Chapter III (2)

For the first time since Mr. Butterell had joined the ship I opened the door of his room and looked in. He lay face up in his berth beneath the open window, with the handle of a sheath knife sticking up from his chest. It had been driven home, and as I looked, horror-stricken at the sight, four bells struck at the wheel, and Bill's voice came from aloft, "Four bells, and all's well!"

Twenty minutes later I was locked in my room, charged by the excited Captain Merwin with murdering the mate. "Find the motive; find the man!" he had stormed. He had heard me threaten again through his window as he was undressing for bed, and nothing that I could say as to another man's threatening, too, had the slightest effect. His daughter had evidently seen, and had fainted from the shock. When she recovered she would, no doubt, so testify.

With the boatswain standing my watch, I sat there until midnight; then, as the other boatswain relieved him, I crawled into my berth, but not to sleep. The problem would not permit it; for it was a problem that would not solve. But, in my casting about for a solution, I was forced to exonerate Bill, the only man besides myself with the "motive." For how could Bill, whom I had seen on the yard just before going below, descend to the lee alley, knife the mate through the window, and get aloft in time to answer at four bells?

Mentally counting my steps along the alley and down to the passage, the half-minute or so while I was engaged at the log slate, and the succeeding interval of time between his death scream and Bill's call from aloft, I found it incredible. Even had he been able so to time his descent by any means as to reach the window before I had closed the log slate, still the men had wakened at the scream, and one or more would have seen him before he could have got out of sight behind the cro'-jack on his way aloft. As for Tom, who also had a motive, though a lesser one, he was out of the question. There were no beckets nor lanyards with which to secure the wheel, and had he dropped it the canvas would have been in ribbons before he could reach the window. The steward, who slept off the forward cabin, had come out, rubbing his eyes, palpably stupid from recent sleep; and he had no motive--the mate had liked him. When I had sprung on deck the strong moonlight had shown it clear of men as far forward as the main hatch, from which a few were arousing themselves. The murderer could not have run forward.

Who else? I asked myself. Mabel? She could have run forward by the lee alley after I had gone down by the other; but why? She had no motive for the crime, and if she had why would she have chosen such a moment, when discovery was inevitable? Then, too, it required strength beyond hers to drive a sheath knife to the handle into the body of a man. No, Mabel was also out of the question; but there came to my mind the equally disquieting query, What was she doing on the main deck, or in the alley near the mate's room, at that time of night? This I could not answer; but at daylight it was answered for me.

Captain Merwin opened the door of my room, and I rolled out of my berth. "Mr. Rogers," he said, "I owe you an apology. You did not kill the mate. She has recovered and explained."

"Who did, sir?" I asked.

"One of the twin stowaways, she does not know which. I have ironed them both in the 'tween deck; but they accuse each other."

"Brotherly love with a vengeance!" I commented. "But I cannot see how either could have done it."

"My daughter saw one of them at the window. Here she is."

Mabel, her glorious hair disheveled, her face pale and drawn, her eyes tear stained, pushed into the room, and incontinently fell into my arms, her own around my neck.

"Oh, it's over!" she said brokenly. "It's over at last--and the strain, and the worry! I could not have stood it much longer! I knew last night that I couldn't; but you wouldn't let me speak!"

"Mabel, Mabel!" said her father. "Steady yourself, my girl!"

"Papa, go away!" she said. "I want to talk with Mr. Rogers, and you could not understand--you haven't understood, at all."

He paused a moment; but she straightened herself before him and pointed to the door. He left us together.

"And you did not understand, either," she said, turning to me. "You thought I enjoyed his conversation, and his society, and his maddening attentions. Why couldn't you see? It was only to quiet him, to flatter his insufferable vanity, and keep him from further assault upon you. I knew--I knew by your face that first day out that you would kill him if he struck you again; and then--then the consequences! You had warned him, threatened, and nothing would have saved you. They would have hanged you--and what should I have done then?"

"And you did this for me, Mabel? Do you really care for me?"

"Since I first saw you," she said, her face flaming with color. "I should not tell you now," she added, "only for what has happened; for I heard your opinion of me that same evening."

"Then you also heard, Mabel," I said, as I took her again in my arms, "that I have loved you, and waited for you, since you were a child."

"Yes," she answered simply. "Perhaps, after all, that is why I am telling you now. I might have told you last night, and followed you down to the main deck; but when I looked in you were busy, and I went to the lee steps to go back and wait for you. Then I saw him at the window, and--and I heard--and screamed. I must have fainted, and when I wakened a little while ago Papa told me you had killed him--and I knew better."

"God love you, Mabel!" I said. "But what roused you last night--to tell me--to follow me?"

"What he threatened after you had warned him again. He purposed to strike you again on the first pretext, and allow you to attempt his life; then to have you imprisoned for murderous assault. He did not believe you would actually kill him; but I knew you would. I wanted to beg you not to try, to be patient, to hold your temper."

"Had you asked me that, Mabel," I said, "I think I should."

After breakfast that morning the body of the mate was given sea burial; then there followed a curious court of inquiry at the mizzen hatch--a court in which the two accused prisoners were also witnesses against each other, and in which the testimony of the only positive witness was invalidated by lack of identification. Mabel could only say that she had seen one of them draw his head and shoulders out of the mate's window just as his agonized scream had smitten her ears, and look into her face as she peered at him from the head of the steps. But she could not tell one from the other. The men had heard the screams; but had seen nothing but myself, bending over the girl.

Bill's testimony was direct and short. He did not change it, nor attempt to qualify it. The sheath knife was his, he admitted, and it had not been touched by him. On the yard he had seen me go forward and into the companion; he had seen the girl follow, peer in at me, and go to the lee steps; and he had seen Tom leave the wheel when the girl had entered the alley, hurry along the lee alley, pick up the knife, reach into the window, and leave it there. He had heard the two screams, had seen me emerge and bend over the girl after she had fallen down the steps, had seen the captain arrive, and when four bells had struck he had answered and come down; for his punishment had ended.

Tom had more to say. First, he had seen Bill drop from the bight of a lee cro'-jack buntline to the house just where the knife was placed. He had seen him pick up the knife, jump to the alley, and after the mate had screamed spring back to the house and disappear behind the cro'-jack as he climbed the buntline. He had watched him farther aloft as he appeared on the cro'-jack yard, and had seen him go up the lee topmast rigging to the upper yard from which, when he had struck four bells, he had answered.

"You inhuman pair of scoundrels!" spluttered Captain Merwin indignantly. "No matter which is guilty--for a twin brother to swear away the life of the other! It is incredible, unheard of! Why didn't you speak at once--either of you--both of you?"

To this they each coolly announced a satisfaction with the death of the mate and a disinterestedness in the fate of the other as to minimize their responsibility.

I now further clouded the case by my own speculations; that Tom could not have left the wheel without the ship's broaching to, and that Bill had not the time in which to descend and return, even had he been able to choose the exact moment. But to this Tom gave immediate answer.

"Can you remember the time it took, sir," he asked me, "from your lookin' at him aloft to your hearin' him sing out at four bells?"

"About four minutes," I said, after a moment's thought.

"Now, I'll prove it, sir, that it was plenty of time. I s'pose the lee buntlines haven't been touched since then, have they?"

The boatswains testified that they had not, and Tom requested that his irons be removed for his demonstration. He was freed, and stepped toward the weather alley. "Now, I'll go aloft, Mr. Rogers," he said, "to the same place on the yard as he was, and you take the same place on the quarter where you was when you seed him up there. Then you start forward, just as you did, and I'll do just what he did."

The captain nodded assent to this, and I went aft to the log while Tom danced aloft to the lee topsail yard. "All ready, sir!" he called. "Start now!"

I faithfully reproduced my steps along the alley, down to the main deck, and into the passage, where I killed time at the log desk. As I turned to leave it I heard Tom call, "Now it is, sir!" from the mate's window, and, stepping out on deck, I went through the pantomime of leaning over Mabel, talking with the captain, and going to the mate's room to call him. Before I had reached the door, however, Tom's voice came from aloft. "Four bells!" he shouted. "All's well!"

I came out. The captain was holding his watch, and Tom was leisurely descending.

"You were slightly mistaken, Mr. Rogers," said the captain. "He did it in less than three minutes. He slid down the middle buntlines of the treesails, took time enough at the window, and went up hand over hand forward of the cro'-jack, then up the topmast rigging. He has proved his innocence by proving his brother guilty. But--God help such brothers!"

"And Gawd help you, you old fool," yelled Bill, as he waved his manacled hands at the skipper, "if I get out o' this fix! I didn't kill him, though I meant to, and I'll kill you yet as sure as I meant to kill him!"

"Down below with him, Mr. Rogers!" said the captain, and I took the frenzied Bill to the 'tween deck, where I lashed him to a stanchion, still raving and threatening, not only the captain, but his brother Tom and myself.

"For it's you," he raved, "that give him a chance to show off his climbin'! What if there was time? D'ye think I'd ha' been fool enough, up aloft where I could see, to come down on that job with the girl puttin' herself in the way? He was on the poop, and couldn't see where she was."

Though I made him no answer, I confess that this aspect of the case troubled me as we sailed on toward Sydney. I said no more about it, though at the trial of Bill at Sydney I introduced it in my testimony. It had little weight. A captain's preconceived opinion of a sailor's guilt often has more influence in court than solid evidence to the contrary, and Bill was convicted of murder in the first degree on the testimony of his brother and the captain's story of the climb.

We went to sea before he was sentenced; I as first mate, and Mabel as my promised wife. And, though the rest of the crew had deserted the murder ship, Tom went with us; for he wanted, he said, to get as far away from his brother, dead or alive, as was possible. And with his brother in limbo Tom was really a changed character, lively, anxious to please, and ambitious to learn. He seemed grateful to me, and accorded me his confidence, showing me his sheath knife one day with its point broken off.

"For I want no murder in mine, sir!" he said. "I know I've got a bad temper, and I know these knives can go deep. No hangman's knots for me, Mr. Rogers! Say, sir, will you show me how to make one?"

Not without repugnance did I make the grisly exhibit for him in the end of a rope. He practiced it until proficient, and then, gleefully and grinning, made hangman's nooses in ropes' ends until the men, with the suasion of the forecastle, changed his mood.

The change seemed permanent. His unpleasant grin gave way to the old and equally unpleasant scowl and nervous manner. He grew irritable, and one morning was so offensively familiar with Mabel and so insolent to Captain Merwin and myself that I ordered him aloft in his watch below for punishment, giving him as a task the making up of gaskets on the mizzen. Then I paid him no attention until four bells, when the helmsman, looking aloft as he struck the bell, sang out, "Great God, sir! Look!"

Tom, neatly noosed with a hangman's knot under his ear, was swaying at the end of an upper mizzentopsail yard gasket which depended from the place on the yard where his brother had clung the night of the murder.

I had begun to dread the sound of "four bells." This division of the watch is at two, six, and ten o'clock, night or day. At six in the evening I had threatened the life of the mate; at ten in the evening he had been killed; and at ten in the morning Tom had hanged himself.

What fatal or momentous event was to happen some day or night at two o'clock, I could not imagine; but an incident that occurred near the end of the homeward run led me to hope that the account had been settled. We were holystoning the decks, and a man working his stone near the wheel one afternoon found an obstruction in the deck, which he pried out and handed to me.

It was a small, flat, triangular piece of steel, sharpened on one edge, the end of a sheath-knife blade. It had been driven or pressed into the deck by some powerful force, then broken off, exactly as though used as a brace between a spoke and the deck to hold the wheel steady while the helmsman left it for a moment or two. As I came to this conclusion the man at the wheel struck four bells, and I tossed it overboard.

I said nothing about it to the captain or to Mabel; but news from Sydney that had beaten us by steamer to New York could not be concealed. On that day, at ten in the morning, Sydney time, his brother Bill had been hanged in the jail yard.

KISMET

Two babies in cabs pushed by their mothers met in a park. While the mothers talked the babies eyed each other for a few moments, then set up a blended scream of such volume and intensity as to break up the conversation and separate the party.

Five years later they met again in a kindergarten, and the pair, not knowing each other's names, but animated by a soul hatred coeval with the beginning of emotion, tried to stare each other out of countenance. Failing in this, they made faces, earnestly and spitefully, until reproved by the teacher and separated. One was soon taken away, its parents having removed their residence.

At eleven years of age they again faced one another, two vigorous boys from different streets of the city, each a leader of his band. There had been a "gang fight," a battle with sticks and stones, with charges and countercharges, retreats and routs. There had been a challenge from one leader, accepted by the other. They stood for a moment, each backed by his following; then one reached down for a chip, which he placed on his shoulder. All boyhood knows the consequences of knocking off a chip; but this one was not knocked off. The other boy also reached for a chip and placed it on his shoulder. And so they stood, silent, scowling, each waiting for a move on the part of the other, each dominated by a hate and a fear that he could not measure by any experience, but which surpassed in strength and grip all other emotions he had known.

"Soak him, Jonesy! Knock it off!" "Don't take that from any man, Smithy! Hit him!" "What's the matter with you?" "Paste him!" came from the combined following; but neither made a move. Slowly, like two tomcats similarly placed, with baleful, glittering eyes, they backed away until surrounded by their followers. Then came cries of derision and contempt, ending in a vigorous onslaught by both leaders, in which several critics bit the dust, and which partly restored their prestige. But it took many days of such tutelage before the discredited leaders regained their influence over the weaker spirits and impressed upon them the fact that they were not afraid to fight. Their excuses and explanations were many, but bore no relation to the real cause of the delinquency.

There were no more gang fights, to the relief of the residents and the police, and the enemies tried to avoid meeting; but when it was unavoidable they passed with quick, defiant, and sullen glances into each other's eyes. Once an involuntary raising of a hand by one was construed into a menace by the other, but he got no farther than to duplicate the gesture. Some intangible power seemed to paralyze his tongue and his muscles. Yet neither boy was a coward in the ordinary sense, nor lacking in the qualities of generosity and forgiveness. Young Smith, while bathing with other boys in the East River at Eighty-sixth Street, swam out into the swift current after a drowning lad, larger than himself, and who had lately bullied him on land, and, by diving again and again, secured him, only to find himself too exhausted to bring him in. A passing tug rescued them, the bully unconscious and Smith at his last gasp. The newspapers made him a hero, and the grateful bully, knowing Smith's enemy, offered to thrash him; but the same paralyzing inhibition prevented Smith from sanctioning this.

Jones, employed as elevator boy in a high building, emulated the feat a little later. Cool, and steady of nerve, he ran his car up and down through the smoke of a fire that gutted the building, and brought down to safety a half-hundred people, being rescued himself on the last trip, suffocating on the floor of his car. He, too, was made a hero, but bore his honors as modestly as Smith.

These experiences seemed to have a marked effect upon their future development. The qualities of courage, endurance, and masculine virility seemed of more importance than the intellectual and moral attributes. Jones declined a clerical position in the office of the skyscraper; and Smith, who could have been educated at college by the father of the bully, chose to ship in the navy as seaman apprentice. Shortly after, young Jones, unaware of Smith's step, yet influenced by the fate that was guiding their paths in parallel lines, joined the schoolship _St. Mary_, and on graduation entered the merchant marine as able seaman, with a scholar's knowledge of navigation. Smith served his time as apprentice, was honorably discharged as petty officer; and as to reach this rating he must master the study of navigation, he faced the world at twenty-one as well equipped in this as was Jones; then, as under the existing laws he could never obtain a commission in the navy, he chose a field where his knowledge was of use. About the same time as Jones he, too, shipped before the mast, and the Seven Seas engulfed them. But each learned of the other through letters from home.

Life in deep-water ships is a school of evolution in which the law of the survival of the fittest has full play. Weaklings, mental or physical, die on the first voyage, or quit at the end of it. Soft men become hard men; hard men become iron men; iron men lose their human attributes. As the stronger virtues of nerve, pluck, and stamina increase, so do the softer qualities of mercy and kindness decline. Both young men were starved and ill-treated before the mast, until, accepting it as the law of the calling, they fought against it to the after end of the ship, then to enforce it against the weaker spirits they had distanced. Each in time became a competent second mate with a growing sense of his importance; then a first mate, with a fixed and accepted reputation for "buckoism" that reached across the thousand miles of sea to the other. Smith, drinking in a saloon at Callao, heard of Black Jones's feat in quelling the _Eldorado_ mutiny with a belaying pin and cursed him mentally in furious envy. Jones, blackguarding a man he had just ironed in the 'tween deck at sea, heard from the victim of a man who could take him down--Bully Smith, who sailed out of New York.

Smith drank deeper from the news of Jones, and went to sea further committed to the blind worship of force. Jones insanely struck the man in irons, and in a week had ironed three others whom he had goaded into mutinous resentment of his abuse. Two strong, positive souls at the opposite ends of the earth, united by the first and lowest of primordial emotions--hatred and fear--were reinforcing each other to their mutual undoing. Had the kindergarten teacher done her duty and brought them together in childhood, or had they fought it out as boys, this might have been averted. Yet there came another chance in middle life.

The fate which gripped them sent one east from San Francisco, and the other west from New York, and the two ships sighted each other at the crossing point of voyages. Here a vicious, biting cold south-westerly gale blew the vessels against the rocky shores of Cape Horn, and in the furious turmoil of surf, backed by mountainous antarctic seas that picked both ships to pieces, but two men reached the shore alive--two strong, hardy, and enduring mates, Smith and Jones. Bruised and bleeding, drenched, freezing, and exhausted they painfully climbed the rocks five miles apart, and struck inland over a hummocky plateau, walking fast to keep out the cold while the moisture in their clothing stiffened to ice, not knowing where they were going, but dimly hoping for aid from the savages.

Through snow and sleet and raging polar wind they staggered on, making for the cañonlike aperture in the hills to the north that showed faintly in the lulls of the storm. Famished for want of food, tortured with thirst that snow would not relieve, racked in every bone and muscle with the awful pain of extreme fatigue, and not daring to halt for fear of the drowsiness that fought the fatigue and presaged death, with the name of God often on their lips--but not in prayer--they degenerated in two nights and a day into a couple of unreasoning wild beasts; but not yet insane, for they remembered one another when they rounded a huge pinnacle of rock at the head of the cañon and met face to face.

Two six-foot, bearded, ragged, and disheveled human brutes faced each other a hundred miles from their kind. And instead of their common suffering uniting them, their common soul mutually repelled them. But instead of silently and scowlingly backing away like the tomcats of boyhood, they snarled and growled incoherently like two rival polar bears, then turned and walked apart, each with what dignity he could assume under the circumstances. They did not enter the cañon; Smith turned east, Jones west, and their further suffering has no place in this story. They were on Hermite Island, and in time, with the help of sealers, Smith reached the Falklands, where he shipped before the mast for Liverpool; and Jones, Punta Arenas, where he got passage for Valparaiso.

It is easy for believers in reincarnation to picture the history of this warfare of soul. Back in the beginning of things two monera collide, and, neither able to absorb the other, separate and remember. Two ameboid organisms struggle for the mastery and rend each other to death. Two monster fish battle in the warm, steaming sea, and swim away, wounded, to be devoured by their kind. Two huge reptiles war to the death. Two mammals fight and run. Two manlike apes grapple on the bough of a tree, and, locked in vicious embrace, with teeth buried in each other's flesh, fall to a common death on the ground. Two apelike men battle with clubs and crack each other's skull. Two human beings duel with sword or pistol and kill each other. Two babies meet in a park and squall. And never, from the beginning, victory for one or forgiveness from either.

Fate gave them another meeting and another chance. Four years later both were paid off at San Francisco, and in looking for berths each met a skipper looking for mates, but at different times. Smith met him first, and, his credentials being good, while his reputation was world-wide and splendid, from a skipper's viewpoint, he was gladly accepted as first officer and sent aboard the ship, lying at anchor in the bay. Jones, rather than wait indefinitely for a berth as first mate, shipped as second, but only after a delay that brought him aboard as the ship was lifting her anchor. Neither knew of the other's presence in port, and their meeting on the poop as the tug was towing the ship to the Golden Gate was a matter of speculation to Captain Brown for some days after. They were introduced by the polite and enthusiastic skipper, who congratulated himself at the moment on his getting two such stars into his ship as Bully Smith and Black Jones of New York--and they stood stock-still and silent, staring at each other, while beads of perspiration gathered on their brows; then both wheeled and walked away, as they had done on the frozen plateau of Cape Horn. Mr. Smith to the forecastle, where the men, under the boatswains, were catting and fishing the anchor; Mr. Jones, to his room off the forward companion-alley. Here he sat on his chest, reviling Smith, his luck, the skipper who had shipped him, and the God above who had created him and brought him into contact with Smith and the things concerning Smith that he could not understand. Why, he asked himself, had he not thrashed him as a boy, or made friends with him?

Dimly, through this inquiry indexed by his curses, Jones at this moment had a fleeting glimpse into the scientific basis of the Golden Rule, ever a fallacy to him. But his past and his present would not permit of a continuance of the mind process. Here he was, a competent first mate with a master's certificate, second mate under a first mate, who was Smith. And at this he listened to a message delivered by the steward from the captain, that his presence was required on deck.

He went up, nervous as a cat in a strange place. Even though the ship was on her way and far from the beach, he approached the captain to ask that he be put ashore. But the captain quietly said, "Report to Mr. Smith, sir," and Jones walked forward to report, meeting Smith coming aft from the forecastle.

"Ready for work, sir," stammered Jones. "What do you wish?"

"No--nothing," answered Smith, equally embarrassed. They passed on, Smith aft to speak to the captain, Jones forward, around the house, meekly bearing the scrutiny of the men, and back to the main-rigging, where he stood idly looking aloft for a moment or two; then he coiled up a rope--a task that ordinarily he would have summoned a man to in a burst of invective.

Mr. Smith walked up to the captain.

"Anchor's on the rail, sir," he said. "What next, sir?"

"What next?" queried the captain, sharply. "Don't you know? Get both anchors inboard and stow them for sea. Pass that chain down into the lockers. Send down the fish-tackle. Get chafing-gear aloft. Stow away those fenders and clear up the decks. Get to work, Mr. Smith. Keep those twenty-four rope-haulers busy. They're looking at you now."

"Yes, sir," answered the subdued Mr. Smith; and he went forward among the men. Mr. Jones found other ropes to coil.

But the ship must be got ready for sea; and after a wearing day of work, with tentative orders from the two mates, with sarcastic comment from the captain, and insolent protest from the bewildered "rope-haulers," this was finally accomplished; and at eight bells in the evening, with the tug cast off and the towline coiled down to dry, with canvas set and the course given to the helmsman, Smith and Jones mustered the men into the waist to choose watches. They picked their men, one after another, with less interest in the proceedings than manifested by the men themselves. Then the first mate said, wearily: "Relieve the wheel and lookout. That'll do the port watch," and went to his berth demoralized and despondent, sick at heart--in the mind state of a prize-fighter lately whipped. The second mate walked the deck in about the same mood, until four bells struck, when, about the time that Smith fell asleep, he roused up his individuality and proved himself a competent and masterful second mate. The watch responded slowly to his call to the main-brace, and he went among them with a belaying pin.

When Smith relieved him at midnight he, too, felt the inhibition until Jones fell asleep, when his powers revived and his watch learned his caliber. Neither man knew the cause of the change of mood. As far as they could analyze their emotions they were nervous, broody, hateful, revengeful, and cowardly, until some reluctancy or misdoing of the men roused them to righteous rage. They did not, and could not, know that this revulsion did not occur until the other was asleep. This brought about a somewhat amusing condition of affairs a few days out.

An Orkney-Islander of Mr. Jones's watch--an intelligent, self-respecting man, who was aloft on the mizzen with a tar-pot--spilled a few drops on the clean white paintwork of the house; and Mr. Jones, standing beside the window of the sleeping Mr. Smith, witnessed the careless act, and shouted:

"Come down here, you long-headed billy-goat, and I'll make you smell hell!"

"Ay, that I will," answered the man, scrambling down in a hurry.

Irreverent forecastle tradition has it that the Orkney Islands are peopled by the descendants of a shipwrecked Dane and a nanny-goat. This tradition found its birth and acceptance, no doubt, from the goatlike characteristics of the heads, faces, and beards of this hardy race of people. But to apply the epithet goat to an Orkneyman is like saying Sawney to a Scot or nigger to a man-and-brother. Mr. Jones faced a raging lunatic; but Mr. Smith had wakened at his shout, was intently listening in the berth below, and Mr. Jones's efficiency left him. He backed away from the enraged sailor, then incontinently fled, pelted in the back by a hard and tarry fist, and occasionally kicked by a heavy sea-boot. Around the house they went, the man in an unspent fury of anger, Jones in an agony of fear and humiliation, until, at the second lap, Mr. Smith appeared at the forward companion, which opened on to the extension of the poop around which they had raced, with as much disquiet in his face as was in Jones's.

"You, too," bellowed the man. "Stand still, an' I'll no eat my dinner till I've licked you baith."

Mr. Smith stood for a moment or two, long enough to receive several crashing blows in the face, which he only tried to shield with his open, enfolding hands; then he, too, fled, but to his room, where he locked himself in.

Mr. Jones had put the house between himself and the enemy, who, having conquered both mates, now seemed to be looking for the captain; but when the captain appeared with a revolver he quieted down, and tamely went in irons. The captain's opinion of his mates must not be given; and the two mates' experiences with the men before, by individual action while the other slept, they had regained their ascendancy and authority, need not be detailed.

The ship was bound for Melbourne, a long passage full of possibilities; but they ate at separate tables, and after the first day's work seldom met except at the change of watches, when one would report to the other the happenings of the watch--the course, speed, direction and changes of the wind, and the progress of routine work--in a strained tone that was answered by the other with an equally embarrassed response. When both were awake their attitude and behavior were such as to merit the frankly expressed contempt of the skipper. When one was asleep, the other earned and won the hatred of his own watch, and this, by forecastle communion, was extended to the other.

There came a spell of bad weather, in which all hands were up occasionally, and then it was noticeable that both mates would blurt out the same order to the men at the same time. It only increased the general strain, and each mate mentally cursed himself and the other for the contretemps. Next, the men observed that the pet antipathies of Mr. Smith among them received more or less of the unkind attention of Mr. Jones, and _vice versa_. A Dutchman, kicked by the first mate in the morning washing down the deck, for working his broom athwartwise instead of fore and aft, was knocked down by the second mate in the dog-watch for passing to windward of him. An Irishman, damned at the wheel by Jones for bad steering, was set to work in his watch below by Smith for the small matter of eating his breakfast on deck. Other resemblances of thought and action occurred, more or less unfortunate, such as both showing kindness to the sick steward until they met at his bedside, then ignoring and neglecting him; and Mr. Jones's untactful appearance with his sextant when Mr. Smith was taking the sun at midday--an uncalled-for and regrettable piece of assumption on his part; for a second mate is not shipped to navigate, no matter what his proficiency. Again, each mate, unknown to the other, stopped the morning coffee of his watch on the flimsiest pretexts.

This communion of soul, mutually strengthened, became a force which pervaded the entire ship's company. The captain grew peevish, fretful, suspicious, and unkind to all. The steward became insolent as he recovered his health. The men quarreled and divided among themselves, uniting only in their hatred of the mates. The cook was mobbed for unprofessional treatment of the forecastle menu, and the carpenter and sailmaker fought a drawn battle for choice of seats at the second-cabin table--a matter that the steward might have decided, but would not. And thus animated, the floating hell sailed slantingly across the Pacific until hit by the outer fringe of a typhoon near the Society Islands, by which time the Orkneyman was released.

Mr. Jones had the deck at the beginning of it, and skillfully got the canvas in down to the maintopgallant sail, when the captain appeared, and, with a falling barometer in mind, decided to call all hands and shorten down to lower topsails. This brought the other mate on deck, and trouble began. The maintopgallantsail and upper mizzentopsail, however, came in easily, and were stowed before the evil genius of the mates could get to work. But then--the port watch to the fore, the starboard to the main--all hands manned the topsail downhauls and weather-braces, while the two mates slacked away the halyards and roared officerlike behests. It was a scene of wild confusion. The yards had been braced for a beam wind; but this wind was hauling aft and increasing rapidly to a screaming gale, which, bearing hard upon the fixed ground-swell, raised an ugly cross-sea that occasionally lifted a ton or two of green water over the rail. Captain Brown, to get his topsails in the easier, followed the wind as it changed, keeping it abeam; and, with a poor helmsman at the wheel, stood close beside him and added his voice to the uproar of whistling wind, pounding seas, the formless shouts of the four gangs at the downhauls, and the senseless upbraiding of the mates.

"Don't part those rotten downhauls!" roared the captain. "Watch out up aloft!" But the mates could not hear distinctly.

"Haul away on your downhauls!" shouted Mr. Jones at the main-rigging, and "Haul away on your downhauls!" repeated Mr. Smith from forward, each speech embellished with stock profanity. The yards were down, and the tackles aloft "two blocks," but the fatuous mates did not see nor hear.

"Belay your downhauls! Belay all!" yelled the furious skipper at the wheel. "Man the spilling-lines, and send a man aft who can steer!"

"Haul on your downhauls!" thundered the mutual-minded mates, and the exasperated men hauled with all their strength. There were six to a gang, and they could have broken new manila under the circumstances. The weather downhauls went first, and the wind within the hollow tube of canvas lifted the yardarms. Then a sea hit the weather quarter, boarded the ship, and washed the incompetent helmsman to the lee alley, where he lay quiet for a time. The captain seized the wheel and ground it up, yelling the while to "send a man aft, to haul away on the spilling-lines, to shut up that d--d noise at the halyards, and 'tend to business."

But in spite of his objurgations the mates could not obey. They ran about the flooded waist of the ship, shouting futile instructions to the demoralized crew to do this or that--and their orders were curiously similar, though inapplicable. Then, in spite of the captain's mighty heavings on the wheel, the ship broached to, spilling the topsails first, next the courses. The first slatted back against the masts, then forward against the strain of the bolt-ropes, started rents here and there, and in three minutes were in rags and shreds, while the yards, with slackened weather-braces, swung and banged about in a manner to send the crew from under. They flocked to the break of the poop, the two mates among them.

"Come aft here to me, you two hell-fired farmers!" bellowed the captain, and the two came. "D--n your wretched, miserable hearts and souls, if it wasn't for the law I'd slaughter you both! Look at my ship! Just look at her, now! Call yourself competent mates? Someone must have told you that. Take this wheel! Take it, both of you, and steer! Get this ship dead before the wind and keep her so! You can't shorten sail, but you can steer, and steer you will, straight and true, or I'll put you 'fore the mast!"

They gripped the spokes meekly, Smith to starboard, Jones to port, and with the aid of the shivered mizzentopsail got the ship before it, and steered--beautifully, with no sign or word from one to assist the other. Neither took charge, as is usual with two men at the wheel. Their movements were simultaneous and harmonious, with no conflicting judgments of pressure or release. They steered as one man with the strength of two; and Captain Brown glared at them awhile, then, unable to criticise, went forward among his men to secure his wabbly upper topsailyards. He tautened the braces; then, as all the downhauls had parted at or near the splices of the upper blocks, sent the whipped ends aloft to be rove off and knotted. But the first man up the fore had hardly reached the futtock rigging, when he sang out: "Land ho! Land dead ahead! Breakers under the bow, sir! It's a reef--a barrier reef. Hard a-port, sir, for God's sake!"

"Port your wheel!" yelled the captain from amidships. "Hard over! Port main-braces, all of you!"

The wheel went over and the men rushed to the braces, but it was too late. Hardly had the ship's head swung a point before there was a crash and a jolt that shook every man from his feet; then came another and heavier crash, and the stern lifted with a sea, swung through an irregular arc of radius equal to the ship's length, and came down with another crash that sent the wheel spinning and both helmsmen to the deck. The foremast went by the board, snapping six feet above the deck, and carrying with it the main-topgallantmast. It fell across the reef that had caught the ship, and the royal and topgallant masts and yards floated in the fairly quiet water of the lagoon within. The stern lifted again, swung farther in, and came down with a jar that shook out the main and mizzen topmasts; but these spars disintegrated as they fell, and landed close aboard or on the reef. Then came a mighty sea that swept over the dismantled wreck as over a breakwater; and the two mates, bruised and half stunned--nearly shocked out of their now limited faculties--were caught just as they stood erect, and carried with it, high over the rail, high over the barrier reef, and dropped in the swirling turmoil of yeasty water within it.

The captain had struggled aft to the starboard alley on the poop, and saw them go. A following sea hit the ship and bore him back in its rush along the alley. Recovering, he again scrambled aft to where, on the house just forward of the wheel, hung a small, circular life-buoy to be thrown by the helmsman in an emergency.

"Stand by!" he called. "Stand by for this life-buoy!" He could see their two shaggy heads rising out of the froth, each of them apparently uninjured, and swimming vigorously toward the reef. "Stand by!" he shouted, encouragingly, and sent the circular ring of cork and canvas whirling toward them with a round-arm throw. It fell near them, and both swam toward it, each getting a grip.

The captain ran forward as he could between the sweeping seas to where his crew clustered under the weather-rail, hanging on to coils of rope and belaying pins.

"Go out there, some of you!" he shouted. "Go down the foremast and throw them a line! I'll clear away the running-gear, so you can overhaul enough. Bear a hand, now, or they can't get back!"

"To hell with them!" said the Orkney-Islander. "Think you, cappen, that I or any man here would go down that spar after yon two buckos?"

Some there might have gone, for the captain was a naturally humane man and very much in earnest. But the Orkneyman was a master spirit among them, and his example prevailed. No one would go. The skipper mounted a few ratlines of the main-rigging, and shouted to swim to the floating wreck of the foremast, not far from where they struggled with the life-buoy--an easy swim had they swum alone. They made no response, nor did they cease their futile struggles. But they did not struggle with each other, only with the life-buoy and with the sea. They drifted to leeward into the lagoon, past the wreckage that might have saved them both, and by which they could have regained the ship. With only their heads showing occasionally, for their struggles kept them under, they went out of sight in the smudge of rain and spindrift, gripping with all their strength the small life-buoy that would have supported one, but not two.

Cursed to the last with a fear of each other that matched their hate, they would not fight, but died as they lived, with their problem unsolved and their supremacy undetermined.

THE MATE OF HIS SOUL

Though he became a man later, he was a child of three when I first knew him, and I was a youngster of ten. He was fair-haired, pink-cheeked, and somewhat girlish--that is, a sweet-faced child, who attracted affection and attention. He had a father, mother, a couple of aunts--all in the same household, and several devoted cousins and neighbors, of various ages, who occasionally visited him. I was in the latter class, and, one day, after running an errand for his mother, I picked him up, after the manner of my elders, and petted him. He stood it tranquilly and smilingly, until his eyes rested on a corner of the room. Then they dilated in terror, and a piercing scream came from his lips. It was not the ordinary scream of nervous children--it was more. After the beginning it rose an octave higher, much as a policeman's whistle will rise from pressure of breath, or a steam siren take a new note when it is well at work. It was penetrating and harrowing, and his feminine relatives responded with inquiries and fumbling after possible pins. Yet the screams continued, while his eyes were fixed in indescribable intensity on the corner. He saw something there.

"What is it, boy?" I asked. "What do you see?"

"There!" he gasped, pointing. "Don't let it. Don't."

I gave him to his mother, and with the true intuition of a harum-scarum boy, I ran to the corner, shouting, "Get out of here," at the same time dealing a furious kick at an imaginary creature.

However, I was not affected at the time. Repeating my injunctions to get out, I kicked and pursued the imaginary thing out through the door, and returned, smiling, to the child.

"It's gone," he whimpered. "Don't let it come back."

"But what was it?" they asked. "What did you think you saw, Freddie?"

He did not answer, and I ventured a suggestion: "Ghosts?"

He shook his head. Perhaps he had no formulated speculations of ghosts.

"Goblins?" He still looked doubtful, and I went into detail.

"Horns?" I asked.

He nodded, and shook convulsively.

"Big mouth, with teeth?"

"Yes, and hair--long hair. And dirty, oh, so dirty."

"Did it have hands, or were they all feet?" I asked, enjoying the joke immensely; for in my babyhood I had felt these fears and seen these things.

"Claws," he answered, "like the cat, only bigger, and all bluggy--all bluggy."

"Tell us more, Freddie," I went on. "I couldn't see him very well, in that dark corner."

"He looked at me," answered Freddie, shivering in his mother's arms, "and he opened his eyes, until they were all white, and he opened his mouth, until it was all teeth. And he wanted to bite me. I knew he wanted to bite me."

"Did he have horns, Freddie?" I persisted.

"Yes--horns on his head, and wings--dirty wings, with claws. But when you kicked him, he looked at you and wanted to bite you; but you made him run. He backed out the door. Didn't you see?"

"Oh, see," I answered bravely, though my heart was beating rather fast, and my tongue somewhat dry against the roof of my mouth. "Don't ever be afraid while I'm around, Freddie. I'll take care of you."

Then his mother took me by the ear, led me out, and banished me, saying that if I taught her little boy any such nonsense I must stay away.

That night, in my darkened bedroom, I saw things myself--things with claws, and horns, and wings, and eyes. But as I had seen them since my earliest remembrance, and had only drawn upon my experiences in my suggestions to Freddie, I managed to banish them and go to sleep, not knowing then that Freddie, my pet playmate, had gathered up these primordial memories from me, and delivered them back. Later on I understood.

My banishment was thorough, and enforced to the limit. I saw little of Freddie through the years of boyhood, only hearing at times that he was a model boy, an example of good behavior to his fellow schoolmates, and a reproach to me, a black sheep of a family in which were no ewes or lambs. My father was a policeman, my two brothers firemen, and my mother a woman of such soul and character that she could master the four of us. She thrashed me through high school, but I evaded the ministry, for which she was preparing me, by running away to sea at the age of eighteen.

I was a second mate when I met Freddie again. It was when I, with the first mate of the schooner I belonged to, and two of the crew, were returning from an evening at the theater, that we passed a group of young men, smoking cigarettes, and one of the men said:

"Get onto the dudes."

One of them promptly followed, spoke a few sharp, incisive words, and gave the critic such a thrashing as astonished us all. It was Freddie, twenty years old, well-dressed and gentlemanly, but with an aggressiveness that never found warrant in his childhood. When he had licked the man, I talked with him amicably.

"Oh, yes," he said. "I'm a seafaring man, too, only I went through Annapolis, and will start on my practice cruise in a week or so. Then I'll get my commission in the navy."

"You've done well, Fred." I felt moved to drop the "Freddie." "I've put in seven years, and am only second mate in schooners."

"But you can do better," he answered. "Why, every day of my life I've thought of you, done the things and said the things that I fancied you might do or say. I never forgot the time you kicked the monster."

"Oh, when you were a baby?" I answered. "Why, I'd about forgotten that, myself."

"Shake your crowd," he said, "and I'll shake mine. Come with me, and talk. I've lots to say."

We talked that evening, to little results. I found Fred vapid, flippant, and uninteresting. He had spent his childhood and youth at home, winning prizes at Sunday school and at the dancing academy. At Annapolis, he had learned boxing and football; but, never in his life had he struck a blow in anger until this evening, when he had thrashed an able seaman. He was as surprised at the feat as I was myself, and asked me if he had done it in the fit and proper manner. I was disappointed in him, and left him, with a willingness not to meet him again. And that night I had the frightful dreams of my childhood, though not then, nor before nor since, have I been a drinking man.

I may as well describe them now, for they appeared again and again while we lay in port, and bear strongly upon this story. There was the menacing monster that I had recognized by Fred's childish description, and the imaginary thing which I had kicked away from him--a creature of teeth and eyes, of horns, claws, wings, and scales, familiar to all sensitive children, perhaps, and possibly descended through the ages as a primordial memory of some prehistoric reptile. But this, terrifying though it was, did not afflict me greatly; for I was somewhat familiar with it, and even in my dreams knew that I could escape it by flight, and in the waking, or half-waking, condition drive it from me by imagined attack.

It was a new element in these new dreams that made me dread the night as a time of torment and horror, and finally so worked upon my nerves that, ascribing it to the influence of my environment, I quit my berth long before the day of sailing.