"And I was just in time to see the finish of 'Shorty' Blake's bombardment of Nagasaki, and it must have been a wonder all the way. They took him off to the transport in a sampan, with four little Jap policemen sittin' on his head and chest, and him kickin' holes in the cabin roof. The only night I was out with him he was playin' a game of turnin' rickshaws upside down, and sittin' on the axle, with the passenger yellin' murder underneath until Shorty got ready to move on. I asked him where he got all his money for rum and police court fines, and he was that twistified with booze, he says:
"'I ripped the mortgage off the old homestead like the hero in a play, and took my commissions like J. P. Morgan reorganizin' a railroad. If you don't believe it, ask the Jap whose name begins with a jade teapot.'"
CAPTAIN ARENDT'S CHOICE
His wife half raised herself from the couch which had been her abiding place for more than twenty years. "My broken flower," the captain named her in his prayers at sea. The One to whom these petitions arose each night his liner throbbed along the Western Ocean track had granted that the heart and soul of the wife should wax in strength and sweetness while her body lay bound in chains of suffering. Because to-night there was worry in the tired, brave eyes which strove so well to mirror only gladness when the captain was at home, he was much disturbed, the more because he had made the cloud to come.
She looked, indeed, like a "broken flower" beside the towering strength of the captain, who growled through his flaming beard when he would speak most softly, who moved in a series of small earthquakes as he tried to pace with gentlest tread, while they thrashed out the momentous problem.
"To think of the new home is wonderful," she said in German, for this they talked when together. "Do the doctors truly believe I shall be stronger if we live at New York? Is there, indeed, hope of health again? Ah, but it is risking all we have saved in these twenty-five years, and——"
The captain no longer withheld his voice and it boomed through the little house with a hurricane note, though he meant it to be only reassuring:
"But the gain is wonderful. Such a home as I have found last voyage—in the country, in the hills, near New York. There is life in the air, and it will make you well every day. And better than that, what is everything to you and me, I shall be with you almost a whole week every voyage—almost a week in a month. Now, when I must sail from Liverpool, I am home here in Antwerp with you perhaps two days a month, perhaps not at all when storm and fog delay my ship, or when the passage is bad for the North Sea packet in winter.