He dropped out of sight. Afterward his name went from the letter heads of “Sadler and Shan.” They read, “Shan Brothers, Saleratus, Cal. Fu Shan—Lum Shan.”
He was a singular man was Sadler. He held the opinion that this life was an idea that occurred to somebody, who was tired of it and would like to get it off his mind. I took him for one that had got too much conscience, or too much restlessness, one of the two, and between them they gave him dyspepsia of the soul. Sometimes that dyspepsia took him bad, and when he had one of those spells he'd light out into poetry scandalous. Some folks are built that way, some not. J. R. Craney, for instance, he was a romantic man, and gifted according to his own line, and had airy notions ahead of him that he pretty near caught up to; but as to metres, he couldn't tell metres from cord-wood. Yet the first time I saw him again, after leaving him at Corazon, he heaved some at me, but he didn't know it was poetry. It was some years later. I sailed the Good Sister quite a time, and did pretty well by her.
CHAPTER IX. — KING JULIUS.
It was back in San Francisco and several years after, and I was master of the Good Sister still, but not feeling agreeable at the time, because Fu Shan and the agent at 'Frisco kept me sitting around collecting barnacles. They didn't seem to know what they wanted me to do with her. I guess the business of Sadler and Shan didn't prosper well for a while after Sadler left, on account of sportive Caucasians.
I was leaning over the rail one day, looking across the wharf, and I saw J. R. Craney come strolling down with one hand in his pocket and the other pulling a chin beard. He hadn't changed so much, except that he looked older and had a chin beard and wore a long black coat and plush vest. He looked at the Good Sister, and he looked at me, and neither of us said anything for a long time, and his business eye was absent-minded and calm, and the blind one pale and dead-looking. Then I says:
“Why don't you get a glass eye, Craney?” and he says, “I wished you'd call me J. R. Phipp. What you doing with that there ship?” which was a promising rhyme, but he didn't know he'd done it. I judged his family name had been collecting barnacles, till it wasn't worth cleaning maybe, or maybe he was a fugitive or exile from Corazon, or maybe he'd speculated in matrimony, and was fleeing from hot water, or maybe kettles, or maybe he'd assassinated his great aunt's second cousin's husband, which was no business of mine, any of it.
“Look here,” I says, not feeling agreeable. “Here's my programme. You go up to 22 Market Street, and ask the agent. Then he'll say he don't know. Then you'll tell him he's a three-cornered idiot, because you'll admire the truth, and come back and we'll have a drink.”
“All right,” he says, absent-minded and calm, and went off up Market Street. By-and-by the agent came down with Craney floating behind.