CHAPTER III
Captain Dinshaw Pulls a Long Bow
Below the customs house in Manila, close to the embankment of the Pasig River, on the Binondo side, opposite Fort Santiago and the Walled City, there is an ancient adobe building thatched with nipa. Its narrow door opens on the waterfront. High and narrow windows, devoid of glass or shell, are mere slits cut through the walls. Seen from the river, they have a striking resemblance to the gun-ports of an ancient battleship.
This place is known to sailormen the world over as "The Cuartel" and probably takes its name from the fact that it was a sort of block house used by the Spanish, to hold the approaches to the river. It stands at the head of a narrow little street which twists back into the native quarter of Tondo, and affords a haven for the mixed population which labours on the Mole—coolies, seamen, Chinese mess "boys," Tagalog cargadores, Lascar serangs, stalwart Sikh watchmen from the hemp and sugar godowns, squat Germans in white suits with pencils stuck in their sun helmets and wearing amber-coloured spectacles. British clerks with cargo lists, customs brokers, barking mates with blasphemous vocabularies, Scotch mechanics with parched throats, and all the underlings who have to do with ships and their freights.
Here they all gather for their tipple and gossip, easy at friendships and quick at quarrels. They babble of things which their employers would have kept secret, their tongues limbered by drams from square-shouldered greenish bottles, Dutch as dykes, which line the shelves behind the bar.
The Cuartel is owned by a black man from Batavia who calls himself Vanderzee. His mother was a Kling. He was berth-deck cook of a gunboat, by his own report, and "Jack o' the Dust" in a river monitor up "China way." That's all anybody seems to know about him, and it is suspected that he has his own reasons for keeping a clove hitch on his tongue about himself.
There are legends about fortunes which have been made out of bits of news gleaned from conversations before the bar of the Cuartel. The lampman of a Blackpool tramp remarked over his peg of rum that his skipper liked smoked eels for breakfast and was taking on a cargo of best steaming coal for Kamrangh Bay. This knowledge enabled Togo to destroy the Baltic fleet in the Tushima Straits. And a stevedore made something like a million dollars out of a cargo of canned salmon by hearing some cockney give his theory about how the blockade could be run to Port Arthur.
Vanderzee made some of his profits out of a little room at the far end of his bar, where a man could sit hidden by tawny tapa curtains rove on a bamboo pole, and have privacy while he heard what was being said at the bar. The room had a marble-topped table and two chairs.
Two men were inside of an afternoon, playing at cribbage. One was short and heavily built, with powerful shoulders threatening to break through the seams of his white drill jacket. His black hair was clipped close to his skull, making his ears appear to stick out amazingly. He had black moustaches which grew down over his mouth, masking it. His face was brown and rough hewn. A straw hat, curled up into a grotesque shape, lay at his feet like some distorted bivalve. Its owner had an air of authority about him, even a touch of dominance in the way he scanned his cards or moved the pegs in the board. When his arm went out to the table, it moved with a ponderous steadiness. His brown and hairy hand had the slow, powerful sweep of a derrick-boom.