Then we backed out of that assembly. Seemed to me it was a proposition a man might as well dodge. Only, I recollect how little Kiyi looked like a wisp of dry hay, and Sadler uncommon large, with his fists on the stone floor on either side, and his head hung over Kiyi, and how the yellow men squatted and said nothing.
Maybe Sadler is studying the “Kiyi Proposition,” still, to find out how the three hundred bronze Buddhas can give three hundred cheerful agreements to the statement that “All things are one,” when, on the contrary, some things have Kiyi luck and some don't. I don't know. The rights and wrongs of this world always seemed to me pretty complicated. There was Julius R. that was slippery and ambitious; there was Sadler that had a worm in his soul; there was Clyde that kept one conscience for argument, and another for the trade; there was Tommy Buckingham who was getting older and troubled about the intentions of things. And yet again there was folks like Kreps and Stevey Todd, say, mild and warm people, and a bit simple, each in his way, and yet they always kept themselves entertained somehow. “All things are one,” are they? I couldn't see it either, no more than Sadler. For this is the Kiyi Proposition. You says: “Here's a bad job. Who did it?” I says: “I don't know.” You says: “Well, who pays for it?” I says: “Ain't any doubt about that. It's Kiyi.”
It was quite a parcel of years I sailed the Pacific, ten years, or thereabout, altogether. The time I saw Sadler behind the Green Dragons was my last cruise there. I says to myself:
“Tommy, you ain't a 'bonny sailor boy' any more. Why don't you sail your own ship? Haven't you got a bank in the West Indies? Why don't you liquidate on Clyde? Why don't you quit your foolishness?” and when Stevey Todd and I got back to San Francisco, I left Shan Brothers and the Good Sister for good, and we came east by railroad to New Orleans.
CHAPTER XI. — THE VOYAGE OF THE “VOODOO”.—NARRATIVE CONTINUED.
Monson was the man's name that I came to deal with in New Orleans. He had a schooner named the Voodoo, a coast cruiser that never went further to sea than the Windwards. There was another white man on the crew, but the rest were negroes. Monson was billed already for Martinique and Trinidad, and that was why I dealt with him, and got him cheap for a short trip beyond Tobago.
Stevey Todd set out for the north to find some relatives he thought he had, but found none to his mind, and concluded he was an orphan. But he found a restaurant to his mind in South Street in New York, and there he settled himself and waited for me to come along. It's a place where seamen generally turn up sooner or later, and I told him I would come there. Monson and I set sail the third of September in the year '85.
Now, Monson was a man of great size and long yellowish hair and beard, and shy, innocent-looking eyes. It always gave me a start to look up six feet of legs and chest, and end in an expression of face which seemed about to remark that the world was a strange place, and might be wicked. The other white man and the negroes were a bad lot, and given to viciousness, but Monson ruled them with a heavy fist. He hadn't been three hours away from the river before he was banging a negro with a board, the others looking on and grinning. He was spanking him, in a way. He ran to me with tears in his eyes. “I'll throw that nigger overboard!” he shouted, dancing about, and shortly after he appeared to have forgotten the matter. I thought I should get along with him, but I thought I'd have to keep cool and calm in dealing with him. He was such a man as it seemed better to be acquainted with in a big open space where there was room for him to explode. He was apt to be either gay or outrageous, and that about any little thing. He was simple and furious and very hearty, and that all made him good company. The negroes looked murderous, and the other white man shifty and dirty, but he was a competent seaman.