In addition to simp Mr. Bates also used the words boob, sucker, chunk of Camembert and dub in this connection. But it is doubtful if Mr. Birdseye heard him now. A great roaring, as of dashing cataracts and swirling rapids, filled his ears as he fled away, blindly seeking some sanctuary wherein to hide himself from the gaze of mortal man.
Remaining to be told is but little; but that little looms important as tending to prove that truth sometimes is stranger than fiction. With Swifty Megrue coaching, with Magnus, the Big Chief, backstopping, with Pinderson, master of the spitball, in the box twirling, nevertheless and to the contrary notwithstanding, the Anneburg team that day mopped up, the score standing:
| R | H | E | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Anneburg | 6 | 9 | 1 |
| Moguls | 4 | 7 | 2 |
[408]
CHAPTER X
SMOOTH CROSSING
On this voyage the Mesopotamia was to sail at midnight. It was now, to be precise about it, eleven forty-five P. M.
and some odd seconds; and they were wrestling the last of the heavy luggage aboard. The Babel-babble that distinguishes a big liner’s departure was approaching its climax of acute hysteria, when two well-dressed, youngish men joined the wormlike column of eleventh-hour passengers mounting a portable bridge labelled First Cabin which hyphenated the strip of dark water between ship and shore. They were almost the last persons to join the line, coming in such haste along the dock that the dock captain on duty at the foot of the canvas-sided gangway let them pass without question.
Except that these two men were much of a size and at a first glance rather alike in general aspect; and except that one of them, the rearmost, bore two bulging handbags while the [409] other kept his hands muffled in a grey tweed ulster that lay across his arms, there was nothing about them or either of them to distinguish them from any other belated pair of men in that jostling procession of the flurried and the hurried. Oh, yes, one of them had a moustache and the other had none.
Indian file they went up the gangway and past the second officer, who stood at the head of it; and still tandem they pushed and were pushed along through the jam upon the deck. The second man, the one who bore the handbags, gave them over to a steward who had jumped forward when he saw them coming. He hesitated then, looking about him.
“Come on, it’s all right,” said the first man.