XXII
LATE that night he returned to the pierhouse of theHudsonlimping, with his arm in a sling, his face bruised and an eye blackened. “Turk” Sturton, whose watch it was, received him without sympathy. “Cap’n wants to see yuh,” he said sternly. “Where’ve yuh been?”
“Shine’s” face expressed all the bitterness of a soul that had found no relief in its curses. “Wait!” he said. “Jus’youwait!”
He went into Keighley’s office. The captain put aside a newspaper that he had been reading, and looked him over. “Well?”
“Shine” moistened his lips and beganhis explanations. They were guiltily ingenious. He had fallen down a hatch in theLeoand had lain unconscious until the steamer was half way to Coney. Then some deckmen in the forecastle had heard him groaning and had come to his rescue. He had been badly shaken up but not seriously hurt, and he had decided to hurry back to theHudsonby trolley instead of waiting for theLeoto make her return trip. He borrowed some clothes and went ashore, but as he was hastening up one of the board walks towards the street-car line, he was stopped by a number of men who were disputing about a cane which one of them had “ringed with one o’ them rings that yuh toss at canes in a ‘Cane-yuh-ring-is-the-cane-yuh-get’ graft.” And they had demanded that he decide whether the cane had been “ringed” ornot. The ring was resting on the knob of the cane, being too small to fall down over it. It was a “faked-up” dispute. They were a “gang o’ strong arms,” and when they got him in among them, they started to “go through” him. He put up a fight. They “got all over” him, knocked him down, gave him a black eye, and took his money. He had had to walk back from Coney. He—
“That’ll do,” Keighley cut in. “Take that sling off yer arm. Yuh can’t come any spiels like that on me.”
“S’welp me, cap, I—”
“Cut it out, now, I tell yuh. Yuh’ve been drunk. Yuh’ve been off duty ten hours without leave. Yuh’ve either got to gi’ me a straight story er walk the carpet at Headquarters.”
“Shine” swallowed and looked down at his feet. He was calculating thatActing-Chief Moran would be lenient with a “Jigger.”
“Yuh’ve been havin’ things pretty much yer own way around here,” Keighley said. “This’s where yuh take a drop. The Commissioner’s out, see? He quit this afternoon. Youse fullahs ’er goin’ to do whatIsay after this. If yuh go up to Headquarters, yuh don’t come back. Moran won’t save yuh. He’s got all he can do to save his own neck, now.”
“Shine” looked at the captain, and recognized that his game was up. “’Twasn’t my fault,” he said. “It was Doherty’s.”
“Doherty! What’d Doherty have to do with it?”
“The damn dip! He done me up,” he said—and plunged into an incoherentand many-cursed account of what had happened.
Keighley heard him in silence. When Doherty’s part in the affair was made plain, the captain “sized up” the situation with the frown of a chess-player studying the board, and said “Ummm” as he saw his play. “Shine” finished, humble and submissive. Keighley said, “Go to yer bunk.”
It is the tradition of the department that a captain shall enforce discipline in his company without sending his men to Headquarters on every trifling charge that he has against them. Keighley watched “Shine” out, snorted contemptously through his nose, reached for the newspaper again, and returned to the column that reported the Fire Commissioner’s resignation. He had“Shine” where he “wanted” him, as he would have said. And he had his whole company in the hollow of his hand.
“Shine” knew it. The “Jiggers” knew it. “It’ll be off to the goose-pastures fer ours all right,” Cripps said, discussing the situation with “Shine.” “The chief’ll get back, now, an’ if he don’t find a way to break us, he’ll ship us off to the Bronx. I don’t care a damn anyway,” he added in feeble defiance.
“Ner me!” “Shine” clenched his hand. “I’m lookin’ fer Doherty. If they kick me out o’ the department, I’ll find him all the quicker. An’ I want youse fullahs to keep yer eyes skinned fer him. Jus’ tell me where he’s workin’. That’s all! I’ll do the rest.”
Cripps swore plaintively. “After us fightin’ ol’ Clinkers fer him, too.”
“An’ fer the rest o’ them,” “Shine” cried. “They’ve played us fer suckers—Moran an’ the whole dirty gang. They’ve used us. An now when they’re afraid o’ fallin’ down, they’ll chuck us. That’s all we’ll get out o’ the ‘Jigger’ bus’ness. Yuh’ll see.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand; he was almost “drooling” with disgust and bitterness. “Never mind. If I ever get ahold o’ Doherty!” he promised himself.
There is nothing persists among these men as an enmity does. A man who has been wronged sees the scar of the injury as a mark of inferiority on him, and his pride in himself is never satisfied until he has been able to “get even,” until he has proved himself the equal of his enemy by returning the hurt in kind. “Shine” could not even consider hiscase in solitude without suffering. When he was among companions, he could not think of Doherty without breaking out in new threats of vengeance, as if he would give a sort of promissory note against his debt of hatred. He asked everywhere for news of Doherty. His first day off he spent in searching Coney, with his hands clenched ready in his pockets. When he heard that Doherty had been seen about the docks, he spent hours at the pierhouse windows watching the river traffic, and took his weekly holiday lounging about the water-front with the instinctive patience of a beast of prey. By the time a month had passed, the desire of revenge had become a sort of subconscious habit that affected his actions without disturbing his thought. He went about his work as of old, butsilently, as self-contained as a man with a great ambition. He knew that if he could wait long enough he could get his man. He was prepared to wait a lifetime.
Then, one day, two things happened: Chief Borden came back to his place in the department and “Shine” heard that Doherty had been seen working as a freight-handler again on the Baltic-American wharves. At meal hour “Shine” did not go to his dinner; he hurried home to change his uniform, and posted off to the Baltic-American sheds—and he was denied an entrance by the wharf watchman. Since the fire on theSachsenthe rule had been strictly enforced that no stranger should be admitted to the company’s piers without a card from the office. “Shine” did not care to show the metal fire-badge on hissuspender; it was not a case for an official appearance. He returned to theHudsonhungry but full of hope. He could wait for his day off, waylay Doherty as the longshoremen left their work in the evening, and mark him for all time.
As it turned out, he did not have to wait for his day off. He waited only two days. On the third day the impossible happened.
An alarm of fire was rung in from the Baltic-American piers.
It found Chief Borden closeted with Captain Keighley when the call came. Under the eye of the head of the department, the crew took their places with an easy alertness and no confusion. The chief followed them aboard; the lines were cast off; Keighley nodded an order to the pilot; and the boat drew out intothe stream with as little show of haste as a fast express pulling out from a railway platform on the tick of the appointed second.
The sullen glow of a sunset was smoldering dully over the Jersey shore; and New York was piled up to face it, a Gibraltar of brick and stone, twinkling with its lighted windows and gay with the blown plumes of steam from its roofs. A stiff breeze from the north drove the waves against the bow of theHudsonand hummed in the guys of her funnel. Keighley and the Chief, facing the bow with their backs to the wheelhouse, their chins sunken in their collars, were bent against the rush of air like a pair of old and deaf cronies, their hands behind them, their heads together as they talked.
“It was about a man named Doherty,”Keighley was explaining reluctantly. “Youremember him, I guess. Some o’ the men didn’t like it when I got him broke. An’ they made a little trouble fer me—off an’ on.”
“He was a ‘Jigger,’ wasn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“How about that fire on theSachsen? Didn’t Doherty figure in that?”
“Well, I saw him there. He was doin’ ’longshore-work on her. He might’ve been in it. I don’t know.”
“Didn’t they stack the deal on you there?”
“I think they did. I don’t know. They got foolin’ with a pierhouse blaze while I was down in her hold.... I tell yuh how it is, chief: it’s all over. They’re attendin’ to bus’ness. Yuh needn’t be a-scared of any of ’em in this comp’ny.”
Keighley’s tone was apologetic and conciliatory. It seemed traitorously so to the chief. “A-scared be damned!” he said. “I got to makethema-scared ofme.Who was at the head of the game here? Moore?”
Keighley answered, “The man that was at the head of it—he’s lef’ the comp’ny.”
The chief darted a black look at Keighley under the peak of his cap. “No one’s left this boat since that fire. I looked her up.”
“No,” Keighley admitted, unabashed. “But he’s left off makin trouble.”
“Now listen to me, Dan,” Borden broke out. “I’ve come back to the department and I’m counting up my friends. Those that ain’t with me are against me. That’s the way I look at it.... You know as well as I dothat if I don’t pound these men, they’ll think I’m afraid of them—and they’ll get to work and knife me.”
“Well—that’s true, too,” Keighley reflected. He glanced up at the Jersey shore and down at the deck again. “I wish yuh’d leave them be, though, chief. I got the best crew in the department, now.”
The chief shook his head. “They didn’t leavemebe. I can’t let up onthem.You know what they’d think.”
“Well,” Keighley said, looking out over the river, “I’ll tell yuh. The man that was at the head of it—” He blinked the water from his eyes and peered into the wind—“in this crew—” He raised his arm slowly and pointed. “What’s that?”
Through the traffic of ferries, car-floats and lighters that crowded theshore, he could see a big freighter drifting down the piers with a flotilla of tugs about her. “What’s the matter? Is she afire?”
The chief watched her. “Looks like it, don’t she?”
There was no answer. He turned to see that Keighley had left him; and he followed back to the wheelhouse, where he found the captain standing at the pilot’s elbow with the glasses at his eyes.
“It’s a Baltic-American boat, all right—theHessen,” Keighley said. “No fire ashore. They pulled her out of her dock, I guess. I don’t see much smoke on her. Lay us alongside, Tom.”
And the chief, mentally putting aside his feud with the “Jiggers” for the time, said: “They’re keeping it under hatches. Gi’ me the glasses.... It’s in one of her after holds.”