Amiable Joe! I can see him yet, tall, ungainly, stoop-shouldered, a slight cast in one eye, his head bobbing like a duck’s as he walked—a most agreeable and pathetic person. His dreams were so simple, his wants so few. He lived with his sister somewhere in Eleventh Avenue down-town in a tenement, and carried home bundles of firewood to her at night all this great distance, to help out. He received (not earned—he did much more than that) seventeen and a half cents an hour, and dreamed of what? I could never quite make out. Marriage? A little cheap flat somewhere? Life is so pathetic at times.
“Light on the starboard bow,” or “Light on the port bow,” were the chosen phrases which we told him he was in duty bound to use, adding always “Sir,” as respectful subordinates should. Also we insisted on his instantly making known to us at such times as we twain happened to be in the engine-room together, all bell buoys, whistle buoys, lighthouses, passing vessels and most of all the monthly pay car as it rounded the curve half a mile up the track about the fifteenth of every month. The matter of reporting the approach of the pay car was absolutely without exception. If he failed to do that we would be compelled, sad as it might be and excellent as his other services had been, to put him in irons. Here we showed him the irons also.
Joe cheerfully accepted. For days thereafter he would come back regularly when the need of heating his coffee or securing a drink necessitated, and lifting a straight forefinger to his forehead, would report, “Light on the port bow, Sir. I think it’s in the steel works jist up the track here,” or “Light on the starboard, Sir. It’s the fast mail, maybe, for Chicago, jist passin’ Kingsbridge.”
“No thinks, Joseph,” I used to reprimand. “You are not supposed to give your thinks. If the captain wishes to know what it is, he will ask. Back to the molding machine for yours, Joseph.”
Joseph, shock-headed, with dusty hair, weak eyes and a weaker smile, would retire, and then we would look at each other, the captain and I, and grin, and he would exclaim:
“Pretty fair discipline, mate.”
“Oh, I think we’ve got ’em going, Captain.”
“Nothin’ like order, mate.”
“You’re right, Cap.”
“I don’t suppose the mate’d ever condescend to take orders like that, eh, mate?”