Micky felt his heart thump like a mallet inside a cask. He had sweated and toiled and starved on the mud flats of Novgorod. He sensed the coming of a bitter Winter. And here was a hard-eyed Russian offering him and his mates a ship for the Pacific broadside, where white men walked and roses bloomed and shirts could be worn.
“I’ve steamed and sailed, man and boy,” he explained, “going on thirty years. I’m ’Umber born—at Great Grimsby on the North Sea. My mate, the tall man with the red face, is an American out of New Bedford. My first engineer came from Tyneside—where they build good ships. We take no back-slack from nobody. Show me your ship, says I, and I’ll work ’er across the Japan Sea and east by the line to Victoria.”
“That is settled,” said Ivan Alexandrovski. “You may come with me.”
Micky McMasters gathered the tattered collar of his dungaree coat around his unshaven neck.
“One more question before it becomes a contract,” he said suspiciously. “Are you loyal Russian or are you Bolshevik?”
Ivan with the long surname smiled blandly. He stroked his straggling beard. He stared down at the little castaway.
“Loyal Russian,” he said. “I have a home in Vladivostok—where Allied troops are guarding.”
Micky turned, jerked his head toward his mates who stood shivering in their rags, and shouted:
“The contract’s signed! A fair thing for all of us. We work the Shongpong across the western Pacific.”
“Ye arranged about terms?” asked Mike Monkey, siding up to the skipper and glancing at the Russian.