“There ain’t no tail here. I didn’t cut off his tail. I didn’t see him so that I could cut off his tail.” He started toward the window with a look as if he proposed to resent my suggestion that he had been cutting off monkeys’ tails. I passed on. I figured that I might as well try to argue with a Sussex shote as with that shapeless mass of fat. I would have saved a nasty bit of trouble for myself, perhaps, if I had remained and argued. And my trouble later that day—and that monkey with the missing tail—was the seed from which—But that’s getting ahead of the story.
===There were really three messes aboard the Zizania. There was the captain’s mess aft, with special dishes, which was entirely distinct from the crew’s food. On the port side was set out the food for the black half of the checker-board crew, and on the starboard side the white half received their provender.
We were at dinner in the captain’s mess. It was our first meal at sea—our first meeting at table.
When Miss Kama came in we were just sitting down. The captain was with us, having left one of the Joneses at the wheel. Keedy lifted his paint-streak mustache against his nose in a smile, and pulled out a chair beside his own.
“Sit here, my dear,” he said to the girl.
She walked past the chair, came around to my side of the table, and sat down. She did not toss her chin or sniff, as some girls would have done, to show dislike of Keedy. She was a cool proposition, that girl was.
That left the chair beside Keedy the only vacant one at the table. A plump little man had been standing off at one side, waiting for the last choice of seats. He looked rather bashful, and his round face was shining with soap, and his hair was plastered down at the sides and combed up in front in a fancy cowlick. You could see that he realized that he did not exactly belong at that table. Therefore he had scrubbed himself up for the occasion.
Captain Rask Holstrom did not trouble himself with any of the finer graces of society. He gruffly introduced the little man as Romeo Shank, chief engineer, and told Shank to slide into the chair beside Keedy. “We ain’t drawing any fine lines between ship’s officers on this trip,” stated the captain, bluntly, for the benefit of all concerned. “Get to table while the grub is hot, and get it into you—that’s the motto. Business before style is the idea aboard this boat.”
He began to shovel food industriously with his knife.
Keedy hitched away from his table-mate a few inches, and looked across at me, and deepened the wrinkle between his eyes. But he could not spoil my appetite. Something else which happened the next moment pretty nigh did it, though.