“Shine” moistened his lips and began his explanations. They were guiltily ingenious. He had fallen down a hatch in the Leo and had lain unconscious until the steamer was half way to Coney. Then some deckmen in the forecastle had heard him groaning and had come to his rescue. He had been badly shaken up but not seriously hurt, and he had decided to hurry back to the Hudson by trolley instead of waiting for the Leo to make her return trip. He borrowed some clothes and went ashore, but as he was hastening up one of the board walks towards the street-car line, he was stopped by a number of men who were disputing about a cane which one of them had “ringed with one o’ them rings that yuh toss at canes in a ‘Cane-yuh-ring-is-the-cane-yuh-get’ graft.” And they had demanded that he decide whether the cane had been “ringed” or not. The ring was resting on the knob of the cane, being too small to fall down over it. It was a “faked-up” dispute. They were a “gang o’ strong arms,” and when they got him in among them, they started to “go through” him. He put up a fight. They “got all over” him, knocked him down, gave him a black eye, and took his money. He had had to walk back from Coney. He—
“That’ll do,” Keighley cut in. “Take that sling off yer arm. Yuh can’t come any spiels like that on me.”
“S’welp me, cap, I—”
“Cut it out, now, I tell yuh. Yuh’ve been drunk. Yuh’ve been off duty ten hours without leave. Yuh’ve either got to gi’ me a straight story er walk the carpet at Headquarters.”
“Shine” swallowed and looked down at his feet. He was calculating that Acting-Chief Moran would be lenient with a “Jigger.”
“Yuh’ve been havin’ things pretty much yer own way around here,” Keighley said. “This’s where yuh take a drop. The Commissioner’s out, see? He quit this afternoon. Youse fullahs ’er goin’ to do what I say after this. If yuh go up to Headquarters, yuh don’t come back. Moran won’t save yuh. He’s got all he can do to save his own neck, now.”
“Shine” looked at the captain, and recognized that his game was up. “’Twasn’t my fault,” he said. “It was Doherty’s.”
“Doherty! What’d Doherty have to do with it?”
“The damn dip! He done me up,” he said—and plunged into an incoherent and many-cursed account of what had happened.
Keighley heard him in silence. When Doherty’s part in the affair was made plain, the captain “sized up” the situation with the frown of a chess-player studying the board, and said “Ummm” as he saw his play. “Shine” finished, humble and submissive. Keighley said, “Go to yer bunk.”