"That two-faced chairman of yours—he never tipped me off you could fight any way except with your hands.""That two-faced chairman of yours—he never tipped me off you could fight any way except with your hands."
Not a man left the hall.
Malone turned and faced Tim.
"You win," he said; "but that two-faced chairman of yours—and he ain't any friend of yours—he never tipped me off you could fight any way except with your hands. Speak the rest of your piece. You win!"
Back at headquarters the state chairman had been for an hour trying to extract a little comfort from the newspaper story of the New Ireland upheaval when the tall boss came in. To the boss, of course, he had to make some comment, and he made it.
"This man Riley," he began cautiously, "I've been trying to discover whether he's a Republican or a Democrat by what he says here."
"How's that?"
"He says: 'Take your leaders: and if they don't carry out your will fire 'em out! If the men you have set on high betray you,' he puts it, 'lasso 'em off their pedestals and set 'em on the street level again!' If that isn't——"
"—government by the people?"
"I wasn't going to say that, sir."
"Why not? Isn't that what it amounts to? Let me see your paper, please. H-m! I don't see what there is here to object to. He is notagainst a party government; in fact, he's all for party. Only make sure the party leaders are honest, he says, in politics, religion, business—in everything; and if they do not live up to their promises read them their lesson. Well, why not? I think he's right. The people know more than they did and we might as well reckon with that new knowledge. The men who don't do that might as well give up the leadership!"
There was a whole page of it in the New IrelandRecordabout Tim. The senator read it all. When he at last looked up he murmured:
"Raised twelve hundred and odd dollars for the widow Nolan. That was surely well done! Two hundred and fifty votes pledged to him before he left the hall. He surely has the touch! And Malone says he's going to stick to his contracting hereafter. Good idea!"
The senator read on: "And Malone also says—also says—H-m!"
The chairman was startled out of his silence.
"I set Malone on to Riley—to fool him."
"You did!" The senator scratched his beard with his finger-nails, drew his chin in to his neck and looked over his pince-nez at the chairman. "Too bad he misunderstood you—wasn't it? It would be so nice if we could give you the credit; but I'm afraid we'll have to hand it to Riley."
It was not said loudly; but the tone and the glint of the eyes—and the cultured boss stirred into using slang! The chairman knew that he might as well pick up his hat and go.
And he did; after he wrote out his resignation with the big boss dictating it over his shoulder.
The battle-fleet, home from foreign waters, now lay, within a mile-square, emblazoned quadrangle, to placid moorings in the bay.
From the after bridge of his own ship Lieutenant Wickett had been observing in silence the night life of the fleet, but when from some happy quarter-deck to windward there floated down the opening strains of a mellow folk-song, he lifted his chin from arms crossed on the bridge top-rail to say to his shore-going friend beside him: "Were you ever able to listen to a ship's band over water, Carlin, and not get to feeling homesick?"
"Still the kid, aren't you? How can you be homesick and you home?"
"I'm not home—not yet."
Just below them the officer of the deck was roaming the quarter-deck. A ship's messenger stepped up to him, saluted and said smartly: "Two bells, sir."
"Strike 'em," came the sharp order; and as the two bells were striking, from other ships, fromwindward and leeward, came also the quick, sharp-toned double stroke.
"Why," asked Carlin, "couldn't they strike those two bells without bothering that deck officer?"
"Regulations."
"They're the devil, those regulations, Wickett."
"Worse—sometimes. You can steer clear of the devil if you want to." He paused. "And yet it would soon be a devil of a service without 'em."
A sailor stepped up to the officer of the deck, and, saluting, said: "Anchor lights burning bright, sir."
A man in a chief petty officer's uniform stepped up to the officer of the deck, whereupon Wickett, sitting up, said: "That's our wireless operator."
"A message for Mr. Wickett, sir," came the operator's voice.
"You'll find Mr. Wickett on the after bridge," the officer of the deck said; and the wireless man came up the bridge ladder and saluted:
"You raised theClermont, Wesson?" Wickett's voice was eagerly anticipatory.
"No, sir, I could not. She has no wireless."
"Oh-h!"
"But I raised the Cape station, and they reported she passed there on schedule time."
"On time? Good! Thank you, Wesson; that's all."
"Were you expecting somebody on theClermont?" asked Carlin, when the wireless man had gone.
"Not really expecting. My home is a thousand miles from here, and my pay won't allow of my family travelling around everywhere to meet me. But I like to dream of rosy possibilities, don't you?"
A cool night breeze was blowing. Wickett bared his head to it. Presently he began to hum:
"And it's O you little baby boyA-dancing on my knee—Will it be a belted chargerOr a heaving deck to sea?Is't to be the serried pennantsOr the rolling blue Na-vee?Or is't to be——"
"And it's O you little baby boyA-dancing on my knee—Will it be a belted chargerOr a heaving deck to sea?Is't to be the serried pennantsOr the rolling blue Na-vee?Or is't to be——"
He turned to Carlin. "When I hear myself singing that, in my own quarters ashore, then I'm home—and not before."
He set to humming softly again:
"And it's O you little baby girlAthwart your mother's lap——"
"And it's O you little baby girlAthwart your mother's lap——"
Suddenly he asked: "Were you ever away from home sixteen months?"
Carlin emphatically shook his head. "No,sir. A year once. And I don't want to be that long away again. Were you—before this cruise?"
"Five years one time."
"F-i-i-ve! Whee-eee! Pretty tough that."
"Tough? More—inhuman. A man can get fat on war, but five years from your family—!" He raised his face to the stars and whoofed his despair of it.
"My year away from home," said Carlin, though not immediately, "was in the Philippines—where I first met you—remember? The night you landed from the little tug you were in command of and a bunch of us—war correspondents we called ourselves—were gathered around a big fire."
Wickett nodded. "I remember. And pretty blue was I?"
"Not at first. I thought you were the most care-free kid I'd met in months as you sat there telling about the funny things that had happened you and your little war tugboat. But towards morning, with only the two of us awake, I remember you as possibly the most melancholy young naval officer I'd ever met. You started to tell what a tough life the navy was for the home-loving officer or man, and I had a special reason for being interested in that. I had—I still have—anephew with his eye on Annapolis. But just then reveille blew the camp awake and you went back to your tugboat."
Wickett smiled, though not too buoyantly, as he said: "Well, on my next cruise to the East I could have added a chapter to the story I might have told you by that overnight camp-fire. And I will now—but wait."
A ship's messenger was saluting the officer of the deck. "Taps, sir."
"Tell the bugler to sound taps," was the brisk command.
The ship's bugler had already taken position, heels together and facing seaward, in the superstructure bulkhead doorway. Looking straight down, Wickett and Carlin could see him, as, shoulders lifting and blouse expanding, he put his lungs into the call. From other ships, as he called, it was coming also—the long-noted, melancholy good night of the war legions.
When the last lingering note drooped out, only one ship, and she a far-away one, remained; but from her, finally, on the wings of the night breeze, the last notes drifted—gently, sweetly, lonesomely, to them.
"What was keeping me walking the deck or sitting up around camp-fires nights in the Philippineswasn't Filipinos," began Wickett. "I'd been in the East a year that time we met, and I put in another year on top of that in China. A terrible two years. But even two years in the East with your heart at home must have an ending. After all, the earth can only revolve so many days in one year, though at times I used to believe she'd quit revolving altogether, had stopped dead, was only marking time—'specially nights—and that the astronomical sharps weren't on to her changes. However, at last she'd rolled her sun up and her sun down the necessary seven hundred and odd times and I was headed for home.
"I went out a middy and came back an ensign—which is very important. An ensign may not rate many high rights in the service, but he does rate a leave of absence. And when my leave came I flew across the bay to the fort, where Colonel Blenner—Doris's father—was commandant. And on the way over I had a thousand visions, dreams, hopes, with of course a million misgivings, fears, doubts, and so on.
"When I met her I set it down right away that my misgivings had come true. A fleet of young artillery officers were manœuvring within shelling range of her, and while I didn't expect her to bound half-way across the drill-ground and throwher arms around my neck, or anything like that, because she never had bounded down and thrown her arms around my neck, and wasn't the bounding-down-and-throwing-her-arms-around-your-neck sort of a girl anyway; but what I did sort of hope for was that after a polite little interval she'd turn the red-caped chaps adrift and say, 'Come on, Dick, let's sit down here in the corner by ourselves and have a good talk,' and perhaps later, before the evening got too old, go for a stroll on the long walk, same as she used to.
"But she didn't turn any of them loose. She kept them all about her while she drew me into the middle of them. But poor me! I'd had no service at all in the civilized ports and hadn't seen more than a dozen white women in the whole two years I'd been gone, and of that dozen had spoken to only three, while as for these artillery chaps—! They made me feel like a six-pound shell in a big turret magazine. Any one of them could talk the eye out of my head the best day I'd ever seen. And the day I came back to her wasn't the best day I'd ever seen—not for talking purposes. I looked at and listened to them, and kept saying to myself: 'I wonder if they realize what a lucky lot they are to be able to stay all the time around where civilized women live?' But I don't believe they did. They took everythingas if 'twas no more than small-arms ammunition was being served out to them.
"In my room in the hotel that night I began to chart a few new courses for myself. Before I left for the East Doris was terribly young and there'd been no other war heroes hanging around. She and her mother were then living in a quiet hotel near my house while her father was off on some board mission in the West. But now it wasn't any isolated little country hotel. It was post quarters, with her father the commandant, and a parade of young army officers in and out of those quarters, with squadrons of two and three-stripers steaming over pretty regularly from the navy-yard across the bay. And she was two years older—a terrible advance, eighteen to twenty, and I'd been two years gone.
"You said a while ago, Carlin, 'What a kid you are!' and perhaps I am, though I think I'm an old, old party myself; but about the time I came back from the East that first time I must have been a good deal of a kid. I know now I was. That first night at the hotel, after I'd been to the fort all day, I talked to myself in good shape. And I wound up by saying: 'Well, what do you care? There are forty nice girls between this hotel and the post.' But there weren't forty. There were a hundred, as far as that went, but there was onlyone that I wanted to see coming over the side of my ship, and next day when I went to see that one again I set out to win her. And I'm not going to give you any history of the courtship of Doris. I couldn't tell it right if I wanted to, and I don't want to—it's our own private story, but she wasn't trifling when she told me she'd never forget me before I went East. In a week it all came back, and once more we were walking under tall pines and sailing in a beautiful bay. In another week it was as when I left her—I had hopes.
"And then came the morning of the last day of my leave, and as an ensign doesn't rate any shore duty I knew that next day it would have to be back to my ship for me; though that same ship being slated for a neighborly berth with the North Atlantic fleet, I didn't feel too discouraged. I'd be within wireless distance at least. But I did not want to go without a promise. The night before I couldn't get two minutes together with her—there being a reception in her father's quarters to somebody or other—but when I was leaving for the night she had said yes, she'd come sailing with me in the morning after breakfast. And I left the hotel at sunrise and went down to the boat-landing to overhaul the hotel's little twenty-one-footer to make sure everything would be all ready for our sail after breakfast.
"I went through the post grounds to get sight of her window in passing, and there she was—all dressed, and looking out across the bay from their veranda. 'I was just wondering if you, too, would be up early this morning, Dick,' she said. 'Do you think it is going to storm?' And I told her no, and if it did, what matter? And without waiting until after breakfast we went off for our young cruise in the bay.
"I was half hoping it would storm, so I could show her what I could do with that little boat. But there was no storm or anything like it. There did come a squall of wind and I let it come, wearing the boat around, and letting the main-sheet run. And she zizzed. And I let her zizz. Nothing could happen. She was one of those little craft with a lead keel that you couldn't capsize, which I explained to Doris, while down on her side the little thing was tearing a white path in the blue water. But Doris's people had been always army people, and she hadn't much faith in floating contraptions. She clung closer to me; and the two of us sitting together and nothing to do but watch the boat go, why—well, we sat together and let her go.
"The breeze died down until there wasn't enough of it to be called a breeze, but that was no matter. We were still sitting close together andwhile we sat so, I found courage to tell her what had been flooding my heart through all those nights and days in Eastern waters. And we came back to breakfast engaged. And after breakfast—" Wickett unexpectedly turned to Carlin and said, half shyly: "I suppose you still think I'm a good deal of a kid to be telling you all this?"
Carlin nodded in serene agreement. "I always thought you were a good deal of a kid. I hope you always will be. God save me from the man who isn't still a good deal of a kid at thirty. What did you do after breakfast?"
"After breakfast I went up to see Colonel Blenner, and found him on his veranda smoking his after-breakfast cigar before he went over to guard-mount. He was genial as ever; except that he put his foot down on an engagement. 'An engagement means a marriage, or should,' he says, 'and how can you marry on an ensign's pay? You with your mess bills and other expenses aboard ship, and Doris with her quarters ashore—you would never meet your bills.'
"I agreed with him, but also argued with him, and shook him some, but could not quite upset him. I left him to run back to the hotel to throw my things together. And there I found a new complication—orders were waiting me. I was tobe detached from my ship and to take command of the gunboatBayport—and a rust-eaten old kettle of aBayportshe was, famous for her disabilities; and I was to sail for Manila next morning at eight o'clock. Manila! Another jolt. I sat down and thought it out.
"And when I got talking to myself again, I said: 'Doris Blenner, you're a great girl—the best ever; but you're not superhuman. No man has a right to expect a girl to be that. You're too lovable, too human, Doris, to be the superhuman kind. I'll be away in the East Lord knows how long—another two years perhaps—and there's all those army chaps always on the job. We'll just have to be married, that's all there is to that, before I leave.'
"I was back to the post in time to join a riding-party after lunch. It was no use my trying to see her alone riding. But after the ride we slipped out onto the ramparts of the fort, and there, the pair of us sitting hand in hand and a sentry a dozen paces away trying not to see and hear us, I told her of my orders and then entered my new plea. 'All for myself, Doris,' I told her. By that time the sun was low behind us and throwing our two shadows onto where the water of the bay came gurgling up against the walls of the fort, and looking down on our shadows from the fortwalls, she said at last she would marry me before I left, if papa agreed—and glad one minute and sad the next, we walked back in the twilight.
"Colors had sounded when we got back, and the colonel was dressing for dinner; but after dinner I took him out for a walk. Three laps we made around the drill-ground and then, halting him under the clump of willows down by the outer walls, I plumped it at him—what it meant to be away for months and years from your own people.
"And he heard me through, and said: 'Why, that's part of the hardship, Richard, in both arms of the service. In my day, Richard——"
"'Pardon, Colonel,' I butted in, 'pardon me, Colonel, but in your day the army people never left the country. Even when you were fighting Indians on the frontier, after all it was only the frontier and never more than a couple of thousand miles at the most to get back home. And when you were through campaigning and back in garrison, your people could come to see you. But twelve thousand miles! It isn't as if a man's within telephone call then. And when you're not to see your people for that length of time, there's danger.'
"'Danger?' He stiffens up and takes a peek at me.
"'Danger, yes sir,' I said. 'I've been out there in the islands, in a tugboat with her engines broken down and she drifting onto a beach where four hundred squatting Moros with Remington rifles were waiting hopefully for us to come ashore. Four hundred of them and five of us all told. But that's not danger, sir,' I hurries on, 'of the kind to scare a man, though it did sicken me to think I'd never see Doris again, and that perhaps it would shock her when she heard of it. But otherwise, sir, that's no danger. But when a young officer goes a thousand miles up a Chinese river in command of a gunboat, as I was this last time—gone for months on it—and being commander was everywhere received as the representative of a great country by all the governors and topside mandarins along the route. And they haven't our idea of things—a lot of things that seem wrong to us seem all right to them. They mean no harm. They intend only to be courteous and complimentary, and so they strew a fellow's path with the flowers of ease and pleasure—if he forgets himself, there's danger, Colonel,' I said. 'I sail at eight in the morning, sir. I'm to be gone I don't know how long, perhaps another two years, and—Colonel—I want a home anchor.'
"He said no word till he had finished his cigar. When he does he drops it at his feet, steps on itto put out the light, and says: 'A good argument for yourself, Richard, but what of Doris?'
"'Doris has probably done a lot of thinking in the matter, sir. Why not leave it to Doris, sir?'
"'Of course,' he said, dry as powder, 'Doris would be disinterested in this case!'
"'Then leave it to her mother, sir.'
"'I see neither logic nor prudence in your argument, Richard,' he answers at last, 'but I will leave it to her mother.' And when he said that, I knew I had won; for, without her ever telling me, I knew her mother was with us. If I had told him that, I would only have been telling what he already guessed, as he told me that same night, later.
"Anyway, after a minute with Doris and her mother, I jumped over to the hotel, and from the side of a most billowy waltz partner I detached Shorty Erroll to get the ring and the smaller stores for a proper wedding, and then I went out to bespeak my own ship's chaplain. I found him lying in his bunk in his pajamas with a History of the Tunisian Wars balanced on his chest and a wall-light just back of his head, and he says: 'Why surely, Dick,' when I told him, but added: 'Though that old sieve of aBayport, I doubt will you ever get her as far as Manila,' after which, carefully inserting a book-mark into the Tunisians,he glides into his uniform and comes ashore with me.
"And without Doris even changing her dress we were married—in the colonel's quarters, with every officer and every member of every officer's family on the reservation—even the children—standing by. And the women said, 'How distressing, Mr. Wickett, to have to leave in the morning!' and the men said, 'Tough luck, Dick'—and be sure I thought it was tough luck, and it would have been tough luck only by this time the entire post had got busy and got word to Washington, and at eleven o'clock, while we were still at the wedding-supper, word came to delay the sailing of the gunboat for twenty-four hours. And that was followed by a telegraphic order next morning to haul theBayportinto dry dock and overhaul her."
Wickett, who had been talking rapidly, came to a full stop, while three bells were striking throughout the fleet.
"Nine-thirty," said Wickett. "I thought I saw a steamer's light beyond the breakwater."
Carlin looked where he pointed. "I don't, but I haven't your eyes. How long was the respite?"
"In ten days they had her afloat again. I thanked my God-given luck for every flying minute of those ten days."
"And did she stay afloat long enough to get to Manila?"
"Oh, yes. She wasn't half bad. Needed a little nursing in heavy weather, but outside of that she wasn't hopeless at all."
"And what of Mrs. Wickett?"
"She was to come to me just as soon as I cabled where in the East the gunboat would fetch up for any sort of a stay. But I was never in one spot for long. We cruised from Vladivostok to Manila and back again, never more than a week in any one place. Even so, as soon as I'd saved enough out of my ensign's pay, she was to come—and she would have—to meet me; but before enough months of saving had passed she wrote me. There was a baby coming, and then I wouldn't let her come. I did not want her jumping from port to port in foreign waters before the baby was born, and she would soon be needing every cent of my ensign's pay that I could save.
"And the months rolled around and the cable came which told that the baby had come, and that Doris and everything was fine; and I was as happy as a man could be with a wife and boy he was crazy to see, but couldn't. She wanted to come out and join me right away, but I said no.
"Well, when the baby was big enough to stand travel she was coming, anyway, she wrote; but Ireminded her that before a great while now I ought to be on my way home. And one day in the China Seas I saw the sun between us and the shore setting under a thousand golden lakes and pools and purple pillars, and a home-bound pennant of a full cable's length whipping the breeze in our smoke astern."
Wickett paused, and resumed: "That was a great night. It was two years and three months since I'd left Bayport. The first thing I did in the morning after turning out, and for every morning thereafter, was to step to the calendar on the wall of my room and block out that day's date with a fat blue-leaded pencil I'd got from the paymaster for that purpose alone, and then, estimating the run on the chief engineer's dope, count how many days were left."
Wickett was silent. He remained silent so long that Carlin thought that that must be the end, abrupt though it was, to the story. But it was not that. Wickett was pointing across the bay.
"See, Carlin—the flag-ship of the second squadron has just sent out an order for its first division to prepare for an emergency signal drill. And the first division are to have a torpedo drill at the same time. Wait—in half a minute it will be on. There—look!"
From the mastheads the red and white Ardoislights were winking even as the illuminated arms of the semaphores were wigwagging jerky messages from bridge to bridge; on shore, on the water, on the clouds, the great search-lights swept and crossed endlessly. It was dazzling. Suddenly it ceased. "Oh-h!" protested Carlin.
"Life is just like that, isn't it?" said Wickett; "all light and play and color for a spell, and then—pff—lights out."
"Maybe," admitted Carlin, "but don't impede the speed of the story. Your ship was racing for home."
"Our orders were to proceed by way of Suez and to rendezvous with the battle-fleet at Guantánamo, Cuba. We got into Guantánamo the day before theMissalamaarrived from the North. TheMissalamahad orders to proceed to the West Coast. Half a dozen of the officers already in Guantánamo were ordered to her. I was one of them."
"Good night! But that was a jolt!"
"That's what it was. But that's the service."
"And couldn't you do anything about it?"
"What could I do? There were my orders. A couple of the fellows came as near to being politicians then as ever they did in their lives. They tried to reach people in Washington—bureau chiefs, senators, influential congressmen—tohave me detached and ordered home. But next day was a holiday and the day after was Sunday, and the ship had to sail by Sunday. And she did, and I with her."
"And how do you account for your being shunted off like that? Somebody have it in for you?"
"No, no—not that. Simply the politicians. I don't suppose the service will ever be free of the near-politicians. The navy has them—fellows who are not good enough officers to depend upon themselves alone, and not good enough politicians to go in for politics altogether. Somebody with a good shore billet somewhere was probably due for sea-duty, and not wanting to let go of a good thing, and having the pull, somebody else went instead. And somebody else for that somebody else, and somebody else again, and so on till at last the somebody else who could be made to serve a turn happened to be me.
"'Hard luck, Dickie,' said the ward-room mess. 'But cheer up—in three months you'll see the Golden Gate, and by then you'll be ready for a little duty on your home coast. Then your lieutenant's straps and shore duty, and your wife and baby to yourself for a while.' I had that thought to cheer me through the night-watches around South America, but at Callao we got orders toproceed to Manila, and after six months out that way it was off to the Island of Guam, and from there to make a survey of some islands in the South Sea. No way I could fix it could I tell my wife to come and meet me at any certain place.
"But no task is endless. We were homeward bound at last. I remember how I used to say at mess that I was never going to believe I was home, till with my own eyes I saw the anchor splash in a home port. But there it was now—the anchor actually splashing in Bayport. I had the bridge making port, and I remember what a look I took around me before I turned the deck over to the executive. From the bridge, with a long glass, I could see above the tree tops the roof of the colonel's old quarters. I pictured him on the veranda below with the baby and Doris waiting for me. I'd sent a wireless ahead for Doris not to risk herself or that baby out in the bay with a fleet of battle-ships coming to anchor. And the baby! I dreamed of him reaching up his little hands and calling, 'Papa, papa!' when he saw me.
"Well, everything was shipshape. We were safe to moorings and I was relieved of the deck and about to step off the bridge when the word was passed that somebody was waiting to see me in the ward-room. And with no more than that—'Somebody to see you, sir'—I knew who itwas. The fort boat had come alongside and people had come aboard—officers' wives and families, I knew, but not just who, because the boat had unloaded aft while I was on the bridge forward. But I knew.
"The messenger smiled when he told me. The men along the deck smiled when they saw me hurrying aft. The marines on the half-deck smiled as I flew by them. Everybody aboard knew by this time of my five years from home and the little baby waiting. Good old Doctor and Pay, going up to take the air on the quarter-deck, said: 'Hurry, Dick, hurry!' Hurry? I was taking the ladders in single leaps. At the foot of the last one, in the passageway leading to the ward-room, I all but bowled over a little fellow who was looking up the ladder like he was expecting somebody. I picked him up and stood him on his feet again. 'Hi, little man!' I remember saying, and thinking what a fine little fellow he was, but no more than that, I was in such a hurry.
"And into the ward-room, and everybody in the ward-room that wasn't occupied with some of his own was smiling and pointing a finger to where, in the door of my stateroom, Doris was waiting for me. And I dove through the bulkhead door, leaped the length of the ward-room country, and took her in my arms. For a minute,five minutes, ten minutes—just how long I don't know—but I held her and patted her and dried her tears.
"'And where's little Dick?' I asked at last.
"'Why, that was Dick you stood on his feet in the passageway,' she said, and laughed to think I didn't know him. 'But that's because he looks so much like you and not me. No man knows what he looks like himself,' she said, and ran and got Dick, and brought him to me, and said: 'Dick, here's your papa.' And Dick looked at me and he said: 'No, mama, that is not my papa. My papa has no legs,' just as I was going to fold him in my arms and hug him to death.
"And—will you still think I was only a kid?—I stepped into my room and drew the curtains, and sat down by my bunk and cried. After five years! And Doris came in, and perhaps she wanted to cry, too, but she didn't. She drew a photograph from her bosom and showed it to me. It was the only one of me that ever suited her, and it happened to be only a head and shoulders, and every day since the baby was old enough she had told him: 'That's your papa, dear, and some day he'll come home in a great big war-ship with guns and guns, and then you'll see.' And the poor little kid, four years and three months old, had never seen any legs on the man in the photograph;but he had seen his mother cry almost every time she looked at it, and he supposed that was why she cried—because papa had no legs. And so the poor kid was waiting to see a man with no legs."
Wickett was silent. Carlin asked no more questions. In silence he, too, studied what was left of the night-life of the fleet. Only the white anchor-lights of the motionless battle-ships, the colored side-lights of the chugging steam-launches, were now left.
Carlin pointed out to Wickett a green light coming rapidly in from sea. "Another battle-ship, Wickett?"
Wickett shook his head. "No. I've been watching her. It's theClermont. She's due. And I'm half afraid to go and board her."
"Why?"
"If my wife's aboard, she'll have with her a fifteen-months-old daughter that I have never seen. Suppose she, too, greets me with—She's swinging back—to her anchorage—look."
The green light rolled in a great half-circle inshore, and disappeared. A red light curved into sight.
Wickett jumped up. "Come on, Carlin, I'll get permission to leave the ship. We'll be there before she lowers the port ladder."
"No, but drop me at the landing on the way and I'll see you in the morning at the hotel. How's that?"
Carlin saw him before the morning. He was in the lobby of the hotel when Wickett with his wife, a fine big boy, and a lovely little baby girl, got out of the hotel 'bus. The boy was clinging to Wickett's hand, all the while talking rapturously of the trip of theClermont. With his free arm Wickett was carrying the baby, which was murmuring, "Papa, papa, papa!"
Carlin would have known Mrs. Wickett without an introduction or the presence of the boy and the baby. Merely from the way she looked at Wickett he knew that this was the girl who had gone sailing with him in the dawn and become engaged before breakfast.
"It's all right," smiled Wickett, with his cheek against the baby's. "This one can't seem to say anything but papa!"
Carlin nodded, and whispered: "And you couldn't afford it?"
Wickett grinned. "We couldn't; but we did. We always do."
"And how about the service—going to quit it?"
Wickett stared at Carlin. "Quit the service!"
Suddenly he recalled, and laughed, and whispered: "Sh-h—! I'm due for a year and a half of shore duty. But don't mind if I hurry along, will you? I got to get these children to bed."
"Go on—hurry—and good night," said Carlin. "Good night, Mrs. Wickett," and handed her into the elevator; and smoked two thoughtful cigars on the veranda and then went inside and sat down and wrote a long letter on the subject of the navy as a profession to the mother of a young lad back home.
There was much detail, and then:
As to being away from home for long periods: Married officers tell me that it is hard at times. But judging by what I saw awhile ago here, the home-coming almost offsets the long absences. The kind of a woman they marry probably makes a lot of difference. I'd say, let him go if he wants to. Good night.Your affectionate brother,Sam.
Your affectionate brother,
Sam.
Hearing the boys in the office talking of a lecture at the Sailor's Haven a few nights ago was what set me thinking to-day. It was on superstition, and the speaker digressed to expend ten minutes, as he put it, on sailors. A most superstitious lot, sailors.
He had a lot of fun with the sailors, and a crowd of old seafaring men sat there and let him, until a boss stevedore from our wharf who'd been one time mate of a coaster, with the preliminary contribution that this was sure the wisest party he'd listened to in all o' seven years, rose to inquire of the gentleman how long he'd been to sea.
Well, he had been to sea quite a little. Twice to Europe and return, once to Panama and return, once to Jamaica in the West Indies and——
"—return?" finishes our stevedore. "Sure you returned each time? 'N' in what sortivver craft'd you sail to them places—and return—in?"
"Why, steamers," answers the lecturer.
"Passinjer?"
"Passenger? Certainly."
"Excuseme!" says our stevedore. "I oughter known better. O' course,you knowall about sailors," and sits down.
The lecturer was all right. He was doing the best he knew, with the finest and fattest of words he could pick out, to make things clearer to his audience; and his audience, appreciating that, let him run on, until he said that there was not one mysterious thing which had ever happened that could fail to be proved very ordinary by mathematical, or historical, or logical, or physical, or some other "cal" deduction; which bounced our watch-dog out of his seat again.
"How d'you 'count," he growls, "for th'Orion'n'Sirius?"
Well-l, he could not account for it, for the simple and overwhelmingly conclusive reason that, previous to that very moment, he had never heard of the ships named.
"Then s'pose you hear 'f 'em now," says our stevedore, and starts in and delivers the lecturer a lecture on theOrionandSirius, and it wound up the show; for when the lecturer started to butt in, all the old barnacles, who before this had been clinging warily to the edge of their seats, now rose up and rallied around our stevedoreto finish his story, which he did; and the old fellows, on leaving the hall, said that the credit of the proceeds for the Sailor's Haven fund, for that night, anyway, ought to go as much to their old college chum from the coal wharf as to any imported lecturer with his deckload of lantern slides.
But our stevedore didn't tell all there was of theOrionand theSirius. The lecturer went home thinking he had been told all about it, but he hadn't. Here it is as it was.
In the fleet of big coal schooners, which at this time were running from the middle Atlantic ports to Boston, the twin five-masters, theOrionand theSirius, were notable.
They were twins in everything: built from the one set of moulds in the one yard at the one time, launched together, rigged together, sailed on their maiden trips together, and were brought home with their first cargoes of coal together by two masters who were almost as twinlike to look at as their vessels.
It was the history of these two big schooners, that they seemed always to be wanting to get together. Their crews used to say of them that if left anchored at all near each other in the stream,they would start right away to swing toward each other. Even if it was slack water they would. Yes, sir.
I can't speak from personal knowledge of that tide-swinging trick, but I do know that I saw them a few hours after they had twice smashed into each other—once under sail off the Capes and once in tow up Boston Harbor; and it was not to be doubted that in both cases they had more than drifted into each other. And of their near-collisions! A day's loaf along the water-front would yield gossip of a dozen or more.
Now, these next few lines are from out of the sailors' book of gossip of mysterious happenings at sea; and it is true that the more sailorly the gossip, the more likely will it be to try to account for unusual accidents at sea in a natural way; and the most usual reason given is inefficiency—lack of seamanship. As to that, it is true that lack of seamanship or of sea instinct has accounted for many calamities at sea, and the same lack would probably account for many another not so set down on the public tablets; but lack of seamanship won't account for all the queer happenings at sea. Every now and then comes a ship which no earthly power seems able to keep up with. From out of our superior shore knowledge we may deduce that the builder or designer wasin fault, that there must have been an asymmetry in her hull, or that her rigging lacked balance, such defects tending to render her uncontrollable under certain conditions. Maybe; but there she is, as she is, with the malign fates seeming to be working double tides to get her.
"Hoodoo ships," sailors term such, and "Hoo-doos, both of 'em," the crews of the collier fleet early labelled theOrionand theSirius. Yes,sir. And some day the pair of them were going up—or down—in a whirl of glory. If only they would smash only each other, and not go to putting poor innocent outsiders out of commission when they did go!—that was all they'd ask ofthem.
The master of theOrionwas Oliver Sickles; of theSirius, Norman Sickles; and they were from the same little hamlet in that Cape Shore region whence come so many capable sailormen. Each was named for his father, and their fathers were brothers who hated each other and brought up their children to hate each other.
It was curious to see them—two master mariners commanding sister ships for the same owners—passing each other on the wharf, brushing elbows in the office, putting to sea time and time together, sailing, again and again, side by side for days together, and yet never seeming to see each other. Indifference was the word; but if by anychance a third person referred to one in the presence of the other in anything like complimentary terms, that third person was soon let to know that he wasn't making any hit with whichever Captain Sickles it was who had to listen. If it was Norman of theSirius, he would shift his feet and start to stare intently at the ceiling or the sky; if it was Oliver of theOrion, with a snarl of disgust he would get up and walk off.
I had heard a lot of the Sickles cousins, but had never had more than a hailing acquaintance with either of them, until this early fall when my firm chartered, among others, theOrionand theSirius, and sent me down to Newport News to see that they lost no time in loading and getting out. It was the time of a threatened coal famine in New England, with coal freights up to two dollars a ton, and my firm chartering everything they could get hold of to take the coal from the railroads at Newport News and rush it east.
In our two new schooner captains, Norman and Oliver Sickles, I found, when I came to have dealings with them, a pair who knew their business. Implacable toward each other they surely were, but so long as their feelings weren't delaying their sailing days, that was their own business. Tall, broad, powerful chaps they both were, twenty-eight or thirty years of age to look at, slow inthought, heavy in action, but competent sailormen always. I had no need to know their records, nor to talk with them too many hours, to find that out. Not much about a schooner, be she two or five master, nor much about the North Atlantic coast, that they didn't know.
I had been three months in Newport News, Christmas was at hand, and the railroad people were telling me that they would have no more coal for my firm until after New Year's. There were twenty thousand tons not yet gone; but if my four four-master schooners could sail next morning, and the five-masters,OrionandSirius, get away the morning after, that twenty thousand tons would be cleaned up.
I hunted up the Captain Sickles of theSiriusand put the question to him: "Captain Norman, if I can get you loaded and cleared by the morning after to-morrow, what's the chance of your making Boston by Christmas?" And he answered, after some thought: "It's a westerly wind with a medium glass to-day. It ought to hang on westerly and dry for another four or five days. Clear me by the morning after to-morrow, and I'll lay theSiriusto anchor in Boston Harbor Christmas Eve, or"—he was a man of serious ways, and spoke most seriously now—-"or I'll give you a good reason why."
I hunted up Captain Oliver Sickles of theOrion, and I found him having a drink in the bar of the Tidewater Café. He looked as if he'd welcome a quarrel, but that was nothing strange in him. I put the same question to him that I had put to his cousin, and the answer came in almost the same words as to the medium glass and the westerly wind, but at that point he looked sharply at me.
"And when does theSiriussail?" he asked.
"The morning after to-morrow."
"And"—suspiciously—"who first that morning, theSiriusor me?"
"I don't know. You'll be loaded and cleared together—it's for yourselves to say who sails first."
"And what did he say?"
Captain Oliver had a hectoring way about him which used to make me promise myself that some day, after he'd done hauling coal for my outfit, I'd tell him what I thought of him. "What did who say?" I asked him now.
"Warn't you talkin' to my cousin awhile ago about the same thing?"
"I was, though I don't remember telling you about it."
"H-m," he sneered, "I thought so. Y' always go to him first."
"Yes, I do!" I snapped at him. "And why? Because he knows his mind. And he's a man to give an answer without using up an afternoon talking about it. He said he'd have theSiriusto anchor in Boston Harbor by Christmas Eve or give me a good reason why."
"He did, did he? Then set this down in your log"—with the end of a prodigiously thick forefinger he was tapping the bar as he said it:—"TheOrionwill be laying to anchor in Boston Harbor by Christmas Eve or there'll be adamngood reason why."
Right here I should say that there was more than a rivalry of craftsmanship between the Sickles cousins. Once, thinking it was theSirius, Norman Sickles's sweetheart, a very pretty and a very good girl, had gone aboard theOrionas it lay in Boston Harbor. Oliver at once locked her in the cabin, put to sea, and carried her to Philadelphia, where, urged by her mother, and to save her good name as she thought, she married Oliver. But that her heart was still with Norman was current gossip in the fleet.
Because he had lately heard that I had been free-spoken in my comment on that exploit was why Captain Oliver now—his forefinger tapping the bar and he eying me from under his hat-brim—added to his "good reason" the word that,no matter what my firm or any other firm thought of this or that, which warn't none o' their business anyway, he wanted 'em all to understand that he was as capable of getting a quick passage out of a vessel as any Norman Sickles that ever walked; which gave me a fine chance to say: "Well, the place to prove that is at sea, and not in a barroom ashore."
Not very delicate—no; but it sent him almost on the run down aboard his vessel, to clear his decks for loading, which was mostly what I was after.
And I let it leak out—the answer of the two cousins about being in Boston before Christmas. A little rivalry of that kind doesn't do any harm; and I wanted to walk into the office on Christmas Eve and say, "The last of that Newport News coal is lying out there in the stream waiting to dock," and then go home, even as many of the crews would want to go home, with an easy conscience for a Christmas holiday.
People in my line used to say that I was pretty young for my job, and some of them to warn me about allowing the underlings to get familiar with me. Well, perhaps I was too young for my job,or for any other job of any account; but as to the other charge I never noticed anybody getting over-familiar with me. Friendly, yes; but even the head of the firm himself couldn't get over-familiar unless I let him.
Part of my job, as I figured it, was to know freights and ships and the masters of ships; and where it hurt the firm's interests if I knew the crews as well, I couldn't see. Some would tell me that the further away I kept from them the more highly they would respect me, and the more highly they respected me the more they would do for me, which would have listened well if their vessels were getting in and out of loading ports any faster than mine did; but nobody noticed that they were.
And beyond that: I could never see where a little friendliness to anybody did any harm. I may have been too young for my job, but I wasn't too young to know that the world is alive with unassuming little fellows who are full to the hatches with knowledge of one kind or another that they will cheerfully unload to anybody who has time for them. Not that I want anybody to think I am so long-headed or forehanded a chap as to spend time only with people who could tell me things! I didn't do any thinking about it one way or the other. Any man that had time for me, I had time for him.
I had time for Drislane. He was one of the crew of theSirius, and I had been seeing quite a little of him while I was in Newport News this fall on the coal. TheSiriuswould load, sail, and return; load, sail, and return; and between trips Drislane and I would have sessions.
I'd seen something of Drislane before this in Boston. His mail used to come addressed to our Boston office, where everybody knew that twice a year, toward the end of June and just before Christmas, a check would come to him from his home in the West. When he came up from the vessel after a trip and found that home envelope awaiting him, he would step around to his room, clean up, and in his shore-going suit of clothes come back, have us cash his check, and then, according to our office force, it was—Good night! for two weeks.
The check, always the same—for twelve hundred dollars—would have given him a good two weeks' whirl in highly-rated, expensive places, if he cared for splurge, but I guess he never was influenced much by regulation ratings. Any place he liked the looks of would do for him—and some perhaps that he didn't like the looks of.
It was no use to try to tell the office force that Drislane hadn't a weak joint somewhere. Man, theyknew! and holding no berths for the purely spiritual, with but one suspicious and unexplainedaction to work from, would build you up a character of any depth of depravity you were pleased to have. Three guesses, no more, was all they needed for Drislane's case. It was rum, or women, or rumandwomen. If neither, then there was no hope for him at all—he was insane.
And certainly his judgment in women was something fierce. I'm setting down now the diction, as well as the judgment, of the office force; this last judgment being based on the evidence of the two illuminated occasions when he had come in to cash his check, and each time brought with him a young woman. Naturally, on his departure, the lads in the office had a word to say. The only way they could account for his selections—well, they couldn't account for them. It must be a genius he had—something was born with him—to pick the homely ones.
There wasn't the least evidence to show that there was anything wrong in these companionships of his. My notion of it was—he would never speak of it—that he picked up any kind of people in any kind of place, and made them as happy as he could while his money lasted. He certainly never went off for any two weeks' jamboree. Whatever his experiences were, they seemed to leave him in good shape physically, anyway. At least the marks of too many lonesome hoursseemed to be ironed out of his face when he came back.
The man was so everlastingly unconscious that he was different from anybody else that it was refreshing. But there was more than that—to me, at least. I always looked on him as a touchstone, one of those men by whom you may gauge other men. Drislane was sensitized to crooks. He had only to stand in the same room with them to get their moral pictures. If I heard of Drislane distrusting a man or of a man disliking Drislane, I would at once set that man down, knowing nothing of the man, as having a rotten spot in him somewhere.
That was the Drislane who met me this night before theSiriusand theOrionwere to sail for their last coal trip of the year, and asked me to have supper with him. And he took me to that same place where I'd had the words with Captain Oliver Sickles the day before—that is, the Tidewater Café—where was a drinking bar in front and a restaurant in back, a common enough sort of place, where women of the street could—and did—bring drunken sailors, and they served you pie with a knife.
I speak of that item of serving pie with a knife, not by way of poking fun at anybody; but here was a man five years away from his inland hills,for a whole year owner of an eating-place in a good-sized seaport city, and had not yet noticed that some people ate pie without a knife. By it I fancied I could gauge the man's social inheritance. And there were other customs of the place in keeping with the pie and knife. I used to speculate on what primitive sort of an upbringing he had that he was so slow to adopt the most ordinary civilized customs.
Drislane seemed to be at home in the place. So was I for that matter; by which I mean I felt safe enough. Several times before this, in my inquisitive ramblings about the port, I had looked in there. So far as that goes, there are not many places where they bother a man who doesn't bother them, always excepting, of course, that he doesn't get drunk and disorderly, and isn't naturally foolish.
While I was studying the place and the people, Drislane ordered supper. I paid no attention to him until he joggled my elbow. "What do you think of her?" he asked.
"Which one?" I asked, and looked about me afresh to note what worshipful creature it was I had missed.
"You didn't notice," he said, plainly put out with me, "the girl who is waiting on us?"
I had noticed her; but when she reappeared withthe first part of our order, I noticed anew. A tall, full-bosomed girl she was, and as she walked across the floor toward us, a load of table things in each hand, she swayed from her hips like a young tree in the wind.
The physical force and poise of the girl was the notable thing about her. She carried her armfuls of dishes and food as if they were handfuls of marshmallows. She must have spent years working like a man in the fields to have developed such physical power. As to her face—it was innocent as a child's.
He introduced me when she had set down her dishes. "Miss Rose"——I didn't get her surname, and it doesn't matter. "Rose's uncle owns this place," he added.
"Poor girl!" I thought.
She met his enchanted gaze with a slow, red-lipped smile. To me she gave an embarrassed, half-sidewise glance. Strange men as yet were evidently disturbing items in her life.
He watched her when she left us, until she had passed through the kitchen-door and beyond sight. "I'm going to marry and settle down," he said.
"This young lady?"
"If she'll have me. I haven't asked her yet." He was fiddling with his bread and butter. Suddenlyhe burst out with: "If you knew how lonesome I used to get, and the things I was tempted to do to forget it!"
"A man doesn't need, son, to be entirely exiled from his family to believe that; but when you're married will you go to sea just the same?" I asked.
He did not answer.
I felt sorry for him. She looked to be a good girl, but I foresaw her troubles in a place like this while he would be away to sea. It would be a constant fight. She was possibly nineteen; she didn't look like a girl who had been tempered by temptation's long siege, and Lord knows what resisting power she would develop when so tempted.
From the fragments Drislane fed me with while she was coming and going, I learned that both her parents were dead, that she had been in the city only three months, that her uncle didn't seem to see anything strange in her employment in his place, and that Drislane was the first man who had shown an honest interest in her. "I take her to the theatre regularly," said Drislane. "I would to-night, only I want to sit in somewhere and have a long talk with her. You'd be surprised the things she doesn't know about the world."
"I wonder," I thought to myself, "if you realizethe thingsyoudon't know about the world," and began to wish then for his own sake that he'd hurry up and take to looking at life through the same glasses other people used.
She was living in sordid quarters in a section where a woman was any man's who could get her, and on any terms he could get her; and she was of the type and at the age which has always been held most desirable by the primitive male; and it was to be doubted if she had had the religious or home training needful to an emotional nature. In a good home, in a community where a woman was respected because she was a woman, all would have been fine; but here—they married, and he most of the time at sea—I felt sorry for her as well as for him.
"Take her out of here when you marry," I said to him before parting.
He shook his head. "No, I had a scrap with my people leaving home. They're all right at home—the best—but they want me to get down on my knees to them."
"Better be on your knees of your own will to your own people than against your will to an enemy," I said, but it had no meaning to him; and I left him to his Rose, almost wishing that something would happen to him soon to shake him up, even if, shaking him up, it shook off afew of the purple blossoms that he thought so necessary to the tree of life. Thinking of him I almost talk like him in his absent-minded moments.
I left Drislane to go to the theatre with Captain Norman Sickles. The theatre over, he went with me to my hotel to get a few ship's papers I had for him. After that we sat in for a smoke and a chat.
We talked until Captain Norman thought it was time for him to be getting back aboard his vessel and turning in. As he stood up to go, he said: "'Tis said you like a little sea trip now and again? Why don't you go home with me in theSirius?"
I was pleased at that—he was known to be not over-free with his invitations—and I thanked him, but on my not saying yes or no at once he looked chagrined; seeing which, I explained that early that fall his cousin had invited me, if ever I cared to return to Boston by water, to take passage with him on theOrion.
He tried to smile. He was a whale of a man,bashful in his ways. He smiled like an overgrown boy who had done something there was no harm in but of which he was ashamed. "He always appears to be gettin' in ahead o' me, don't he?" he said, wistfully-like, after a moment, which hurried me into saying: "But I never said I'd go with him, captain, and he probably thinks he knows me too well to ask me now. I want to go with you, captain, and"—I made up my mind then and there—"I will—and proud to have you ask me."
"Good!" 'Twas a real smile now. "And if theOrionhauls out with us you may see a wet passage, and maybe a bit of excitement of one kind or another before we make Boston Light."
We shook hands on the hope of a fast run to Boston, and then, drawing from my suit-case a package of receipts, coal memoranda, and so on, I held them up. "For theOrion, captain. Where do you suppose I'll find your cousin this time of night to give them to him?"
"Where but the Tidewater where that girl is?"
I stopped to put one thing to another. "And he is after that red-haired Rose, too?"
"What else?"
"But doesn't she know, or doesn't her uncle know, that he's a wife in Boston?"
"Her uncle!" he snorted. "He's no more wit than my ship's cat."
"But Drislane knows—won't he tell her?"
"He don't seem to. A proud one, Drislane. Six months he's been with me now in theSirius, and if she isn't sure she wants him above anybody else on this earth, then she needn't have him, that's all; or leastwise, that's how I sense him. He wouldn't take no odds of the devil, that lad."
I could believe that; and it set me to thinking.
"Maybe you're thinkin' now," he went on, "that she should be able to see for herself what my cousin is? But what training has she had to judge o' men? What other kind does she see aught of in her uncle's place? Indeed, with her bringing up and what brains the poor girl has, she's done very well, I'm thinkin', to ha' kept off the rocks as long as she has. A hundred to one you'll find my fine cousin at the Tidewater to-night. But I must be going. Good night to you."
Only the bartender was in the front room of the Tidewater, and he was so busy peeking through a slide in the wall, the same through which he passed the drink orders from the restaurant, that he did not hear me come in. The door to the inner room was closed, but the low-powered roarsof people trying hard not to be noisy were oozing through.
"What's doing?" I called to the bartender. I had to call it twice to make him turn around.
"It's the big captain of theOrionand that little deck-hand Drislane."
Anybody taking Drislane for a joke always did get my goat. "He's not a deck-hand!" I bit out, "he's a seaman, and a good one. But what about him and Captain Sickles?"
"It's about him an' the boss's Rose. The captain begins to abuse Drislane somethin' fierce, an' he comes back at him. Then the captain brings her into it. 'What would a girl be wantin' with a little runt like you?' he says; and after that, 'I dunno but I'll take her to Boston with me this trip,' and said it like he meant it. An' the little Drislane he jumps into him two-handed, an' they're hard at it now."
I squeezed inside the door of the inner room. "Man-to-man fashion!" I could hear, in the powerful voice of Captain Oliver, while I was crowding through the ring of people to the open space in the middle of the floor. "That's it—man fashion wi' the naked fists!" some scattering voices echoed.
Man-to-man fashion! As if man could invent an unfairer scheme to settle private quarrels! Give a man heavy muscles and huge knuckles,tough hide and thick skull, add half the courage of a yellow dog, and how can he lose at that game? The old-time duellists with their swords were a hundred times fairer. A long sword to his wrist and the smallest man had a chance; which is as it should be, or else we might as well pick some seven-foot, solid-skulled savage from out of the jungle and set him up for king.
Man to man! Drislane was five foot six and weighed, possibly, a hundred and thirty-five pounds, and was no boxer. Sickles was six foot three and weighed two-fifty. He had enormous muscles and knuckles of brass. His hide was thick and hard as double-ought canvas. Drislane could have stood off and pounded on his ribs for a week and hardly black-and-blued them. He could have swung on him for a month and not knocked him over.
It was the old-fashioned style of stand-up fighting. No regular rounds with a rest between. The men rushed and slugged and clinched and tugged, and when they fell, got up and went at it again. Always, when they went to the floor, Sickles let his two hundred and fifty pounds drop limp and heavy on Drislane. Drislane would almost flatten out under it. Standing up, when Sickles's fist landed on him he would wince all over. He felt pain like a girl.
It was slaughter. Blood, blood, blood; andthe blood all on one side. For perhaps twenty times Drislane was knocked flat. If Sickles had only the explosive spark to go with those tremendous blows he wouldn't have had to hit Drislane more than once. But he could only continue to knock the little man flat; and knocking him flat often enough, the pounding finally told.
The time came when Drislane could not rise to his feet. He worked himself up to one knee, with the big man waiting for him to look up so he might deliver the blow more sweetly. Drislane, knowing to the full what was coming, looked up and took all there was of it.
This time he lay flat and quiet. The triumphant Sickles bent over him. "Y'are satisfied, are yuh?"
Sickles wasn't going to stop with beating him up. Drislane must proclaim his conqueror's victory and his own defeat. Possibly he wanted the girl Rose to hear it. She had been standing back on a box in the kitchen doorway and must have seen most of the fight. I was wondering how far the joy of battle would mount in her primitive nature; but when I looked up to note that, and how she took Drislane's beating, she had gone.
"Are yuh? Speak up!—are yuh?" bellowed Sickles.
Drislane by now could open his eyes. He lookedup at his conqueror but would not say the word. Sickles dug the toe of his shoe into his side.
I had been waiting, half sick to my stomach, for a good excuse to butt in. I had marked, when I first came in, a piano-stool setting upside down atop of the piano to one side of the room. In these possibly rough-house wind-ups it never does any harm to note where a few little articles of warfare may be picked up in a hurry. This piano-stool had a two-inch oak seat.
"You wunt, heh?" Sickles lifted his foot.
"No, he won't!" I butted in, and as he straightened up to see who it was, I went on: "And don't think I'll be foolish enough to go staving in my good knuckles on you. See this little wherewithal I'm holding, and not too loosely, by the wind'ard leg? You've a fine thick skull, but this is thicker. One cute little wallop o' this amidships of your ears, and it's little you'll care whether you take theOrionout on the first or the last of the flood-tide to-morrow. Let him be!"
Now, don't let anybody think I was making a play for any Carnegie medal thereby. I knew Oliver Sickles, and even better did I know his kind, who only go to battle when certain victory lies before them. The only chance I was taking was with my firm's interests. It might be that he'd have such a grouch against me that he'dcarry no more coal for my firm than he could help in future.
He let him be. He put on his collar and coat, and received as his due the applause of that crawling breed which are never by any chance seen shaking hands with anybody but a winner. While he was still at the hand-shaking I threw him his ship's papers.
I had the bartender order a carriage, and while waiting I tried to cheer up Drislane. I told him that he must not think of going to sea next day, that I would see Captain Norman Sickles and get him off, and later go with him to Boston by rail.
He shook his head. He could hardly part his swollen lips to talk; and then could only half whisper. "I'll sail to-morrow on theSirius," he said; and rolled his head over to see what Sickles was doing.
Sickles was just then stepping through that kitchen doorway where but two minutes earlier Rose had been standing. Drislane closed his eyes; and then, as if he thought he had to show me he wasn't beaten, he opened them and smiled. After I'd fully taken in that smile, I wished he had cried.
The bartender called through the slide that the carriage was waiting. I carried out Drislane, drove him to my hotel, and called in a doctor.Between us we gave him a hot bath, salved and plastered him, and put him to bed.