The coming of the midnight seemed to be a signal that the life of the town should stop. It seemed to bring everybody home, so that in a few minutes the Plaza was almost empty and so quiet that one could tell the passing feet: the small, belated woman hurrying: the guardians in couples slowly patrolling, pausing to try if doors were locked.
Then, from one of the streets leading to the Plaza from the northward, there came the singing of drunkards. Sard hoped at first, from the noise that was made, that the drunkards were foreigners; but they were two English reefers, both sillily drunk, followed by a third, who, being sober and much younger than the others, was trying to pilot the drunkards down to the landing-stage. They were trying to sing some fragment of grand opera which they had heard that night: they made a bestial row, “between the bull and the cat.”
Sard eyed them to see who and what they were: the two drunkards were from a small barque in the bay: the sober boy, to his amazement, was Huskisson, a first-voyager from the Pathfinder. Huskisson, a Pathfinder, running the midnight with these two night-owls, within an hour or two of landing, and not ten days from Captain Cary’s death. Sard stiffened and waited.
The drunkards bowed low to Sard, laughed, lurched across to the door of the centre house of the Last Sighs, and banged upon it with their fists. They shouted a song as they banged.
“Beautiful Rosey-posey,
Ever I think of thee,
I love sweet Rosey-posey
And sweet Rosey-posey loves me.”
One of them called to the waiter to bring them some vinos; the other, a short, squat, sub-nosed lad, whose name was Crockums, did not like the waiter.
Crockums: You darned mañana Dago, fetch the vinos, intende, or I’ll smash your papish chops. You want to forget, you ain’t in no Vatican, now, nor yet in any rancheria. Come on, Paggy, and pitch this feller over the bubb-banisters.