When they were across the bar the Captain ordered the cook to give the men their food.
“Git for'rd, sonny,” he added, fixing Wilbur with his eye. “Git for'rd, this is tawble dee hote, savvy?”
Wilbur crawled forward on the reeling deck, holding on now to a mast, now to a belaying-pin, now to a stay, watching his chance and going on between the inebriated plunges of the schooner.
He descended the fo'c'sle hatch. The Chinamen were already there, sitting on the edges of their bunks. On the floor, at the bottom of the ladder, punk-sticks were burning in an old tomato-can.
Charlie brought in supper—stewed beef and pork in a bread-pan and a wooden kit—and the Chinamen ate in silence with their sheath-knives and from tin plates. A liquid that bore a distant resemblance to coffee was served. Wilbur learned afterward to know the stuff as Black Jack, and to be aware that it was made from bud barley and was sweetened with molasses. A single reeking lamp swung with the swinging of the schooner over the centre of the group, and long after Wilbur could remember the grisly scene—the punk-sticks, the bread-pan full of hunks of meat, the horrid close and oily smell, and the circle of silent, preoccupied Chinese, each sitting on his bunk-ledge, devouring stewed pork and holding his pannikin of Black Jack between his feet against the rolling of the boat.
Wilbur looked fearfully at the mess in the pan, recalling the chocolate and stuffed olives that had been his last luncheon.
“Well,” he muttered, clinching his teeth, “I've got to come to it sooner or later.” His penknife was in the pocket of his waist-coat, underneath his oilskin coat. He opened the big blade, harpooned a cube of pork, and deposited it on his tin plate. He ate it slowly and with savage determination. But the Black Jack was more than he could bear.
“I'm not hungry enough for that just now,” he told himself. “Say, Jim,” he said, turning to the Chinaman next him on the bunk-ledge, “say, what kind of boat is this? What you do—where you go?”
The other moved away impatiently.
“No sabe, no sabe,” he answered, shaking his head and frowning. Throughout the whole of that strange meal these were the only words spoken.