Where the Pavement Ends - John Russell

The cry wrenched from him as he searched our faces. It was very necessary to him that we should believe; he had all a boy's eagerness to keep the illusion—some illusion. And this was natural too, though even the kid prank as he told it came to the same stark and gratuitous horror. For Chris Wickwire had dropped out of life from that gangway!

Captain Raff chewed his cheroot for a space in silence. You would hardly expect him to have the subtlety of a donkey engine, so to speak, but he might surprise you at times, and he had learned to be very patient with the mate. Perhaps in his own time he had passed some crisis when the stuff in him was molding and setting, though it must have been quite a different occasion with so rugged a soul.

"Well," he said carefully, "we know all that, and I never heard nobody jaw you as hard about it as what you done yourself. But it's all right now, ain't it? You've found him. Didn't you just say you found him again?" And then he added what turned out to be a singular comment: "If the chief was smokin' his ol' pipe as usual, I judge nothin' much could ha' happened to him. He must be pretty much his own self after all."

So Sutton was driven back on the mere fact, which must always have been tough for him. He had blinked it thus far, as I suppose was his weakness to blink and to spin all manner of sanguine threads about the naked nubs of things. But if he meant to tell, he had here to tell outright, though I saw him wince....

"I found him in an awful hole down there," he faltered, "a kind of a chandoo shop. And the stuff he's smoking now is—opium!"

I cannot say that either Raff or myself had arrived at any clearness when we headed away into the maze of Colootullah that night. It was all a bad dream, and it began badly, in a dog kennel of a ticca gharri that racked us in tune to our own jarring thoughts.

We huddled together on the one bench, we two, though, dear knows, the captain would have been a fare by himself. Sutton sat opposite quite stiffly with his knees drawn aside, and the journey long said never a word. And this was the next aspect we had of him, you will note: a strained and silent presence and a pallid face glimpsed now and then by the brief flicker of some street lamp. For he had seen what we had not—Chris Wickwire alive, but Chris Wickwire transmogrified out of all belief, the inmate of a hideous den in the city's vilest slum—and somehow it set him sharp apart from us....

You must know there had been something very special in the bearing of all hands toward the chief engineer of the Moung Poh. Every ship has her social code. We had been a good deal of a family craft, as they say, and in the curious way of such traditions this had come to center on Chris Wickwire. If Raff was the sturdy patriarch, the chief had been the prim and formidable maiden aunt of our little household on the high seas.

I suppose to any outsider he must have seemed no more than a long-boned, long-lipped stick of a Dumbartonshire Cameronian, as dry as the texts he was always mishandling. But he had a value to us like a prized domestic relic; we admired, derided, and swore equally by and after him. His vast, lean height and face of a hanging judge, his denatured profanity, and the intimate atmosphere of disaster, hell-fire, and general damnation in which he moved—these were points of pride and almost of affection.