"See that eye?" said a Newcastle collier cove newly translated third engineer—we sampled some odd specimens for third up and down the ports—"Ol' Chris, 'twas 'im done it. 'You red, raw, an' blistered son of perdition,' he says, 'I'll learn you to 'ide liquor in your bunk. Wine is a knocker,' he says, and stretches me. And with that goes back to his cabin to prye for me! I 'eard 'im groanin' as I come by the dead-light. Oh, he's a 'oly wonder and no mistyke—once he goes to set a bloke right there's nothin' he won't do for 'im!"
Nobody knew what wide courses had brought him eastward; his history began at the dock head where he appeared with the famous clay pipe in his mouth and the rest of his luggage in a plaid. There was a loose rumor he had once been top tinker in the big liners, until he took to raiding the saloon for revivals and frightening the lady passengers into fits. It was said again that he had come out from his native boiler shops of Clyde as a missionary, making vast trouble for the official brethren and seeking converts with a club. But if his doctrine was somewhat crude, he had a lifetime's knowledge of machinery, and the man that can nurse engines will need to show fewer diplomas in outlandish parts than the one that can save souls. By the same token Chris Wickwire undertook to do both.
You can figure how this bleak moralist would fasten on a type like Sutton. Soft airs and sweet skies had no appeal for the Cameronian; to him the balmy East was all one net of the devil baited with strange seductions, and unnameable allurements. The rest of us were hardly worth a serious warning. But our youthful mate, with the milk scarce dry on his lips, as you might say, and his fresh appetite for life and confident humor—here was a brand to be snatched from the burning: here was a stray lamb for an anxious shepherd!
And Sutton—at the first he took to it like a treat. It made a new game for him, you see, amusing and rather flattering as well, the kind of a jape he was all too apt at.
"Where ha' ye been the day—ashore again? Buyin' gauds an' silk pajamies, I notice. Laddie, do ye never tak thocht for your immortal speerit, which canna hide under lasceevious trickeries nor yet cover its waeful' nakedness? No' to speak of yon blazin' Oriental bazzaars, fu' o' damnable pitfalls for the unwary! Aye, laugh now!... Laddie, ye're light-minded. Heaven send down its truth upon ye before ye wuther like the lilies o' the field!"
This sort of thing was good fun for Sutton—at the start, as I say. He must have had many a rare chuckle from superior ground. Being damned with such assurance, he naturally inquired into means of grace, and so developed the jest.
With the streak of slyness that marked him, he kept it pretty much between himself and the censor, but I chanced to overhear an odd passage. He called one day for a Bible, offering to prove the other wrong on some argued matter.
"Na, fegs," said Christopher. "I hae nane."