“What?”
“I’ve fired the watchman and who’s to look after her?”
“Oh, she won’t hurt.”
“Won’t hurt! Why, if you fell asleep on these wharves, they’d have your back teeth before you woke and you wouldn’t feel them pulling them. Why, these hooligans, if they didn’t strip her, they’d camp in her, and then she’d be no more mortal use till she was boiled. No. I guess I’ll have to stick to her.”
“Stick to her!” cried George, “you mean to say, sleep here?”
“Yep. What’s wrong? The old bunk bedding will do me and the nights are warm. To-morrow I’ll get a man to look after her for a few hours in the evening whilst I get my dunnage aboard. Come along ashore with me while I get some grub and a toothbrush.”
He slipped out of his overalls and they climbed ashore.
“She won’t take any harm for an hour or two by herself,” said Hank.
They found a street of shops boasting a drug store. Here Hank bought his toothbrush, then he bought a German sausage, some bread, six small apples and two bottles of tonic water, also an evening paper from a yelling newsboy. Then he remembered that he would want a candle to read the newspaper by and went into a ships chandler’s to buy one, leaving George outside.
George glanced at the paper, then he spread it open hurriedly and stood reading it, heedless of the passersby or the people who jostled him. Hank, coming out of the store with his candle, looked over George’s shoulder and this is what he read, in scare headlines across a double column of print: