Sonnie-Boy's People

by James B. Connolly

People in my line used to say that I was pretty young for my job, and some of them to warn me about allowing the underlings to get familiar with me. Well, perhaps I was too young for my job, or for any other job of any account; but as to the other charge I never noticed anybody getting over-familiar with me. Friendly, yes; but even the head of the firm himself couldn't get over-familiar unless I let him.

Part of my job, as I figured it, was to know freights and ships and the masters of ships; and where it hurt the firm's interests if I knew the crews as well, I couldn't see. Some would tell me that the further away I kept from them the more highly they would respect me, and the more highly they respected me the more they would do for me, which would have listened well if their vessels were getting in and out of loading ports any faster than mine did; but nobody noticed that they were.

And beyond that: I could never see where a little friendliness to anybody did any harm. I may have been too young for my job, but I wasn't too young to know that the world is alive with unassuming little fellows who are full to the hatches with knowledge of one kind or another that they will cheerfully unload to anybody who has time for them. Not that I want anybody to think I am so long-headed or forehanded a chap as to spend time only with people who could tell me things! I didn't do any thinking about it one way or the other. Any man that had time for me, I had time for him.

I had time for Drislane. He was one of the crew of the Sirius, and I had been seeing quite a little of him while I was in Newport News this fall on the coal. The Sirius would load, sail, and return; load, sail, and return; and between trips Drislane and I would have sessions.

I'd seen something of Drislane before this in Boston. His mail used to come addressed to our Boston office, where everybody knew that twice a year, toward the end of June and just before Christmas, a check would come to him from his home in the West. When he came up from the vessel after a trip and found that home envelope awaiting him, he would step around to his room, clean up, and in his shore-going suit of clothes come back, have us cash his check, and then, according to our office force, it was—Good night! for two weeks.

The check, always the same—for twelve hundred dollars—would have given him a good two weeks' whirl in highly-rated, expensive places, if he cared for splurge, but I guess he never was influenced much by regulation ratings. Any place he liked the looks of would do for him—and some perhaps that he didn't like the looks of.

It was no use to try to tell the office force that Drislane hadn't a weak joint somewhere. Man, they knew! and holding no berths for the purely spiritual, with but one suspicious and unexplained action to work from, would build you up a character of any depth of depravity you were pleased to have. Three guesses, no more, was all they needed for Drislane's case. It was rum, or women, or rum and women. If neither, then there was no hope for him at all—he was insane.

And certainly his judgment in women was something fierce. I'm setting down now the diction, as well as the judgment, of the office force; this last judgment being based on the evidence of the two illuminated occasions when he had come in to cash his check, and each time brought with him a young woman. Naturally, on his departure, the lads in the office had a word to say. The only way they could account for his selections—well, they couldn't account for them. It must be a genius he had—something was born with him—to pick the homely ones.

There wasn't the least evidence to show that there was anything wrong in these companionships of his. My notion of it was—he would never speak of it—that he picked up any kind of people in any kind of place, and made them as happy as he could while his money lasted. He certainly never went off for any two weeks' jamboree. Whatever his experiences were, they seemed to leave him in good shape physically, anyway. At least the marks of too many lonesome hours seemed to be ironed out of his face when he came back.

The man was so everlastingly unconscious that he was different from anybody else that it was refreshing. But there was more than that—to me, at least. I always looked on him as a touchstone, one of those men by whom you may gauge other men. Drislane was sensitized to crooks. He had only to stand in the same room with them to get their moral pictures. If I heard of Drislane distrusting a man or of a man disliking Drislane, I would at once set that man down, knowing nothing of the man, as having a rotten spot in him somewhere.