"You should go, of course," says Wallie. "He will be glad to see you."
"Mebby so, mebby so, lad, but why should I thrust my wuthless carcass onter him? Besides, the round-trip fare to Newport is four dollars an' more." An' Bill gazes mournful-like across East River to Brooklyn, an' Wallie's too polite to bust in on him, but I c'n see in his eyes where he's goin' to get four dollars some way for old Bill some day to pay a visit to Newport.
An' then it comes time for Wallie to hike off to school, an' he kisses his father good-by, an' says "So long, Hiker!" to me, an' thanks old Bill for his story.
"It always gives me pleasure to instruct an' edify growin' youth," says old Bill, lookin' after Wallie goin' up South Street, an' whilst he's lookin' a policeman an' a common nordinary citizen heaves into sight. An' the man looks to be excited, with a coat over one arm.
"You take some o' these young fuhlers," says Bill, "that's been drivin' a dray all his life an' invest him with a yunniform an' authority an' a club in his hand, an' two or three times more pay than ever he got before—you do that, an' I tell you there's nobody safe from 'em." An' old Bill slips the pipe back into the coat-tail pocket of the coat an' leaves it on the steps, an' scoots lightly to behind barrels o' flour three high in the back o' the store.
Mr. Whelan has a peek over his paper at Bill passin'; but he don't say anything on'y to step to the door when the policeman an' the man come along.
"Look!" the man hollers, an' dives for the coat Bill 'd left behind him. "An' look at—the pipe!" He'd hauled it out of the coat-tail pocket. "My pipe!"
An' then the policeman says: "This gentleman this morning, Mr. Whelan, dropped into Spiegel's after a little bat for a little nip and a——"
"If you please," interrupts the man, "I will tell it. A short while ago"—he faces Mr. Whelan—"I was yunnanimously elected outer sentinel o' my lodge o' Fantail Pigeons. And last night a few friends, wishin' to commemorate the honor, presented me with this pipe—a fine pipe, as you can see—of ebony. And my initials, see—HRC—Henry R. Cotton—on the gold band. And a picture of a fantail—see—engraved on the bowl. You don't happen to be"—the man steps up to Mr. Whelan an' grabs an' squeezes his hand, all the while lookin' him hard in the eye—"a Fantail?" When Mr. Whelan don't say anything, the man gives him another grip, 'most jumpin' off his feet this time to make sure it was a good one.
"No," says Mr. Whelan, wrigglin' his fingers apart after the man let go of 'em—"I'm no Fantail."
"Oh, well, it's all right—there are some good men who are not. However, I leave the chaps this morning and step into a place down the street for a cup of coffee before I go to the office, and possibly I laid my head down on the table for a minute's nap. However, when I get up to take my coat off the hook where I'd left it, the coat is gone. And in place of it is this disreputable garment—see?" an' he throws down the old coat an' wipes his feet on it.
"Spiegel's bartender, Herman," puts in the policeman, "says there was a nold bum came in an' hung his coat next to this gentleman's, an' when he went the coat went; and he must 'a' went pretty quiet, Herman says, for he didn't notice him goin'. An' his description fits an old loafer who hits the free-lunch trail pretty reg'lar 'round here, an' I think I seen him loafin' around here once or twice."
"He meant to steal that coat an' pipe," says the man.
"If he meant to steal it," says Mr. Whelan, "why d' y' s'pose he left it here?"
"Why, I dunno," says the man.
"O' course he didn't," says Mr. Whelan. "An', look here"—he sticks the mornin' paper under the man's nose an' says: "What do you think o' Marquard holdin' the Phillies down to two hits yesterday?"
"No!" says the man; "two hits? Well, say, he'ssomeboy, hah?"
"Is he? Listen to me," says the policeman, shovin' his club between them. "Listen. All I gotter say is, with Mattie an' Jeff an' the Rube goin' right, where'll them Red Sox fit with the Giants in the world's series next month? God help 'em—that's all I gotter say."
"The Giants look like a good bet to me, too," says the man, an' soon up the street toward Spiegel's the pair of 'em go, fannin' about the Giants with Mr. Whelan.
An' when Mr. Whelan is soon back alone, Bill comes out from behind his flour-barrels an' with his plug o' Comanche Chief in his hand. "I don't s'pose yuh could swap this for chewin' o' the same brand, could yuh, Mr. Whelan?" he says.
"Why—you given up smokin'?" says Mr. Whelan.
"How'm I goin' to smoke without a pipe?" says Bill.
"That's so," says Mr. Whelan, an' goes behind the counter an' pulls down a couple o' boxes of brier pipes.
"With a middlin' good hook to the stem, if you don't mind," says Bill.
Mr. Whelan passes over the best make of French brier. Bill held it up. "She looks all right." He put it between his teeth. "An' she feels all right." He sticks it into his shirt. "An' I guess she'll smoke all right." He steps to the door an' picks up the old coat. "What good it done him to wipe his feet on my coat, I dunno," he says. Then he turns back.
"About Wallie, Mr. Whelan?"
"Why, Bill," says Mr. Whelan, "when he gets back from school of course he'll get down the chart to look up all those countries you passed on the way back from Yunzano, and o' course we'll have to make a correction or two in your jography."
"O' course," says Bill. "I useder have a good mem'ry once, but"—he taps his head—"gettin' old, gettin' old, Mr. Whelan. That coat now—it sure did look like the cut o' the coat I used to wear on theTropic Zone. And the pipe!" an' old Bill gazes mournful-like across East River to Brooklyn, an' turns again an' says: "A good boy, your boy, Mr. Whelan—no evil suspicions o' people in his heart. An', as my old capt'n o' theTropic Zoneuseder quote fr'm the Bible to me: 'It's they shall inherit all there is that's wuth inheritin'.'"
An' then Bill heaved another sigh, and put on his old coat, an' went shufflin' up South Street, on the side away from Spiegel's.
Cahalan, of the many voyages, had been reading of the latest marine near-disaster and the part played therein by the ship's wireless man; but refused to be impressed.
"The slush the papers print sometimes!" he snorted. "Here's this now about this SOS fellow—all these papers trying to make out what a wonder he was, as if it took a wizard to keep pumping out three letters till somebody heard you. And a hero, too!"
"Why not—he stood by his key, didn't he?"
"Sure he did. And if you and me were wash-women we'd probably stand by our wash-tubs, wouldn't we? If there was no more danger keeping on washing than standing around doing nothing, we surely would, wouldn't we? But nobody'd think of calling us heroes for it, would they? That SOS man now—if he didn't want to stand by his key he could 've jumped overboard—it was only a thousand miles to shore. So he stood by his key and eased his mind by having something to do, which, of course, makes him a hero."
"It's a great thing just the same, the wireless."
"Sure it is and needs no fake booming, but I like to see a little brains mixed with it. There was a fellow named Furlong—I ran across him first in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, where our battle-fleet was rondayvouing for winter drill. I had a month's pay on a fight coming off in London and was wishing I knew how it came out without waiting a week or ten days for the New York papers, when Faulkner, the captain's yeoman, says: 'Why don't you ask Furlong, the wireless operator? He'll find out for you.'
"But how can he?" says I.
"You people in the deck division," says Faulkner, "you're living in the past. You fellows want to come out of your sailin'-ship dreams and steam around and see what's doin' in the world. Furlong'll pick it off from the Cape Cod station when they're gettin' it from across for the newspapers."
"From here—from off the ship?" I asks. "Why, I thought the record for picking up or sending from a ship was six or seven hundred miles."
"Maybe it is," says Faulkner, "but Furlong's specialty is breaking records."
So I step up to the wireless shack to see Furlong. Regan, the chief signal quartermaster, was there before me. Regan had a girl in Brooklyn, and Furlong was getting off Regan's regular evening message to her about how he was still in good health and still hoped to be back in the spring and so on by wireless to a station up near New York in charge of a friend of Furlong's, whose job was to pass it on to a telegraph-office in Brooklyn just across the street from where the girl lived. She would have it for breakfast in the morning, and Regan would have her answer to it some time during the day. A consolation to two loving hearts it was, and they doing it all winter without it costing either of them a copper.
I tell Furlong what I'm after. "Sure," he says, and begins to make the colored lights hop. "And have a cigarette while you're waiting," he says, "for it will take a few minutes."
I looked around for a match. "Here," says Furlong, and spills a little alcohol from a bottle onto a copper-looking switch thing and brings down on that another copper-looking switch thing with a handle—both of 'em sticking out from the bulkhead—and out flows a blue flame six inches long and I light my cigarette, watching out not to burn the end of my nose while I'm lighting it. He had the place full of little gadgets like that.
While we sat there he gives out all the latest news as fast as he grabs it off, not only about my fight in London, but how the ponies were running in New Orleans, what Congress was killing time about, which particular European country was going to war now—all the important news.
I'm not setting up Furlong for any hero, mind you, but sitting up there in his little shack on the superstructure, grabbing news like that from everywhere flying—he made a hit with me. After that if I didn't want to know any more than was there good skating in Central Park I'd ask Furlong, and he'd dig up some station or other around New York, make the blue lights hop, clap the wireless gear to his head, and soon be telling me all about it.
That spring I was transferred, and didn't see Furlong again for two years. Then it was in the East—in Hong Kong during the Russo-Japanese war, both of us paid off and both of us wondering what we'd do, but Furlong not worrying much about the money end of it. He had plenty of that, enough anyway to keep him in good clothes and stop at all the good hotels he cared to for a while. And enough to stake me after I'd gone broke, too.
In Hong Kong we struck in with another young fellow who was flourishing around as an American tourist, though Furlong knew him for a wireless man before he'd been with him an hour, and in less than another hour knew him for the wireless operator one time on theNippon, a steamer running from our country to Japan. But he never let on he knew him.
"Suppose he is playing a little game of bluff, where is it my business to show him up?"
Furlong had come to know the daughter of a purser running on a steamer, thePlantagenet, between Hong Kong and the Japanese ports, and she was pretty as you please and he taking a great shine to her; after telling the old man, mind you, that he had been an enlisted man in the United States navy and was thinking of going back home to Chicago, but not telling him that his folks back home had bales of money, which would have put him in right, for the old man did like the chink of hard coin and was picking up his share on his own little graft—renting his room to rich passengers when the ship was crowded, picking up a little more change by doing a little smuggling, and probably in the pay of the Jap Secret Service on the side.
One evening Furlong, always a sociable chap, brings his wireless friend around, and another evening, and another. Pretty soon things don't seem to be running as smooth as they used to for Furlong, but fine for his wireless friend. "Well, that's all right, too," says Furlong, "if they like him better than me."
"But no need to give you a frost, is there?" I said.
Things kept growing cooler around the girl's house, so we made up our minds 'twas about time to get away somewhere, and war being a great place to forget your troubles, we had a look in at that. We took the Russian side. We were for the Japs in the beginning, but by this time nearly all our navy people in the East had swung over to the Russians. Why? M-m—probably because deep down inside of us we believed the Russians were nearer our own kind.
Before we left Hong Kong I found out how Furlong's wireless friend had done for him. With a few drinks in him—me buying the drinks—he gushes some confidential chatter.
Furlong was in the pay of the Russian Government, was what he told the foxy old purser. How else could a man so clever—talking and having so much money to spend as Furlong was spending—how could he have been an enlisted man in any navy? And he showed a cable—being so easy to fix up, I wondered why he hadn't made it a wireless—that no man of Furlong's father's name was living in Chicago. I didn't tell that to Furlong—not then. Why? Because to my notion he was well clear of a cheap bunch.
Later we heard she was married to the wireless chap and the pair of them living off her father. His people had lost all their money in speculation, so the young fellow told the old man; which left nothing for the old man to do but get him a job somewhere; which he did, on thePlantagenet, where the wife was aboard, too—to save expenses.
"Kind of tough on her," says Furlong, and maybe it was, though I couldn't see it. She only got what was coming to her. The woman that would look at Furlong and not see that he rated a whole division like the other chap— But trying to account for young women's judgment of young men and vice versa, as the old Romans would say, what's the use? And if we all knew as much as we ought to there would half the time be no story, would there?
We were both in Port Arthur when things were looking blue for the Russians. The Japs were hammering away at the forts and the place filling up with dead and wounded, and all kinds of sickness and fever flourishing, and medical and food supplies getting pretty low. They were wondering how they were going to make out, when some topsider said that if some of the sick and wounded could be got up to Vladivostok it might save a good many lives and be a great relief to the rest of the garrison.
There happened to be three transports in the harbor at this time. They had slipped by the blockade, which wasn't ever any too well kept, the mines outside being about as dangerous to the Japs as to anybody else. These three ships would accommodate three thousand sick people. So they were put aboard, sick and wounded, officers and men—and women, too, some officers' wives among them.
For a convoy to the transports the best they could detail was a battleship that had been in an engagement not long before. Pretty well shot up she was and much doubt would she stand the trip to Vladivostok; but she was the only one available and out we went, with Furlong as her wireless operator. There being not too many good wireless men lying around just then, they counted a lot on him.
Before we left port there was a rumor flying that the Japs had wind of what we were trying to do; and perhaps that was the reason why when the battleship had trouble with her machinery on our first day out she didn't put back to Port Arthur, but put into a little Chinese harbor on the westerly side of the Yellow Sea. You may think the Chinese officials wanted to run us out, but they didn't. Maybe they saw the shadows of the future.
We lay in there all that night, I bunking in with Furlong in the wireless shack and he on watch every minute. During the night he picked up the call of a Russian supply-ship—theSevastopolshe was—and passed the word on to the admiral, who sent back word to tell her to wait outside till next morning and then follow on, giving her the next day's course.
Next morning we went belting across the Yellow Sea at eleven knots—pretty good for us—and we began to think everything was working fine, when astern, about noon, came up a smoke. Furlong and I could see her without leaving the wireless shack, which on this Russian battleship was on the after-bridge. She drew nearer, and something about her caught my eye. I knew I had seen her somewhere, and, getting a chance at the chief quartermaster's long glass, I took a peep, and sure enough—thePlantagenet! I didn't say anything, not even when the flag-lieutenant and the executive were having a great spiel together as to her being the supply-ship which we expected was coming astern of us.
Soon a vapor comes up and the stranger fades away, and after thinking it over, I tell the flag-lieutenant what I felt sure of, and he tells the admiral, and the old man he has Furlong tell the transports to come closer, and then he signals them to steam off by the right, and once more to the right, and again to the right, which brought us after half an hour or more a couple of miles astern of where we'd been when thePlantagenetlast showed. It was a day of shifting fog and vapor, and when we raised her again there she was still on the old course, but now directly ahead of us.
She came and went between puffs of fog vapor. The admiral was satisfied now that she was thePlantagenet, and as she'd long been suspected of doing secret scout work for the Japs, he began to do some thinking about her. She was a fast steamer, and all the more use to the Japs because she wasn't a Jap.
"If she could bring about the capture of this little fleet of ours, she'd make a lot of money for her owners and officers, wouldn't she?" I says to Furlong. "And that wireless friend of yours, he'll get an extra good whack, too, for they'll mostly depend on him, won't they?"
"Yes," says Furlong, "but not if I can stop him."
By and by the admiral comes into the wireless shack himself and tells Furlong to see if he couldn't raise the strange ship by wireless. But he couldn't. She wouldn't answer; which made the admiral pretty mad, and with the fog lifting and we seeing her again, he trained a big gun on her but didn't fire, though for a second I thought he would—across her bow anyway.
All that afternoon we held to our course. Another night and day we hoped to make Vladivostok all right, but coming on to dark our old wreck of a battleship broke down again. So the old man picked out another place to put into—on the northern part of the Korean coast we were now, where the Russian officers were pretty well posted and—something telling us the Koreans wouldn't bother—we felt safe for the night. We all figured we had slipped thePlantagenet, and so we had, maybe, only for that blessed supply-ship behind us. She had been sent a wireless not to anchor till a couple of hours after the rest of us—after dark.
But she had one of those yap skippers who are always bound to be in the commander-in-chief's eye, and instead of sneaking in without calling attention to himself, he comes bowling along, every light aboard her blazing, and steams like a torch-light procession around the harbor. She might just as well have lit up and kept her search-lights going, for as she passed each one of us her lights were blocked off, which told to any other ship which might be watching outside just how many ships of us there were to anchor inside. That parading skipper certainly did get in the old man's eye. If the admiral's message read anything like it sounded, then that parading skipper must have felt as good as blown from a turret-gun before he turned in that night.
Later in the night the officer that in our navy we'd call the flag-lieutenant—a decent kind who talked good English, too—ordered Furlong to turn in. He had been on continuous duty since we left Port Arthur. "You can do no more, and you are much fatigued, you require repose," says the flag-lieutenant. And Furlong thought a little repose wouldn't hurt either; but before going he thought he would give one last listen for anything that might be floating around in the wireless zone.
Right away I saw that something was doing.
"Look up K K K," he says—"quick!"
I got out the printed call-book, but no K K K there.
"Perhaps she is some new ship," says Furlong, "or an old one with a plant installed since the last list was put out. Quiet now—maybe I can recognize the sending." He listened; and "No"—he shook his head thoughtfully. "And yet—wait—Sh-h—" he jams the head-gear harder to his ears. "Well, what d'y' think o' that! It's that lobster off the oldNippon—nearly two years since I've taken him."
"That married——"
"Yes," he says.
"And still on thePlantagenet, d'y' s'pose?"
"Must be. I know him now like I'd know his voice, or his signature. And she's not far off either—coming strong!"
"Then they must 'a' seen that supply-ship and her fool skipper parading in to-night."
"That's what. Sh-h—he's using a cipher code, and merchantmen don't use cipher codes to each other. I'll ask him what his call is."
He makes the blue lights sputter again and listens. And in a few seconds almost jumps out of his chair. "We got him! He says he's theGrand Knightof the China and Indian Line, but last night while I was sitting here doing nothing I raised theGrand Knight—she was in Formosa Strait then and bound south. But I'll give him OK, and see what he does then." Which he did, and waited another while.
ThePlantagenetkept pumping away, calling the cipher letter over and over, Furlong said—he listening in and trying to dope things out. By and by he made up his mind she must be trying to raise some plant ashore, probably a station on the Japanese coast in touch with Togo's fleet. "If we could only get on to her cipher," says Furlong; and, after another thinking spell: "It's sure to be something made up in a hurry. And I don't believe thatNipponchap's got overmuch invention. Here, look here, Cahalan. Three-quarters of all quick-made codes are one way, when it's an amateur makes 'em up in a hurry—it's mostly to push letters forward or back three or four or five or ten places. Here, get to work with this pad and pencil."
I take thePlantagenet'sright call—P G—and slips them forward and back, and sure enough seven letters forward gives him W N, the same she'd been sending with the K K K. When I'd got that far Furlong, listening hard, said she'd got an answer and was giving her position—ten miles southeast of Hai-po Bay, which was the little place we were laying into.
Furlong kept spelling out the letters as he caught them, and I kept putting them down and pushing them forward seven till it read:Russian-battle-ship-and-three-trans-ports-are—just that far when Bing! Furlong breaks in and begins to send—nothing particular, but everything he could think of. Every minute or so he'd let up, only to hear another operator—the K K K one—calling excitedly.
"He wants to get off the rest of that message about us," said Furlong, and lets thePlantagenetstart another letter or two and then breaks in again. And he kept at it with never a let-up for maybe an hour, when he notices signs of weakness in our current and sends word to the flag-lieutenant, who goes below and pretty soon comes up with the admiral to the shack.
"For how long can you restrain thePlantagenetfrom sending that message?" asks the admiral.
"No telling, sir," says Furlong, "but not for a great while. I've had to pump it in so fast trying to break their waves that I'm afraid I'll soon burn out our plant."
That worried the old man, who sent word to the chief engineer to rush the repairs and get up steam as soon as he could. "And if there's anything you require you have only to demand it," he says to Furlong, who never stops keeping the wireless on the hop. It was hot in the wireless shack, with everything closed up tight, and there was the steady buzzing and about fourteen colored lights flashing at one time from that bird-cage thing. All I could see were lights, and we had to yell to hear each other talk. And Furlong, who'd been up then for sixteen hours on one stretch, the wireless gear strapped to his head most of the time, was beginning to feel the strain. Nobody to relieve him either.
To break up their waves Furlong had to keep giving them all he had, and of course something had to give way. What I know of a wireless outfit wouldn't rate me heavy in a wireless fleet, but the rotary converter or something like it became so hot that Furlong said he'd have to have an electric fan to cool it. "And get it quick!" he calls out after me.
The first fan I spotted was in an officer's room that none of us admired much. He was a man who would rate a man higher for tying his neckerchief right than for laying a turret-gun on the target at twelve thousand yards. He was getting ready to turn in. It was a hot night and I knew he'd have trouble trying to sleep without a fan, his room being where it was—near the engine-room ladder—and orders being that all air-ports be kept closed that night.
Of course, he didn't want to give up his fan. I didn't waste any time on him—only to say to the flag-lieutenant that it was just the class of fan that Furlong ordered, and the flag-lieutenant tells the officer—still kicking he was—that he'd get an order from the admiral if he desired. On reflection, the officer didn't think a special order from the admiral was necessary, and in a minute or two I was pumping nice cold air on the converter with the fan.
Then the brush-holders and the brushes kept getting out of adjustment or something. They were too light to carry the extra current. Before this Furlong had passed the word to the chief electrician, and he had switched on juice enough to run a central office plant ashore. We fixed up the brushes, and everything was doing fine, I thought, when all at once Furlong looks across the table and says: "O, Lord! The condenser-plates!"
I never knew before I was shipmates with any such gadgets, but I look around and there are four glass plates about an inch thick and a foot and a half across that the current was boring through.
"Sure enough!" I says—"the condenser-plates going to hell. What'll I do with them?"
"Find out if there are any thick sheets of glass in the storeroom," says Furlong.
There was. Not a lot, for glass lying around loose doesn't stand overmuch of a chance on any battleship. We got what sheets of glass were below, but in the hurry of rushing them up topside I fell back down an iron ladder to the splinter-deck port side aft, and when I hit it—a two-and-three-quarter-inch chilled steel-plate deck—I near cracked my skull. And all because I was only trying to save the glass, holding it out from my body while I was falling. And while I'm trying to find my feet the officer I'd borrowed the electric fan from rushes out from his room and was going to put me in the brig for the noise I'd made. There happened to be enough glass left for another set of condenser-plates, and while they were cutting it to shape Furlong calls for another electric fan.
I thinks of a young officer, the freshest one ever, who had an ancestor related to Peter the Great, and an uncle or granduncle or grandmother or somebody or other in the family who was even then a general. Now, of course, there's no great harm in talking a little about your family, but when you begin to think it gives you a rating to ride over other people! And the living ancestor was such an old granny of a general, according to all accounts, and the dead one such an old robber! "Mr. Kaminoff, sir, has a specially powerful fan," says I to the flag-lieutenant.
"Yes—O yes—true!" says the flag-lieutenant and bounces down to Mr. Kaminoff's quarters himself, and Kaminoff didn't know what happened till he found himself gulping down big gobs of darkness by way of getting his breath. It was a hell of a hot night, and nobody less than a four-striper would have dared to leave his port open that night, because Kaminoffskis or Romanoffskis, the old man made them all toe the mark when he gave out an order.
The illustrious Kaminoff howled around some in the dark, but nobody minded him now the powers were sitting on him. When he came out on the gun-deck in his silk pajamas to get the air, he probably wished he was an ordinary seaman without any ancestry and owned a hammock to swing to a couple of hooks somewhere.
By letting that second fan play onto the glass plates they stayed cool for a time. But only for a time. By and by they showed signs of melting again. And the flag-lieutenant, deliberating on the possibility of thePlantagenetgetting her message away and the probability of the Jap fleet bearing down on them if he did get it away, he sends a man down to the chief engineer to ask again how long before we could get up steam.
Maybe two hours, said the chief engineer, and Furlong said he'd try to hold out for two hours more.
But we were getting in a new mess every ten minutes. The keys weren't heavy enough to stand the continuous pounding under the current Furlong was giving 'em. One set of points was already burned off—he had to ship new keys. Then it was back to the new condenser-plates, which didn't seem to be of the best quality of glass and were beginning to fuse worse than the old ones. They were going fast and Furlong was puzzled—for a while. Then—"Tallow!" he hollers, and away hustles the flag-lieutenant for the paymaster, who was already turned in and sound asleep 'spite of the heat, for he had a good fan in his room—being the paymaster. He was shook up, broke out the stores, and four condenser-plates of tallow were moulded; but as soon as Furlong sees what kind of tallow it was, he says they couldn't be made to work without they were coated with tin-foil or something like it.
"Tin-foil? But where shall we obtain tin-foil?" says the flag-lieutenant. "Have you no tin-foil?" says he to the paymaster, who said no, he had no such item in his lists.
"There's a lot of tobacco in the canteen and a couple of hundred cases of tea below," says Furlong to the flag-lieutenant.
"O yes, the tobacco and the tea!" says the flag-lieutenant, and they send down three or four husky lads to break out the commissary yeoman, or whatever his rating was, out of his hammock. You could hear him yelling clear up on the superstructure when they landed him onto the deck, for by this time half of the ship's crew began to guess that something was going on, and whoever could get near enough to lay hands on that commissary yeoman was helping to hustle him along to his shack.
"Ganavitch! ganavitch!" he kept saying, or something like that; and the flag-lieutenant sent up to Furlong to ask, now they had him, what was he to do?
"Break out your tobacco and your tea!" yells Furlong, who, with the receiver strapped to his head and the fingers of one hand pounding the key and the other motioning me to hurry on the thrilling messages which I was reading from the back pages of an American magazine:
The - forty - horse - power - Camarac - is - the - machine - how - about - C. B. & Q. - corsets - to - pinch - in - your - shape - send - for - our - latest - catalogue - with - illustrations - add - an - inch - to - your - height - why - be - poor - the - best - abana - cigars - two - dollars - the - hundred - observe - that - curve - use - the - instantaneous - safety - razor - no - honing - no - strapping——
For some time before this I'd seen how foolish it was to be straining your brain inventing messages to send when there they lay ready printed to your hand, and so 'twas:
—pneumatic - soap - she - floats - why - pay - rent - don't - you - think - uneeda - wash - write - us - for - free - sample——
I kept calling it out and Furlong kept banging it away on the key.
The flag-lieutenant sticks his head in. "What shall the commissary yeoman do with the tobacco and the tea?"
Furlong hollers to tear out the tin-foil and bring it up to him. They brought it up, and a couple of Slavs, who had been working the tallow into the shape of condensing-plates—helped out by two electric fans and a stream of ice-water playing on them—they wrap the tin-foil around the tallow plates.
"Mould some more!" yells Furlong—"and keep mouldin' 'em!"
As fast as one set would melt, out they'd ship another. There was plenty of tallow—those Russian ships they're greasy with tallow—and dozens of cases of tobacco and Lord knows how many boxes of tea. It was a stirring sight below, with a dozen or so wild Slavs in their underclothes smashing things open with axes and tobacco and tea flying around regardless. Every blessed Russian that had a samovar and could get hold of hot water begins to make tea. There must have been a division of them sitting around between decks—at two in the morning—drinking hot tea and sweating like horses, for it was hotter than—oh, but it was hot that night!
"More tallow plates!" yells Furlong.
They had a carpenter's mate drafted below, a Finlander with a good eye, and he was cutting out swell plates with a chisel, and as fast as he did they would wrap them in the tin-foil and the two Slavs would squeeze them into place.
Sure-enough sea-going condensing-plates those tallow inventions of Furlong's were, and they did the business till the chief engineer reported he had steam up, and we started to put out. "And now," says the flag-lieutenant to Furlong, "your noble exertions are to be rewarded. You shall see how we shall catch thatPlantagenetship!"
"And a good job," I says to Furlong. "I hope they blow her out of water when they do get her." Which sets him to studying.
"Say, Cahalan," he asks, "you don't suppose they'd do that?"
"Why not?"
"They'd have to prove she sent the wireless messages. Even I couldn't prove that any man aboard her ever sent a wireless message," says Furlong, "let alone that they sent any to the Japs about us."
"No matter," I says. "Everybody aboard here believes she did. And you know she did. And if you'd seen those wild Slavs prancing around between decks awhile ago, I bet you some of 'em wouldn't wait too long to slip out a torpedo surreptishus-like from the torpedo chamber."
Furlong lays down his head-gear and ponders awhile. "If I thought there was any danger—say, Cahalan—suppose his wife—the wireless chap's—is aboard, as she probably is?" He reaches for the key.
"What're you goin' to do now?" I asks.
"I'm going," he says, "if those home-made, unpatented tallow condenser-plates will hold for just one more charge—I'm going to tell thePlantagenetthat a Russian battle fleet is headin' her way and for her to steam to the south'ard about as fast as she can go and to keep on steaming."
He fills the bird-cage gadjet with green and blue flashes again and kept filling it till the tallow plates melted into a pool of grease.
The pool of grease hardened into a flat cone of tallow on the deck. "Did you get it away?" I asks him.
"We'll soon see," he says.
When we made steam and got well outside, all we saw, far down on the horizon, was a streak of black smoke going wide open to the south'ard. The admiral let her go—with that start and she good for twenty-one knots he had to. And while we were watching, up comes the commissary yeoman to complain to the flag-lieutenant. When he came to put the tobacco back in the boxes there was sixty-four plugs shy and thirteen more had bites out of them.
The flag-lieutenant said he did not see how he could help the commissary yeoman; and then, being pretty tired, we turned in.
When we woke up we were at anchor in Vladivostok.
They thought Furlong was all right after that, and wanted him to start right in and overhaul a wireless plant in their yard ashore. He could be an officer if he desired, they said.
"What d'y'think of it, Cahalan?" he says.
"They're good people, the Russians," I said, "and I like 'em. But I like my own people better, and I will not. I'm going back home."
"And me," he says.
And we did, or back to the nearest thing to it—a cruiser of our own which happened to be to anchor in Chee Foo.
That night in the forec's'le Tom was telling them how he got the word of the Jeffries-Johnson fight.
"I sights her smoke to the west'ard, the sun just risin'. But it came to me that mebbe a great steamer like her wouldn't like it to be held up by a couple o' Grand Bank trawlers in a dory, an' I mentions that to Jack there, but Jack says: 'You know how they all want to know aboard the vessel, 'specially the cook.'"
The cook looked up to say dejectedly: "I'd ha' forgiven you."
"Jack handed me his oil jacket for a signal o' distress, an' I lashes it to the blade of an oar an' lashes th' oar to a for'ard thwart an' sits down an' waits.
"Along she comes, an' she cert'nly was the grand sight comin'. The len'th an' height of her, and a wave to her bow an' stern would swamp a dory! An' her bridge! Miles away 'twas high as some flyin' thing. On she comes a-roarin'—twenty-six knots, no less. An' almost atop of us she stops. An' I looks up at her, an' a gold-braided lad in blue he leans over the side rail o' th' bridge an' he says: 'What's wrong with you chaps?'
"An' I looks up an' says: 'Who won?'
"An' he says: 'What d'y'mean—who won?'
"An' I says: 'God, man! where you been the last few days ashore? Who won th' fight?'
"A couple other gold-braided lads 'd joined the first, an' behind them four or five rail-polishers was bobbin' up an' down. An' then came a fat-whiskered lad an' bustles all the others out o' his way, an' one o' the others hands him a little megaphone, an' he leans over the rail an' he says: 'You Yankee beggars, do I understand that you're holdin' up a ship of our class, and we, bearin' the roy'l mails, to ask who won a bloody prize-fight?'
"An' I says: 'Ferget y'ur class an' y'ur roy'l mails—who won th' fight?'
"There was a couple o' hundred o' passengers mebbe by this time along the top rail—men an' women, in night-dresses an' bath-robes the women, the men in Chinese trousers they looked like to me. An' a lad in a blue one of 'em he sings out: 'There's sporting blood for you!' an' he grabs another lad in a pink one an' says: 'Look—those two down there want to know who won the fight'; an' then sings out to us: 'Say, you're all right, you two?' An' just then the whiskered one on the bridge, he sings out—what was it he said, Jack?"
Jack quoted: "'Will the first-cabin passengers understand that I am thoroughly capable of carrying on all the necessary conversation with these people in regard to this matter?'"
"An' I was gettin' mad, an' I says: 'To blazes with y'ur nessary conversation, you pot-bellied loafer—who won th' fight?' An' at that the passenger that'd first butted in he makes a megaphone of his hands an' he sings out: 'Johnson!'
"'Johnson?' I says—'Johnson?' an' reaches back to find somethin' t' heave at him. I was goin' to heave a cod at him, but Jack says: 'Don't waste that on him,' an' digs me out an old gray hake, an' I holds it by the tail an' I says: 'Say, you, you in the blue Chinese trousers, who'd you say won?' an' he says: 'Why, Johnson.'
"'You glue-eyed squid!' I says, an' scales th' old hake up at him, an' he dodges, but his chum in pink he didn't have time an' it ketches him fair, an' 'What in thunder's that thing!' he yells, an' takes to hoppin' up an' down an' wipin' the hake scales off his chin.
"An' the lad in blue sings out: 'Say, you, you oughter be in a big league with that arm o' yours,' an' he rushes inside the house an' comes out with a bunch of papers twisted together an' throws 'em over the side, an' Jack an' me we picks 'em up an' smooths 'em out on a thwart, an' there 'twas in letters six inches high—black letters, too—'JOHNSON WINS!' an' that's them the cook's readin' to himself now."
Tom stopped, and he who was called Professor said: "No doubt you would have wagered all you possessed if you had been home instead of out here."
"I wouldn't 'a' minded that. But Jeffries licked by a nigger! What's the white race comin' to? Say—say, but I wisht good old John L. in his prime'd been there to Reno—or Dan Magee."
There were two, both of course new to the vessel, who before this night had never heard of Dan Magee. One being from Fortune Bay, Tom was expecting no better of him; but the other (and he called Professor because of his book learning), and living in Boston, in Boston where they used to nourish champion fighters!
"But there is no record of a Dan Magee who was a heavyweight champion," argued Professor.
"A good thing for a lot of 'em there ain't," snapped Tom. "JOHNSON!!—Johnson!—Johnson——"
"I bet twenty to fifteen on Jeffries before we left Gloucester." This was from the cook, who, having read all about the fight, was now mixing a pan of bread, with his sad eyes directed to a deck beam. "Yes, twenty to— Cæsar Zippicus!" he brought his fist downbff!in the lump of dough. "And I left ten more—I just remember—with Billy Mills to bet for me at the same odds."
Professor, lying in a lower bunk, took the trouble to roll over and say: "And why did you do that?"
"Why? Why?" The cook glared at the lower bunk. "You people— Caesar Zippicus!" and, raising the bread pan high above his head, he brought it down smash atop of the galley-locker. Whang!
The cook looked ashamed. "I just remember I left another twenty with Jerry McCarty to place on Jeffries, too," he explained.
"Never mind, cook," said Tom, "you wouldn't 'a' lost nothing if it'd been Dan Magee."
"To blazes with you and Dan Magee!" whooped the cook.
"And that's what I says, too, cook." This was from Fortune Bay. "I been hearin' more o' Dan Magee this night! It's Dan Magee this an' Dan Magee that. And what did ever the man do?"
"Do?" Tom held a reverential hand high. "A book wouldn't tell th' half Dan did. Where's Jack?"
"Gone for'ard."
"Too bad—if Jack Ferris wasn't aft playin' cribbage with the skipper in the cabin, you'd hear a few things more of Dan Magee. But he'll be for'ard by'n'by for his turnin'-in mug-up, an' then——"
And by and by Jack came. "They're castin' doubt on Dan Magee," declared Tom to his dorymate. "Tell him about the time he licked th' seven p'licemen in Saint Johns or about that time in Soorey."
Jack glanced at the clock.
"There might be time for the Soorey fight. We were chasing mackerel," said Ferris, "on the Cape shore this time, and a lively southeaster coming on one day, the skipper said he guessed he'd run into Soorey to let it blow by. And as we'd been up three nights owling, after we dropped anchor all hands turned in for a good sleep.
"Late in the afternoon somebody sings out, 'Supper!' and I woke up. Looking across the cabin, I saw Dan awake, too, sitting on the locker, with his slipshods to one side and his rubber boots to the other. He was casting an eye now to one and now to the other, when he looks up and sees me. 'What d'y'say, Jackie boy?' says Dan. 'Will we slide into our slipshods and go for'ard for supper, or will we haul on our rubber boots and go ashore and eat like a pair of tourists and look the place over? What d'y'say?'
"We hadn't much of a cook that summer. He'd come off a yacht and was everlastingly making potted mackerel, which he could make good; but a pity nobody'd ever told him fishermen don't go ketching fish to be always eating 'em. And so I said: 'Me for ashore.'
"So we got into our rubber boots, hoist a dory over the side, and we're shoving off when the skipper, who we thought we'd left asleep, sticks his head up the cabin companionway and sings out: 'Where you two bound?'
"'We thought,' says Dan, 'we'd be rowing a few miles out to sea and back by way of limbering up our slack muscles.'
"'There's some people I expect'd bust wide open if they wasn't allowed to be smart,' says Captain John. 'I don' know but what I'll go ashore with you,' and he threw a mug of coffee into himself and jumps in and we start off.
"Suddenly Dan stops rowing. 'Isn't this September?' says Dan, and the skipper says yes. 'And a Monday?' asks Dan, and the skipper stops and thinks for a moment and says yes it was. 'And the first Monday?' asks Dan. 'Yes,' says the skipper, 'but what in tarnation of it?' 'Nothing,' says Dan, 'only that if we were home it would be Labor Day.' And the skipper says: 'Well, what o' that?' 'Nothing,' says Dan, 'only it'd be a holiday and all hands celebrating if we were to anchor in some port ashore.'
"'But Labor Day ain't no holiday in this country,' says the skipper.
"'No,' says Dan, 'but we c'n make a holiday of it.'
"'I don' know about that,' says the skipper. 'If it moderates at all, I cal'late to be pullin' out by daybreak.'
"'Sure, and we c'n have a celebration that'll reverber-r-ate in history by then,' says Dan.
"Now, Dan was a great reader. He'd lie in his bunk of a night when he had no watch to stand and he'd read the morning up sometimes, and now when he starts rowing again he starts talking about things he'd read.
"'I used to read about the holidays that some countries have,' says Dan, 'but I never believed it till I was in a vessel running salt fish to Cadiz one time. And the ship-loads o' salt fish they consume in that country, 'twould amaze you. But one night layin' in Cadiz harbor a big whale of a steamer cut into us, and all the topside planking she left of us to starb'd not even this new cook of ours—and God knows he's savin' enough of the raw material!—he couldn't have started a galley fire with it. We had to run her up on the railway and calk her, and after that 'twas the carpenters—nine weeks in all—and 'twas great opportunities we had to study the customs of the country. And there was a country for you! Every once in a quick while a holiday. And the days they did work no one breaking his neck to get the work done. 'Twas proof to me they must be people o' genius to get ahead at all. But then they do say the people that does the least work has the most genius, the most imagination; and imagination, they say, is the first qualification of genius, and too much work it kills the imagination. What d'y'think o' that doctrine, skipper?' says Dan.
"'I don't know nothing about imagination,' says the skipper, 'but I alwuz notices that them that does the least work c'n get off the most hot air.'
"Just then we bump into the dock, where the skipper, without even waiting to see the painter made fast, hurries up toward the street.
"'There he goes,' says Dan, 'lookin' for—what they call 'em, now?—affinities. And if he only had a little taste in the matter! There's people, they say, that all vessels look alike to—sharp-built and round-bowed, light-sparred and heavy. And he's that way with women. One looks just like any other to him. The gray-headed old rat, he has sons as old as me or you at home, Jack, and there's the widow Simmons in Gloucester with two lodging-houses at the head o' the harbor. He's courting her, too.'
"'From what I hear, Dan,' says I, 'the widow is able for him.'
"At the head of the dock was a lobster factory with a pile of cooked lobsters under a shed half as high as our masthead. 'Here's our supper, boy,' says Dan, and we go up to a man and ask how much for lobsters, and he says: 'Help yourselves for fifty cents a dozen.' And we help ourselves. I had one dozen and Dan two. 'And couldn't we get a little drop o' something to follow after these red gentry?' asks Dan, and the man calls a boy, and Dan gives the boy a five-dollar bill, and when the boy comes back with a dozen pint bottles of English ale, he tells him to keep the change, the ale looked so good to him.
"He had nine bottles and I had three, and 'That's what I call a decent little lunch,' says Dan, 'and it begins to feel more like a holiday; and how is it with you, Jackie boy?'
"I said I felt better, too, and we headed for the main street. By the time we got to the top of the hill—we'd hove-to here and there along the way, of course, with a little sociable drink in each to leave a good name behind us—and by now Dan said he could feel his side-lights burning bright; and as he said it we came abreast of a place with a window all of red glass, to port, and another, all green glass, to starboard. And over the door, shining out from a square box of a lantern, was the sign 'Snug Harbor!'
"Hard-a-lee!' says Dan, and we tacked across the street and fetched up all-standing in front of the door. 'It's a great thing, isn't it, boy, to have a vessel that answers her helm?' says Dan, and leads the way in.
"The first room had a bar running the length of it. Gay times were going on in back somewhere, but, of course, we had to stop and buy a drink or two here by way of showing our good intentions. There was one man behind the bar; but before we could order, another fellow leaves a group near the window and goes behind, too. 'What's your name, mate?' says this one to Dan.
"'I'm Dan Magee o' Skibbaree,' says Dan, and leaps a yard into the air and knocks his heels together, and when he comes down pulls a bill from his roll and throws it on the bar.
"'I thought so. I'm from Skibbaree myself. I knew your father.'
"'Then you're from a place I never heard of before this last minute,' says Dan. 'But if you did know my father you knew a good man, a better man than ever you were—or will be,' says Dan, 'and if you want to dispute it 'tis his son will prove it to you. And if you think you can come any of your come-all-ye's over me, you're mistaken. I'll be thanking you for the change of that ten-dollar bill,' says Dan.
"'A ten-dollar bill?' says the bartender, and opens one hand and says: 'Why, no—see—a dollar bill.'
"'You don't tell me now!' says Dan, and reaches over and with a twist of his fingers opens the bartender's other hand, and there was the ten-dollar bill. And he takes it and tucks it away, and doing that he lets him have another look at the roll of bills he had with him.
"'My private opinion of you,' says Dan, 'I'd hate publicly to express it, 'specially in the presence of these honorable gentlemen here,' and he points to the four or five hard-looking tickets, who had left the window and were now crowding up close. 'But you don't want to be making the mistake of thinking because a man rolls a bit in the wind that he's carrying more sail than he ought. I've seen 'em, lad, with their hatches under; but let your wheel fly and up they'd come like a spinning top. It's the ballast, lad, they have—the ballast—and don't make any mistake—if I feel like swinging all I got, the ballast's there to hold me up to it,' and with that he turns and drives his foot through the swinging-doors and into the next room with almost a flying leap. I stops to pay for the drinks and then follows Dan; but before I got through I heard one of the loafers say: 'And did you see that wild man's pile?' And I says to myself: 'If we get out of here alive, we're lucky.'
"The other room was a big room with sand on the floor, a bar and a barmaid to one side, and a counter to the other with a man behind it opening oysters. There were small tables at one end and men and women sitting to them drinking. The men were mostly seafaring hoboes, foolish lumpers, and deck-swabs—from off steamers, most likely. There was a man to the bar, and I didn't see who he was at first, he being almost hid between a big-bellied stove; but Dan spotted him right away. 'Will you look at our bold skipper!' whispers Dan—'and his wife not buried a year yet.' I takes another look and sees that so it was, and that he was talking a fourteen-knot clip to the barmaid.
"'Good evening, captain,' says Dan. The skipper turns, screws up his face, says 'Howdy' at last, and turns to the barmaid again.
"'We were for passing on to the next room, where the dancing and piano-playing were; but there'd been the noise from the room we'd just left of a bunch of men coming in off the street and stopping just long enough for a round of drinks, and now they were coming through the swinging doors; and 'Did you see 'm hit 'm that last one?' one was saying, and 'Two rounds,' says another—'not enough to exercise Alf.'
"In front of the crowd was a whale of a fellow in a red sweater and a little cap atop of his head, and beside him was our short-change bartender friend and behind him a dozen men, among 'em the same half a dozen tough lads we'd already seen out front before.
"The big prize-fighter swings himself across the floor as if nobody else was living just then except to wait on him. 'A mug of your best, Daisy dear,' he says to the barmaid; and, hearing that, the skipper whips around with a sour face, but he takes another look at the bruiser and whips back again.
"We could see the couples floating by the glass doors opening into the next room, and that's where Dan and myself were bound, and where we'd have got to, only the bartender's voice stops us. 'Say, you,' he calls out, 'how'd you like to put the gloves on and have a go with little Alf here?' Dan didn't stop. And 'You!' yells the bartender—'I mean you, you big Gloucesterm'n!'
"Dan turned then. 'What's that?'
"'How'd you like to put on the gloves with Alf here? There's a nice little bit of a ring across the way.' The big fellow himself wasn't even looking at Dan. He was elbowing the skipper to one side to get closer to the barmaid. The skipper was looking riled.
"'Why should I?' asks Dan. 'I've no quarrel with him.'
"'No, you big stiff; but if it was me, you would. You're Dan Magee of Skibbaree, are you? Why don't you leap into the air now and knock your heels together and say that to Alf? Or does his being the Soorey Giant make a difference?'
"'Hang you and your Soorey Giants!' says Dan.
"'Alf! Alf! Did y' hear 'im?' hollers the bartender. And at that a man, a fair-sized man, too, jumps into the middle of the floor and says: 'Don't you ago botherin' wi' him, Alfie—I'll take care of 'im.' He has a red sweater, too, and a little cap at the top of his head, and he takes a couple of fancy steps and spars with his hands, and by and by steps in and gives Dan a poke. And Dan he squints down at this lad and says, 'What's ailing you, man?' and the boxing chap he dashes in and pokes Dan again, and everybody laughs. But before they were done laughing, Dan, who'd never had a boxing-glove on in his life, he slaps out with his left paw and ketches the fancy boxer one on the side of his chin, and he doesn't stop falling backward till he fetches up between our skipper and the Soorey Giant.
"'Alf!' he gasps, and the Soorey Giant looks around to see who did it, and he spots Dan. 'Ho, ho!' he says—'ho!' and they all push back their chairs and tables to give him room. And he keeps looking at Dan and then steps into the clear space and fiddles around and measures his distance and lets go, and it ketches Dan fair on the chest and sends him back half a dozen feet. And as he does that somebody hits me one behind the ear and down I go. And somebody else said, 'He's one of 'em, too,' and reaches for the skipper, and down he comes, too, and the pair of us stay over to the corner where they'd knocked us and look on.
"The big fellow dances away and shapes up for Dan again. He reaches for Dan and ketches him fair again on the chest, and back goes Dan and begins to look foolish, and they all laugh and cheer, the women too, and of the women the bar-maid loudest of all. And 'He's Dan Magee o' Skibbaree!' says our old friend the bartender, and you couldn't hear a word then for laughing. And at that Dan springs a yard into the air and lets a roar out of him. 'Yes,' says he, 'I'm Dan Magee o' Skibbaree!' and comes charging across the floor. The big fellow sets himself, and when he gets Dan right he lets go. It was like hitting the big bass drum in a parade when he lands on Dan's chest. But this time Dan was coming full tilt, and he keeps on coming and makes a swipe with his left paw, and down goes Mr. Soorey Giant. But he jumps up and comes on, bellowing, and he swings, and Dan lets him swing while he reaches out himself and grabs him and whirls him around, and keeps whirling and turning with him till the Soorey champion's feet leave the floor, and then Dan lets him go and he fetches up against the door leading into the dance-hall. 'Yes,' says Dan, 'I'm Dan Magee o' Skibbaree,' and leaps a yard into the air and knocks his heels together, and grabs the big-bellied stove near the bar. There was no fire in it, but it was busting with ashes. Five feet high it was, maybe, and three feet through the middle. 'Fair Helen,' says Dan, 'I'm thinking you'd better be fleeing the plains o' windy Troy,' and the barmaid ran screaming away, and in her place behind the bar Dan drops the stove. 'Hurroo!' yells Dan, and spying a barrel full of oyster-shells, he picks it up and capsizes it on the head of the man behind the counter, who'd been yelling, 'Knock his head off, Alf!' at the top of his voice a minute before. And then Dan wades into the eight or ten real tough ones who had got after the skipper and me in a corner and were pelting us good, and he pulls them off, two or three at a time, not trying to hurt anybody, but tossing 'em right and left ten or a dozen feet away, just as they happened to come to his hand. The air was full of flying people, when the bartender came hurrying back with a mob of what looked like brass-polishers and deck-swabs from the dance-hall. Dan sees him, and 'Oh, there you are?' he says, and upsets him and grabs him by his ankles, and starts to swinging him like he was a sixteen-pound hammer, and when he has him going good he lets him go altogether. Into the crowd he'd been leading from the dance-hall he went, and those that weren't knocked over flew back to where they'd come from.
"'Hurroo!' says Dan, and throws a few chairs and tables at the mirrors and glasses and bottled goods behind the bar. 'Hurroo!' he yells, and turns and grabs the nearest man to him, whirls him back-to, grips him under the arms, jumps through the swinging-doors, and makes for the street. But the street door was locked. He spots the window with the all-red glass. 'Hurroo!' yells Dan, 'here will soon be a ship with her port light carried away,' and throws his man through the red window and jumps through after him. 'Follow me!' yells Dan, and down the hill he went with seven-league strides. And the skipper and me after him, and not a slack till we made the dock and jumped into the dory.
"The skipper rolled into the stern of the dory, and there he lay. Dan rowed out to the vessel—I was too tired—and on the way out he half whispers: 'What d'y'think of him, Jackie, that would take up with a woman of that kind and a buxom creature like the widow Simmons, with two houses clear of all debt in Gloucester, witherin' away for love of him?'
"The skipper never let on he was alive until we were alongside the vessel, and then it was all hands on deck and weigh anchor and make sail and drive her. But never a word of what had happened until Soorey Harbor was many a mile behind. And then—the middle of the afternoon it was and theTubalrunning off before a good breeze—the skipper sidles up to Dan and says: 'Dannie, you sure they ain't no incumbrances on the two houses o' the widder?' And Dan says: 'Isn't it my own sister's husband's nephew is her lawyer?'"
At this point Ferris came to a full pause.
"And what became of the marvellous Magee?" asked Professor.
"What becomes of most good men?"
"I bet youIknow," interposed the Newfoundlander. "Wimming!" He held one solemn finger in the air. "Wimming and the red rum o' Saint Peer, I bet you. They ruins the best o' men."
"When next I saw Dan," resumed Ferris, "he'd got married to a Boston girl and had a shore job—piano-moving—'just enough exercise to keep him soopled up,' he said. And there he was, in grand condition, sitting on the back porch and looking out on his possessions. A little white house with a porch in front and behind. And there was a garden with a little patch of cabbages, and a little patch of tomatoes, and a little patch of corn—a little patch of this and a little patch of that, not one blessed patch in the whole place as big as the bottom of a dory. And there was a school of white rabbits running around—for the children; and a fleet of pigeons sailing overhead—for the children. And the children like a fleet of little dories in the wake of Dan, and his wife washing the dishes and peeking out the kitchen window with an eye to 'em all. This was after supper one Sunday evening. And Dan would hoist up first one kid and then another, and with his pipe he'd blow rings for 'em.
"And he sat there and kept advising me to marry and settle down. I stood it for a while, and then I said: 'Dan, you remember that Fourth o' July you beat up the seven policemen in Saint Johns?' I thought he'd shake his head off at me and go blind with winking and ducking his ear toward the kitchen window. 'And that night in Soorey?' I goes on, and he looked scared, and 'Sh-h!' he says, and I stopped. But later, meaning only to make conversation, I says: 'Did ever you think o' going to sea again, Dan?' And at that—I thought she was up-stairs with the children, but she wasn't—out she bounces with my hat—a spunky little woman, no higher than a buoy keg—and says: 'I don't want to hurry you, an old friend of my husband's as you are, but the last car for the city passes by the corner in five minutes. If you hurry, you can get it.' And I took that car, only it didn't pass for thirty-five minutes, and it rained most of the time I was waiting, and I didn't have any coat."
Jack stood up and set his coffee-mug back in the grub locker and made as if to climb the companionway; but before he could escape Professor pinned him with:
"Do you or don't you approve of his marriage?"
"Wow! I set out to tell a story to please Tom here, and the first thing in telling a story is to tell it, not to stop to preach a sermon. And to finish the story, I tell you, boy"—Jack turned and fixed Fortune Bay with a solemn eye—"I tell you they'll get you—sure's wind follows an oily sea the women will get you on your weak side, if you don't watch out."
"But you hear me, too, boy," put in Tom, "if it'd been Dan Magee with a few boxin' lessons out to Reno—Dan Magee afore he was married—you bet there'd been no fresh guys in Chinese trousers leanin' over the hurricane-deck of any forty-thousand-ton steamer an' yellin' JOHNSON! JOHNSON! JOHNSON! to no lone trawler on th' Grand Banks at four o'clock in the mornin'."
"G-g-r-r—" growled Professor, and turned his face to the vessel's side.
"Ay, boy. Good night," said Tom cheerfully.
Books by James B. Connolly
PUBLISHED BY CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
"Few writers have the ability to picture sea life with the accuracy and feeling which Mr. Connolly has always shown."—Boston Herald.
HEAD WINDS
Illustrated. 12mo. $1.35 net
This book is remarkable for the variety of stories it contains and their characters, which include Continental immigrants, Central American soldiery, Gloucester fishermen, Mississippi roustabouts and steamboat people, American bluejackets, and newspaper correspondents. These are among the best stories Mr. Connolly has ever written.
SONNIE-BOY'S PEOPLE AND OTHER STORIES
Illustrated. 12mo. $1.35 net
"Mr. Connolly writes with a classic simplicity, an artistic directness, a seafaring virility such as may seldom be found in short stories of this day or any other."—Los Angeles Times.
OPEN WATER
Illustrated. 12mo. $1.35 net
A collection of stories of the same type—breezy, fresh, vigorous—as those in his earlier books.
Some are of Gloucester fishermen, some of the men of the navy, some of the smugglers—in all such is the smack of the salt-laden wind, the rattle and creak of ships' tackle, the dull boom of pounding surf or the hissing crash of the breakers. But there are the other stories of sport and adventure ashore of which Mr. Connolly has shown his complete mastery.
THE CRESTED SEAS
Illustrated. 12mo. $1.35 net
"Tales of daring and reckless deeds which make the blood run quicker and bring an admiration for the hardy Gloucester men who take their lives in their hands on nearly every trip they make. There are Martin Carr and Wesley Marrs and Tommy Clancy and others of the brave crew that Connolly loves to write about."—Chicago Post.
WIDE COURSES
Illustrated. 12mo. $1.35 net
"He holds our attention with these eight new stories of his, holds it in lighter mood as well as in the dramatic key which he touches oftenest, the key of man in his indomitable courage doing battle with storm and wave, with the hardships of life that have hardened him. These 'Wide Courses' are, indeed, interesting sailing with never a dull moment."—New York Tribune.
OUT OF GLOUCESTER
Illustrated. 12mo. $1.35 net
"His book gives graphic descriptions of life on board of a fisherman and has the genuine salt-water flavor. Mr. Connolly knows just what he is writing about, from actual experience, as his book very plainly indicates, and as such it is a valuable addition to sea literature."—Gloucester Times.
THE DEEP SEA'S TOLL
Illustrated. 12mo. $1.35 net
"Sea stories of the land you can't help liking. Stirring, heart-moving yarns of the Gloucester fishermen who brave death daily in pursuit of their calling."—Chicago Record-Herald.
"No teller of sea tales can put the passion of the sea into his stories more forcibly than Mr. Connolly."—Brooklyn Eagle.
"The very breath of the ocean blows in these thrilling stories of deep-sea adventure."—Albany Journal.
THE SEINERS
With frontispiece by M. J. BURNS
12mo. $1.35 net
"It carries the sails easily. In Tommy Clancy he has created a veritable Mulvaney of the sea."—Collier's Weekly.
"Full of vigor and song and the breath of the sea."—St. James Gazette.
"A real tale of the sea which makes one feel the whiff of the wind and taste the salt of the flying spray—such is Mr. J. B. Connolly's new book, 'The Seiners.' ... Certainly there is not a lover of the sea, man or woman, who will fail to be delighted with this breezy, stirring tale."—London Daily Telegraph.
AN OLYMPIC VICTOR
Illustrated. 12mo. $1.35 net
"His story of the straining, gruelling struggle, the heart-breaking efforts of the runners over those twenty-four miles of country roads, is soul-stirring."—Philadelphia Press.
THE TRAWLER
12mo. 50 cents net
WINNER OF THE COLLIER $2,500 STORY CONTEST
"It is literature. In thought, in sentiment, in rugged knowledge of rugged men, in strength and finish of writing, it is entitled to a place of permanence."—THEODORE ROOSEVELT.
JEB HUTTON
The Story of a Georgia Boy
Illustrated. 12mo. $1.20 net
"A bright, dashing story, sure to charm boys who love the strenuous life."—The Outlook.
"'Jeb Hutton' is a boy's story from beginning to end; clean, wholesome, spirited, and calculated to do good."—Boston Journal.
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONSPUBLISHERS . . . . . NEW YORK