Sonnie-Boy's People

by James B. Connolly

"Who will give—Father in heaven! Come—come with me." Lavis helped her to her feet.

VI

Cadogan looked into the smoking-room. Lavis was gone. He hesitated, wheeled quickly, returned to the deck, sought the nearest gangway, and rapidly descended four decks. He traversed one passageway, another, and entered what looked like a carpenter's shop, where, he knew, was a thick-topped wooden table with its legs held by small angle-irons to the wooden planking over the steel-deck floor.

Cadogan crawled under the table, hunched his shoulders, straightened his legs, and had the table up by the roots. He stepped out from under it, grasped it across the beam, raised it high, brought two of the legs down against the deck, once, twice; reversed the ends and brought the other two legs down to the deck, once, twice. The legs were gone.

He set the table top on his head. A man stood in the doorway. Cadogan motioned him out of the way. "Where yuh goin' with that?" snarled the man. Cadogan set the end of his plank against the man's chest, walked straight ahead, and stepped over the man's body. In the passageway some one seized his table from behind. Cadogan let go entirely, wheeled sharply, caught the man by the collar and trousers, smashed him against the bulkhead, and, as the other dropped his hold of the table top, threw him a dozen feet down the passage. The man, rising to his feet, ran the other way. Cadogan picked up his plank and resumed his way.

At a place where a boat-falls dropped past the ship's rail Cadogan laid down his burden. This was on the lowest open deck, where not many people would be coming to bother him; but, to reduce the chance of loss, he set his table top up on edge in the shadow of the rail, while he went off for an armful of steamer chairs.

He needed lashings for his chairs. A transverse passageway opened on to the deck near by. Staterooms opened off either side of the passage. The door of the nearest room was locked. "Bright people," he muttered, "who didn't intend anybody should steal anything while they were gone!" He set one foot under the door-knob, rested his back against the bulkhead across the narrow aisle, and straightened his leg. The lock gave way; the door swung open. "When they return I hope you won't miss the fine bed sheets," he murmured, and swished them—one, two—from the berths, with the blankets and one pillow. He slit the hemmed edges of the sheets and tore them into strips lengthwise. With these strips he lashed his chairs compactly together. The chairs in turn he lashed to the heavy plank.

Cadogan had taken off dinner coat, waistcoat, collar, tie, and linen shirt to work more freely. Now he looked about for the coat. All the while he had been working he was not unaware that forms of men had flitted by him, and that more than one had stopped as if curious to know what he was at. He knew that more than one of these were now prowling within leaping distance and that from them were coming muffled words of comment. Also he was not unaware that the ship was nearing her end. He could detect the first pitching of her hull, the settling of the deck under his feet, even as he could hear the half-tones of the menacing voices from out of the shadows. He was aware, too, that a despairing multitude were massing on the decks above him.

Up there, he knew, they were preparing to meet the end in a hundred different fashions. Up there would be those who smiled and those who cried, those who joked or moaned, who prayed or blasphemed, those who were going with pity in their hearts and consumed with bitterness others; forgiving whoever it was that had brought it on, or wishing, the others, that they had the negligent ones to coldly and calmly wring their necks before they went themselves.

Cadogan, having found his coat, laid it on a bitt near by while he should launch his little raft. He balanced it on the rail, inserted a hook under one of his lashings at each end, folded his blankets on top, and, a boat-falls in each hand, paid out carefully, slowly. He could not have lowered a human body more tenderly. Easily, gently, he felt it settle on the bosom of the sea. He took a turn of his falls around the bitt, and, always with one eye peeping sidewise into the shadows, reached for his coat. In the pocket of that coat was the photograph of his beloved.