Chapter IV

“That was the yarn Billy spun, and there he sat when he’d finished asking us what he was to do.

“‘Well, I says to him, ‘you’re asking that question a bit too late; to begin with, you should never have trusted yourself alone in ’Frisco with them nerves of yours. Second, you went the wrong way about getting rid of the thing.’

“‘Oh, did I?’ said Billy. ‘And how would you have done—put yourself in my position, and what would you have done to get rid of it?’

“That flummoxed me.

“‘Well,’ I said, ‘to begin with, I wouldn’t have been such an ass as to want to get rid of it.’

“‘S’posing you were,’ said he, ‘and I allow I was an ass to fancy all them things, but supposing you were, will you tell me where I went wrong? Wouldn’t you have done everything I did just as I did it? Of course you would. I tell you I was fixed to that thing by bad luck and I only got rid of it after it had done me in with the drink.’

“‘But you haven’t got rid of it,’ says Buck.

“‘Whach you mean?’ asks Billy, his hair standing on end.

“‘You brought it on board,’ says Buck, and he goes to the locker and takes the parcel out. Billy looked at it, took it in his hands and turned it over.

“‘Then he says: ‘That does me.’ He says no more than that. The life seemed to go out of him for a bit as if the hunch had come on him that it wasn’t no use to fight any more.

“‘I says to Buck: ‘Come on up on deck and leave him with the durned thing,’ and up we went and there we saw a big freighter pounding along and coming up from south’ard, ’Frisco bound and making to pass us close.

“‘There’s his chance,’ says Buck; ‘run down and fetch him up and we’ll flag her to stop, it’s better than taking him off to hell or Timbuctoo, seeing he’s a married man.’

“Down I went and up I brought him. There was a fair sea still running, but nothing to make a bother about, and we could easy have got him off in a boat. But do you think that chap would go, not he; he said he’d sure be drowned if he put off in a boat in that sea, said the thing was out to drown him if it could. Then he went below and got into his bunk with his inamorata, and we let the freighter pass, and that was his last chance of getting to Los Angeles for many a long day.

“I was pretty sick with him, so was Buck. It wasn’t so much because he was afraid of drowning as because he was afraid of being drowned by that rotten parcel, but we weren’t so free of superstitions ourselves as to be too hard on the poor chap, so we didn’t do more than make his life a hell till he was ashamed of himself to the soles of his boots and taking a hand in the working of the ship. We wanted to shy parcel and petticoat overboard, but he wouldn’t let us. We’d shown him the initials on the belt of the thing and he said they were his wife’s and it was plain now that some mistake had been made in packing it among his things by the servant maid he gave us the specification of. He said he reckoned he’d keep it to bring back to her, so she might know his story was true.

“But it was many a day before he was likely to see Los Angeles again and so we told him.