CHAPTER XIV
Early next morning, the morning watch of sailors, whose custom was to fetch the day’s supply of water for the galley and cabin, discovered that the barrels were empty. Mr. Jackson was so alarmed that he immediately called Captain Doane, and not many minutes elapsed ere Captain Doane had routed out Grimshaw and Nishikanta to tell them the disaster.
Breakfast was an excitement shared in peculiarly by the Ancient Mariner and Dag Daughtry, while the trio of partners raged and bewailed. Captain Doane particularly wailed. Simon Nishikanta was fiendish in his descriptions of whatever miscreant had done the deed and of how he should be made to suffer for it, while Grimshaw clenched and repeatedly clenched his great hands as if throttling some throat.
“I remember, it was in forty-seven – nay, forty-six – yes, forty-six,” the Ancient Mariner chattered. “It was a similar and worse predicament. It was in the longboat, sixteen of us. We ran on Glister Reef. So named it was after our pretty little craft discovered it one dark night and left her bones upon it. The reef is on the Admiralty charts. Captain Doane will verify me.. ”
No one listened, save Dag Daughtry, serving hot cakes and admiring. But Simon Nishikanta, becoming suddenly aware that the old man was babbling, bellowed out ferociously:
“Oh, shut up! Close your jaw! You make me tired with your everlasting ‘I remember.’”
The Ancient Mariner was guilelessly surprised, as if he had slipped somewhere in his narrative.
“No, I assure you,” he continued. “It must have been some error of my poor old tongue. It was not the Wide Awake, but the brig Glister. Did I say Wide Awake? It was the Glister, a smart little brig, almost a toy brig in fact, copper-bottomed, lines like a dolphin, a sea-cutter and a wind-eater. Handled like a top. On my honour, gentlemen, it was lively work for both watches when she went about. I was super-cargo. We sailed out of New York, ostensibly for the north-west coast, with sealed orders – ”
“In the name of God, peace, peace! You drive me mad with your drivel!” So Nishikanta cried out in nervous pain that was real and quivering. “Old man, have a heart. What do I care to know of your Glister and your sealed orders!”
“Ah, sealed orders,” the Ancient Mariner went on beamingly. “A magic phrase, sealed orders.” He rolled it off his tongue with unction. “Those were the days, gentlemen, when ships did sail with sealed orders. And as super-cargo, with my trifle invested in the adventure and my share in the gains, I commanded the captain. Not in him, but in me were reposed the sealed orders. I assure you I did not know myself what they were. Not until we were around old Cape Stiff, fifty to fifty, and in fifty in the Pacific, did I break the seal and learn we were bound for Van Dieman’s Land. They called it Van Dieman’s Land in those days.. ”
It was a day of discoveries. Captain Doane caught the mate stealing the ship’s position from his desk with the duplicate key. There was a scene, but no more, for the Finn was too huge a man to invite personal encounter, and Captain Dome could only stigmatize his conduct to a running reiteration of “Yes, sir,” and “No, sir,” and “Sorry, sir.”
Perhaps the most important discovery, although he did not know it at the time, was that of Dag Daughtry. It was after the course had been changed and all sail set, and after the Ancient Mariner had privily informed him that Taiohae, in the Marquesas, was their objective, that Daughtry gaily proceeded to shave. But one trouble was on his mind. He was not quite sure, in such an out-of-the-way place as Taiohae, that good beer could be procured.
As he prepared to make the first stroke of the razor, most of his face white with lather, he noticed a dark patch of skin on his forehead just between the eyebrows and above. When he had finished shaving he touched the dark patch, wondering how he had been sunburned in such a spot. But he did not know he had touched it in so far as there was any response of sensation. The dark place was numb.
“Curious,” he thought, wiped his face, and forgot all about it.
No more than he knew what horror that dark spot represented, did he know that Ah Moy’s slant eyes had long since noticed it and were continuing to notice it, day by day, with secret growing terror.
Close-hauled on the south-east trades, the Mary Turner began her long slant toward the Marquesas. For’ard, all were happy. Being only seamen, on seamen’s wages, they hailed with delight the news that they were bound in for a tropic isle to fill their water-barrels. Aft, the three partners were in bad temper, and Nishikanta openly sneered at Captain Doane and doubted his ability to find the Marquesas. In the steerage everybody was happy – Dag Daughtry because his wages were running on and a further supply of beer was certain; Kwaque because he was happy whenever his master was happy; and Ah Moy because he would soon have opportunity to desert away from the schooner and the two lepers with whom he was domiciled.
Michael shared in the general happiness of the steerage, and joined eagerly with Steward in learning by heart a fifth song. This was “Lead, kindly Light.” In his singing, which was no more than trained howling after all, Michael sought for something he knew not what. In truth, it was the lost pack, the pack of the primeval world before the dog ever came in to the fires of men, and, for that matter, before men built fires and before men were men.
He had been born only the other day and had lived but two years in the world, so that, of himself, he had no knowledge of the lost pack. For many thousands of generations he had been away from it; yet, deep down in the crypts of being, tied about and wrapped up in every muscle and nerve of him, was the indelible record of the days in the wild when dim ancestors had run with the pack and at the same time developed the pack and themselves. When Michael was asleep, then it was that pack-memories sometimes arose to the surface of his subconscious mind. These dreams were real while they lasted, but when he was awake he remembered them little if at all. But asleep, or singing with Steward, he sensed and yearned for the lost pack and was impelled to seek the forgotten way to it.
Waking, Michael had another and real pack. This was composed of Steward, Kwaque, Cocky, and Scraps, and he ran with it as ancient forbears had ran with their own kind in the hunting. The steerage was the lair of this pack, and, out of the steerage, it ranged the whole world, which was the Mary Turner ever rocking, heeling, reeling on the surface of the unstable sea.
But the steerage and its company meant more to Michael than the mere pack. It was heaven as well, where dwelt God. Man early invented God, often of stone, or clod, or fire, and placed him in trees and mountains and among the stars. This was because man observed that man passed and was lost out of the tribe, or family, or whatever name he gave to his group, which was, after all, the human pack. And man did not want to be lost out of the pack. So, of his imagination, he devised a new pack that would be eternal and with which he might for ever run. Fearing the dark, into which he observed all men passed, he built beyond the dark a fairer region, a happier hunting-ground, a jollier and robuster feasting-hall and wassailing-place, and called it variously “heaven.”
Like some of the earliest and lowest of primitive men, Michael never dreamed of throwing the shadow of himself across his mind and worshipping it as God. He did not worship shadows. He worshipped a real and indubitable god, not fashioned in his own four-legged, hair-covered image, but in the flesh-and-blood image, two-legged, hairless, upstanding, of Steward.
CHAPTER XV
Had the trade wind not failed on the second day after laying the course for the Marquesas; had Captain Doane, at the mid-day meal, not grumbled once again at being equipped with only one chronometer; had Simon Nishikanta not become viciously angry thereat and gone on deck with his rifle to find some sea-denizen to kill; and had the sea-denizen that appeared close alongside been a bonita, a dolphin, a porpoise, an albacore, or anything else than a great, eighty-foot cow whale accompanied by her nursing calf – had any link been missing from this chain of events, the Mary Turner would have undoubtedly reached the Marquesas, filled her water-barrels, and returned to the treasure-hunting; and the destinies of Michael, Daughtry, Kwaque, and Cocky would have been quite different and possibly less terrible.
But every link was present for the occasion. The schooner, in a dead calm, was rolling over the huge, smooth seas, her boom sheets and tackles crashing to the hollow thunder of her great sails, when Simon Nishikanta put a bullet into the body of the little whale calf. By an almost miracle of chance, the shot killed the calf. It was equivalent to killing an elephant with a pea-rifle. Not at once did the calf die. It merely immediately ceased its gambols and for a while lay quivering on the surface of the ocean. The mother was beside it the moment after it was struck, and to those on board, looking almost directly down upon her, her dismay and alarm were very patent. She would nudge the calf with her huge shoulder, circle around and around it, then range up alongside and repeat her nudgings and shoulderings.
All on the Mary Turner, fore and aft, lined the rail and stared down apprehensively at the leviathan that was as long as the schooner.
“If she should do to us, sir, what that other one did to the Essex,” Dag Daughtry observed to the Ancient Mariner.
“It would be no more than we deserve,” was the response. “It was uncalled-for – a wanton, cruel act.”
Michael, aware of the excitement overside but unable to see because of the rail, leaped on top of the cabin and at sight of the monster barked defiantly. Every eye turned on him in startlement and fear, and Steward hushed him with a whispered command.
“This is the last time,” Grimshaw muttered in a low voice, tense with anger, to Nishikanta. “If ever again, on this voyage, you take a shot at a whale, I’ll wring your dirty neck for you. Get me. I mean it. I’ll choke your eye-balls out of you.”
The Jew smiled in a sickly way and whined, “There ain’t nothing going to happen. I don’t believe that Essex ever was sunk by a whale.”
Urged on by its mother, the dying calf made spasmodic efforts to swim that were futile and caused it to veer and wallow from side to side.
In the course of circling about it, the mother accidentally brushed her shoulder under the port quarter of the Mary Turner, and the Mary Turner listed to starboard as her stern was lifted a yard or more. Nor was this unintentional, gentle impact all. The instant after her shoulder had touched, startled by the contact, she flailed out with her tail. The blow smote the rail just for’ard of the fore-shrouds, splintering a gap through it as if it were no more than a cigar-box and cracking the covering board.
That was all, and an entire ship’s company stared down in silence and fear at a sea-monster grief-stricken over its dying progeny.
Several times, in the course of an hour, during which the schooner and the two whales drifted farther and farther apart, the calf strove vainly to swim. Then it set up a great quivering, which culminated in a wild wallowing and lashing about of its tail.
“It is the death-flurry,” said the Ancient Mariner softly.
“By damn, it’s dead,” was Captain Doane’s comment five minutes later. “Who’d believe it? A rifle bullet! I wish to heaven we could get half an hour’s breeze of wind to get us out of this neighbourhood.”
“A close squeak,” said Grimshaw,
Captain Doane shook his head, as his anxious eyes cast aloft to the empty canvas and quested on over the sea in the hope of wind-ruffles on the water. But all was glassy calm, each great sea, of all the orderly procession of great seas, heaving up, round-topped and mountainous, like so much quicksilver.
“It’s all right,” Grimahaw encouraged. “There she goes now, beating it away from us.”
“Of course it’s all right, always was all right,” Nishikanta bragged, as he wiped the sweat from his face and neck and looked with the others after the departing whale. “You’re a fine brave lot, you are, losing your goat to a fish.”
“I noticed your face was less yellow than usual,” Grimshaw sneered. “It must have gone to your heart.”
Captain Doane breathed a great sigh. His relief was too strong to permit him to join in the squabbling.
“You’re yellow,” Grimshaw went on, “yellow clean through.” He nodded his head toward the Ancient Mariner. “Now there’s the real thing as a man. No yellow in him. He never batted an eye, and I reckon he knew more about the danger than you did. If I was to choose being wrecked on a desert island with him or you, I’d take him a thousand times first. If – ”
But a cry from the sailors interrupted him.
“Merciful God!” Captain Doane breathed aloud.
The great cow whale had turned about, and, on the surface, was charging straight back at them. Such was her speed that a bore was raised by her nose like that which a Dreadnought or an Atlantic liner raises on the sea.
“Hold fast, all!” Captain Doane roared.
Every man braced himself for the shock. Henrik Gjertsen, the sailor at the wheel, spread his legs, crouched down, and stiffened his shoulders and arms to hand-grips on opposite spokes of the wheel. Several of the crew fled from the waist to the poop, and others of them sprang into the main-rigging. Daughtry, one hand on the rail, with his free arm clasped the Ancient Mariner around the waist.
All held. The whale struck the Mary Turner just aft of the fore-shroud. A score of things, which no eye could take in simultaneously, happened. A sailor, in the main rigging, carried away a ratline in both hands, fell head-downward, and was clutched by an ankle and saved head-downward by a comrade, as the schooner cracked and shuddered, uplifted on the port side, and was flung down on her starboard side till the ocean poured level over her rail. Michael, on the smooth roof of the cabin, slithered down the steep slope to starboard and disappeared, clawing and snarling, into the runway. The port shrouds of the foremast carried away at the chain-plates, and the fore-topmast leaned over drunkenly to starboard.
“My word,” quoth the Ancient Mariner. “We certainly felt that.”
“Mr. Jackson,” Captain Doane commanded the mate, “will you sound the well.”
The mate obeyed, although he kept an anxious eye on the whale, which had gone off at a tangent and was smoking away to the eastward.
“You see, that’s what you get,” Grimshaw snarled at Nishikanta.
Nishikanta nodded, as he wiped the sweat away, and muttered, “And I’m satisfied. I got all I want. I didn’t think a whale had it in it. I’ll never do it again.”
“Maybe you’ll never have the chance,” the captain retorted. “We’re not done with this one yet. The one that charged the Essex made charge after charge, and I guess whale nature hasn’t changed any in the last few years.”
“Dry as a bone, sir,” Mr. Jackson reported the result of his sounding.
“There she turns,” Daughtry called out.
Half a mile away, the whale circled about sharply and charged back.
“Stand from under for’ard there!” Captain Doane shouted to one of the sailors who had just emerged from the forecastle scuttle, sea-bag in hand, and over whom the fore-topmast was swaying giddily.
“He’s packed for the get-away,” Daughtry murmured to the Ancient Mariner. “Like a rat leaving a ship.”
“We’re all rats,” was the reply. “I learned just that when I was a rat among the mangy rats of the poor-farm.”
By this time, all men on board had communicated to Michael their contagion of excitement and fear. Back on top of the cabin so that he might see, he snarled at the cow whale when the men seized fresh grips against the impending shock and when he saw her close at hand and oncoming.
The Mary Turner was struck aft of the mizzen shrouds. As she was hurled down to starboard, whither Michael was ignominiously flung, the crack of shattered timbers was plainly heard. Henrik Gjertsen, at the wheel, clutching the wheel with all his strength, was spun through the air as the wheel was spun by the fling of the rudder. He fetched up against Captain Doane, whose grip had been torn loose from the rail. Both men crumpled down on deck with the wind knocked out of them. Nishikanta leaned cursing against the side of the cabin, the nails of both hands torn off at the quick by the breaking of his grip on the rail.
While Daughtry was passing a turn of rope around the Ancient Mariner and the mizzen rigging and giving the turn to him to hold, Captain Doane crawled gasping to the rail and dragged himself erect.
“That fetched her,” he whispered huskily to the mate, hand pressed to his side to control his pain. “Sound the well again, and keep on sounding.”
More of the sailors took advantage of the interval to rush for’ard under the toppling fore-topmast, dive into the forecastle, and hastily pack their sea-bags. As Ah Moy emerged from the steerage with his own rotund sea-bag, Daughtry dispatched Kwaque to pack the belongings of both of them.
“Dry as a bone, sir,” came the mate’s report.
“Keep on sounding, Mr. Jackson,” the captain ordered, his voice already stronger as he recovered from the shock of his collision with the helmsman. “Keep right on sounding. Here she comes again, and the schooner ain’t built that’d stand such hammering.”
By this time Daughtry had Michael tucked under one arm, his free arm ready to anticipate the next crash by swinging on to the rigging.
In making its circle to come back, the cow lost her bearings sufficiently to miss the stern of the Mary Turner by twenty feet. Nevertheless, the bore of her displacement lifted the schooner’s stern gently and made her dip her bow to the sea in a stately curtsey.
“If she’d a-hit.. ” Captain Doane murmured and ceased.
“It’d a-ben good night,” Daughtry concluded for him. “She’s a-knocked our stern clean off of us, sir.”
Again wheeling, this time at no more than two hundred yards, the whale charged back, not completing her semi-circle sufficiently, so that she bore down upon the schooner’s bow from starboard. Her back hit the stem and seemed just barely to scrape the martingale, yet the Mary Turner sat down till the sea washed level with her stern-rail. Nor was this all. Martingale, bob-stays and all parted, as well as all starboard stays to the bowsprit, so that the bowsprit swung out to port at right angles and uplifted to the drag of the remaining topmast stays. The topmast anticked high in the air for a space, then crashed down to deck, permitting the bowsprit to dip into the sea, go clear with the butt of it of the forecastle head, and drag alongside.
“Shut up that dog!” Nishikanta ordered Daughtry savagery. “If you don’t.. ”
Michael, in Steward’s arms, was snarling and growling intimidatingly, not merely at the cow whale but at all the hostile and menacing universe that had thrown panic into the two-legged gods of his floating world.
“Just for that,” Daughtry snarled back, “I’ll let ’m sing. You made this mess, and if you lift a hand to my dog you’ll miss seeing the end of the mess you started, you dirty pawnbroker, you.”
“Perfectly right, perfectly right,” the Ancient Mariner nodded approbation. “Do you think, steward, you could get a width of canvas, or a blanket, or something soft and broad with which to replace this rope? It cuts me too sharply in the spot where my three ribs are missing.”
Daughtry thrust Michael into the old man’s arm.
“Hold him, sir,” the steward said. “If that pawnbroker makes a move against Killeny Boy, spit in his face, bite him, anything. I’ll be back in a jiffy, sir, before he can hurt you and before the whale can hit us again. And let Killeny Boy make all the noise he wants. One hair of him’s worth more than a world-full of skunks of money-lenders.”
Daughtry dashed into the cabin, came back with a pillow and three sheets, and, using the first as a pad and knotting the last together in swift weaver’s knots, he left the Ancient Mariner safe and soft and took Michael back into his own arms.
“She’s making water, sir,” the mate called. “Six inches – no, seven inches, sir.”
There was a rush of sailors across the wreckage of the fore-topmast to the forecastle to pack their bags.
“Swing out that starboard boat, Mr. Jackson,” the captain commanded, staring after the foaming course of the cow as she surged away for a fresh onslaught. “But don’t lower it. Hold it overside in the falls, or that damned fish’ll smash it. Just swing it out, ready and waiting, let the men get their bags, then stow food and water aboard of her.”
Lashings were cast off the boat and the falls attached, when the men fled to holding-vantage just ere the whale arrived. She struck the Mary Turner squarely amidships on the port beam, so that, from the poop, one saw, as well as heard, her long side bend and spring back like a limber fabric. The starboard rail buried under the sea as the schooner heeled to the blow, and, as she righted with a violent lurch, the water swashed across the deck to the knees of the sailors about the boat and spouted out of the port scuppers.
“Heave away!” Captain Doane ordered from the poop. “Up with her! Swing her out! Hold your turns! Make fast!”
The boat was outboard, its gunwale resting against the Mary Turner’s rail.
“Ten inches, sir, and making fast,” was the mate’s information, as he gauged the sounding-rod.
“I’m going after my tools,” Captain Doane announced, as he started for the cabin. Half into the scuttle, he paused to add with a sneer for Nishikanta’s benefit, “And for my one chronometer.”
“A foot and a half, and making,” the mate shouted aft to him.
“We’d better do some packing ourselves,” Grimshaw, following on the captain, said to Nishikanta.
“Steward,” Nishikanta said, “go below and pack my bedding. I’ll take care of the rest.”
“Mr. Nishikanta, you can go to hell, sir, and all the rest as well,” was Daughtry’s quiet response, although in the same breath he was saying, respectfully and assuringly, to the Ancient Mariner: “You hold Killeny, sir. I’ll take care of your dunnage. Is there anything special you want to save, sir?”
Jackson joined the four men below, and as the five of them, in haste and trepidation, packed articles of worth and comfort, the Mary Turner was struck again. Caught below without warning, all were flung fiercely to port and from Simon Nishikanta’s room came wailing curses of announcement of the hurt to his ribs against his bunk-rail. But this was drowned by a prodigious smashing and crashing on deck.
“Kindling wood – there won’t be anything else left of her,” Captain Doane commented in the ensuing calm, as he crept gingerly up the companionway with his chronometer cuddled on an even keel to his breast.
Placing it in the custody of a sailor, he returned below and was helped up with his sea-chest by the steward. In turn, he helped the steward up with the Ancient Mariner’s sea-chest. Next, aided by anxious sailors, he and Daughtry dropped into the lazarette through the cabin floor, and began breaking out and passing up a stream of supplies – cases of salmon and beef, of marmalade and biscuit, of butter and preserved milk, and of all sorts of the tinned, desiccated, evaporated, and condensed stuff that of modern times goes down to the sea in ships for the nourishment of men.
Daughtry and the captain emerged last from the cabin, and both stared upward for a moment at the gaps in the slender, sky-scraping top-hamper, where, only minutes before, the main- and mizzen-topmasts had been. A second moment they devoted to the wreckage of the same on deck – the mizzen-topmast, thrust through the spanker and supported vertically by the stout canvas, thrashing back and forth with each thrash of the sail, the main-topmast squarely across the ruined companionway to the steerage.
While the mother-whale expressing her bereavement in terms of violence and destruction, was withdrawing the necessary distance for another charge, all hands of the Mary Turner gathered about the starboard boat swung outboard ready for lowering. A respectable hill of case goods, water-kegs, and personal dunnage was piled on the deck alongside. A glance at this, and at the many men of fore and aft, demonstrated that it was to be a perilously overloaded boat.
“We want the sailors with us, at any rate – they can row,” said Simon Nishikanta.
“But do we want you?” Grimshaw queried gloomily. “You take up too much room, for your size, and you’re a beast anyway.”
“I guess I’ll be wanted,” the pawnbroker observed, as he jerked open his shirt, tearing out the four buttons in his impetuousness and showing a Colt’s .44 automatic, strapped in its holster against the bare skin of his side under his left arm, the butt of the weapon most readily accessible to any hasty dip of his right hand. “I guess I’ll be wanted. But just the same we can dispense with the undesirables.”
“If you will have your will,” the wheat-farmer conceded sardonically, although his big hand clenched involuntarily as if throttling a throat. “Besides, if we should run short of food you will prove desirable – for the quantity of you, I mean, and not otherwise. Now just who would you consider undesirable? – the black nigger? He ain’t got a gun.”
But his pleasantries were cut short by the whale’s next attack – another smash at the stern that carried away the rudder and destroyed the steering gear.
“How much water?” Captain Doane queried of the mate.
“Three feet, sir – I just sounded,” came the answer. “I think, sir, it would be advisable to part-load the boat; then, right after the next time the whale hits us, lower away on the run, chuck the rest of the dunnage in, and ourselves, and get clear.”
Captain Doane nodded.
“It will be lively work,” he said. “Stand ready, all of you. Steward, you jump aboard first and I’ll pass the chronometer to you.”
Nishikanta bellicosely shouldered his vast bulk up to the captain, opened his shirt, and exposed his revolver.
“There’s too many for the boat,” he said, “and the steward’s one of ’em that don’t go along. Get that. Hold it in your head. The steward’s one of ’em that don’t go along.”
Captain Doane coolly surveyed the big automatic, while at the fore of his consciousness burned a vision of his flat buildings in San Francisco.
He shrugged his shoulders. “The boat would be overloaded, with all this truck, anyway. Go ahead, if you want to make it your party, but just bear in mind that I’m the navigator, and that, if you ever want to lay eyes on your string of pawnshops, you’d better see that gentle care is taken of me. – Steward!”
Daughtry stepped close.
“There won’t be room for you.. and for one or two others, I’m sorry to say.”
“Glory be!” said Daughtry. “I was just fearin’ you’d be wantin’ me along, sir. – Kwaque, you take ’m my fella dunnage belong me, put ’m in other fella boat along other side.”
While Kwaque obeyed, the mate sounded the well for the last time, reporting three feet and a half, and the lighter freightage of the starboard boat was tossed in by the sailors.
A rangy, gangly, Scandinavian youth of a sailor, droop-shouldered, six feet six and slender as a lath, with pallid eyes of palest blue and skin and hair attuned to the same colour scheme, joined Kwaque in his work.
“Here, you Big John,” the mate interfered. “This is your boat. You work here.”
The lanky one smiled in embarrassment as he haltingly explained: “I tank I lak go along cooky.”
“Sure, let him go, the more the easier,” Nishikanta took charge of the situation. “Anybody else?”
“Sure,” Dag Daughtry sneered to his face. “I reckon what’s left of the beer goes with my boat.. unless you want to argue the matter.”
“For two cents – ” Nishikanta spluttered in affected rage.
“Not for two billion cents would you risk a scrap with me, you money-sweater, you,” was Daughtry’s retort. “You’ve got their goats, but I’ve got your number. Not for two billion billion cents would you excite me into callin’ it right now. – Big John! Just carry that case of beer across, an’ that half case, and store in my boat. – Nishikanta, just start something, if you’ve got the nerve.”
Simon Nishikanta did not dare, nor did he know what to do; but he was saved from his perplexity by the shout:
“Here she comes!”
All rushed to holding-ground, and held, while the whale broke more timbers and the Mary Turner rolled sluggishly down and back again.
“Lower away! On the run! Lively!”
Captain Doane’s orders were swiftly obeyed. The starboard boat, fended off by sailors, rose and fell in the water alongside while the remainder of the dunnage and provisions showered into her.
“Might as well lend a hand, sir, seein’ you’re bent on leaving in such a hurry,” said Daughtry, taking the chronometer from Captain Doane’s hand and standing ready to pass it down to him as soon as he was in the boat.
“Come on, Greenleaf,” Grimshaw called up to the Ancient Mariner.
“No, thanking you very kindly, sir,” came the reply. “I think there’ll be more room in the other boat.”
“We want the cook!” Nishikanta cried out from the stern sheets. “Come on, you yellow monkey! Jump in!”
Little old shrivelled Ah Moy debated. He visibly thought, although none knew the intrinsicness of his thinking as he stared at the gun of the fat pawnbroker and at the leprosy of Kwaque and Daughtry, and weighed the one against the other and tossed the light and heavy loads of the two boats into the balance.
“Me go other boat,” said Ah Moy, starting to drag his bag away across the deck.
“Cast off,” Captain Doane commanded.
Scraps, the big Newfoundland puppy, who had played and pranced about through all the excitement, seeing so many of the Mary Turner’s humans in the boat alongside, sprang over the rail, low and close to the water, and landed sprawling on the mass of sea-bags and goods cases.
The boot rocked, and Nishikanta, his automatic in his hand, cried out: