After the Jap and the electric needle chump came to town, business fell off, as I was telling you. They’d have made me close up my shop and get out if it hadn’t been for Spotty Crigg. Ever hear of him? Well, you sure haven’t been in San Francisco long. In those days he kept a sailor boarding-house and saloon round the corner from my parlours, and he was sort of boss of the water-front—good any time to deliver five hundred votes. I ain’t saying that Spotty was a Sunday-school kind of man, but he stuck to his friends. I was one of the gang, so he sent me enough jobs to keep me going. Besides, I helped him once or twice on a shanghaing deal. You see, like most sailor boarding-house keepers in those days, he was a crimp—used to deliver a sailor or two when foremast hands were scarce and the pay was good. Spotty Crigg is dead now, or I wouldn’t be telling you about his last and biggest shanghaing scrape. I didn’t understand it at the time, but I learned about it afterward, part from Crigg and part from people on the other side of the little deal.
One of my society customers was young Tom Letterblair. Maybe you don’t know about him, either. He belonged to about the richest tribe of swells on Nob Hill. That fellow was as wild as a fish-hawk, a thoroughbred dead game sport. His being wild didn’t bother his people so much as the way he went about it—always doing something crazy. His people were strong on getting into the society columns of the papers, but he was eternally getting the family name on the news pages of the yellow journals, if not in the police reports. He wasn’t really what you would call bad, either; only wild and careless and brought up wrong, and stubborn about it when anyone tried to call him down. He’d never seem sorry if he got the family into trouble, but just laugh at his sisters when they roasted him. And instead of treating him quiet and easy, and gentling him into being good, they’d jaw him. That’s a bad scheme with a gilded youth like Tom Letterblair.
They were a bunch of orphans. That was half the trouble.
Finally, Tom Letterblair took up with a chorus girl and refused to drop her. The family tried to buy her off. Now she wasn’t a nice sort of girl, but she was true to Tom. She told him about it. For once, although he was such a careless fellow, he got mad and what does he do but come to me to have her name, “Dotty,” tattooed on his arm with the double snake border. Says he to me confidentially, “That’s the girl I’m going to marry when I come of age, which is only two months, and don’t you forget it.” Seems that he told other people the same thing, so that it came back to his family.
Now his sisters and the Eastern society swells that they were married to didn’t hanker any to have Dotty for a sister-in-law. But they knew by experience that if Tom Letterblair said he’d do it, all blazes wouldn’t hold him. J. Thrasher Sunderland, one of Tom’s brothers-in-law, had what he thought was a bright idea. It was to get the kid shanghaied on a sailing vessel off for a six months’ voyage.
That wasn’t such a bad scheme either. They could keep him away from Dotty and drink for six months, have him work hard, and make a man out of him. It’s been done before right in this port. That wild streak is a kind of disease that strikes young fellows with too much blood in their necks and money in their pockets. I know. I’ve had it myself, bar the money. By six months, what doctors call the crisis would have been over. The risky thing was the chance of raising a howl when he got back, but they were willing to take chances that the sense knocked into him with a belaying pin would make him see it their way. They were going to give it out to the papers and their friends that he was off for his health.
J. Thrasher Sunderland made his first break when he went to Captain Wynch of the bark Treasure Trove, instead of going straight to a crimp, as he ought to have done. Wynch promised to treat the kid well and try to brace him up. Never having seen Tom Letterblair he got a description of him, including the tattoo mark. Then the skipper went to Spotty Crigg and promised him a hundred dollars for doing the rough work of getting Tom on board the vessel.
Letterblair was such a big, careless fellow, he never suspected anything, and a lure note fetched him to Crigg’s saloon the night before the bark cleared. Tom had been drinking hard that day—showed up badly slewed. ’Twas a jolly drunk, and he was ready for a glass with anyone.
Now, Crigg hadn’t given much thought to this little transaction, for he was doing that sort of work almost every day in the week. But when that young swell, all dressed up to the nines, came into the “Bowsprit” saloon, the looks of him put a brand-new idea into Spotty’s noddle. It struck him that a hundred dollars was pretty small pay for catching a fish of that size and colour; there was evidently a big deal on somewhere. Like everyone else that read the papers, he knew considerable about Tom Letterblair, knew him for a young sport, free as water with his money. Putting two and two together, he saw that if he could save the kid instead of stealing him, there might be a good many times a hundred in the affair. Besides, there was a chance of finding out who was trying to get the shanghaing done, and then collecting blackmail. So he decided to play both ends. He would steal the wrong man, and hold on to the right one.
He ran his eye around the place and saw Harry Maidslow, a scene-shifter in the old Baldwin Theatre, who used to drop in, now and then, on his nights off. Man for man, Maidslow and Letterblair were modelled on the same lines—Maidslow wore a moustache, but that would come off easy enough—yellow hair, blue eyes, big and strong build. Maidslow hadn’t a relative this side of the Rockies; no one would miss him. Crigg knew that.