XXVIII—SORTING THE CHECKER-BOARD CREW
MR. KEEDY evidently desired to impress on me that his hankering to make sure of my company during the night was inspired by pure and sudden friendship.
When he came to awaken me his mustache was lifted so high in an amiable smile that the twin sooty wings seemed to stick out of his nostrils. He hoped I was getting to like the West and the folks there. I returned that up to date I had not been homesick—a conservative statement, and true; I had had no time to be homesick.
He paid for my breakfast; further evidence of friendship. Then he called a cab and took me and my belongings down to the berth of the Zizania. The old steamer was docked in a place which, so he told me, was the China Basin, and we wormed our way through alleys and junk-piles and got aboard.
We hadn’t hurried that morning, and the time was well into the middle of the forenoon.
Captain Holstrom was stubbing to and fro on the main deck. He wore a fine air of proprietorship, and welcomed us with a flourish of his hand. He patted his breast, and the crackle of paper sounded.
“Money paid,” he reported. “Them’s the dockyments. Come up into the wheel-house. There’s the place to talk the rest of our business.”
Marcena Keedy did most of the talking that forenoon. He loved to lollop the words “three million dollars’ worth of gold ingots” in his mouth. He had wormed out of me at breakfast-time admissions enough so that he knew I was favorably disposed. He proposed to try to take advantage of me and I saw his game and resolved to do some bluffing on my own part. He put a lot of verbal plush around his propositions, but I could feel the hard nub just the same.
After all that conversational fluff he wanted me to sign a contract to take day’s wages for the job—double pay for the days when I recovered any gold.
I turned that wages suggestion down, flat and final. You would have thought I had money plastered all over me.
“It has got to be on shares,” I said.
“You doggone bean-eater, have you got the nerve to talk shares on an investment of a diving-suit against our steamer and our information about the Golden Gate?” stuttered Keedy.
“That isn’t the way the thing shakes down, Mr. Keedy. You have made it plain to me that you’re gambling in this—it isn’t a straight deal.”
He swore at me, but I didn’t mean the thing the way he cook it.
“If you were going down there,” I said, “with a big expedition, and proposed to build coffer-dams, and all that, and go at it scientific fashion, I would hire as a regular diver. I couldn’t demand anything else. But I’m not merely investing a diving-suit, as it stands. I’m playing a lone hand in the diving part of the scheme; I’m investing all my experience, all my skill; I’m investing life itself, for, as near as I can find out from what you say, it will be up to me to know how to get that gold, and then go get it. I want one-third of the velvet after all bills are paid, and I want a contract drawn before I start.”
Perhaps I wouldn’t have jabbed the thing so hard at Holstrom, but I did not propose to be the monkey for Keedy. I looked innocent and suggested that they’d better talk with another diver. Keedy flapped like a speared fish for half an hour—and then he came over. Captain Holstrom walked up and down with his hands behind his back during all the talk. I judged from his general air that he was viewing the whole thing as more or less of a dream, and did not want to get too wide awake about it from fear of losing courage and interest.
“There’s one thing about it—you’ll work harder if you have a lay,” said Keedy.
That’s usually the way with the grafter or loafer—he’s afraid the other fellow won’t work hard enough.
Frankly, I did not have any very brilliant hopes in regard to that expedition, for if old Ingot Ike had told the truth about the failure of the underwriters, I figured that the diving proposition must be a tough one. Keedy was hot about it, for he did not know enough about such work to judge chances; as for Captain Holstrom, ever since he had won this Zizania elephant he was in a state of mind which made him ready for any project, even to putting wings on her and starting for the moon.
I didn’t pay much attention to the outfitting, except to make a list of such equipment in the way of lines, hose, air-pumps, and such matters as I needed for my part of the work. Keedy and Holstrom turned around and borrowed money on the security of the steamer, this debt to stand against our partnership. Keedy seemed so sure of that gold that he did not stop to ask me how I was fixed to stand my share in case of utter failure. Therefore, with plenty of funds to work with, we were ready for sea in short order, and to sea we went, swashing out past Point Lobos, the sea-lions hooting at us as we passed their rocks, and started down the coast.
I leaned over the rail and watched the shore melt in the hazy distance, and did not blame the sea-lions for their derogatory remarks. I did not know much about steamers, but I realized that the Zizania, condemned Government tub, wasn’t anything to brag about. She was a real old ocean-walloper, a broad-beamed duck of a thing, thrashing her warped paddles, her rusty walking-beam groaning, her patched boilers wheezing—a weather-worn, gray, and grunting ocean tramp.
Like all craft of the buoy-boat model, she had much deck room forward of the bridge, and here were nested, as dories are nested on a Gloucester trawler, four forty-foot lighters. Plenty of anchors accompanied these scows—huge, rusty second-hand anchors which Captain Holstrom had bought from junkmen. The Zizania was naturally slow, and this load forward now made a snail of her. Hawsers and chains encumbered her deck space everywhere—age-blackened ropes, and iron from which rust scales were dropping. Captain Holstrom had ransacked the wharfs for hand-me-downs. Even the men whom he had shipped looked as though he had secured them at a rummage sale.
“It’s a checker-board crew,” the captain had informed me as they straggled on board. “Half black men, and half white. That’s the only way to sort men when you’re bound on a long cruise. Keep the blacks mad with the whites, and vitchy vici, and you’ve always got half the crew on your side in case of trouble. There can’t any general mutinies start when you’ve got a checker-board crew. Number-one Jones has the white men’s watch; Number-two Jones has the black watch; and as soon as we get this stuff stored and the rest moused on deck I’ll have Number-one sick his bunch on to Number-two’s, and let ’em fight long enough to get good and mad. Then they’ll sort of neutralize each other for the rest of the cruise.”
That system of gentle diplomacy was new to me, and I loafed around and kept an eye out, for I have always had a hearty relish for an honest scrap. Furthermore, in explaining to me later, the captain had stated that I was expected to jump in with himself and the mates and break up the fight with clubs when it had progressed far enough.
“You see, we want to leave both sides mad and neither side licked,” said Captain Holstrom. “It will be like cooking in a hot oven. The thing mustn’t get scorched on. I know how to handle it. Jump in when I say the word.”
He had given me these instructions leaning over the sill of the pilot-house window soon after we had got away from the dock.
“Not that the doodah will start for some time yet,” he added. “But I’m a great hand to have things all ready and understood. You can be looking up your club between now and to-morrow.”
I glanced into the wheel-house as I walked on. Marcena Keedy lounged in solitary state on the transom seat at the rear, puffing away at a cigar.
“You’re always welcome in here,” he called. But I had no appetite for the companionship of Mr. Keedy.
It occurred to me, with just a bit of relish in the thought, that Miss Kama Holstrom probably was of similar mind in regard to Mr. Keedy. She had taken a seat in the wheel-house when she had come on board that day. Now she was in her state-room, which was the cabin on the upper deck near the bridge, planned as the captain’s apartment. Either she had pre-empted it or Captain Holstrom had assigned her to it. I had seen that the Joneses—Number-one and Number-two—were in berths near my quarters below, and it was plain that partners Holstrom and Keedy had quartered themselves in the mates’ room on the upper deck.
Miss Holstrom’s door was on the hook, and I caught a glimpse of her more by accident than by design. She nodded without speaking, and I raised my cap and went below to the main deck.
I got there in season to see the lighting of a fuse which exploded Captain Holstrom’s “checker-board” plans ahead of scheduled time.
The first man I met on the deck was Ingot Ike. He was gnawing at a hunk of gingerbread with his snags of teeth, and was grinning amiably.
“This is going to be a comfortable trip for me,” he confided. “I find I know the cook. It’s a lucky thing if you stand in well with the cook. Him and me was shipmates together on a Vancouver packet. He’s the Snohomish Glutton.” He opened his eyes and looked at me as though he expected that I would show astonishment. “I said—he’s the Snohomish Glutton,” he repeated, more loudly.
But my face remained blank.
“You don’t mean to tell me that you never heard of the Snohomish Glutton!”
I shook my head.
“You nev—You don’t—You ain’t ever—” Ike took another drag at the gingerbread, and swallowed hard. “Why, the Snohomish Glutton is known—the Snohomish Glutton, he has eat at one setting—Oh, shucks, if you ain’t ever heard, what’s the use!” He started on, but whirled and came back and shook the hunk of gingerbread under my nose. “I suppose if it had been writ and printed in a book you Eastern perfessers would know all about it. Thank God, in the West we know a lot of things that ain’t printed in a book!” Then he stumped away.
Well, I concluded I would stroll along to the galley and take a look at the cook, and be able thereafter to say that at least I had seen this notable of the Pacific.
There was a spacious galley on the old Zizania. I looked in through an open window which commanded the port alley. A fat man was chopping kindlings. He was a thing of rolls and folds of fat—a gob of a man. There were narrow slits near his nose marking his eyes, but his eyes seemed to be shut by fat. A little, round, pursed-up mouth was in the middle of his face, and from this came wheezy grunts as he chopped.
While I was watching him, an object bounded into the galley door and leapfrogged him, darting past me through the window. Before I could turn my head the thing, whatever it was, had disappeared around the corner of the alley.
The cook straightened up, and by an effort opened his eyes enough to stare at me. I expected a deep, gruff voice, But he had a real tin-whistle pipe.
“What did you throw at me?”
“I didn’t throw anything. Something rushed through the galley—I didn’t see what.”
“Things don’t hit a man unless they are thrown,” he insisted. “I may look funny, but I ain’t funny. I don’t relish having things thrown at me.”
He gave up trying to hold his eyes open, and went on chopping.
I was getting my breath ready to protest when the thing came through once more. It was a monkey. But it missed the cook’s back, for the broad shoulders heaved as the ax came up. The monkey slipped, slid across the chopping-block, and down came the ax. The animal squealed horribly, flung itself past me through the open window, and fled. It went like a shot, but I got the fleeting impression that its tail was gone.
“What did you do then?” asked the cook, squinting at me suspiciously.
“I tell you I haven’t done anything at all. That was a monkey. He came from somewhere. He ran through here. I think you have cut off his tail.” He peered about. “There ain’t no tail here,” he whined. “There couldn’t have been any monkey here. This ain’t any place for a monkey to be. There may be monkey business here—and you’re getting it up. You go away from here!”
I’m afraid the Snohomish Glutton and I would have had trouble then and there, but just then a man came rushing into the door of the galley. He had the monkey under his arm, upside down, and he was pointing quivering finger at a bleeding stump of a tail. I couldn’t understand what he was bawling. I found out afterward that he was a Russian Finn and could command only a few English words even when he was perfectly calm. He was not calm now. I never heard a man rave so. The monkey joined him with hideous screams.
The cook listened for a time, puckering his fat forehead. When he found that the man was talking a foreign language he upraised his ax and swished it around in circles near the Finn’s head. A cook in his galley is lord supreme in his domain, and the sailor probably knew as much. The ax was menacing; it was coming very close, and the Finn already had one exhibit of that cook’s ferocity under his arm. He allowed himself to be backed out, and the cook slammed and barred the door.
“What did he say?” he asked me, in his piping tones.
“I don’t know what he said.”
“I reckoned it was some kind of Dago swearing, and I don’t allow a man to swear at me. Most likely it was swearing.”
“You cut off that monkey’s tail,” I insisted. “I thought so when he squealed. Now I’m sure of it.”
He went to peering around again, whining to himself like a fat porcupine who is being badgered.
“There ain’t no tail here. I didn’t cut off his tail. I didn’t see him so that I could cut off his tail.” He started toward the window with a look as if he proposed to resent my suggestion that he had been cutting off monkeys’ tails. I passed on. I figured that I might as well try to argue with a Sussex shote as with that shapeless mass of fat. I would have saved a nasty bit of trouble for myself, perhaps, if I had remained and argued. And my trouble later that day—and that monkey with the missing tail—was the seed from which—But that’s getting ahead of the story.
===There were really three messes aboard the Zizania. There was the captain’s mess aft, with special dishes, which was entirely distinct from the crew’s food. On the port side was set out the food for the black half of the checker-board crew, and on the starboard side the white half received their provender.
We were at dinner in the captain’s mess. It was our first meal at sea—our first meeting at table.
When Miss Kama came in we were just sitting down. The captain was with us, having left one of the Joneses at the wheel. Keedy lifted his paint-streak mustache against his nose in a smile, and pulled out a chair beside his own.
“Sit here, my dear,” he said to the girl.
She walked past the chair, came around to my side of the table, and sat down. She did not toss her chin or sniff, as some girls would have done, to show dislike of Keedy. She was a cool proposition, that girl was.
That left the chair beside Keedy the only vacant one at the table. A plump little man had been standing off at one side, waiting for the last choice of seats. He looked rather bashful, and his round face was shining with soap, and his hair was plastered down at the sides and combed up in front in a fancy cowlick. You could see that he realized that he did not exactly belong at that table. Therefore he had scrubbed himself up for the occasion.
Captain Rask Holstrom did not trouble himself with any of the finer graces of society. He gruffly introduced the little man as Romeo Shank, chief engineer, and told Shank to slide into the chair beside Keedy. “We ain’t drawing any fine lines between ship’s officers on this trip,” stated the captain, bluntly, for the benefit of all concerned. “Get to table while the grub is hot, and get it into you—that’s the motto. Business before style is the idea aboard this boat.”
He began to shovel food industriously with his knife.
Keedy hitched away from his table-mate a few inches, and looked across at me, and deepened the wrinkle between his eyes. But he could not spoil my appetite. Something else which happened the next moment pretty nigh did it, though.
A black man leaped into the saloon through the forward door by which the waiter came and went. Two other black men were at his back. They stopped just inside the door and dragged off their knitted caps. They had the appearance of being a delegation, and an excited delegation at that. It was plain to be seen that they had come rushing aft without stopping to figure on consequences. The leader carried something in front of him, and it was looped over the blade of a wicked-looking-knife. He held the object at arm’s length toward Captain Holstrom, pointed at it with the vibrating finger of his left hand, and yelped shrilly like a dog. He was too excited and too furious to put his complaint into words.
“What have ye got there—a snake?” yelped the captain, gulping down a mouthful, and wrinkling his nose like one who had suddenly come upon something disgusting.
“We find him in our kittle—we find him dere. Yassuh! We eat ’most to de bottom, and den we find him,” raved the negro.
Captain Holstrom snapped up from the table and strode over and squinted at the object which dangled from the knife blade.
“Dey cook for us in our kittle a monkey tail—dem white men cook dat for us, and laugh,” squealed the negro.
“And you think that some of those cheap white jokers put it in, eh?”
“Dey laugh all de time since when we pull him out. Yassuh, it’s a lot of fun for dem men.”
Captain Holstrom rubbed his nose thoughtfully, and stared down on the thing which had savored the black men’s dinner.
A happy thought seemed to strike him. He turned his head and winked at me.
“Take that thing out and whack it across the face of the white man you find laughing the hardest,” he commanded. “When he gets up to hit you pitch in.” He came lurching back to the table. “I didn’t intend to have the row till to-morrow,” he informed us, in an undertone. “But this is too good a chance to miss. We’ll get that checker-board crew on a war basis where they’ll stay put.”
The black men were lingering at the door, trying to get the captain’s meaning through their wool.
“Excuse me, Captain Holstrom,” I said, “but I think I know how this thing happened—and I feel it’s too bad to have innocent men beaten up.” I started to tell what I had seen, but he swore and broke in on me.
“Don’t butt into something that’s none of your business!” he snapped. He roared at the men: “Go do what I told you to do. Go punch the jokes out of that white gang or you’ll have no peace the rest of the voyage. Get out of here before I kick you out!”
It sounded like a very pretty row, judging it from where we were sitting in the saloon. It began in a very few minutes.
“Mr. Number-two Jones,” directed the captain, “go out there and oversee, and let me know when it’s time to break the clinch.” He loaded up his plate once more and kept on eating.
In about five minutes the mate returned. “I reckon it’s about time to knock ’em apart, Captain Holstrom,” he advised, shoving his head in at the door. “No great harm done, but they’re chewing each other bad, and that means expense for plaster and salve.”
If I hadn’t already lost my appetite for dinner, that grisly statement from Mr. Number-two Jones would have fixed me. I pushed back from the table.
“Come along, Sidney,” commanded the captain, kicking his chair out from under him. “Come settle your dinner. I’ll find a club for you.”
“I’ll obey the orders you gave me first, sir,” I called after him; “I won’t butt into something that’s none of my business.”
“Do you mean to say—” He had stopped and whirled on me.
I was sore because he had snapped me up so short before them all. I thought my explanation should have been considered.
“I mean to say that this fight was needless. You started it; now you can stop it.”
Mr. Keedy had been lighting a cigar, and it was plain that he did not intend to venture out into the mêlée.
“Look here—I tell you to come along,” yelled the captain. “It’s your duty.”
“Not on your life. I’m no ship’s officer! I’m along as a diver, not as a prize-fighter.”
Captain Holstrom looked ugly enough just then to tackle me as a preface to his job forward, but after cursing a moment he followed the mate. The riot was increasing, and it was plain that he was needed in the field.
Keedy leaned back and scowled at me through his cigar smoke.
“I didn’t know I had picked a quitter,” he sneered. “We’re tackling a job that needs sand. You ain’t a tin horn, are you?”
I didn’t answer and the back of my neck began to itch; I suppose if I had had hair there like a dog’s, the hair would have bristled. That itching in the neck when you’re mad is a survival of the old days when men had lots of hair on ’em.
I started to walk out of the saloon. Miss Kama was sitting there, looking at us, and her presence rather complicated matters for a man who was getting madder all the time, as I was. The other officers had chased along on the trail of Captain Holstrom.
“A second-hand diving-suit doesn’t stack up very high against what we’re putting into this thing—Captain Holstrom and myself,” he insisted. “There was something going in from your side in addition to the divingsuit, as I understand it. But a coward can’t invest grit.”
I stopped at the door and walked back toward him.
“A what?” I inquired.
“I said ‘a coward.’”
I slapped him—not hard.
“Now come up on deck with me, Mr. Keedy. You’ve got to come after that. There’s a lady here.”
“I’m going, gentlemen,” said the girl. “Don’t mind me.” She looked at Keedy and set her lips.
But Keedy jumped up and pulled a gun instead of putting up his fists.
“I don’t fight that way, Mr. Keedy,” I told him. “I have no gun. You’d better put yours up. You can’t afford to kill me—not yet!”
“No—and that’s the devil of it,” he blurted, after waiting a moment. “You have taken advantage of—of—”
“Of your hankering to get money into your paws,” I snapped back at him. “If you won’t come up and fight man fashion, I can’t make you, but if you ever call me a coward again on this trip I’ll put in a little evidence to the contrary with these.” I showed him my fists.
He rammed his revolver into his hip pocket and stamped out of the saloon.
I found the girl looking at me, wrinkling her forehead.
“I beg your pardon, Miss Holstrom,” I apologized. “But an itching to strike that man has been in my fingers for some time.”
“You ought to have waited until you had an excuse to strike harder than that, Mr. Sidney. I have known Marcena Keedy for a long time. A man like you with a big job ahead ought to be able to keep his eyes to the front all the time. Now you will have to keep looking behind you. I say—I have known Mr. Keedy for a long time.”
She went out.
I followed a few minutes afterward, and I went with my head down, and I was pretty thoughtful. Captain Holstrom and I bumped together in the doorway. He shoved past me and threw a club into a corner.
“I hope you can dive better’n you can fight,” he snorted.
Then he bawled to the waiter and demanded his piece of pie.