II
Let me interpolate now Mr. Harman’s part of the story in his own words.
“When Cap Ginnell bottled me and Blood in the cabin of the Heart of Ireland,” said he, “we did a bit of shoutin’ and then fell quiet. There ain’t no use in shoutin’ against a two-inch thick cabin hatch overlaid with iron platin’. He’d made that hatch on purpose for the bottling of parties; must have, by the way it worked and by the armamints on it.
“You may say we were mugs to let ourselves be bottled like that. We were. Y’ see, we hadn’t thought it over. We hadn’t thought it would pay Ginnell to abandon the Heart for a derelick schooner better found and up to her hatches with a cargo of champagne, or we wouldn’t have let him fool us down into the cabin like we did and then clap the hatch on us. Leavin’ alone the better exchange, we hadn’t thought it would be nuts to him to do us in the eye. Mugs we were, and mugs we found ourselves, sittin’ on the cabin table and listenin’ to the blighter clearin’ the crew off. There weren’t no chance of any help from them. Chows they were, carin’ for nothin’ s’long as their chests an’ opium pipes was safe.
“The skylight overhead was no use for more’n a cat to crawl through, if it’d been open, which it wasn’t, more’n an inch, and fastened from the deck side. Portholes! God bless you, them scuttles wasn’t big enough for a cat’s face to fit in.
“I says to Blood: ‘Listen to the blighters! Oh, say, can’t we do nuthin’, sittin’ here on our beam ends? Ain’t you got nuthin’ in your head? Ain’t you got a match in your pocket to fire the tub and be done with it?’
“‘It’ll be lucky for us,’ says Blood, ‘if Cap Ginnell doesn’t fire her before he leaves her.’ With that, I didn’t think anythin’ more about matches. No, sir! For ha’f an hour after the last boatload of Chows and their dunnage was off the ship and away I was sniffin’ like a dog at the hatch cover for the smell of smoke, and prayin’ to the A’mighty between sniffs.
“After that we rousted round to see how we were fixed up for provisions and water. We found grub enough for a month, and in one of the bunks a breaker ha’f filled with water. Now that breaker must have been put there for us by Ginnell before we left the Heart to ’xamine the derelick schooner. He must have fixed in his mind to do us in and change ship right from the first. I remarks on this to Blood, and then we starts a hunt for tools to cut our way out of there, findin’ nuthin’ serviceable but cutlery ware an’ a corkscrew. Two prong forks and knives wore thin with usin’ weren’t what we were searchin’ for; a burglar’s jimmy, blastin’ powder, and a drill was more in our line, but there weren’t any, so we just set to with the knives, cuttin’ and scrubbin’ at the tender parts of the hatch, more like tryin’ to tickle a girl with iron stays on her than any useful work, for the plates on that hatch would ’a’ given sniff to the plates on a battleship, till I give over and just sat down on the floor cursin’ Schwab and the Steel Trusts and Carnegie and Ginnell and the chap that had forged them plates from the tip of his hammer to the toe of his boots. ‘Oh, why the blazes,’ says I, ‘weren’t we born rats! There’s some sense in rats; rats would be out and on deck, while here’s two chaps with five fingers on each fist and men’s brains in their heads bottled and done for, scratchin’ like blind kittens shet up in a box, and all along of puttin’ their trust in a swab they ought to have scragged when they had the chanst.’
“‘Oh, shet your head!’ says Blood.
“‘Shet yours,’ says I. ‘I’m speakin’ for both of us; it’s joining in with that skrimshanker’s done us. Bad comp’ny, neither more nor neither less, and I’m blowed if I don’t quit such and their likes and turn Baptis’ minister if I ever lay leg ashore again.’ Yes, that’s what I says to Cap Blood; I was that het up I laid for everythin’ in sight. Then I goes on at him for the little we’d done, forgettin’ it was the tools were at fault. ‘What’s the use,’ says I, ‘tinkerin’ away at that hatch? You might as well be puttin’ a blister on a bald head, hopin’ to raise hair. Here we are, and here we stick,’ I says, ‘till Providence lets us out.’
“The words were scarce out of my head when he whips out Ginnell’s gun, which he was carryin’ in his pocket and hadn’t remembered till then. I thought he was goin’ to lay for me, till he points the mouth of it at the hatch and lets blaze. There were three ca’tridges in the thing, and he fires the three, and when I’d got back my hearing and the smoke had cleared a bit there was the hatch starin’ at us unrattled, with three spelters of lead markin’ it like beauty spots over the three dimples left by the bullets.
“All the same, the firin’ done us good—sort of cleared the air like a thunder-storm—and I began to remember I’d got a mouth on me and a pipe in my pocket. We lit up and sat down, him on the last step of the companionway and me on the table side, and then we began to figure on what hand Providence was like to take in the business.
“I says to him: ‘There’s nothin’ but Providence left, barrin’ them old knives and that corkscrew, and they’re out of count. We’re driftin’ on the Kuro Shiwo current, aimin’ right for the Horn, you may say, but there’s the kelp beds, and they’re pretty sure to hold us a bit. They’re south of us, and Santa Catalina’s east of them, with lots of fishin’ boats sure to be out, and it’s on the cards that some of them jays will spot us. “Derelick” is writ all over us—bare sticks and nothin’ on deck, and sluin’ about to the current like a drunk goin’ home in the mornin’.’
“The Cap he cocks his eye up at the telltale compass fixed on the beam overhead of him. It cheered him up a bit with its deviations, and he allowed there might be somethin’ in the Providence business if the kelp beds only held good.
“‘Failin’ them,’ he says, ‘it’s the Horn and a clear sea all the way to it, with the chance of bein’ passed be day or rammed at night by some rotten freighter. I don’t know much about Providence,’ he says, ‘but if you give me the choice between the two, I’ll take the kelp beds.’
“Blood hadn’t no more feelin’s for religion in him than a turkey. He was a book-read man, and I’ve took notice that nothin’ shakes a sailorman in his foundations s’ much as messin’ with books.
“I don’t say my own religious feelin’s run equal, but they gets me by the scruff after a jag and rubs me nose in it, and they lays for me when I’m lonely, times, with no money or the chanst of it in sight; times, they’ve near caught me and made good on the clutch, so’s that if I’m not bangin’ a drum in the Sa’vation Army at this present minit it’s only be the mercy of Providence. I’ve had close shaves, bein’ a man of natural feelin’s, of all the traps laid for such, but Blood he held his own course, and not bein’ able to see that the kelp beds might have been put there by Providence to hold us a bit—which they were—and give us a chanst of bein’ overhauled before makin’ a long board for the Horn and sure damnation, I didn’t set out to ’lighten him.
“Well, folks, that day passed somehow or nuther, us takin’ spells at the hatch to put in the time. Blood he found a spare ca’tridge of Ginnell’s, and the thought came to him to scrape a hole at the foot of the hatch cover and use the ca’tridge for a blastin’ charge. The corkscrew came in handy for this, and toward night he’d got the thing fixed. ‘Now,’ says he, ‘you’ll see somethin’!’ And he up with the revolver and hit the ca’tridge a belt with the butt end, and the durned thing backfires and near blew his head off.
“After that we lit the cabin lamp and had supper and went asleep, and early next mornin’ I was woke by the noise of a boat comin’ alongside. I sat up and shook Blood, and we listened.
“Then we began to shout and bang on the hatch, and all at once the fastening went, and all at once the sun blazed on us, and next minit I was on deck, with Blood after me. Now what d’you think had let us out? I’ll give you twenty shots and lay you a dollar you don’t hit the bull’s-eye. A girl! That’s what had let us out. Dressed in white, she were, with a panama on her head and a gold watch on her wrist and white shoes on her feet and a smile on her face like the sun dazzle on water. And pretty! Well, I guess I’m no beauty-show judge, and my eyes had lit on nothin’ prettier than Ginnell since leavin’ Frisco, so I may have been out of my reckonin’ on points of beauty, but she were pretty. Lord love me, I never want to see nothin’ prettier! I let out an oath, I was that shook up at the sight of her, and Blood he hit me a drive in the back that nigh sent me into her arms, and then we settled down and explained matters.
“She was out from Avalon in a motor boat, and she’d run short of spirit and sailed up to us, thinkin’ we were at anchor. Providence! I should think so! Providence and the kelp beds, for only for them we’d have been twenty miles to the s’uth’ard, driftin’ to Hades like hutched badgers on a mill stream. We told her how Ginnell had fixed us, and she told us how the gasoline had fixed her. ‘And now,’ says she, ‘will you give me a biskit, for I’m hungry and I wants to get back to Avalon, where my poppa is waitin’ for me, and he’ll be gettin’ narvous,’ she says.
“‘Lord love you,’ says I, ‘and how do you propose to get back?’
“For the wind had fallen a dead ca’m, and right to Catalina and over to San Clemente the sea lay like plate glass, with the Kuro Shiwo flowin’ under like a blue satin snake.
“She bit on her lip, but she was all sand, that girl—Culpepper were her name—and not a word did she say for a minit. Then she says, aimin’ to be cheerful: ‘Well, I suppose,’ says she, ‘we’ll just have to stay at anchor here till they fetch me or the wind comes.’
“‘Anchor!’ said I. ‘Why, Lord bless you, there’s a mile-deep water under us! We’re driftin’.’
“‘Driftin’!’ she cries. ‘And where are we driftin’ to?’
“That fetched me, and I was hangin’ in irons when Blood chipped in and cheered her up with lies and told me to stay with her whiles he went down below and got some breakfast ready, and then I was left alone with her, trustin’ in Providence she wouldn’t ask no more questions as to where we were driftin’ to.
“She sat on the cargo hatch whiles I filled a pipe, lookin’ round about her like a cat in a new house, and then she got mighty chummy. I don’t know how she worked it, but in ten minits she’d got all about myself out of me and all about Ginnell and Blood and the Yan-Shan and the dollars we’d missed; she’d learned that I never was married and who was me father and why I went to sea at first start. Right down to the colour of me first pair of pants she had it all out of me. She was a sure-enough lady, but I reckon she missed her vocation in not bein’ a bilge pump. Then she heaves a sigh at the sound of ham frying down below, and hoped that breakfast was near ready, and right on her words Blood hailed us from below.
“He’d opened the skylight wide and knocked the stuffiness out of the cabin, and down we sat at the table with fried ham and ship’s bread and coffee before us.
“I’d never set at table with the likes of her before, but if every real lady’s cut on her bias, I wouldn’t mind settin’ at table with one every day in me life. There was only two knives left whole after our practice on the hatch with them. Blood and she had the whole ones, and I made out with a stump, but she didn’t mind nor take notice. She was talkin’ away all the time she was stuffin’ herself, pitchin’ into Cap Ginnell just like one of us. Oh, I guess if she’d been a man she’d have swore worth listenin’ to; she had the turn of the tongue for the work, and what she said about Ginnell might have been said in chapel without makin’ parties raise a hair, but I reckon it’d have raised blisters on the soul of Pat Ginnell if he’d been by to hear and if he’d a soul to blister, which he hasn’t.”
Mr. Harman relit his pipe, and seemed for a moment absorbed in contemplation of Miss Culpepper and her possibilities as a plain speaker; then he resumed:
“She made us tell her all over again about the Yan-Shan business and the dollars, and she allowed we were down on our luck, and she put her finger on the spot. Said she: ‘You fell through by not goin’ on treatin’ Ginnell as you begun treatin’ him. If he was bad enough to be used that way, he wasn’t even good enough for you to make friends with.’ Them wasn’t her words, but it was her meanin’.
“Then we left her to make her t’ilet with Blood’s comb and brush, tellin’ her she could have the cabin to herself as long as she was aboard, and, ten minutes after, she was on deck again, bright as a new pin, and scarce had she stuck her head into the sun than Blood, who was aft, dealin’ with some old truck, shouts: ‘Here’s the wind!’
“It was coming up from s’uth’ard like a field of blue barley, and I took the wheel, and Blood and her ran to the halyards. She hauled like a good un, and the old Heart sniffed and shook at the breeze, and I tell you it livened me up again to feel the kick of the wheel. We’d got the motor boat streamed astern on a line, and then I gave the old Heart the helm, and round she came, so that in a minit we were headin’ for Santa Catalina hull down on the horizon and only her spars showin’, so to speak. I thought that girl would ’a’ gone mad. Not at the chanst of gettin’ back, but just from the pleasure of feelin’ herself on a live ship and helpin’ to handle her. I let her have the wheel, and she steered good, and all the time Santa Catalina was liftin’, and now we could see with the glass that the water all round the south end was thick with boats.
“‘They’re huntin’ for me,’ said she. ‘I guess poppa is in one of them boats,’ she says, ‘and won’t he be surprised when he finds I ain’t drowned? Your fortunes is made,’ says she, ‘for pop owns the ha’f of Minneapolis, and I guess he’ll give you ha’f of what he owns. You wait till you hear the yarn I’ll sling him——. Here they come!’
“They sighted us, and ha’f a hundred gasoline launches were nose end on for us, fanning out like a regatta, and in the leadin’ launch sat an old chap with white whiskers and a fifty-dollar panama on his head.
“‘That’s pop,’ she said.
“He were, and we hove to, whiles he came climbin’ on board like a turtle, one leg over the bulwarks and one arm round her neck, and then up went a hallelujah chorus from that crowd of craft round us, women wavin’ handkerchiefs and blowin’ their noses and blubbing nuff to make a camel sick.
“Then he and she went down to the cabin to make explanashions, and the parties in the boats tried to board us, till I threatened them with a boat hook and made them fend off while we got way on the Heart.
“When we were near into Avalon Bay, the Culps came on deck, and old man Culpepper took off his hat to me and Blood and made us a speech, sayin’ we’d lifted weights off his heart, and all such.
“‘Never mind,’ says Blood, ‘we haven’t done nuthin’. Put it all down to Providence,’ says he, ‘for if we saved her she saved us, and I ain’t used to bein’ thanked for nothin’.’
“But, Lord bless you, you might as well have tried to stop the Mississippi in flood as that old party when he’d got his thank gates up. He said we were an honour to merchant seamen, which we weren’t, and the great American nation—and Blood black Irish and me Welsh, with an uncle that was a Dutchman—and then I’m blest if he didn’t burst into po’try about the flag that waves over us all.
“It began to look like ten thousand dollars in gold coin for each of us, and more than like it when we’d dropped anchor in the bay and he told us to come ashore with him.
“Now I don’t know how longshore folk[1] have such sharp noses, but I do know them longshore boatmen on Avalon Beach seemed to know by the cut of the Heart and us we weren’t no simple seamen, with flags wavin’ over us and an honour to our what-you-call-it navy. They sniffed at us by some instinct or other, more special a wall-eyed kangaroo by the name of Aransas Jim, I think it were.
“Said nothin’ much, seein’ old man Culp was disembarkin’ us with an arm round each of our necks, so to say, but we took up their looks, and I’d to lay pretty strong holts on myself or I’d have biffed the blighters, lot o’ screw-neck mongrels, so’s their mothers wouldn’t have known which was which when sortin’ the manglin’.
“Now you listen to what happened then. Culp he took us up to a big hotel, where niggers served us with a feed in a room by ourselves. Champagne they give us, and all sorts of truck I’d never set eyes on before. And when it was over in came old man Culp with an envelope in his hand, which he gives to Blood.
“‘Just a few dollars for you and your mate,’ says he, ‘and you have my regards always.’
“The girl she came in and near kissed us, and off we went with big cigars in our mouths, feelin’ we were made men. The longshoremen were still on the beach scratchin’ the fleas off themselves and talkin’, I expec’, of the next millionaire they could rob by pretendin’ to be fishermen. Blood he picked up a pebble on the shingle and put it in his pocket, and when the longshore louts saw us comin’, smokin’ cigars and walkin’ arrogant, they made sure old man Culp had given us ha’f a million, and they looked it. All them noses of theirs weren’t turned up just now. They saw dollars comin’ and hoped for a share.
“‘Here, you chap,’ says Blood to Aransas Jim or Aransas Joe or whichever was his name, ‘help us to push our boat off and I’ll make it worth your while.’ The chap does, and wades after us, when we were afloat, for his dues. He held out his hand, and Blood he clapped the pebble into it, and off we shot with them helaballoing after us.
“Much we cared.
“On board the Heart, we tumbled down to the cabin to ’xamine our luck. Blood takes the envelope from his pocket, slits it open, and takes out a little check that was in it. How much for, d’you think? Five thousand dollars? No, it weren’t.
“Twenty dollars was writ on it. Twenty dollars, no cents.
“‘Say, Blood,’ says I to him, ‘you’ve got the pebble this time.’
“Blood he folded the check up and lit his pipe with it. Then he says, talkin’ in a satisfied manner ’s if to himself:
“‘It were worth it.’
“That’s all he said. And, comin’ to think of it now meself, it were.”