What are you givin’ us, Doc.?”
“Stand still! don’t move!” Walter Merritt Emory said peremptorily to Daughtry. “I want you to take notice,” he added to the others, as he gently touched the live-end of his fresh cigar to the area of dark skin above and between the steward’s eyes. “Don’t move,” he commanded Daughtry. “Wait a moment. I am not ready yet.”
And while Daughtry waited, perplexed, confused, wondering why Doctor Emory did not proceed, the coal of fire burned his skin and flesh, till the smoke of it was apparent to all, as was the smell of it. With a sharp laugh of triumph, Doctor Emory stepped back.
“Well, go ahead with what you was goin’ to do,” Daughtry grumbled, the rush of events too swift and too hidden for him to comprehend. “An’ when you’re done with that, I just want you to explain what you said about leprosy an’ that nigger-boy there. He’s my boy, an’ you can’t pull anything like that off on him . . . or me.”
“Gentlemen, you have seen,” Doctor Emory said. “Two undoubted cases of it, master and man, the man more advanced, with the combination of both forms, the master with only the anæsthetic form—he has a touch of it, too, on his little finger. Take them away. I strongly advise, Doctor Masters, a thorough fumigation of the ambulance afterward.”
“Look here . . . ” Dag Daughtry began belligerently.
Doctor Emory glanced warningly to Doctor Masters, and Doctor Masters glanced authoritatively at the sergeant who glanced commandingly at his two policemen. But they did not spring upon Daughtry. Instead, they backed farther away, drew their clubs, and glared intimidatingly at him. More convincing than anything else to Daughtry was the conduct of the policemen. They were manifestly afraid of contact with him. As he started forward, they poked the ends of their extended clubs towards his ribs to ward him off.
“Don’t you come any closer,” one warned him, flourishing his club with the advertisement of braining him. “You stay right where you are until you get your orders.”
“Put on your shirt and stand over there alongside your master,” Doctor Emory commanded Kwaque, having suddenly elevated the chair and spilled him out on his feet on the floor.
“But what under the sun . . . ” Daughtry began, but was ignored by his quondam friend, who was saying to Doctor Masters:
“The pest-house has been vacant since that Japanese died. I know the gang of cowards in your department so I’d advise you to give the dope to these here so that they can disinfect the premises when they go in.”
“For the love of Mike,” Daughtry pleaded, all of stunned belligerence gone from him in his state of stunned conviction that the dread disease possessed him. He touched his finger to his sensationless forehead, then smelled it and recognized the burnt flesh he had not felt burning. “For the love of Mike, don’t be in such a rush. If I’ve got it, I’ve got it. But that ain’t no reason we can’t deal with each other like white men. Give me two hours an’ I’ll get outa the city. An’ in twenty-four I’ll be outa the country. I’ll take ship—”
“And continue to be a menace to the public health wherever you are,” Doctor Masters broke in, already visioning a column in the evening papers, with scare-heads, in which he would appear the hero, the St. George of San Francisco standing with poised lance between the people and the dragon of leprosy.
“Take them away,” said Waiter Merritt Emory, avoiding looking Daughtry in the eyes.
“Ready! March!” commanded the sergeant.
The two policemen advanced on Daughtry and Kwaque with extended clubs.
“Keep away, an’ keep movin’,” one of the policemen growled fiercely. “An’ do what we say, or get your head cracked. Out you go, now. Out the door with you. Better tell that coon to stick right alongside you.”
“Doc., won’t you let me talk a moment?” Daughtry begged of Emory.
“The time for talking is past,” was the reply. “This is the time for segregation.—Doctor Masters, don’t forget that ambulance when you’re quit of the load.”
So the procession, led by the board-of-heath doctor and the sergeant, and brought up in the rear by the policemen with their protectively extended clubs, started through the doorway.
Whirling about on the threshold, at the imminent risk of having his skull cracked, Dag Daughtry called back:
“Doc! My dog! You know ’m.”
“I’ll get him for you,” Doctor Emory consented quickly. “What’s the address?”
“Room eight-seven, Clay street, the Bowhead Lodging House, you know the place, entrance just around the corner from the Bowhead Saloon. Have ’m sent out to me wherever they put me—will you?”
“Certainly I will,” said Doctor Emory, “and you’ve got a cockatoo, too?”
“You bet, Cocky! Send ’m both along, please, sir.”
“My!” said Miss Judson, that evening, at dinner with a certain young interne of St. Joseph’s Hospital. “That Doctor Emory is a wizard. No wonder he’s successful. Think of it! Two filthy lepers in our office to-day! One was a coon. And he knew what was the matter the moment he laid eyes on them. He’s a caution. When I tell you what he did to them with his cigar! And he was cute about it! He gave me the wink first. And they never dreamed what he was doing. He took his cigar and . . . ”