At last his chief, Merritt, said to him one night, with just the slightest shade of grievance in his voice, “’Pears to me you’re mighty busy these days, too busy to have a yam even. What ’yer doin’ anyhow with yer nose in a book all the time?”
For a moment the idea of the extremely taciturn Merritt wanting a yam almost made C. B. smile, but he suppressed the impulse and replied apologetically—
“I’m afraid I’ve been a bit selfish of late, but the fact is I’ve just found my way into a new world. I never knew how much there was in books before, and I forget everything else but the people that seem to be all alive before me, doing and saying things that I never dreamed of before. You see, I’ve missed very much the long talks and pleasant society that I’ve been used to all my life till I came here, for no one here seemed to care about anything that I like, and I can’t listen to their yarns at all: they’re all dreadful to me because of the bad language.”
Merritt looked at him keenly for the space of a minute, and then said as if thinking aloud, “I wonder what Pepe thinks of ye now since you saved his life. Don’t seem overnabove thankful ’s far ’s I can see. Spoke t’ him yet?”
C. B. flushed dark red as he replied, “Yes, I asked him the next day if I could do anything for him, and I found him as bitter as ever. He knows all about the business—how, I don’t know, but he does—and he seems to hate me worse for it. What it means I don’t understand, but I can’t alter it, and so I must let him go his own way.”
“I know,” grunted Merritt; “he’s a bad man, eaten up with jealousy of you. If you’d a ben a no ’count greenie that couldn’t keep your end up, an’ had to knuckle down to him in the half deck same as his other cronies do or did, you wouldn’t had no trouble with him. I got no use for men like him except to make oil, for he’s a pretty fair average whaleman—I’m not denying that.
“But what I like about you is that you’re not only a good whaleman, but you’re a good man. An’ now I want to tell you somethin’. I ben achin’ to get it off my chest for a long time past, ever since I took such a shine t’ ye at the first lowerin’. I told yer I had a chum once, didn’t I? Yes; well, I picked him up on the beach at the Bay of Islands. He’d swum ashore from the Guidin’ Light, a whaleship that had the reputation in her day of being the worst of all the bad ships that ever went a spoutin’. He was pretty desperate, but he knew enough not to try and skip while she was anchor: the standin’ twenty dollars reward would ha’ put every Maori in the neighbourhood on his track in a fluke-twist. So he waited till she was under weigh, and then when she was well off the heads he slipped down a rope and put for shore.
“Well, he’d fetched round to Russell, an’, mind I’m telling ye, they were pretty hard crowd there those days, so if a poor devil had no money he stood a gaudy chance of starvin’. Well, I was in a good homely ship, the Mornin’ Star, the skipper’s boat-header at that, an’ we come into the Bay of Islan’s to wood and water up an’ give liberty as usual. I come ashore with the skipper as soon as the kellick was down, and while he was up at the store I strolled along the beach an’ I finds Dick, the chap I’m talkin’ about, lyin’ on the sand half dead. I gives him a kick just to let him know he was liable for a sunstroke, and he gets up halfway and looks at me just like a dog I had once. That was enough for me. I gets him up, takes him to old Rowsell’s store, and fills him full of good grub an’ beer, and then when the skipper come along I puts in a word fer him an’ he’s taken aboard.
“We happened to be a couple of hands short, so the old man wasn’t sorry to have him, and I—well, I don’t know what it could ha’ been, but I got so fond of that fellow you can’t think. When he got into decent rig, and had two or three square meals, he was a different chap, quite handsome and a regular Jim Dandy. He was a white man too, some sort of an Englishman I guess, an’ he could talk like a hull box o’ books. We was only about nine months out from New Bedford when he came aboard, an’ before another three months he’d so twisted himself around me, one that had never had a pet before since I first knew myself, that I’d ha’ died for him. He was after oarsman in my boat an’ smart too, but, though I wouldn’t see it then, he was a coward an’ a sneak of the worst kind. I was in hot water the whole time takin’ his part, for he was always in rows, an’ used to run to me like a kid. I think I liked him all the more for that, an’ beside a row has always ben a sort o’ tonic to me.
“Looking back now I can’t understand the hold that fellow had over me, for he was always playing some dirty trick or another, not on me, but other fellows, an’ I had to get him out o’ them. An’ if ever I went for him real angry, he could always salve me over in a few minutes with that soapy tongue of his. At last I found him out. We went into Callao, an’ it was the days when shanghaiing was carried on wuss there than anywhere else. No one was allowed out of the ship except on such business as takin’ the skipper ashore, an’ then we was forbid to leave the boat. But he had ben there before, an’ knew Buck Murphy, the big shanghai boss, who used ter come down on the quay an’ yam with him very quiet. One afternoon while we was waitin’ for the skipper, Dick persuades me to come up to a house not above two ships’ lengths away an’ have a drink with him, bringin’ two hands out of the boat with us and leavin’ a Kanaka in charge. It was only to be for a minute.