I'd calculated on the bags staying under my bunk till we came to New Orleans, thinking to pass off the two that were doctored on Monson in a hurry, and then to get out of reach hot-footed. I calculated now that, as soon as he found his bags had been doctored, he'd mention it candid and loud, and meanwhile I might as well get my gun in working shape for trouble. Maybe I might make a bargain with the shifty-looking white man, and organize an argument as to which should be dropped overboard, Monson or me. But I hadn't got to the point, when Monson came lounging up the gangway, still acting apologetic. I judged maybe he'd stowed away his bags without digging into them. I says:
“Let bygones be, Captain,” and he says, “That's right! It's that way.”
It was a remarkable thing how friendly and kind we got, hoping there was no hard feeling.
That day the wind rose to a gale and the sea went wild. It kept Monson on deck night and day for four days. It kept us in a boiling pot, and on the fifth we entered the mouth of the Mississippi. Then Monson went down to sleep, and he hadn't waked when we anchored off the levee at New Orleans, which was six o'clock in the evening. By eight I was on a train going north, with a new trunk in the baggage car.
I've never happened to see Monson since. I guess he was contented. When I opened the bags, one of them was mainly full of eighth-inch sections of lead pipe.
Maybe he'd heard me go down to the hold in the first place, but probably he found first his lead pipe at the time he left me on the deck, and then he'd changed things a bit more to his ideas of what was right, bearing in mind the natural wickedness of the negroes. He didn't appear to have noticed that some of the stuff was stowed in my leather satchel, but he got nearly a third of Clyde's savings.
I came to New York and I walked along South Street, thinking of the day, twenty years back, when I first walked along South Street, cocky and green. Then I came toward the slip where the Hebe Maitland had lain that day, and where I'd looked at her and said, “Now, there's a ship.” I thought of Clyde and that odd talk in the cabin of the Hebe Maitland, where all my deep-sea goings began. And I looked up and I says, “Now, there's a ship!”
The prow of her came up to the sidewalk, and the bowsprit stretched over the street, pointing at a house on the other side that was a restaurant by its sign. The Annalee was the ship's name in gilt lettering, and the clean lines of her and her way of lying in the water would give you joy. I walked alongside her on the dock, and I went across the street to look at her that way, and stood in front of the restaurant. And there I sniffed around a bit, and there I smelt hot waffles. “It's a tasty smell,” I says. “Smells like Stevey Todd,” and I went into the restaurant, and there was Stevey Todd. “Stevey,” I says, “if you'll give me some hot waffles and honey, I'll buy that ship out there if she's buyable.” And Stevey Todd gave me hot waffles and honey, and I bought the Annalee.
It might be thought, and some would say so, that the trouble I had with Monson came of Clyde's money being unclean, as not got honestly, but through dodging South American customs, and I'm free to admit it was sticky when I dug it up. But it's never acted other than respectable since that time. I never agreed with Clyde in argument, more than did Stevey Todd. A man falls in with various folks by sea and land, and he finds many that are made up of ill-fitting parts. Clyde was an odd man and a bold one, though old and dry. Monson I took for a loud and joyful one, simple and open in his mind, and violent in his habits and free of language, and yet he acted to me both secret and moderate, and I guess I mistook him.
Stevey Todd and I went to sea again in the coasting trade, and mainly to the south, and saw the coasts and parts we knew in the Hebe Maitland days. So I passed several years more.