“You can make your choice, Mr. Parkinson. Ye sail with me and you play my game or you can go ashore to rot and starve on the beach, same as when I picked ye out of the gutter. I have given this dirty young Chinese blackguard a taste of what is coming to him. Will ye fall to or shall I kick you out of the ship?”
“I—I will take your orders, sir,” stammered the other.
“Then help me get this steamer to sea. We will wait for no more Chinese sailors. Muster all hands on the upper deck.”
They came piling up from the hold and the dining-room abaft the galley, where most of them had been at breakfast. The inanimate comprador was no longer visible.
“Will you sail with me at once or lose the chance of making the voyage?” demanded O’Shea. “Some of you will have to shovel coal and others wash dishes and do seamen’s duty on deck. But I will pay ye extra for it, and we will take this old box of a steamer to where we want to go.”
The response was hearty and unanimous. The adventurers could think of no worse fate than to be once more stranded in Shanghai. They were well fed, they had slept in clean beds again, and their employer was a man who could be trusted to deal with them fairly. With a spirited cheer they scattered to their various stations. The chief engineer spoke briefly, his gray whiskers standing out in the morning breeze:
“Nobody but a wild Irishman would have the nerve to take this painted coffin to sea with a gang of misbegotten greenhorns to man her. I have steam enough to give her steerage-way whenever you’re ready to cast off, Captain O’Shea.”
“Then let go, fore and aft,” roared the master. “Are ye pilot enough to take her down the river, Mr. Parkinson?”
“I could do it with both eyes shut, but I’m not so familiar with the coast to the north’ard.”
“I have a pilot for the part of the coast and the river we are bound for,” grimly returned O’Shea. “He is locked in a spare state-room just now. He will know that part of China very well, for ’tis me opinion that he has been there before.”