"Good Lord, you wouldn't do that!" exclaimed Martin.
"Oh, yes—I did it once," confessed Little Billy easily. "Indeed, a swig of shellac punch is drink for the gods; my very soul writhes now at the thought of it. But, I'll admit, the wood-alcohol beverage conceals complications. It was the captain, and his little stomach-pump, that brought me to that time. But no more of such frolicking on board ship. That episode occurred during my first year with Captain Dabney. Never since have I succumbed to the craving while at sea. Oh, I'll be all right this time—only don't be startled if you hear me talking to myself, or roaming about in the middle of the night."
That was all that passed between them. But during the days following Martin's eyes often rested on the other with curiosity and sympathy. It was a new experience for Martin, to be room-mated with a dipsomaniac, and besides Little Billy had grown to be a very dear friend, indeed. Everybody on the ship loved the sunny hunchback.
Little Billy's happy face grew bleak, and many fine lines appeared about the corners of his eyes and mouth. He was suffering keenly, Martin knew. Even now, he could hear the uneasy, labored breathing of the man in the bunk above.
It was a strange, changeable, eager face, Little Billy had. It seemed to vary in age according to the hunchback's mood; these days he looked forty, but Martin had seen him appear a youthful twenty during an exceptionally happy moment. Actually, Martin learned during the passage, Little Billy Corcoran's age was thirty-one.
He learned, moreover, that Little Billy was the son, and sole surviving relative, of Judge Corcoran, a famous California politician in his day. Judge Corcoran had been a noted "good fellow" and a famous man with the bottle. And his son was a hunchback and a dipsomaniac. Little Billy was blessed with a fine mind, and he had taken his degree at Yale, but throughout his hectic life the thirst he was born with proved his undoing.
"I am an oddity among a nation of self-made men," Little Billy once told Martin. "They all commenced at the bottom and ascended fortune's ladder, whereas I started at the top and descended. And what a descent! I hit every rung of that ladder with a heavy bump, and jarred Old Lady Grundy every time. I was the crying scandal, the horrible example, of my native heath. That old rogue, my father, used to boast that he never got drunk—I used to boast that I never got sober. Finally, I bumped my last bump and found myself at the bottom. And there I stayed, until Captain Dabney, and the dear girl, pulled me out of the mire."
Almost literally true, this last, for Martin learned that five years before, Captain Dabney had salvaged Little Billy off the beach at Suva, a dreadful scarecrow of a man, and Ruth's nursing, and the clean sea life, had built a new William Corcoran. But the appetite for the drink was uneradicable, and the genial hunchback's life was a series of losing battles with his hereditary curse.
But the boatswain was proved a poor prophet. Not that week, nor the next, did they reach Fire Mountain. The Cohasset crossed the path of the Orient mail-packets, the great circle sailers, and they entered their last stretch of Pacific sailing, above the forty-eighth parallel.
Captain Dabney's objective was the little-used gateway to the Bering that lies between Copper Island and the outlying Aleuts. They sailed upon a wild and desolate waste of leaden sea; a sea shrouded frequently with fog, and plentifully populated with those shipmen's horrors, foot-loose icebergs. And their fair sailing abruptly terminated.