“You quite bowl me off my feet, Captain Spreckels. I haven’t thought of leaving the East. But I will go with you and I can never thank you enough. About clothes and an outfit, I——”
“I haf more clothes than a plenty for two of us, McDougal. There is beer but no whiskey in my vessel. I do not trink liquor at sea. Come. Paddy Blake haf left word mit his man here dot my sailors vas already sent to the landing mit a boarding-house runner. We will go aboard the tug.”
With this, the energetic master mariner tossed down a gin rickey, said adieu to Captain O’Shea, and whisked McDougal out of the place with an arm across his shoulders. The episode made O’Shea feel slightly bewildered. The unfortunate McDougal had appeared and vanished with an abruptness that savored of unreality. His confession was the sort of thing that might come to a man in a nightmare. McDougal had painted the scenes with a few broad strokes, and yet as O’Shea sat musing, they seemed astonishingly vivid: the aged Chinese official pulling his coat about his neck just before his head bounced off like a bloody ball—the ragged colossus of a street pedler flinging afar his resonant call—McDougal, wretched and forlorn, huddled in the tea-house and fighting off the horrors. He had opened the book of his life and let O’Shea read a page of it, but there must have been many more worth knowing.
These reflections were interrupted by a violent dissension in the vicinity of the bar. A British tar smote a Scandinavian over the head with a bottle and stretched him on the floor. Somebody plucked the piano stool from under the musical cabin steward and hurled it at the aggressor. The missile flew high and swept the bar-tender into his glassware with a most splendid crash. Then hostilities became general.
The combatants were too busy to observe the entrance of a wizened, clerical-looking little man in a black frock-coat and a rusty tall hat. With a shrill whoop, he pulled a slung-shot from his pocket and pranced into the thick of the scrimmage. He was as agile as a jumping-jack, his coat-tails seemed to be flying in a dozen places at once, and whenever his weapon landed a seaman promptly lost all interest in the row and made for the street with his head tenderly held in his hands. In the wake of the active little man peace hovered like a dove.
With magical celerity the floor was cleared of disorder, and the promoter of harmony calmly assisted the damaged bar-tender to clear away the wreckage. Captain O’Shea accosted him when the task was finished.
“Paddy Blake is me name,” the little man replied in a jerky, rasping voice, cocking his head to one side. “The boys will have their fun and I hope they didn’t annoy ye. The place will be quiet for a bit. What can I do for ye?”
“’Tis a matter of private business,” answered O’Shea.
“Then come into the back room, where we can be sociable. I take ye for a shipmaster.”
“Right you are; but I have no ship at present. You might call me a tourist.”