Chapter II: Part 2

We put out. The _Happy Day_ was an ancient craft that had been built right there in Bayport, and if she'd ever been outside the harbor before, the oldest inhabitant couldn't recall it. How she was going to act outside this night none of us would bet, but we hoped she'd surprise us.

But she acted pretty much like we figured she would. She had a 65-foot hammer hoist. We couldn't see ten feet away--it was a dark, drizzly night--but we could feel the runways of that hoist waving somewhere up in the clouds above us. And no harm in that, if it didn't come down on our heads; and no harm when she wouldn't lift from a sea--she wasn't built to--but if only she'd let one pass! But not a blessed one. She'd slue around sideways, and the next one would hit her a swipe, and aboard they'd come as if all the welcome in the world was waiting them.

The _Happy Day_ rated a deck-house amidships, with a galley and a little L that Scoot had built on, with a bunk to sleep in of nights. A sea coming aboard one side took the house along with it over the other side. "O' course," said Wheezer, "it was nachally to be espected, but if she'd waited till next week I was reckonin' to had her painted red with blue trimmin's, an' sell her along o' the rest o' the lighter."

When the house threatened to loosen up first, Scoot came up out of the hold to rescue Confucius from his bunk, with a brier pipe he'd bought years before this for a half-crown in Liverpool and a pair of custom-made pants he used to wear to parties.

A couple of tons of water in the shape of a small sea chased Scoot back down the ladder. A spry one, Scoot. He got out of the way, holding Confucius and the pants high in the air. The back of William T's neck happened to be about the middle of the region where most of that sea landed below. After he'd coughed up what he could from his insides, William T. had a word to say. Scoot had rigged up a bilge-pump which worked from the hold. William T. was told to work that as well as shovel the coal. What he wanted to say was that he'd shovel the coal or he'd stand by the pump, but not both. "What did I ship for--what for?" he demanded of Scoot.

Scoot was a little man, and he used to rig up a pair of big black horn-rimmed spectacles he owned and talk with care before strangers, but he wasn't so safe as he looked. His father, a delicatessen man, had intended him for a chemist, and then died in time to save him from it. Scoot had other notions, and only he met a Barbados negro with a head made of the same mixture as two parts in five Portland cement after it'd had two days to set--only for him Scoot said he might have been a light-weight champion riding around in his own auto. After that fight he said he'd never raise his hand to a man again. No, sir; it would be a meat-axe for him--also he was going to draw the color line. And the higher life for him thereafter.

"Only in toilsome essays to climb the heights
Does man from his baser nature rise,"

Scoot used to say. And he did essay to climb, but every once in so often his foot would slip and down he'd come and begin to claw around like anybody else.

"That big brute that toted me aboard here, and that other big brute up on deck, mebbe they c'n lick me," said William T. now; "but no red chin-whiskered, toothless runt like you kin."

Scoot wasn't shy any teeth. It was the way his under jaw was hung. When he'd take to chewing with his front teeth, that lower jaw used to come up outside the upper one. But it was true about his chin-whisker, and he didn't like it.

"That so?" says Scoot, and stows his big horn spectacles in their case and selects a nice long spanner; and when William T. came at him wide open he tapped him--once, twice--neatly.

When William came to, Scoot was waving a full-sized twenty-pound shovel before his eyes. Says Scoot: "Observe, please, this instrument. You insert the forward end of it under this pile of coal--so; and you elevate it--so: a hand here and a hand there; and you project it into the firebox--so. And so on and so on, repeating ad noshum. You savvy?" says Scoot. "Cause if you don't, then you hear me, son; I'll whale the everlastin' livers 'n' lights outer your debased hide."

"You-all are sure a bunch o' tough guys," says William T.; and thereafter Scoot went around applying Leakitis to the worst spots in peace.

We were having our own recreation up on deck. I was to the wheel, of course, and as long as I hung on there I was all right. But Wheezer had to stay forward to keep a lookout. We didn't have any lights, and we didn't want any wandering craft to be running over us in the dark and drizzle. Wheezer wanted to climb up the hammer hoist to get out of the way of the seas, but wasn't too sure he wouldn't come down and go any minute over the side with it. He wound up by lashing himself to a weather-deck bitt and letting most of the water in the Gulf of Mexico flow over him. Being, as he said, a diver by trade, 'twas no strange thing for him to be under water, but being under this way, he said he missed the air-tube. In the middle of it he remembered he forgot to say good-by to his partner at the dance-hall. "If anything happens us, I hope she won't think I came out here to get lost a-purpose to get away from her," said Wheezer.

From time to time Scoot stuck out his head to make sure we weren't yet washed overboard, and to report on the leaks; and also on William T. Scoot wouldn't call William any Olympic champion with a shovel, but--doubtless we had noticed it--he was producing steam.

Which was so. Four miles an hour was all we ever figured on driving the _Happy Day_ across smooth harbor routes, and here she was banging out that many in a seaway on the open gulf, making fair allowance, of course, for the side slips. She was all right, the old _Happy_, and she brought us at daybreak to Horseshoe Shoal and the _Yucatan_, she still with her bow fast but her stern loose to the seas. Without wasting any time, I laid the _Happy Day_ alongside, and Wheezer was about to go aboard her when he was met at the gangway by a cat.

Wheezer always did have a terrible respect for the laws of the sea. "Ain't there some law about ship's cats?" he asks now; and Scoot digs out his case and adjusts his glasses, and after a little meditation says: "There are, Wheezer, many superstitions and traditions connected with the sea. A marvellous vehicle of misinformation and credulous belief, the sea. Reflect on the vogue which sea-serpents have enjoyed. Reflect on how the ferocity of sharks has been exaggerated. It is doubtless the fact, Wheezer, that jaded imaginations thankfully accepted these ancient fallacies to render more startling the dénouement of their dramas. To such, doubtless, do we owe the invention of the cat on abandoned ships to frustrate the hopes of those who would claim honest salvage." Scoot took another breath. "It is usually a black cat, but even so for a cat to rank before the law as the equal of a human creature is absurd. This, I perceive" (Scoot let the back of his head settle on to his shoulder so's to have a good look) "is not a black but a gray cat, Wheezer--a lean, gray feline. In the days of the ancient Persians, Wheezer, a gray cat was a symbol of----"

"Scat, you slab-sided gray symbol!" barked Wheezer just then, and the cat scatted with a long leap from the rail of the oil-ship on to Scoot's shoulder, and from there into the hold of the _Happy Day_.

"Whatever the Persians thought o' cats, this cat's off her now, Scoot," said Wheezer--"she's sure abandoned now," and went aboard.

"It looked hungry passing me," said Scoot, and called down to Billie T. to feed it a little lubricating oil on a shovel. "It's nourishing and fattening," says Scoot, "and we'll keep it aboard. Every seagoing ship should have one for luck."

Wheezer reported not another soul aboard the oil-ship; and, under the laws of the sea, that made her ours to do what we pleased with. And we had our own notions of how to work her off the bar. We broke out ten or a dozen barrels of oil and poured them over the troubled waters. Then I belted and bolted Wheezer into his diving-suit, and broke out our steam-drill--left over from the _Weeping Annie_--and Wheezer dropped over and began to bore holes under the bow of the oil-ship.

Scoot had never been shipmates with an oil-burner before, and he went below to get acquainted with this one. I was busy wiring charges of dynamite for what we had to do next, so to William T. was left the job of pumping air to Wheezer. Twice Wheezer came up, his cheeks bulging out when I unscrewed his helmet, to ask me to explain to William T. that pumping the air ahead of time and then resting up to wait till that was used up wasn't the way of it--not if Wheezer was to stay alive. Regular and steady, that was the word, said Wheezer.

Wheezer got all his holes bored and the dynamite planted in them. This was a lot of dynamite left over when we traded the _Weeping Annie_; we'd kept it in the hold of the _Happy Day_, which was another reason for Scoot to sleep aboard her nights. He said he wasn't going to let her blow up some night and no one on board to prove who did it.

When we were all ready on deck, Scoot said he guessed he'd take a chance on her engines. He would not bet on what would happen, but he guaranteed we'd get action of some kind, even if it was no more than a cylinder-head blown through the side of the ship, if we'd only come below and help him out. So we passed him this and that, turned this jigger and that jigger to his orders, and by and by he lights a row of jets and her engines turned all right.

"Any time now," says Scoot, and I touched off the dynamite, and what looked like a million cubic yards of mixed stuff comes splattering up from under her bow. William T., who was leaning over the bow to see how it worked, got most of the oil, that being on top. Then I gave Scoot the bells, he backed her engines, and off she came smooth and easy.

While William T. was picking the oil and sand and mud and sea-water out of his eyes and ears and nose and mouth, and complaining that somebody oughter tipped him off, I called to him to shift the _Happy Day's_ line so she could drift astern of the ship. "And whatever yuh do, son, hang onter her line," Wheezer warned him. By this time William had shed his first independent views of things and was obeying orders fine; so when the _Happy Day_ went whirling astern, William was hanging on to the end of the line. Down the deck he went skidding on his heels, and over the rail, still hanging on to the line.

Finding himself overboard, he climbed up on the _Happy Day_. By this time we were well off the bank in pretty good water, and I sung out to William that I would swing around and get him, and gave the necessary bells when the time came for Scoot to back her; but Scoot, I guess, wasn't yet full shipmates with his oil-burning machinery, for we kept right on going ahead till we went clean through and over the _Happy Day_.

I remember seeing the cat climbing up the hammer hoist when it saw what was coming and clawing into its place up top; and how when the _Happy_ went under and the tall hoist careened over toward us, the cat made one flying leap on to the oil-ship's deck. When Scoot heard of that later, he said: "We'll name it Confucius--a wonderful, wise cat."

When William T. saw what was coming, he took a running long dive and overboard from the other end of the _Happy Day_. Wheezer stove in the heads of four or five more barrels of oil and dumped them over the side so's to make it easier for William clawing around in the seaway. When he came swimming aboard, he was wanting to know wasn't there any jobs that didn't require him to swaller any more oil--shovelling coal or working bilge-pumps, he didn't care. So we let him go down to the engine-room to help out Scoot.

We ought to have seen the morning papers before we did to enjoy what happened next. Captain Davis of the _Niobe_ was to depart at daybreak to make another desperate attempt to save the oil-ship in the teeth of the storm, the morning papers said. And he did. We met him on our way back to Bayport, and he steamed around us two or three times. Then he steamed away for Westport. He didn't say a word himself, but she carried the most eloquent stern, the _Niobe_, that ever I looked at through glasses when she was steaming away.

The oil-ship was down by the head a trifle where the dynamite had loosened her bow-plates a little, but nothing to hurt. We got her into port all right.

But getting a salvaged ship into port don't always end a man's troubles. There was a slick young lawyer came to us. He said he'd like to handle our case. We asked what his charge would be, and he said: "Oh, that will be all right--I'll make my price to suit you boys." We said all right, go ahead, and "Now, boys," he says then, "what's the story? Give it to me straight."

I tells him the story. He rubs his hands and chuckles, and says: "Good! Great! Nothing to it--a pipe! But listen to me, boys. When you get up there in court, don't go trying to make any joke of it the same as you just done to me. Everything is all fixed up nicely for you to play heroes' parts. Here are all the newspaper accounts--look--of Captain Davies's heroic work and seamanship, as told by Captain Judkins, and of Captain Judkins's humane and heroic work as told by Davies. Even the crew--look--give out interviews of what heroes they were. And, lemme tell you, I've seen the _Happy Day_ many a time, and I wouldn't go outside in her for a million dollars. Now play it up, play it up--the storm, the peril, your own heroic efforts, you know."

Which was all right to say; but imagine any human being getting up to tell of our trip and leave out the funny little parts, especially when we see Judkins sitting in a back bench listening, though he didn't listen too long. He all at once got up and didn't come back.

In the old days we'd have been awarded 50 or 60 per cent for our part, and she was a million-dollar ship with her cargo; but the insurance companies don't let any loose-footed seafarers put across anything like that these days. We got thirty thousand dollars for salving the ship, and ten thousand more for the loss of the _Happy Day_.

Our slick lawyer said we hadn't played it up right. "But never mind," he said; "I've been allowed full damages for the _Happy Day_ and awards for your time and some of the risk you-all ran. There's twenty thousand for you boys."

Wheezer and Scoot looked at me, and I looked at the lawyer. "Twenty thousand? Don't you think it's too much for us?" I asks.

"Why," he says, "it is a lot o' money for you boys to be carrying away for one night's work. But I generally split it that way--fifty-fifty."

We were in his office. I told Wheezer and Scoot to wait for me below. "Perhaps there'd better be no witnesses," I whispered to Scoot, and they got out.

The bright young lawyer takes another look at me after I lock the door and come back to him. "What do you mean to do?" he says.

And I said: "First, I'm going to give you one whale of a beating."

"You lay your hands on me," he says, "and I'll have you up for assault and battery. I'll show every mark in open court."

"I'm going to mark you," I said, "where you won't show them in any open court."

And I did. "And that's only the beginning," I said; but about then he agreed to call in Wheezer and Scoot; and, for instructing us to comport ourselves with dignity before the high court, we thought five hundred was about right, and after another little chat he agreed it was. We gave William T. the same for what he'd done, and he stayed drunk for a week at the Blue Light, which is what we reckoned he would do. But he was his own boss ashore.

Before I was fairly home the wife rushes me over to the little house she'd the option on. Being only two blocks south of the boulevard didn't make any hit with me, for the next thing I could see where she'd be breaking into society. But when I see the baby that I'd left kicking his legs in a baby-carriage--when I see him sprinting around the sun-parlor on his own feet, I begin to see the beauty of sun-parlors. "Take it," I said.

She certainly was tickled. "I always knew," she said, before I had time to say another word, "that all you needed was to apply yourself steadily to make your fortune."

Well, she's a great little woman, and what's the good of hurrying up to break illusions? I waited all of two hours before I told her how I made the price of the house.

The Bull-Fight

"What with these young schools aboard ship and chocolate caramels where bottled beer was one time in the cantine, 'tis a changed navy we've come to."

There was Porto Bello with its painted walls, there was the liberty boat at the gangway, and there was Monaghan with nothing but abuse for all present institutions.

"'Twas a good adventure the navy was once, but 'tis a kind of factory they would be making of it, with pay-days, not fightin' days, the grand thing to be lookin' for'ard to.

"And oh," he sighs after a breath, "the hearty arguments a liberty party would find to their elbows in any foreign port of importance in the old days! But now--puh!"

"Monaghan," I says, "is it in human nature, do you think, to alter so wonderfully in one short generation?"

"'Tisn't me," says Monaghan, "that reads shelves of books from the ship's library, includin' poetry. Go on, you; cling to your hopeful views, till some day you die of them. But for me--I'll go with you on no shore liberty this day."

So over the side I went without Monaghan, but our executive--him we called Regulations--was there to speed our going from the gangway grating.

"Remember, now," says Regulations, "no street brawlings and no ordering rounds of intoxicating drinks in cantinas. Whoever isn't there when the liberty boat leaves the landing-pier this afternoon, and whoever returns aboard here under the influence of liquor I shall send 'em to the brig. And don't think for one moment that any one of you can fool me with any cock-and-bull story of what happened you."

No great evil in Regulations, but a pity, I was thinking, he would not leave a little more to our imagination and maybe good intentions. Some of us there were, I knew, that would like to think that 'twas maybe not altogether fear of the ship's discipline would be holding us to our good behavior.

Meditating, maybe sadly, I was on the distrust of Regulations and the defection of Monaghan, when I looked up to find myself abreast of a cantina that was run by an Americanized native called Tony, the same who one time kept a fruit-stand on West Street in New York till he discovered that bananas and pineapples and lemons were not the most staple articles of diet on the water-front of a great American port. "Tony," I says, "'twould grieve a certain superior officer of my ship exceedingly were I to order one single draft of spirituous liquor on this my first day of liberty in two months. But 'tis no summer resort on the New England coast this is. Will you, in God's name, give me something to cool the blazing throat of me?"

"When I tended bar in a hotel one time in a prohibition State in your country," says West Street Tony, "we made one drink especially for temperance people. I mix one now," he says; and he did.

"Lemonado Porto Bello we call that down here," says Tony.

"'Tis satisfying," I said; and had another, and passed on my way.

'Twas truly a beautiful port--Porto Bello--in the low latitudes; and there were little children playing in the streets and long-tailed birds singing in the trees; and from one place to another I passed, having here and there along the way a lemonado Porto Bello by way of abating the heat of the hot morning. And so, until approaching noon found me under the portales of a hotel on a fine high hill.

'Twas in truth a hot morning. The Hot Coast the guide-books in the ship's library called all that country, and no misname in that; but when a waiter steps up with a negligée air and a towel and swipes a battalion of camping flies from the marble deck of my table to the scuppers of the sidewalk, and says: "Vairy gooda beer on icey--two bottlas for-r da one-a peso," like a friendly soul who would help out a thirsty and innocent foreigner, I said no.

"No," I said; "no intoxicating beverages will I order myself this day. Lemonade Porto Bello," I said: "duo"--holding up two fingers to maybe help out his lack of his own language. "One for me, one for him," I said, and pointing to a glass a young fellow with an air of preoccupation and melancholy at the next table had standing empty to his elbow.

"Bueno, bueno!" said the waiter, and in good season brought me one and replaced the empty glass of the abstracted young man with the other.

It was, as I said, a hot day. As to that, I've yet to see a morning in twenty years of cruising on that blasted coast when it wasn't hot. Sitting in the shade of the portales on that high hill and almost a breeze coming in from the waters of the Gulf--even so, all ready to soak iced Porto Bello lemonados into me, even so it was hot.

And while I'm waiting there having another lemonade, and by and by another and another, a young girl enters the shade of the portales; and no man could carry two eyes in his head and not notice the loveliness of her. Lovely and good. I could feel it in the air when I wasn't looking straight at her. Women's hats and men's cigarettes bobbed in high approval, and the watery eyes of two gray-whiskered old rounders grew almost bright and decent to look at when from over the tops of their newspapers they gazed after her in passing.

My little table was up by the main entrance, and as if for no more than to let her lovely glance rest on some manly creature who might be sitting unattached in the neighborhood, she stopped on the lowest step of the hotel doorway and her eyes were slanted in my general direction.

"Jeepers!" I said to myself, for even with a gray hair here and there impinging on the black mop above my temples--even so, I needed no ship's surgeon to testify that the pension-list was a long way from me yet. And as for the rank, 'twas well I knew that when the heart goes cruising 'tis little the rank matters. Gunner's mate, even as an admiral of the line, may well have his fair romance: that I knew.

But what man of intelligence and natively good intentions may run riot through the years of tempestuous youth and not arrive some day at a belated wisdom? After another upward glance I saw that not for me was that look of virginal yearning and distress. The line of fire of her gaze had for its target the back of the head of the young fellow who so melancholy and abstracted was gazing on the blue waters of the Gulf from the next table.

"Jeepers!" I said to myself, "is he asleep or what?" and above my lemonade I points a soft cough at him.

But no sign from him, and I coughed again--the short double cough which is the signal among all males from Kamchatka to Punta Arenas, sailing east or west, north or south, great or little circles, as you please--for all males above the age of apprentice boys to stand to attention--that 'tis lovely ladies coming over the side.

But never a sign of hearing from him, and "Mucho calero, mucho heato," I said respectfully, and with a side look of apology, meaning in that way to intimate to the lovely creature that I had gone as far as the regulations would permit a rough and simple nature who hadn't been formally introduced.

I thought she would step down onto the walk beside us there to speak, but a voice from within the hotel called out: "Marguerite! Marguerite!" A firm, commanding voice it was, and with it the lovely vision faded somewhere into the forbidding dark between-decks of the hotel.

By and by the chin of the young fellow at the next table lifted off his chest, his eyes came slowly back from the blue waters--or whatever it was they were staring at--to the white marble top of his table, and he stared, puzzled, at his full glass. "I thought I drank that," he says, and has a sip of it.

"I never ordered anything like that," he says, and shoves it from him, and then he spies me. "Excuse me," he says, "but did you speak?"

"I did," I says, "but so long ago that I've most lost the use of my tongue. But no harm; I'll speak now again," and I clapped my hands and "Muchacho! Boyo!" I calls. "Oono lemonado plaino--and oono lemonado Porto Bello with much frio--you know--mucho iceyo and hurry like helleo!"

And I explained to the young fellow how long years back my chum Monaghan had taught me how to talk these tropic languages: the way to do was to wave both hands, stick an "o" onto every other word and yell like a bo'son's mate in the morning watch, and, with the waiter maybe knowing a little American to help you out, you could get what you ordered every time.

"But I'm wondering who it was called her," I said when the lemonades had come. "There she was, sort of standing on one foot like she wanted to talk to somebody, and I know that somebody wasn't me, when 'Marguerite!' a voice called--like that--and whing! she was gone, with sighs soft as the bubbles in the wake of a torpedo to mark her going."

"Marguerite?" says the young fellow, coming wonderfully back to life. "What did she look like?"

"Queen o' the Movies--nothing less for looks, but with a touch o' home and mother and little babies clinging to her neck."

"That's Marguerite! Why didn't you call me?" he says.

He reminded me in his indignation of the rookies aboard ship when they're first shook up to go on night watch. If you don't haul 'em out of their hammocks and throw them ten feet down the passageway by their necks and ankles, they bellow to the skipper at the mast next morning how no one called them. But I would not tell him that. Let him who has never felt the sting of the barbed arrow rub salt in the wound it makes.

"I coughed so loud at you the second time that I had all the Johnnies along the row looking up over their coffee demi-tasseys, and all the stout señoras were eying me with more than ordinary female suspicion," was all I said to that.

He ran inside the hotel then. By and by he comes back. "She was here, but she's gone, the clerk doesn't know where."

"I'm sorry to hear that," I says; and, moved by my further words of sympathy, he tells me how he's been steaming in the wake of the beautiful young lady through seven European monarchies and four Central American republics, and of how, whenever he thought he was safe alongside, the mother would up anchor and leave him riding to a lonesome mooring in the dark of some foreign port.

"Just ten minutes with Marguerite and her mother together and I know I could explain how it came about I got mixed up in what they think was a disgraceful row, but I can't get the chance."

To my way of thinking the young lady at least wouldn't require much explanation; and, talking of one thing and another, we had a bite of lunch and after lunch a smoke, and we were absorbing, to abate the heat--he a plain and myself another lemonado Porto Bello--when a mahogany-tinted boy with a musical voice and his pants held up by one suspender stops in front of us to chant of a bull-fight which is to come off that afternoon.

"Maybe," I says to my new young friend, "this bull-fight would make you forget your troubles for a while." And he agrees it might. So "Boyo! Muchacho!" I hail the waiter. "Duo--two-o seatso for the bull-fighteo! You know--good seatso--the besto!"

"Bueno, señor," says the waiter, and hurries off, and pretty soon is back with two yellow tickets for three pesos each, proving again what I'd said about talking the language.

'Twas the advice of the waiter to take a blue-line trolley-car for the bull-ring, the same being quick and cheap. But it was no blue or any other colored trolley-car that I hailed from the shadow of the hotel portales. No, no. A rakish, two-horse cruiser of low freeboard--that was the craft befitting two American señors of importance to go sailing through the streets of Porto Bello on a hot day to a bull-fight, and, that the inhabitants of the benighted place might be fully informed of our high rating, I stuck both feet over the port side. "And I want to see any five-foot spig policeman try to put 'em back inboard," I said.

No policeman tried to, and in due season and good order we made entrance to a plaza that was crowded with long-legged tables piled high with chile con carnes and olla podridas and various other comestibles indigenous to the region; and under the tables, where the shade was deepest, were many cases of native beer piled high with ice.

From behind the tables men and women in green and yellow and red and blue and purple and I don't know what-all colors of clothes were crying out what they had to sell, and up and down the long lines of waiting people were men telling how they had the best seats to sell to the bull-fight.

"Beer on ice and the speculators with the best seats out on the sidewalk--it makes me almost feel that I'm back on Broadway," says my young friend. 'Twas the first sign of life he'd shown since he'd jumped into the hotel to look for the young lady of his sorrows, and the same encouraged me to hope that maybe before the afternoon was over he'd remember that 'twasn't yet the Last Day--that the blue waters of the Gulf and the golden rays of the sun was still shining and sparkling, the one to the other below and above us--glory!

'Twas a plaza of promise we had come to. On a stand over by the bull-ring entrance was a band of hill Indians trying to jam a little music out of a collection of queer-looking instruments, but making a poor job of it, not to speak of resting up too frequently to please a young American bluejacket who was standing by. A festive lad he was, and he climbed up on the band-stand and stepped a lively jig by way of speeding up the band.

But the band hadn't come there to be speeded up. It was a hot day, and after the crazy Americans were come and gone there would be other hot days--or such, I gathered, was the leader's retort.

"No hurry?" says the young bluejacket. "No hurry uppo? Then you guys watch me do an imitation of a whirlin' dervish I see one time in the Caffey dee Joy in Cairo. Watch!"

They watched and saw him revolve himself, one, two, three, four times atop of the stand, and then down the steps and on to his head in the plaza area. But he was of unquenchable spirit; without letting on that that wasn't part of it, he climbed back on to the band-stand and questioned the leader further. Did he know any American music, and would he for a peso--or two pesos, say--play some? Did he sabe Americano musico?

The leader of the band did sabe, and, the two pesos being passed, out rolled "Marching Through Georgia." Which pleased our dancing blue-jacket. "Fine!" he says. "My old man was with Sherman's outfit on that hike. Roll her out again!"

And once more was "Marching Through Georgia" rolling nobly out, and as it was so rolling, a young American marine--but looking too slim and melancholy to so much as give back talk to a scuttle-butt--detached himself from a file of his comrades, and, marching stiffly up onto the band-stand, said: "What d'you-uns mean tellin' this yer nigger to play that-a-one for? I was bawn 'n' raised in Jaw-juh. In Jaw-juh, and my daddy fit with Lee," and he whaled our dancing bluejacket under the ear.

The band-leader was playing an instrument that sounded like a currycomb rubbing across a battle-hatch. Swishy-swishy, it was going, with a loud r-r-rump-umph every few bars, and it was shaped like a long-necked pumpkin. This the young native of Jaw-juh grabbed by its long neck and bent in several places over the leader's skull. There was a platoon of native policemen standing by and another platoon within easy signal distance. With the first shriek of the band for help that first platoon came limbering up, not forgetting to pass the word for their watchmates as they came.

But waiting in line for their tickets, or sampling in their strollings the wares above and beneath the piled-up tables, were a few files and boatloads of our own marines and bluejackets, and these now came steaming up to the battle line, meaning harm to nobody in particular, but curious to know what all the ballyhooing was about and so as to be handy in case anything was doing.

The native police came galloping up and captured the outraged Georgian in the first rush, and as they did so up charged in one thin khaki wave his marine comrades to his rescue. And 'twas a gallant charge, even if all that came of it was to bury the band-stand under the falling bodies.

The mind of my young friend--it pleased me to know him for being so thoughtful--was running in much the same groove as my own. "Down under that pile that poor band-leader is still wondering what he did to get hit. That marine shouldn't have bothered him," says he.

"You're right," I said. "And this everlasting looking for trouble on shore liberty--it gives me the needles."

'Twas just then a tall policeman, with a sword and his chin stuck out belligerently before him gave signs for me to vamose from the plaza. "And what board of examiners," I says, "gave you a rating to be ordering me around?" and I relieved him of his sword and drove his chin back to front dress.

Says the young fellow with me then: "Once in New York I tried to keep some policemen from taking a couple of friends of mine into a patrol-wagon, and they took me along too, and my picture was in the paper next morning--that's what got me in wrong with Marguerite's mother, and this will probably get me in wrong again. But where a fellow's people are there's where he must be too, I suppose."

There were almost tears in the poor boy's voice but nothing like them in his eyes when beside me he waded in knee-deep, and he was a wide-shouldered, round-chested lad with quick, strong ways to him. Knee-deep, I say, for by this time the uniformed natives were threatening to roll over us like some huge, advancing wave. And such natives as weren't in uniform stood to one side and cheered, or maybe hove a doby brick or two at intervals.

But not entirely one-sided was it, for every bluejacket or marine arriving by the blue-line cars, after a quick masthead view of the situation, took a running hop, step, and a leap into the middle of it.

Our numbers were increasing, and there were other matters to aid us. The pedlers at the tables were hurrying to remove their wares from the war zones, but the quick advances of battle overtook the most of them, and tropical things to eat and drink from above and beneath the tables were soon adding a grand variety to the first plans of battle. There was the ice that had been cooling the beer. You take a lump of ice about the size of a small man's head, point the same carefully at a range of three or four feet, and hurl it with the full power of a moderately strong arm and--but 'tis a bad habit, boasting. And a thick-bottomed bottle of native beer--'tis a useful little article, too, at close quarters.

It was a hot day. "Mucho calero, mucho heato, be quiet, you!" I admonished one of the enemy lying prone at my feet, and picked up a beer-bottle, taking notice that it was not empty and that the cold beads of a late icing still clung to it. And I snapped free the patent stopper, and, for better action, loosened the blouse about my neck, giving thanks at the same time for the lucky man I was to have a blouse left on me to loosen.

Now, if Regulations had been there to see, it is a fine sermon he could have preached on the evils of strong drink--how it brings its own punishment always in its wake. And not a word but would be true. But a man exalted by the clash of battle is no man to preach to. 'Tis then he delights in confounding the precepts of his betters. And, man, the hot day it was! In all my cruisings on that abandoned coast I never knew a hotter; from the melting asphalt the heat was rising in torrid waves. I placed the cold bottle of beer to my lips and felt the first trickle of it on my swollen tongue. But no more than felt it, when the enemy--who by all rights was out of the combat at my feet--stood up, and what it was he clouted me with on the back of my head I never learned, nor does it matter now; war is war. But in falling I remember saying sad like to myself: "A man that would do that would ship his mother in the navy!"

Elbow to elbow with me all this time was my new young friend, and he had in his hand at the moment of my fall the mahogany leg of a table, that fine-grained mahogany for which, as I had so often read in the ship's library, that Hot Coast is also justly famous. With the table leg, the same being of good length and moderately thick through, the lad reached over and tapped on the temple the party who had exploded the shell, or whatever it was, on the back of my head. And as McWarrish, an eye-witness, informed me later, my would-be assassin shared no further in the glory of that day.

It had been a pleasant and not unequal prospect up to then, but by now they had routed the colonel of the barracks from his box-seat in the bull-ring, and "Fix bayonetso!" he calls to his soldiers coming on at the double, and they fixed bayonets. "Advanceo!" he says, and they advanced and continued to advance until presently, the ice being melted and the beer-bottles expended--being, as I should have poetically said, short of ammunition--such of our bluejackets and marines as were not in the need of first aid to the injured might presently be seen making the best of their way back to their liberty boats.

In good time I revived, and I could taste it even then--that one teaspoonful of cold beer on the end of my swollen tongue, and, recalling the incident, "The green-eyed spig!" I says. "Is it any wonder they have revolutions every other week or so in their God-forsaken land?"

And what did I hear then but a voice calling me, and what did I see when I turned my head but my young friend with his head in the lap of the lovely Marguerite, and the rest I knew without being told, for Marguerite's stern mother was pouring water onto her lace handkerchief and applying the same to a lump topside of the youth's ears!

A large hearty-looking party was tending to my case. McWarrish was his name, and he was Marguerite's mother's brother, who managed a silver or lead (or was it a gold?) mine on that same Hot Coast, which, according to the ship's library, was likewise rich in oil, rubber, pepper, tabasco sauce, palm-leaf fans, and all manner of vegetable and mineral resources: a fertile and auriferous country that needed only the intelligence and energy of the superior northern races to make of it a marvellous commercial asset.

I did not have to tell McWarrish about the fight. He had seen it with the ladies from the veranda of the plaza hotel. And at dinner at the hotel, where in what was left of my uniform I sat in state, it developed that McWarrish and myself were of the one mind concerning Bobbie Burns. He poured six or eight or maybe a dozen libations to the memory o' rantin' Robbie, and says McWarrish then: "Mon, mon," he says, "but 'tis inspirin' tae meet wi' sich rare friendliness," and leads me down to where he had his motor-boat ready to take me out to the ship.

"Would ye no like tae ha' been there," says McWarrish, "the rainy nicht Robbie cam' ridin' on his horse frae the tavern wi' fower or five, or eight or ten it micht be, guid measures o' usquebaugh under his shirt tae keep him wet inside, wi' his cloak doon ower his shouthers tae keep him dry ootside, the whiles he composed the grandest song ever writ by the hond o' mon? Listen!" And he rolls out:

"Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled,
Scots wham Bruce has aften led--"

He was a large-boned man, McWarrish, with a voice that left no idle spaces in the air about him, and I am myself no dwarf, nor weak of lung; and singing in and out among the fleet we went, while marine guards looked over top-rails and bluejackets rolled out of their blankets to give us a cheerful word in passing and sailors on anchor watch warned us in a friendly way not to run 'em down and sink 'em--from one battleship after another--when in the silvery night they would loom surprisingly up before McWarrish, who was steering.

"Wull I gae aboard wi' ye, brither," he says to me when by and by we made my ship, "tae explain the reason o' your delay?"

"Thank you, friend," I said, "but there'll be trouble enough as it is." And I climbed up the side the while he shoved off for the beach again.

"What," says Mr. Trench, who had the deck, "shall I set down in the log for your overstaying your liberty after you were so strictly warned?"

"Yes," says Regulations, bobbing up behind him, "what's the alibi this time?"

And I gives them the log of the day from first to last, even as I've told it here, omitting, of course, the personal allusions, and all gravely and respectfully, as befitted an enlisted man to his officers.

"M--m--," says Regulations, and considered the case. "You say you bought tickets to the bull-fight, eh? And didn't use them? M--m--m--then you must have the tickets yet. Where are they?"

From the inside of my cap I pulls out two yellow tickets, and passes them to him. No great evil, as I've said, in the make-up of Regulations, and doubtless, in good time, by reason of advanced age and taking no mad chances, he will rise to be commander-in-chief of the fleet.

He looks at the tickets under the deck light. "H--m," he sniffs; "h--m," and leaves the deck.

"Just as well, Cohalan," says Mr. Trench, "you saved those two tickets."

"If I hadn't, sir," I says, "there was a hatful of them to be had for the picking up in the plaza when the battle was over. And they're to be married next Tuesday, and I'm invited."

Mr. Trench was my division officer, and this was not our first cruise together. "I'll recommend you for shore liberty," says Mr. Trench--"providing there's no bull-fight the same day."

And I'm passing on when I hear the whispering voice of Monaghan.

"I was listening to you," says Monaghan, "and thinking while I listened of what you said one day. 'Nothing like poetry,' says you, 'to develop the imagination.'"

"More beautiful than the flowers of the imagination," I says to that, "are the rocks of eternal truth. You were saying only this morning how when yourself and myself were apprentice lads together, 'twas paroquets and blue monkeys 'stead o' picture post-cards as in these degenerate days we would be sending home to show the family and neighbors how we'd been in foreign parts. And that's true, but such are only the temporary frivolities of the human creature and not to be measured as important. I tell you, Monaghan, that in its potentials human nature has not changed--not yet."

"Not yet?" says Monaghan. "How much longer of this mechanical age will you be giving it?"

"That," I said, "is to be determined. But 'tis my belief, Monaghan," I says, "that let the drums beat and the banners wave and the gonfalons and the various other palladiums and symbols of our liberty be carried in marching columns before us, and, barrin' the shell-makers and the spellbinders and the owners maybe of newspapers with increasin' circulations, 'tis my belief we would march forth to war as cheerfully and rampageously as any band of red Indians that ever danced around a red fire in the full of an autumn moon."

"If all you say is true," says Monaghan, "then it must 'a' been a grand place for an hour or two--that plaza this day. And yourself and myself and that husky bridegroom-elect standin' elbow to elbow this day--man, but 'tis talkin' of us in the cantinas they would be for a full generation to come. And, 'stead o' that, here was I, a man of my tonnage an' speed under forced draft, lyin' here useless as an old cruiser in ordinary."

From the little motor-boat, the same being navigated in devious ways back to the pier, I could hear McWarrish:

"Oh, my luve's like a red, red rose,
That's newly sprung in June;
Oh, my luve's like the melodie--"

Always, or so I've thought, there's something disposing to romance, or maybe melancholy, in the quiet that lies o'er great waters, and something, it may be, softening to large voices.

Anyway, 'twas a lovely, moonlit tropic night--fitting close to a blessed day.

A Bale of Blankets

They were holding what was almost a public reception in the ward-room of the _Missalanna_. The Honorable J. J. Flavin, having appeased his hunger and slaked his thirst, signalled the Filipino mess-boy for a smoke; and having decided as to what was the most expensive cigar on the tray, he took two, and moved on to where, through a shining air-port, a fresh sea-breeze might find its cooling way to his beaded brow, for it was a warm summer's day and at trencher-play the Honorable Flavin had been no laggard.

As the Honorable J. J. smoked, so did he take the time to observe; and, observing, he vouchsafed the opinion to a thin-faced, high-shouldered young fellow who happened to halt near him: "These navy fellows must have a fat time of it, huh, Carlin?"

Carlin flashed a glance on Flavin. "How do you figure that?"

"Why, look at the swell feed--and the champagne here to-day. And look!" He slid off for inspection the band of the cigar he was smoking. "I paid three for a dollar for that same cigar the other day at a big hotel in Washin'ton. They must have money to throw overboard to be givin' that kind away."

Carlin knew the brand. He also knew that only two, or it might be three, officers of that ward-room mess could afford to smoke that make of cigar regularly; but he did not tell Flavin that. "They get those cigars for twelve cents apiece--buying 'em by the hundred--in Cuba, J. J.," he suggested mildly.

"And the dealers stick us thirty-five cents for em up here! Anyway, a fat time they have swelling 'round in uniforms given 'em by the gover'ment for the ladies to admire 'em."

Two years of political reporting in his home city and two more as Washington correspondent for the paper of most vital circulation in that same home city had not made of Carlin a politician, and it is to be doubted if ten times four years in a political atmosphere would have so made him; because ancestrally implanted in Carlin's breast was an inextinguishable desire to speak what he thought, and usually as soon as he thought it.

He said now--sharply: "What do you know about naval officers or navy life, J. J.?"

The Honorable J. J. Flavin had never, not even when he was only ward leader and therefore much more disposed to humility than now, been able to reconcile Carlin's unworshipful tongue with his own sense of what was due a man of importance in the political world. And Judas priest, he had a tongue of his own if it came to that! "Of course, you know all about it!" he retorted.

"No, I don't," replied Carlin promptly and placidly. "But I probably know more than do you or almost anybody else who has never had the chance to live aboard ship and see some of it. This afternoon the officers of this ship are spreading themselves according to service traditions to give you and me and all aboard here a good time. To-morrow they'll be to sea and on the job, a simple-living, busy crowd--working hard, taking chances, and making no talk about it."

Flavin whoofed a funnel of doubting cigar smoke into the teeth of the air-port breeze. "Taking chances! How? And where?"

"Everywhere. Day and night--battleships, destroyers, in submarines and aeroplanes. Thirty men and officers killed in one turret explosion only last month."

"Taking chances--huh! Foolish chances!"

"Anybody who isn't living to see how long he can live takes a foolish chance once in a while. That turret crew were on the battle-range trying to make big-gun records."

"And did they make 'em?"

"They did. And their seven-inch batteries made 'em, too. Single guns and broadsides at ten thousand five hundred yards."

"I didn't hear about that," growled Flavin.

"No? That's a shame, J. J. The department ought to 've wired you about it."

Flavin eyed Carlin sidewise. No use--he would never change. Would he never get on to himself? Flavin wondered. Carlin ought to have been one of the best-advertised men in his line in the country, as everybody around Washington said, but a fellow liable to hop out any time and bat somebody that could be of use to him over the eye, how could anybody go boosting him?

"They must 'a' treated you pretty well, Carlin?" he hazarded slyly.

"They treated me well--yes," snapped Carlin. "And they're treating you pretty decently now, aren't they?"