“Bring him to me!”
Hansen returned at nightfall. He steadied the bosun’s ladder that hung from the taffrail and watched Abie Kelly climb to the deck.
Captain Gully greeted the crimp like a long-lost son. They descended to the whaler’s cabin while Hansen was hooking the dingey’s bow to a dangling fall.
“To be brief as possible,” said Gully after pouring out a generous portion of rum, “I want six men before midnight, when the tide turns.”
“What kind of men, cappin?”
“Any kind, so long as they are husky—Chinks, Kanakas, dock-rats, mission-stiffs.”
Abie the Crimp, as he was known along the Barbary Coast, upended the rum, wiped his mouth, and stared at the skipper of the Bowhead.
Captain Gully was tall, thin, and weather-beaten. Abie was slight. He had hawk eyes, black as beads; a hawk’s long nose and a disappearing chin. He had been born in San Francisco. His mother owned the dive known from the Golden Gate to Vladivostok as the Blubber Room.
“Cap,” said Abie, “I’d like to assist you, but you know the law.”
“Time was when you didn’t speak to me of any law.”