'The old man talks sense,' said Jacobs. 'And as for Healy, he's a most notorious daylight robber, as lives on sailor-men and the p'isonin' of 'em. I stayed in 'is 'ouse for ten days, and was 'oofed, fair 'oofed, on board of a most notorious American ship where we lived on belayin' pin soup, and was tickled with 'and-spikes, tickled just to death. I'll stay by the old hooker. What d' ye say, mates?'
And they all swore that no enticements should prevent their sticking to the most comfortable ship that sailed the seas. A little after noon they picked up the pilot, and in a couple of hours were towing up the Columbia past Astoria. And word went on the wires to Portland that the Oriana, Captain Ticehurst, was on her way to the Willammette.
'That's all right,' said Mr. Healy. 'Now we'll see!'
He gritted his teeth, twisted his ugly mouth, and gave a nod sideways as if he were bidding farewell to the finally discomfited skipper of the Oriana. For Ticehurst so far had been the only man with sufficient 'sand' in his composition to buck up against the most outrageous system of crimping and extortion which exists in any part of the world. San Francisco (called ''Frisco' by those who have not lived there) might be tough, and so might Shanghai Smith, whose name was cursed on all the seven seas, but Portland, O., the big wheat port in the smooth and deep Willammette, with mighty Mount Hood in the background, was the hardest and toughest and roughest city in the West. And Mr. Healy, Jim Healy, the sandy-headed Irish-American to whose native brutality a certain low cunning in diplomacy was added, stood out in blackguardism and general toughness far above his peers.
'We'll see,' said Healy. 'This will be a skin game, a real freeze-out. Bully for you, Mr. Ticehurst!'
He called a quiet informal meeting of the genial blood-suckers who regulate the price of sailors in a so-called civilised city; and the crimps assembled in his back parlour, where many scoundrelly schemes had been hatched.
'He's come to fight,' said Healy, 'and what I propose is to give him so much of it that he'll sicken and quit. The first thing right now is to put prices up. I vote we make it a hundred and sixty dollars a man.'
He proposed to charge the skipper of any merchant ship £32 a head for any man he shipped. He also proposed to take the entire Oriana's crew out of her, in which case he would have to supply eighteen men all told, when she was full of wheat and ready to sail. In other words, it was his idea, and on such ideas he lived, to charge £576 for a crew. And as men were scarce, they must of necessity be drawn from another ship, to which the crew of the Oriana would presently be sold. It was a great scheme, and much honour must assuredly be given to the men who originated so easy a manner of getting a living. It amounted to charging two shipmasters a fee of £1152 for swapping crews. This is the way the crimps of Portland live even unto this day, in the year of civilisation 1901. There are pickings besides, for as John Jacobs, A.B. in the Oriana, had said when his skipper asked him who was the biggest kind of a fool, 'If you please, sir, it's a sailor.' On consideration, however, it might appear that the State of Oregon, which allowed its trade to be hampered by such means, was collectively even a bigger fool than a sailor.
The proposal of the one hundred and sixty dollars price was carried unanimously. And Healy grinned sardonically as he spoke further to his friends.
'Last time this Ticehurst and me came mighty close to trouble, and I want to get even. And I mean to be. Now what I want is this. Any men you boys get off of her I want transferred to me. When I ship them I'll settle with you. And, moreover, if he comes to you for men, send him on to me. I'll talk to him, the low down swine! I'll talk to him like a father!'