Chapter II: Part 2

“Ridgeway,” he said, “you don’t seem to understand. This particular ‘mystery of the sea’ hasn’t been scratched yet--not even _scratched_, Ridgeway.” He sat down and leaned forward, fixing me with a didactic finger. “What happened?”

“Well, I have an idea the ‘barbarian’ got them, when it came to the pinch.”

“And let the--remains over the side?”

“I should say.”

“And they came back and got the ‘barbarian’ and let _him_ over the side, eh? There were none left, you remember.”

“Oh, good Lord, I don’t know!” I flared with a childish resentment at this catechizing of his. But his finger remained there, challenging.

“I do,” he announced. “The Chinaman put them over the side, as we have said. And then, after that, he died--of wounds about the head.”

“So?” I had still sarcasm.

“You will remember,” he went on, “that the skipper did not happen to mention a cat, a _yellow_ cat, in his confessions.”

“McCord,” I begged him, “please drop it. Why in thunder _should_ he mention a cat?”

“True. Why _should_ he mention a cat? I think one of the reasons why he should _not_ mention a cat is because there did not happen to be a cat aboard at that time.”

“Oh, all right!” I reached out and pulled the bottle to my side of the table. Then I took out my watch. “If you don’t mind,” I suggested, “I think we’d better be going ashore. I’ve got to get to my office rather early in the morning. What do you say?”

He said nothing for the moment, but his finger had dropped. He leaned back and stared straight into the core of the light above, his eyes squinting.

“He would have been from the south of China, probably.” He seemed to be talking to himself. “There’s a considerable sprinkling of the belief down there, I’ve heard. It’s an uncanny business--this transmigration of souls--”

Personally, I had had enough of it. McCord’s fingers came groping across the table for the bottle. I picked it up hastily and let it go through the open companionway, where it died with a faint gurgle, out somewhere on the river.

“Now,” I said to him, shaking the vagrant wrist, “either you come ashore with me or you go in there and get under the blankets. You’re drunk, McCord--_drunk_. Do you hear me?”

“Ridgeway,” he pronounced, bringing his eyes down to me and speaking very slowly. “You’re a fool, if you can’t see better than that. I’m not drunk. I’m sick. I haven’t slept for three nights--and now I can’t. And you say--you--” He went to pieces very suddenly, jumped up, pounded the legs of his chair on the decking, and shouted at me: “And you say that, you--you landlubber, you office coddler! You’re so comfortable sure that everything in the world is cut and dried. Come back to the water again and learn how to wonder--and stop talking like a damn fool. Do you know where--Is there anything in your municipal budget to tell me where Björnsen went? Listen!” He sat down, waving me to do the same, and went on with a sort of desperate repression.

“It happened on the first night after we took this hellion. I’d stood the wheel most of the afternoon--off and on, that is, because she sails herself uncommonly well. Just put her on a reach, you know, and she carries it off pretty well--”

“I know,” I nodded.

“Well, we mugged up about seven o’clock. There was a good deal of canned stuff in the galley, and Björnsen wasn’t a bad hand with a kettle--a thoroughgoing Square-head he was--tall and lean and yellow-haired, with little fat, round cheeks and white mustache. Not a bad chap at all. He took the wheel to stand till mid-night, and I turned in, but I didn’t drop off for quite a spell. I could hear his boots wandering around over my head, padding off forward, coming back again. I heard him whistling now and then--an out-landish air. Occasionally I could see the shadow of his head waving in a block of moonlight that lay on the decking right down there in front of the state-room. It came from the companion; the cabin was dark because we were going easy on the oil. They hadn’t left a great deal, for some reason or other.”

McCord leaned back and described with his finger where the illumination had cut the decking.

“There! I could see it from my bunk, as I lay, you understand. I must have almost dropped off once when I heard him fiddling around out here in the cabin, and then he said something in a whisper, just to find out if I was still awake, I suppose. I asked him what the matter was. He came and poked his head in the door.

“‘The breeze is going out,’ says he. ‘I was wondering if we couldn’t get a little more sail on her.’ Only I can’t give you his fierce Square-head tang. ‘How about the tops?’ he suggested.

“I was so sleepy I didn’t care, and I told him so. ‘All right,’ he says, ‘but I thought I might shake out one of them tops.’ Then I heard him blow at something outside. ‘Scat, you ----!’ Then: ‘This cat’s going to set me crazy, Mr. McCord,’ he says, ‘following me around everywhere.’ He gave a kick, and I saw something yellow floating across the moonlight. It never made a sound--just floated. You wouldn’t have known it ever lit anywhere, just like--”

McCord stopped and drummed a few beats on the table with his fist, as though to bring himself back to the straight narrative.

“I went to sleep,” he began again. “I dreamed about a lot of things. I woke up sweating. You know how glad you are to wake up after a dream like that and find none of it is so? Well, I turned over and settled to go off again, and then I got a little more awake and thought to myself it must be pretty near time for me to go on deck. I scratched a match and looked at my watch. ‘That fellow must be either a good chap or asleep,’ I said to myself. And I rolled out quick and went above-decks. He wasn’t at the wheel. I called him: ‘Björnsen! Björnsen!’ No answer.”

McCord was really telling a story now. He paused for a long moment, one hand shielding an ear and his eyeballs turned far up.

“That was the first time I really went over the hulk,” he ran on. “I got out a lantern and started at the forward end of the hold, and I worked aft, and there was nothing there. Not a sign, or a stain, or a scrap of clothing, or anything. You may believe that I began to feel funny inside. I went over the decks and the rails and the house itself--inch by inch. Not a trace. I went out aft again. The cat sat on the wheel-box, washing her face. I hadn’t noticed the scar on her head before, running down between her ears--rather a new scar--three or four days old, I should say. It looked ghastly and blue-white in the flat moonlight. I ran over and grabbed her up to heave her over the side--you understand how upset I was. Now you know a cat will squirm around and grab something when you hold it like that, generally speaking. This one didn’t. She just drooped and began to purr and looked up at me out of her moonlit eyes under that scar. I dropped her on the deck and backed off. You remember Björnsen had _kicked_ her--and I didn’t want anything like that happening to--”

The narrator turned upon me with a sudden heat, leaned over and shook his finger before my face.

“There you go!” he cried. “You, with your stout stone buildings and your policemen and your neighborhood church--you’re so damn sure. But I’d just like to see you out there, alone, with the moon setting, and all the lights gone tall and queer, and a shipmate--” He lifted his hand overhead, the finger-tips pressed together and then suddenly separated as though he had released an impalpable something into the air.

“Go on,” I told him.

“I felt more like you do, when it got right again, and warm and sunshiny. I said ‘Bah!’ to the whole business. I even fed the cat, and I slept awhile on the roof of the house--I was so sure. We lay dead most of the day, without a streak of air. But that night--! Well, that night I hadn’t got over being sure yet. It takes quite a jolt, you know, to shake loose several dozen generations. A fair, steady breeze had come along, the glass was high, she was staying herself like a doll, and so I figured I could get a little rest, lying below in the bunk, even if I didn’t sleep.

“I tried not to sleep, in case something should come up--a squall or the like. But I think I must have dropped off once or twice. I remember I heard something fiddling around in the galley, and I hollered ‘Scat!’ and everything was quiet again. I rolled over and lay on my left side, staring at that square of moonlight outside my door for a long time. You’ll think it was a dream--what I saw there.”

“Go on,” I said.

“Call this table-top the spot of light, roughly,” he said. He placed a finger-tip about the middle of the forward edge and drew it slowly toward the center. “Here, what would correspond with the upper side of the companionway, there came down very gradually the shadow of a tail. I watched it streaking out there across the deck, wiggling the slightest bit now and then. When it had come down about half-way across the light, the solid part of the animal--its shadow, you understand--began to appear, quite big and round. But how could she hang there, done up in a ball, from the hatch?”

He shifted his finger back to the edge of the table and puddled it around to signify the shadowed body.

“I fished my gun out from behind my back. You see, I was feeling funny again. Then I started to slide one foot over the edge of the bunk, always with my eyes on that shadow. Now I swear I didn’t make the sound of a pin dropping, but I had no more than moved a muscle when that shadowed thing twisted itself around in a flash--and there on the floor before me was the profile of a man’s head, upside down, listening--a man’s head with a tail of hair.”

McCord got up hastily and stepped over in front of the state-room door, where he bent down and scratched a match.

“See,” he said, holding the tiny flame above a splintered scar on the boards. “You wouldn’t think a man would be fool enough to shoot at a shadow?”

He came back and sat down.

“It seemed to me all hell had shaken loose. You’ve no idea, Ridgeway, the rumpus a gun raises in a box like this. I found out afterward the slug ricochetted into the galley, bringing down a couple of pans--and that helped. Oh, yes, I got out of here quick enough. I stood there, half out of the companion, with my hands on the hatch and the gun between them, and my shadow running off across the top of the house shivering before my eyes like a dry leaf. There wasn’t a whisper of sound in the world--just the pale water floating past and the sails towering up like a pair of twittering ghosts. And everything that crazy color--

“Well, in a minute I saw it, just abreast of the mainmast, crouched down in the shadow of the weather rail sneaking off forward very slowly. This time I took a good long sight before I let go. Did you ever happen to see black-powder smoke in the moonlight? It puffed out perfectly round, like a big pale balloon, this did, and for a second something was bounding through it--without a sound, you understand--something a shade solider than the smoke and big as a cow, it looked to me. It passed from the weather side to the lee and ducked behind the sweep of the mainsail like _that_--” McCord snapped his thumb and forefinger under the light.

“Go on,” I said. “What did you do then?”

McCord regarded me for an instant from beneath his lids, uncertain. His fist hung above the table. “You’re--” He hesitated, his lips working vacantly. A forefinger came out of the fist and gesticulated before my face. “If you’re laughing, why, damn me, I’ll--”

“Go on,” I repeated. “What did you do then?”

“I followed the thing.” He was still watching me sullenly. “I got up and went forward along the roof of the house, so as to have an eye on either rail. You understand, this business had to be done with. I kept straight along. Every shadow I wasn’t absolutely sure of I _made_ sure of--point-blank. And I rounded the thing up at the very stem--sitting on the butt of the bowsprit, Ridgeway, washing her yellow face under the moon. I didn’t make any bones about it this time. I put the bad end of that gun against the scar on her head and squeezed the trigger. It snicked on an empty shell. I tell you a fact; I was almost deafened by the report that didn’t come.

“She followed me aft. I couldn’t get away from her. I went and sat on the wheel-box and she came and sat on the edge of the house, facing me. And there we stayed for upwards of an hour, without moving. Finally she went over and stuck her paw in the water-pan I’d set out for her; then she raised her head and looked at me and yawled. At sundown there’d been two quarts of water in that pan. You wouldn’t think a cat could get away with two quarts of water in--”

He broke off again and considered me with a sort of weary defiance.

“What’s the use?” He spread out his hands in a gesture of hopelessness. “I knew you wouldn’t believe it when I started. You _couldn’t_. It would be a kind of blasphemy against the sacred institution of pavements. You’re too damn smug, Ridgeway. I can’t shake you. You haven’t sat two days and two nights, keeping your eyes open by sheer teeth-gritting, until they got used to it and wouldn’t shut any more. When I tell you I found that yellow thing snooping around the davits, and three bights of the boat-fall loosened out, plain on deck--you grin behind your collar. When I tell you she padded off forward and evaporated--flickered back to hell and hasn’t been seen since then--why, you explain to yourself that I’m drunk. I tell you--” He jerked his head back abruptly and turned to face the companionway, his lips still apart. He listened so for a moment, then he shook himself out of it and went on:

“I tell you, Ridgeway, I’ve been over this hulk with a foot-rule. There’s not a cubic inch I haven’t accounted for, not a plank I--”

This time he got up and moved a step toward the companion, where he stood with his head bent forward and slightly to the side. After what might have been twenty seconds of this he whispered, “Do you hear?”

Far and far away down the reach a ferryboat lifted its infinitesimal wail, and then the silence of the night river came down once more, profound and inscrutable. A corner of the wick above my head sputtered a little--that was all.

“Hear what?” I whispered back. He lifted a cautious finger toward the opening.

“Somebody. Listen.”

The man’s faculties must have been keyed up to the pitch of his nerves, for to me the night remained as voiceless as a subterranean cavern. I became intensely irritated with him; within my mind I cried out against this infatuated pantomime of his. And then, of a sudden, there was a sound--the dying rumor of a ripple, somewhere in the outside darkness, as though an object had been let into the water with extreme care.

“You heard?”

I nodded. The ticking of the watch in my vest pocket came to my ears, shucking off the leisurely seconds, while McCord’s finger-nails gnawed at the palms of his hands. The man was really sick. He wheeled on me and cried out, “My God! Ridgeway--why don’t we go?”

I, for one, refused to be a fool. I passed him and climbed out of the opening: he followed far enough to lean his elbows on the hatch, his feet and legs still within the secure glow of the cabin.

“You see, there’s nothing.” My wave of assurance was possibly a little overdone.

“Over there,” he muttered, jerking his head toward the shore lights. “Something swimming.”

I moved to the corner of the house and listened.

“River thieves,” I argued. “The place is full of--”

“_Ridgeway. Look behind you!_”

Perhaps it is the pavements--but no matter; I am not ordinarily a jumping sort. And yet there was something in the quality of that voice beyond my shoulder that brought the sweat stinging though the pores of my scalp even while I was in the act of turning.

A cat sat there on the hatch, expressionless and immobile in the gloom.

I did not say anything. I turned and went below. McCord was there already, standing on the farther side of the table. After a moment or so the cat followed and sat on her haunches at the foot of the ladder and stared at us without winking.

“I think she wants something to eat,” I said to McCord.

He lit a lantern and went out into the galley. Returning with a chunk of salt beef, he threw it into the farther corner. The cat went over and began to tear at it, her muscles playing with convulsive shadow-lines under the sagging yellow hide.

And now it was she who listened, to something beyond the reach of even McCord’s faculties, her neck stiff and her ears flattened. I looked at McCord and found him brooding at the animal with a sort of listless malevolence. “_Quick!_ She has kittens somewhere about.” I shook his elbow sharply. “When she starts, now--”

“You don’t seem to understand,” he mumbled. “It wouldn’t be any use.”

She had turned now and was making for the ladder with the soundless agility of her race. I grasped McCord’s wrist and dragged him after me, the lantern hanging against his knees. When we came up the cat was already amidships, a scarcely discernible shadow at the margin of our lantern’s ring. She stopped and looked back at us with her luminous eyes, appeared to hesitate, uneasy at our pursuit of her, shifted here and there with quick, soft bounds, and stopped to fawn with her back arched at the foot of the mast. Then she was off with an amazing suddenness into the shadows forward.

“Lively now!” I yelled at McCord. He came pounding along behind me, still protesting that it was of no use. Abreast of the foremast I took the lantern from him to hold above my head.

“You see,” he complained, peering here and there over the illuminated deck. “I tell you, Ridgeway, this thing--” But my eyes were in another quarter, and I slapped him on the shoulder.

“An engineer--an engineer to the core,” I cried at him. “Look aloft, man.”

Our quarry was almost to the cross-trees, clambering up the shrouds with a smartness no sailor has ever come to, her yellow body, cut by the moving shadows of the ratlines, a queer sight against the mat of the night. McCord closed his mouth and opened it again for two words: “By gracious!” The following instant he had the lantern and was after her. I watched him go up above my head--a ponderous, swaying climber into the sky--come to the cross-trees, and squat there with his knees clamped around the mast. The clear star of the lantern shot this way and that for a moment, then it disappeared, and in its place there sprang out a bag of yellow light, like a fire-balloon at anchor in the heavens. I could see the shadows of his head and hands moving monstrously over the inner surface of the sail, and muffled exclamations without meaning came down to me. After a moment he drew out his head and called: “All right--they’re here. Heads! there below!”

I ducked at his warning, and something spanked on the planking a yard from my feet. I stepped over to the vague blur on the deck and picked up a slipper--a slipper covered with some woven straw stuff and soled with a matted felt, perhaps a half-inch thick. Another struck somewhere abaft the mast, and then McCord reappeared above and began to stagger down the shrouds. Under his left arm he hugged a curious assortment of litter, a sheaf of papers, a brace of revolvers, a gray kimono, and a soiled apron.

“Well,” he said when he had come to deck, “I feel like a man who has gone to hell and come back again. You know I’d come to the place where I really believed that about the cat. When you think of it--By gracious! we haven’t come so far from the jungle, after all.”

We went aft and below and sat down at the table as we had been. McCord broke a prolonged silence.

“I’m sort of glad he got away--poor cuss! He’s probably climbing up a wharf this minute, shivering and scared to death. Over toward the gas-tanks, by the way he was swimming. By gracious! now that the world’s turned over straight again, I feel I could sleep a solid week. Poor cuss! can you imagine him, Ridgeway--”

“Yes,” I broke in. “I think I can. He must have lost his nerve when he made out your smoke and shinnied up there to stow away, taking the ship’s papers with him. He would have attached some profound importance to them--remember, the ‘barbarian,’ eight thousand miles from home. Probably couldn’t read a word. I supposed the cat followed him--the traditional source of food. He must have wanted water badly.”

“I should say! He wouldn’t have taken the chances he did.”

“Well,” I announced, “at any rate, I can say it now--there’s another ‘mystery of the sea’ gone to pot.”

McCord lifted his heavy lids.

“No,” he mumbled. “This mystery is that a man who has been to sea all his life could sail around for three days with a man bundled up in his top and not know it. When I think of him peeking down at me--and playing off that damn cat--probably without realizing it--scared to death--by gracious! Ridgeway, there was a pair of funks aboard this craft, eh? Wow--yow--I could sleep--”

“I should think you could.”

McCord did not answer.

“By the way,” I speculated. “I guess you were right about Björnsen, McCord--that is, his fooling with the foretop. He must have been caught all of a bunch, eh?”

Again McCord failed to answer. I looked up, mildly surprised, and found his mouth opened wide. He was asleep.

POPULAR LITTLE BLUE BOOKS

220 Senator Vest’s Tribute to a Dog and Other
Dog Lore

1170 Funny Ghost Stories. Jerome K. Jerome

901 Woman: The Eternal Primitive.
Wm. J. Fielding

229 Ridiculous Women: Comedy of French Life.
Molière

410 Amorous Misadventures. Restif de la Bretonne

810 Some Polite Scandals of Parisian Life

404 Romances of Paris. Alfred de Musset

1062 Humoresque. Fannie Hurst

1115 Ridiculous Stories. Stephen Leacock

659 Two Famous Stories. Theodore Dreiser

661 Neurotic America and the Sex Impulse.
Dreiser

865 Main Street Tales. Sherwood Anderson

866 Untold Lie and Other Tales. Anderson

698 Tales of Chicago Streets. Ben Hecht

699 Broken Necks and Other City Tales.
Ben Hecht

540 Brightly Colored Tales of Love.
Remy de Gourmont

541 Passion Stories of Many Hues.
Remy de Gourmont

1202 Forbidden Love and Other Stories.
Barry Pain

1194 Love’s Heroism and Other Tales

317 Flirtation in the Night and Other Tales.
Chekhov

23 Great Stories of the Sea

145 Great Ghost Stories

938 French Tales of Passion and Cruelty

178 One of Cleopatra’s Nights. Theophile Gautier

230 The Quest for a Blonde Mistress. Gautier.

58 Tales from Boccaccio’s Decameron

12 Tales of Mystery. Edgar Allan Poe

102 Sherlock Holmes Tales. Conan Doyle

783 Mandalay and Other Poems. Rudyard Kipling

795 Gunga Din and Other Poems. Kipling

222 The Vampire and Other Poems. Kipling

815 A Book of Familiar Quotations

367 How to Improve Your Conversation

82 Common Faults in Writing English

697 4,000 Words Often Mispronounced

821 How to Improve Your Vocabulary

1103 A Book of Puzzles and Brainteasers

1210 A Book of Mathematical Oddities

167 General Rules for Everyday Health

74 Physiology of Sex Life. Dr. Greer

1 The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

556 Hints on Etiquette. Esther Floyd

1219 How to Make Your Home More Homelike

364 How to Argue Logically. Schopenhauer

185 The Gods. Robert G. Ingersoll

4 The Age of Reason. Thomas Paine

27 The Last Days of a Condemned Man.
Victor Hugo

160 The Wit and Wisdom of Voltaire

1231 The Best Jokes of 1926

389 Jokes and Clever Sayings About Kissing

29 Dreams: Short Stories of Passion’s Pawns

314 Short Stories of French Life. Daudet

954 A Bath and Other French Tales. Emile Zola

893 Five Hundred Riddles

830 A Book of Crossword Puzzles

1253 General Information Quizzes

868 Some General Hints on Self-Improvement

166 English As She Is Spoke. Mark Twain

668 Humorous Fables. Mark Twain

422 Book of Best Yankee Jokes

287 Best Jokes About Doctors

112 Secret of Self-Development. J. C. Powys

855 How to Write Letters for All Occasions

56 Dictionary of American Slang

972 Popular Joke Book

382 Wit and Wisdom of Abraham Lincoln

738 Poor Richard’s Almanac. Ben Franklin

1089 The Common Sense of Sex. Oppenheim

ORDER BY NUMBER: Your choice 5c each, plus 1c per book for packing and carriage charges. Order by number. Complete catalogue free on request.

HALDEMAN-JULIUS PUBLICATIONS,
Dept. S-25, Girard, Kansas

=TRANSCRIBER’S NOTES=

Simple typographical errors have been silently corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

Punctuation, hyphenation, and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed.