"How about them now?" he questioned, after throwing away the blackened cloth. It would have paid to tell him that they were better if only to keep him from going at them again.
"Oh, but my lame back!" I replied, glad to shift the doctor's attention in that direction. The worst he could do to my back was to put a plaster on it, I reasoned, and this would almost certainly relieve me of one watch at least.
"Don't stoop so much," was all he would recommend. "What else?"
"Well, Doctor," I pursued, "I'm sick, sick all over. I need at least one watch to rest up in."
The good man became facetious.
"Why, we're all sick," he laughed. "The captain, the first officer, the cook, and what not. We're terribly short-handed. If you don't keep your watches the ship simply won't go, and heaven knows when we'll see Bremerhaven."
I smiled a very sickly smile, and retired. If the old Elbe was so hard up for propulsion power that my weak services were unequivocally necessary, then of course I must do my utmost to save the lives, perhaps, of the precious freight in the cabins—but, oh! how I wished that I had remained in Hoboken and become a saloonkeeper, anything in fact but a coal-passer.
The first glimpse we had of land may have been a lovelier sight to some of the cabin passengers than it was to us trimmers, but it hardly seems possible. My companions told me that the rocks and cliffs, barely visible, on our left, were England, the home of my ancestors, but this fact did not interest me one-half so much as the far more important fact that they represented terra firma. I wanted to put my feet on land again, even in Turkey if necessary. Coal-passing, bunker life, hot fires, and clanging ash buckets had cured me for the time being at least of all sea-going propensities in a professional capacity. A flattering offer to command a great liner would hardly have tempted me just then. Indeed, tramp life, with all its drawbacks, seemed a summer pastime compared with bunker life.
The twelfth day out, I think it was, we "made" Bremerhaven, where the good ship was to have a rest, and the men who had shipped in Hoboken were to be paid off. The long voyage was over, I had finished my last "watch" below, and was free to mingle with the steerage passengers on deck and view the new country I had traveled so far to see. My clothes were the same that I had gone on board with in Hoboken—a fairly respectable outfit then, but now sadly in need of cleaning and repair. My face and hands were dark and grimy, although they had been given numberless washings; it was simply impossible to get all of the coal dust out of them. Indeed, it was days before my hands looked normal again.