“JOHN DINWIDDIE DRISCOLL–THE MISSOURIAN”
“His cheeks were smooth, but they were tight and hard and
brown from the weathering of sun and blizzard”
39Various items on the Luz struck the trooper as amusing. There was the incongruity of his seven-hundred-dollar cabin, the secession of his stomach from the tranquillity of the federal body organic, and finally, this running away from somebody. But he quickly perceived that the last was serious enough. The skipper lowered his glasses, and shook his perky head a number of times. “Who said life was all beer and skittles?” he demanded defiantly, and glared at Driscoll as though he had. But getting no answer, he seemed mollified, as though this proved that the man who had said it was an imbecile. Murguía, by the way, had come to hate no truth more soulfully than the palpable shortcoming of life in the matter of beer and skittles. And now it was borne in upon him again, for the skipper announced, definitely and with an oath, that they’d have to begin throwing the cargo overboard.
Poor Don Anastasio behaved like a man insane. He wrung his hands. He protested stoutly, then incoherently. He whined. He glared vengefully at the dread sail on the horizon, and then he shrank from it, as from a flaming sword. And as it grew larger, his eyeballs rounded and dried into smaller discs. But at once he would remember his darling cotton that must go to the waves, and the beady eyes swam again in moisture, like greenish peas in a sickly broth. Avarice and terror in discord played on the creature as the gale through the whimpering cordage.
“No ’elp for it, sir,” said the skipper, bridling like a bantam. “Didn’t I try to save my cargo, off Savannah, and didn’t I 40 lose my sloop to boot? Didn’t I now, sir?–Poor old girl, mebby she’s our chaser out ’ere this very minute.”
“Try–try more turpentine,” said Murguía weakly.
“Yes, or salt bacon, sir, or cognac, or the woodwork, or any blarsted thing I see fit, sir!” The little skipper hit out each item with a step downward to the deck, and five minutes later Murguía groaned, for bale after bale came tumbling out of the hold. Then over they began to go, the first, the second, the third, and another, and another, and after each went a moan from Anastasio. He leaned through the window to see one tossing in the waves, then suffered a next pang to see the next follow after. It was an excruciating cumulus of grief. The trooper regarded him quizzically. Destruction of merely worldly goods had become routine for him. He returned to his contemplation of the two funnels.
The skipper came back, dripping with pray. “The wind’s changin’,” he said, “and that’ll beat down the sea some.”
“Reckon they’ll get us?” Driscoll asked.
Murguía took the query as an aggravation of woe, and he turned wrathfully on the trooper. “Don’t you see we’re busy?”