There's a sailor on the New York that's had almost as many thrillers as Sandboys and between you and me I think he could talk Sandboys all around the block. He's been a pirate, he told me, but a nice kind of a pirate. He says he was called the Chesterfield of the Black Flag because he always did what he did politely no matter how horrible. If he attacked a ship at night he always did it in a dress suit and things like that, and if there were ladies aboard of any ship he captured and he had to lock 'em up in the hold he always apologized for doing it, and hoped they'd have a good time. He was brought up in Salem Massachusetts where he imbibed a love of the sea and learned manners—those are his own words, particularly imbibed. That word shows what a fine man he really is. His language is really splendid. Most pirates, he told me, wasn't fit to associate with gentlemen because they couldn't talk like gentlemen, but he felt that he could go anywhere, even into a lady's parlor and talk and never say a word that "wouldn't go with the furniture," as he put it, without swearing off a bit of his piracy neither. He has charge of the steamer-chairs on board this boat and nobody but me knows who he really is. He hasn't been on shore for five years because he says there's a price on his head. Just as soon as the boat gets into port he takes a dozen cans of sardines and a box of crackers and goes and hides up under the bowsprit and lives there on the sardines and crackers until the ship starts to sea again, when he comes out and takes charge of the chairs. That's how I came to know him. I get up early and go out on deck and he tells me all the thrillers he knows.
He had an awful experience last trip over. He was putting away the chairs one night when all of a sudden he saw one of the English detectives that had been looking for him for years coming along the deck and in the moonlight the detective saw him and recognized him at once.
"Aha!" said he. "Run to earth at last, Chesterfield."
"Not as I know on," said the sailor. "Seems to me I'm run to sea." And then he gave a wild ominous laugh. "I'm very glad to see you," he continued. "How are Mrs. Detective and the children?"
"You haven't lost any of your manners, Chesterfield," said the detective; "but they don't go with me. You're my pirate!" And he laid his hands on Chesterfield's shoulder.
"Pardon me," said Chesterfield. "But really my dear Mr. Detective you don't realize your peril. I could throw you overboard in two seconds, and if it wasn't an exceedingly impolite thing to push a gentleman of your standing into the water where you'd get your clothes spoiled I'll be jiggered if I wouldn't do it. Can't I summon assistance for you?"
"I'll summon it quick enough!" cried the detective rudely not even thanking Chesterfield for his offer, and he ran to one of those big air funnels that came up through the decks and hollered help down it, supposing that it lead into the cabin where the stewards stay; and Chesterfield just took him by the coat tails and pitched him head first through the funnel into the hold, where the fellow could howl to his heart's content and nobody'd hear him because he landed way below the lowest deck on a bale of cotton and there he staid until the ship got into port—and when he came out he was so excited that nobody'd believe what he said, he spoke so sort of crazy and he was arrested for a stowaway. Chesterfield of course had gone and hid under the bowsprit, and even if folks had believed the detective they'd have thought he'd escaped. But to show how polite he was, every morning Chesterfield would go to the funnel when nobody was looking and call out good-morning to the detective and drop down two sandwiches and a bottle of ginger-ale so he wouldn't starve.
When the pirate isn't on duty I don't have quite as much fun, though I have fun enough. We have to eat by a time-table. Soup comes at half past six, fish at twenty minutes to seven, lobster patties at ten minutes to seven, roast beef at seven, and so on, and I don't like it a bit. I don't ever want anything but soup and pie. The soup comes in early enough but you have to wait an hour and forty minutes for the pie and it's slow work. I asked the Captain if I couldn't have my pie at six forty and he said he'd be glad to let me only discipline had to be kept up and if the waiters were allowed to bring in pie out of its turn it would upset the whole system an' we'd get nothing but chaos. I don't know what chaos is; we've never had any at home and I never saw it on a bill of fare anywhere, but Pop says it's no good and spoils one's digestion.
