The speaker dashed across the room with outstretched hand. It was Haywood, that much-wanted youth, famous for his adventures in Sing Sing and India.
“I was this minute spinnin’ your yarn to Bob here,” he cried, indicating a grinning seaman at his heels, “when who should come in but yourself as big as life. Gee! I thought for a minute this rice-water was beginning to put me off my feet. So you’ve beat it to here, eh? Show Bob the phizz-snapper or he’ll think I’m a liar.
“Say,” he continued, as Bob turned the apparatus over in his stubby fingers with the nervousness of a bachelor handling a baby, “where in Niggerland did you and Marten go that night you beat me out of the chow-room at the Home in Cally? You sure faded fast.”
“Up country,” I answered, and gave him a brief account of my travels since we had separated.
“Well, I’ve had a hell of a run, too,” he said, when I had finished, “though there was no jungle in it. When I made that pier-head jump out of Rangoon I thought I was signed on A. B. But the skipper thought different and it was down in the sweat-box for mine. The lads had told me she was bound for China, but before we was two days out the mate passed the tip that she was off for the States. It near give me heart failure, but I took a ramble through the bunkers and as they was half empty I knew the old man’d have to put in somewhere for coal. So I tried soldierin’, hopin’ to be kicked ashore. In three weeks we dropped into Yoko, but when I hit the skipper for my discharge he give me the glassy eye. So I packed my swag and went down the anchor-chain into a sampan at midnight, and the next mornin’ give the consul a song and dance about the tub bein’ the hungriest craft afloat and the mate the meanest. He took it all in and when the old man come ashore he told him to pay me off p. d. q.
“The month’s screw give me a good blow-out that ended in two days by me gettin’ broke an’ pinched. When I got out I hit it off for Kobe on a passenger and turned a little trick the night I got there that landed me over seventy yen. It was a cinch I had to fade away, so I took a pasteboard to Naggy. But the graft was no good there, so I picked up with Bob an’ a deck passage an’ here we are. This is plenty near enough the States for mine. But say,” he concluded, in a confidential whisper, “I haven’t got a red. Happen to have the price of a flop that ain’t workin’?”
In memory of old times I paid his lodging for the night and we wandered out into the city.
When I awoke two mornings later a dismal downpour promised a day of forced inactivity; and inactivity in a foreign land means ennui and a stirring of the Wanderlust. I packed my “swag” hurriedly, therefore, and an hour later was slipping down the Woosung on board the Chenan of the Nippon Yusen Kaisha. Among several hundred third-class passengers I was the only European; but I have yet to be treated more considerately by fellow-travelers. Our sleeping quarters consisted of two inclined platforms running half the length of the ship, on which, in my ignorance, I neglected to preempt a claim. But I lost nothing thereby, for no sooner was it noised among the Japanese that an American was unprovided for, than a dozen crowded round to offer me their places. I joined a party of four students returning from Pekin, and, by packing ourselves together like spoons, we found room without depriving any other of his quarters.
Three times daily we filed by the galley and received each a small wooden box divided into three compartments; the larger contained rice, the smaller, oily vegetables and tiny baked fish. With each meal came a new pair of chopsticks. Japanese food does not appeal greatly to the white man’s appetite; but the food supplied on the Chenan was far less depressing to the spirits than the steerage rations on many a transatlantic liner.
On the second morning out, the rolling green hills of Japan rose slowly above the sun-flecked sea. My companions hailed each landmark with patriotic fervor and strove to convince me that we had reached the most beautiful spot on the globe. In reality they were not far wrong. The verdure-framed harbor of Nagasaki was little less charming than that of Hong Kong; from the water’s edge rose an undulating, drab-roofed town that covered the low coast ranges like a wrinkled brown carpet, and faded away in the blue wreaths of hillside forests.