"He can't ship me aboard any 'Hell-packet,'" answered Goodwin serenely. "When I ship, I ship myself, an' I pay my board in cash. There ain't any advance note to be got out o' me."
The other halted and drew Goodwin to halt, facing him at the edge of the sidewalk, where a beetle-browed saloon projected its awning above them. Like Goodwin, he was young and brown; but unlike Goodwin there was a touch of sophistication, of daunting experience, in the seriousness of his face. The two had met and chummed after the fashion of sailors, who make and lose their friends as the hazard of the hour directs.
"You don't know Tom Mowbray," he said in a kind of affectionate contempt. "He's, he's a swine an' he's cute! Didn't you hear about him shippin' a corpse aboard o' the Susquehanna, an' drawin' three months' advance for it? Why, you ain't got a show with him if he's got a down on ye."
Goodwin smiled. "Maybe I don't know Tom Mowbray," he said; "but it's a sure thing Tom Mowbray don't know me. Come on an' have a drink, Jim. This thing of the Etna it's settled. Come on!"
He led the way into the saloon beside them; Jim, growling warningly, followed him.
At twenty-six, it was Goodwin's age, one should be very much a man. One's moustache is confirmed in its place; one has the stature and muscle of a man, a man's tenacity and resistance, while the heart of boyishness still pulses in one's body. It is the age at which capacity is the ally of impulse, when heart and hand go paired in a perfect fraternity. One is as sure of oneself as a woman of thirty, and with as much and as little reason. Goodwin, when he announced that he, at any rate, would not be one of the crew of the Etna, spoke out of a serene confidence in himself. He knew himself for a fine seaman and a reasonably fine human being; he had not squandered his wages, and he did not mean to be robbed of his earnings when he shipped himself again. It was his first visit to San Francisco; the ports he knew were not dangerous to a man who took care of himself, who was not a drunkard, and would fight at need. He showed as something under six feet tall, long in the limb and moving handily, with eyes of an angry blue in a face tanned russet by wind and sun.
In the saloon he laughed down Jim's instances of Tom Mowbray's treachery and cunning, lounging with an elbow on the bar, careless and confident under the skeptical eyes of the white-jacketed barman.
"I reckon Tom Mowbray knows when he's safe," he said. "Why, if he was to do any o' them things to me I'd get him if I had to dig for him. Yes, sir!"
From thence the course of events ran as anyone familiar with the Barbary Coast might have prophesied. They returned to the boarding-house for supper and joined their fellows at the long table in the back room, and were waited on by Tom Mowbray's "runners." Mowbray himself, with his scared, lean wife and his wife's crippled brother, had a table apart from the men; as he ate he entertained himself by baiting the unhappy cripple, till the broken man stammered tearfully across the table at him, shaking and grimacing in a nervous frenzy, which Tom Mowbray always found comical. The woman between them sat with her eyes downcast and her face bitter and still; they made a picture of domesticity at which the sailors stared in a fascination of perplexity, while the hard-faced "runners" in their shirt-sleeves carried the plates to and from the kitchen, and the ritual of the evening meal proceeded to its finish.
If there was in Goodwin a quality more salient than his youthful force and his trust in his own capacity, it was the manner he had of seeing absorbedly the men and things that presented themselves to his eyes, so that even in dull and trivial matters he gathered strong impressions and vivid memories. The three people at the little table made a group from which, while he ate, he could not withdraw his eyes. The suffering passivity of the woman, the sly, sinister humor in Tom Mowbray's heavy, grey face, the livid and impotent hate that frothed in the crippled man, and his strange jerky gestures, the atmosphere of nightmare cruelty and suffering that enveloped them like a miasma these bit themselves into his imagination and left it sore. He saw and tasted nothing of what he ate and drank; he was lost in watching the three at the other table; the man who refilled his cup with coffee winked across his head to one of the others as though in mirth at his abstraction.