Chapter V: Part 5

* * * * *

It began to grow wearisome, pumping an organ for a living. And I had fed myself full on Chaucer.

I began to yawn, behind the organ, over the growing staleness of life in a sailors' mission. And also I was being pestered by a tall, frigid old maid in purples and blacks, who had fixed her eye on me as a heathen she must convert.

* * * * *

"How'd you like a voyage to China?" the sky-pilot asked, one day.

Cathay ... Marco Polo ... Milton's description of the Chinese moving their wheelbarrows along the land by means of sails ... many poetic visions marched across my mind at the question.

"I'd like to, right enough."

"Then here's a chance for you," and he handed me a copy of the Bulletin, pointing out an advertisement for cattlemen on the steamboat, _South Sea King_, about to take a cargo of steers from Queensland to Taku, province of Pechi-li, Northern China.

"What are they sending cattle away up there for?"

"Supplies for troops ... The Boxer outbreak, you know ... go down to the number given in the advertisement, and I'm sure they'll sign you on as cattleman, if you want the job."

"All right. I'll go now."

"No," looking me over dubiously, "you'd better not go there or anywhere else, in your present rig ... you're too ragged to apply even for such work ... hang around till morning, and I'll go home to-night and bring you a decent coat, at least. Your coat is worse than your trousers ... though _they_ are ravelled at the bottoms and coming through in the left knee ... every time you take a step I can see a glint of white through the cloth, and," walking round me in a tour of inspection, "the seat might break through at any moment." All this was said without a glint of humour in his eyes.

* * * * *

Next morning the sky-pilot came down very late. It was twelve. But he had not forgotten me. "Here's the coat," and he solemnly unwrapped and trailed before my astonished gaze a coat with a long, ministerial tail. I put it on. The tail came below the bend of my knees. I laughed. The sky-pilot did not.

Finally he stepped back, cracked a solemn smile, and remarked, "You _do_ look rather odd!"

The intonation of his voice, his solemn almost deprecatory smile, set me off and I laughed till the tears ran down my face.

"I say, what's so funny?"

"Me! I am!... in your long-tailed coat."

"If I was on the rocks like you I wouldn't see anything to laugh about."

* * * * *

At the shipping office, the place mentioned in the advertisement, in the dimly lit, grey-paned room, there sat one lone, pasty-faced, old-youngish clerk on the traditional clerk's high stool. But he proved lively beyond his appearance.

"My God! do look who's here!" he exclaimed facetiously, and then, rapidly, without giving me room for a biting word in return, "no, there's no use now, my boy ... we took on all the cattlemen we needed by ten o'clock this morning."

I walked away, disconsolate. I bore on my back my swagman's blanket. In the blanket I carried a change of shirts the sky-pilot had given me, a razor, a toothbrush, a Tennyson, and a Westcott and Hort's Greek New Testament with glossary, that I had stolen from a bookstall in Sydney.

* * * * *

I found out where the dock was, nevertheless, where the men were loafing about in groups, waiting to be taken out to the _South Sea King_ ... which lay in the harbour.

At the entrance to the pier I met a powerful, chunky lad who was called "Nippers," he said. He, too, was going with the _South Sea King_ ... not as a cattleman, but as stowaway. He urged me to stow away along with him. And he gave me, unimaginatively, my name of "Skinny," which the rest called me during the voyage.

* * * * *

We strolled up to the men and joined them.

"Hello, kids!"

"Hello, fellows! Are you the cattlemen for the _South Sea King_?"

"Right you are, my lad ... we are that!"

The men went on with their arguing. They were fighting the Boer War all over again with their mouths. Some of them had been in it. Many of them had tramped in South Africa. They shouted violently, profanely, at each other at the tops of their voices, contending with loud assertions and counter-assertions, as if about to engage in an all-round fight.

Several personal altercations sprang up, the points of the debate forgotten ... I couldn't discover what it was about, myself ... only that one man was a fool ... another, a silly ass ... another, a bloody liar!

* * * * *

The launch which was to carry them to the _South Sea King_ at this moment started nosing into the dock, on a turbulent zig-zag across the harbour; and the men forgot their quarrelling. It brought up at the foot of a pile and made fast.

"Come on, Skinny," Nippers urged me aggressively, "it's front seats or nothing. Act as if you owned the boat." We thrust ahead of the others and swarmed down the ladder ... heaping, swearing, horse-playing, the cattlemen filled the launch from stern to bow.

Nippers had been a professional stowaway since his tenth year. He had gone all over the world in that fashion, he had informed me. He was now sixteen. I was almost eighteen.

His six years of rough life with rough men had brought him to premature manhood, taught him to exhibit a saucy aplomb to everybody, to have at his finger-ends all the knockabout resourcefulness and impudence that the successful vagrant must acquire in order to live at all as an individual....

* * * * *

We were the first on deck.

"Where are the cattlemen's bunks?" Nippers asked of an oiler who stood, nonchalant, somewhat contemptuous, looking over the side at the seething, vociferous cattlemen.

Not wasting a word on us, the oiler pointed aft over his shoulder, with a grimy thumb.

We found a dark entrance like the mouth to a cave, that led down below. In our hurry we lost our footing on the greasy ladder and tumbled all the way to the bottom.

We had not time to rub our bruises. We plumped down and under the lower tier of bunks ... just in time ... the men came pouring down helter-skelter ... the talking, arguing, voluble swearing, and obscenity was renewed ... all we could see, from where we lay, was a confusion of legs to the knee, moving about....

They settled down on the benches about the table. They slackened their talk and began smacking their lips over ship-biscuit, marmalade, and tea.

* * * * *

Still we lay in silence. The screw of the propeller had not started yet. We dared not come out or we would be put ashore.

* * * * *

We were hungry. We could hear their tin plates clattering and clinking as the cattlemen ate supper, and smell the smell of cornbeef and boiled potatoes. Our mouths ran from hunger.

--"wish I had something to scoff, I'm starvin'," groaned Nippers, "but we'll hafta lay low till the bloody tub pulls out or we'll get caught an' dumped ashore."

Supper done with, the men were sitting about and smoking. They were soon, however, summoned up on deck, by a voice that roared down to them, from above, filling their quarters with a gust of sound.

We were alone now, perhaps,--it was so still.

With an almost imperceptible slowness, Nippers thrust his head out, as cautiously as a turtle ... he emerged further.

He made a quick thrust of the arm for a platter of beef and potatoes, that stood, untouched, on the table ... someone coughed. We had thought we were alone. Nippers jerked back. The tin came down with a clatter, first to the bench, then to the floor. A big friendly potato rolled under to where we were. We seized on it, divided it, ate it.

Contrary to our conjecture, some of the men must have stayed below. Someone jumped out of a bunk.

"There's rats down here!"

"--mighty big rats, if you arsks me."

"It's not rats," and I could hear a fear in the voice that quavered the words forth, "I tell you, buddy, this ship is haunted."

"--haunted!" boomed the voice of a man coming down the ladder, "you stop this silly nonsense right now ... don't spread such talk as that ... it's stowaways!"

We saw a pair of legs to the knees again. We lay still, breathless. A watch chain dangled down in a parabolic loop. Then followed a round face, beef-red with stooping. It looked under apoplectically at us.

"Ah, me b'yes, c'm on out o' there!"

And out we came, dragged by the foot, one after the other, as I myself in my childhood have pulled frogs out from a hole in a brook-bank.

"I've been hearing them for hours, Mister," spoke up the little, shrivelled, leathery-skinned West Indian negro, who spoke English without a trace of dialect, "and I was sure the place was haunted."

* * * * *

We stood before the captain, cap deferentially in hand.

But he looked like anything but a man in charge of a ship. He was short. In outward appearance, moreover, he was like a wax doll. He had waxen-white cheeks with daubs of pink as if they had been put there from a rouge pot. His hair was nicely scented, oiled, and patted down. His small hands were white and perfectly manicured.

Nippers began to snicker openly at him. But the sharp variety and incisiveness of the oaths he vented at us, soon disabused us of any opinion we might have held that he was sissified....

"What's wrong with _you_, you young ---- ---- ---- ---- you?" began the captain. The snicker died slowly from Nipper's lips, and in his face dawned an infinite, surprised respect....

Then, after he had subdued us:

"So you're stowaways, eh?... and you think you're going to be given a free ride to Brisbane and let go ashore, scot free?... not much! You'll either go to jail there or sign up here, as cattlemen for the trip to China--even though I can see that your mouths are still wet from your mothers' tits!" And he ended with a blasphemous flourish.

Nippers and I looked at each other in astonishment. Of course we wanted to sign on as cattlemen. No doubt some of the men hired at Sydney had failed to show up at the wharf.

The ship's book was pushed before us.

"Sign here!" I signed "John Gregory" with satisfaction. Nippers signed after, laboriously.

"And now get aft with you, you ----!" cursed the captain, dismissing us with a parting volley that beat about our ears.

"Gawd, but the skipper's a _right_ man enough!" worshipped Nippers.

We hurried down the ladder to gobble up what was left of the cornbeef and potatoes.... Nippers looked up at me, with a hunk of beef sticking from his mouth, which he poked in with the butt-end of his knife.... "Say, didn't the old man cuss wonderful, and him lookin' like such a lady!"

* * * * *

There was plenty of work to do in the few days it took to reach Brisbane, where the cattle were to be taken aboard. The boat was an ordinary tramp steamer, and we had to make an improvised cattleboat out of her. Already carpenters had done much to that effect by erecting enclosures on the top deck, the main deck, by putting up stalls in the hold. Every available foot was to be packed with the living flesh of cattle.

We gave the finishing touches to the work, trying to make the boarding and scantling more solid--solid enough to withstand the plunging, lurching, and kicking of fear-stricken, wild Queensland steers unused to being cooped up on shipboard....

* * * * *

We had made fast to a dock down the Brisbane River, several miles out from Brisbane ... nearby stood the stockyards, with no cattle in them yet.

In a day's time of lusty heaving and running and hauling we had taken on the bales of compressed fodder that were to feed the cattle for the twenty-day trip to Taku, China.

Then the little, fiery, doll-like skipper made the tactical error of paying each man a couple of bob advance on his forthcoming wages.

In a shouting, singing mob we made for Brisbane, like schoolboys on a holiday.

Two shilling apiece wasn't much. But a vagabond can make a little silver go far. And there are more friends to be found by men in such a condition, more good times to be had--of a sort--than a world held by more proper standards can imagine.

In both brothel and pub the men found friends. There were other sailors ashore, there were many swagmen just in from the bush--some with "stakes" they had earned on the ranches out in the country ... and in their good, simple hearts they were not averse to "standing treats."

* * * * *

As if by previous appointment, one by one we drifted together, we cattlemen of the _South Sea King_--we drifted together and found each other in the fine park near the Queensland House of Parliament.

We had, all of us, already over-stayed our shore-leave by many hours. We grouped together in informal consultation as to what should be done--should we go back to the ship or not?

"We might run into a typhoon ... with all them crazy cattle on board!" voiced one....

* * * * *

Nevertheless, perhaps because it was, after all, the line of least resistance, because there regular meals awaited us, and a secure place of sleep, by twos and threes we drifted back, down the long, hot, dusty road, to where the _South Sea King_ lay waiting for us ... the mate, the captain, and the cattle-boss furious at us for our over-stayed shore-leave....

* * * * *

The cattle had been there these many hours, bellowing and moving restlessly in their land-pens, the hot sun blazing down upon them.

* * * * *

Our cattle-boss, it seems, knew all about the handling of his animals on land. But not on sea. When, the following morning, we started early, trying to drive the cattle on board ship, they refused to walk up the runway. In vain the boss strewed earth and sod along its course, to make it seem a natural passage for them ... they rushed around and around their pens, kicking up a vast, white, choking dust,--snorting, bellowing, and throwing their rumps out gaily in sidelong gallopades ... all young Queensland steers; wild, but not vicious. Still full of the life and strength of the open range....

Then we scattered bits of the broken bales of their prepared food, along the runway, to lure them ... a few were led aboard thus. But the captain cried with oaths that they didn't have time to make a coaxing-party of the job....

At last the donkey-engine was started, forward. A small cable was run through a block, and, fastened by their halters around their horns, one after the other the steers, now bellowing in great terror, their eyes popping for fear--were hoisted up in the air, poised on high, kicking, then swung down, and on deck.

You had to keep well from under each one as he descended, or suffer the befouling consequences of his fear ... we had great laughter over several men who came within the explosive radius ... till the mate hit on the device of tying each beast's tail close before he was jerked up into the air.

What a pandemonium ... shouting ... swearing ... whistles blowing signals ... the chugging respiration of the labouring donkey-engine ... and then the attempted stampede of each trembling, fear-crazy animal as soon as he rose four-footed, on deck, after his ride through the sky....

* * * * *

The ship was crammed as full as Noah's ark. In the holds and on the main deck stood the steers, in long rows....

On the upper deck, exposed to all the weather, were housed the more tractable sheep, who had, without objection, bleated their way aboard docilely up the runway--behind their black ram ... that the cattle-boss had to help on a bit, by pulling him the few first yards by his curly horns.

* * * * *

As we swam by in the fading day, a pale ghost of a moon was already up. Ghostly rows of knee-ing trees stood out like live things in the river....

Under the night, off at sea, what with the mooing and baaing through all the ship, it seemed like an absurd farmyard that had somehow got on the ocean.

* * * * *

There were two quarters for the men ... a place under the forecastle head, forward--as well as the after-quarters. Nippers and I had been separated--he staying aft, while I took up my bunk forward.

* * * * *

But the men on the boat, the few that stick in my memory as distinct personages:

There was the bloated, fat Scotch boy, whom we called just Fatty, a sheepherder by calling. He had signed on for the trip, to take care of the sheep on the upper deck;

There was a weak, pathetic cockney, who died of sun-stroke;

The ex-jockey, a bit of a man with a withered left arm--made that way from an injury received in his last race, when his mount fell on him;

There was the West Indian Negro, a woolly, ebony wisp of a creature, a great believer in ghosts (he who thought we stowaways were ghosts when we hid under the bunk). The Irish cattle-boss gave him the job of night-watchman, "to break him of his superstitious silliness";

There was the big, black Jamaica cook ... as black as if he was polished ebony ... a fine, big, polite chap, whom everyone liked. He had a white wife in Southampton (the sailors who had seen her said she was pretty ... that the cook was true to her ... that she came down to the boat the minute the _South Sea King_ reached an English port, they loved each other so deeply!) ...

Then there was the giant of an Irishman ... who, working side by side with me in the hold, shovelling out cattle-ordure there with me, informed me that I looked as if I had consumption ... that I would not be able to stand the terrific heat for many days without keeling over ... but, his prediction came true of himself, not of me.

One morning, not many days out, the little West Indian watchman, bringing down the before-daylight coffee and ships-biscuits and rousing the men, as was his duty,--found the big fellow, with whom he used to crack cheery jokes, apparently sound asleep. The watchman shook him by the foot to rouse him ... found his big friend stiff and cold.

The watchman let out a scream of horror that woke us right and proper, for _that_ day....

The next day was Sunday. It was a still, religious afternoon.

We men ranged in two rows aft. The body had been sewn up in coarse canvas, the Union Jack draped over it.

The captain, dapper in his gold-braided uniform, stood over the body as it lay on the plank from which it was to descend into the sea. In a high, clear voice he read that beautiful burial-service for the dead ... an upward tilt of the board in the hands of two brown-armed seamen, the body flashed over the side, to swing feet-down, laden with shot, for interminable days and nights, in the vast tides of the Pacific.

No one reached quickly enough. The Union Jack went off with the body, like a floral decoration flung after....

* * * * *

We drank the coffee brought to us before dawn, in grouchy, sleepy, monosyllabic silence. Immediately after, the cattle were to water and feed ... and a hungry lot they were ... but despite their appetites, with each day, because of the excessive heat of the tropics, and the confined existence that was theirs--such an abrupt transition from the open range--they waxed thinner and thinner, acquired more of large-eyed mournfulness and an aspect of almost human suffering in their piteous, pleading faces....

* * * * *

If the big chap who succumbed to heart failure that night had lived a few days longer, he would have wondered still more at me or anyone else surviving a day's work in the hold.

For the thermometer ran up incredibly ... hotter and hotter it grew ... and down there in the hold we had to shovel out the excrement every morning after breakfast. It was too infernal for even the prudish Anglo-Saxon souls of us to wear clothes beyond a breechclout, and shoes, to protect our feet from the harder hoof.

Our eyes stung and watered from the reek of the ammonia in the cattle-urine. What with the crowding, the bad air (despite the canvas ventilators let down) and the sudden change from green pasturage to dry, baled food, most of the beasts contracted "the skitters." This mess was what we had to shovel out through the portholes ... an offensive-smelling, greenish, fluidic material, that spilled, the half of it, always, from the carefully-held scoop of the shovel.

Cursing, with the bitter sweat streaming off our bodies and into our eyes, and with an oblique eye to guard from heat-maddened, frantic steer-kicks,--each day, for several hours, we suffered through this hell ... to emerge panting, like runners after a long race; befouled ... to throw ourselves down on the upper deck, under the blue, wind-free sky and feel as if we had come into paradise....

* * * * *

"I wish I had never come back to this hell-ship, at Brisbane!"

"I wish I had never come aboard at all at Sydney!"

* * * * *

At such times, and at other odd ends of leisure, I brought my Westcott and Hort's Greek New Testament from my bunk, and with the nasty smell of sheep close-by, but unheeded through custom--I studied with greater pleasure than I ever did before or since.

* * * * *

As I said before, it was not long before these poor steers were broken-spirited things.

But there was one among them whose spirit kept its flag in the air, "The Black Devil," as the cook had named him fondly ... a steer, all glossy-black, excepting for a white spot in the center of his forehead. He behaved, from the first, more like a turbulent little bull than a gelding. The cook fed him with tid-bits from the galley.

He had evidently been someone's pet before he had been sold for live meat, to be shipped to China.

When we took him on board by the horns he showed no fear as he rode in the air. And, once on his feet again, and loose on deck, he showed us hell's own fight--out of sheer indignation--back there in Brisbane. He flashed after us, with the rapid motions of a bullfight in the movies. Most of us climbed every available thing to get out of his reach. He smashed here and there through wooden supports as if they were of cardboard.

The agile little ex-jockey kept running in front of him, hitting him on the nose and nimbly escaping--in spite of his wing-like, wasted arm, quicker than his pursuer ... that smashed through, while he ducked and turned....

"I'll be God-damned," yelled the captain from the safe vantage of the bridge, "fetch me my pistol," to the cabin boy, "I'll have to shoot the beast!"

All this while the big black Jamaica cook had been calmly looking on, leaning fearlessly out over the half-door of the galley ... while the infuriated animal rushed back and forth.

The cook said nothing. He disappeared, and reappeared with a bunch of carrots which he held out toward "The Black Devil."...

In immediate transformation, the little beast stopped, forgot his anger, stretched forth his moist, black nuzzle, sniffing ... and walked up to the cook, accepting the carrots. The cook began to stroke the animal's nose....

"_You_ little black devil," he said, in a soft voice, "you're all right ... they don't understand you ... but we're going to be pals--us two--aren't we?"

Then he came out at the door to where the steer stood, took "The Black Devil," as we henceforth called him, gently by the under-jaw,--and led him into a standing-place right across from the galley.

* * * * *

As we struck further north under vast nights of stars, and days of furnace-hot sunshine, the heat, confinement, and dry, baled food told hideously on the animals ... the sheep seemed to endure better, partly because they were not halted stationary in one spot and could move about a little on the top deck.... But they suffered hardships that came of changing weather.

* * * * *

Especially the cattle in the lower hold suffered, grew weak and emaciated.... We were ever on the watch to keep them from going down ... there was danger of their sprawling over each other and breaking legs in the scramble. So when one tried to lie down, his tail was twisted till the suffering made him rise to his feet ... sometimes a steer would be too weak to regain his feet ... in such a case, in a vain effort to make the beast rise, I have seen the Irish foreman twist the tail nearly off, while the animal at first bellowed, then moaned weakly, with anguish ... a final boot at the victim in angry frustration....

Last, a milky glaze would settle over the beast's eyes ... and we would drag him out and up by donkey-engine, swing him over and out, and drop him, to float, a bobbing tan object, down our receding ocean-path.

* * * * *

The coast of Borneo hovered, far and blue, in the offing, when we struck our first, and last, typhoon. The mate avowed it was merely the tail-end of a typhoon; if that was the tail-end, it is good that the body of it did not strike down on us.

The surface of the ocean was kicked up into high, ridge-running masses. The tops of the waves were caught in the wind and whipped into a wide, level froth as if a giant egg-beater were at work ... then water, water, water came sweeping and mounting and climbing aboard, hill after bursting hill.

The deck was swept as by a mountain-torrent ... boards whirled about with an uncanny motion in them. They came forward toward you with a bound, menacing shin and midriff,--then on the motion of the ship, they paused, and washed in the opposite direction.

Here and there a steer broke loose, which had to be caught and tethered again. But in general the animals were too much frightened to do anything but stand trembling and moaning ... when they were not floundering about....

Down below was a suffocating inferno. For the hatches that were ordinarily kept open for more air, had to be battened down till the waves subsided.

* * * * *

At the very height of the storm, we heard a screaming of the most abject fear.

The jockey had passed, in forgetful excitement, too close to his enemy, The Black Devil--who had not forgotten, and gave him a horn in the side, under the withered arm.

Several sailors carried the bleeding man aft to the captain ... who dressed his wound with fair skill. The jockey was not so badly injured, all things considered. The thrust had slanted and made only a flesh wound ... which enabled the fellow to loaf on a sort of sick-leave, during the rest of the trip.

* * * * *

The storm over, frantically we tore off the hatches again ... to find only ten steers dead below. The rest were gasping piteously for air. It was a day's work, heaving the dead stock overboard ... including the two more which died of the after-effects....

When we went to look the sheep over, we found that over a third of them had been washed overboard. The rest were huddled, in frightened, bleating heaps, wondering perhaps what kind of an insane world it was that they had been harried into.

* * * * *

The story of this cattleboat unfolds freshly before me again, out of the records of memory ... the pitiful suffering of the cattle ... the lives and daily doings of the rowdy, likeable men, who were really still undeveloped children, and would so go down to the grave ... with their boasting and continual vanity of small and trivial things of life.

* * * * *

All the time I was keeping a diary of my adventures ... in a large, brown copybook, with flexible covers. I carried it, tightened away, usually, in the lining of my coat, but occasionally I left it under the mattress of my bunk.

Nippers observed me writing in it one day.

That night it was gone. I surmised who had taken it.

Seeking Nippers, I came upon him haltingly reading my diary aloud to an amused circle of cattlemen, in his quarters aft.

"Give me that book back!" I demanded.

He ignored me.

"Give him a rap in the kisser, Skinny!"

I drew back, aiming a blow at Nippers. He flung the book down and was on me like the tornado we had just run through ... he was a natural-born fighter ... in a twinkling I was on the floor, with a black eye, a bleeding mouth.

I flung myself to my feet, full of fury ... then something went in my brain like the click of a camera-shutter ... I had an hallucination of Uncle Landon, coming at me with a club....

I plumped into a corner, crouching. "Don't hit me any more ... please don't, Uncle Lan!"

"He's gone crazy!"

"Naw, he's only a bloody, bleedin' coward," returned another voice, in surprise and disgust.

Someone spat on me. I was let up at last.... I staggered forward to my bunk. My book had been handed back to me. It's a wonder I didn't throw myself into the sea, in disgust over the queer fit that had come over me. I lay half the night, puzzling ... was I a coward?

Not unless an unparalleled change had occurred in me. I had fought with other children, when a boy ... had whipped two lads at once, when working in the Composite factory, that time they spit into my book.

* * * * *

One day a fishing-junk hove into sight, just as if it had sailed out of a Maxfield Parrish illustration,--swinging there in the mouth of a blood-red sunset ... then, like magic, appeared another and another and another....

"Fishing-junks," ejaculated the mate, "--pretty far out, too, but a Chink'll risk his life for a few bleedin' cash ... and yet he won't fight at all ... an' if you do him an injury he's like as not likely to up an' commit suicide at your door, to get even!"

"That's a bally orful way to get even with a henemy!" exclaimed a stoker, who sat on the edge of the forward hatch.

"I should say so, too!"

Then, far and faint, were heard a crew of Chinese sailors, on the nearest junk, singing a curious, falsetto chantey as they hauled on a bamboo-braced sail....

"A feller wot never travelled wouldn't bloody well believe they was such queer people in the world," further observed the philosophic coal-heaver.

* * * * *

Next morning the coast of China lay right against us, on the starboard side ... we ran into the thick of a fleet of sampans, boats fashioned flat like overgrown rowboats, propelled each by a huge sculling oar, from the stern ... they were fishers who manned them ... two or three to a boat ... huge, bronze-bodied, fine-muscled, breech-clouted men ... as they sculled swiftly to give us sea-room each one looked fit to be a sculptor's model.

Their bodies shone in the sun like bronze. Several, fearing we might run them down, as we clove straight through their midst, raised their arms with a shout full of pleading and fright.

"What's the matter? are they trying to murder some of these poor chaps?" I asked.

"No ... we're just having a little fun ... what's the life of a Chink matter?"

* * * * *

"I say, if the Chinks up where the Boxers are fighting are big and strong as them duffers, here's one that don't want no shore-leave!" commented someone, as we stood ranged by the side.

"I always thought Chinamen was runts."

"Oh, it's only city Chinks--mostly from Canton, that come to civilized countries to run laundries ... but these are the real Chinamen."

* * * * *

After the cattle had been unladen, the crew were to be taken down to Shanghai and dumped ashore ... as it was an English Treaty port, that would be, technically, living up to the ship's articles, which guaranteed that the cattlemen aboard would be given passage back to English ground....

But I was all excitement over the prospect of making my way ashore to where the Allied troops were fighting....

* * * * *

Dawn ... we were anchored in Taku Bay among the warships of the Allied nations ... grey warships gleaming in the sun like silver ... the sound of bugles ... flags of all nations ... of as many colours as the coat of Joseph.

"Well, here we are at last!"

* * * * *

Next day the work of unloading the cattle began ... hoisted again by the horns from our boat of heavy draught to the hold of a coasting steamer, that had English captain and mates, and a Chinese crew.

Some of the steers were so weak that they died on deck ... as they were dying, butchers cut their throats so their beef could be called fresh.

The only one who desired to go ashore there, I made my way, when it was dark and the last load of steers was being transferred to shore, down below to the hold of the coaster. I stood in a corner, behind an iron ladder, so that the cattle couldn't crush me during the night ... for the Chinese had turned them loose, there, in a mass.

* * * * *

I stumbled ashore at Tongku, a station up a way on the banks of the Pei Ho river.

My first night ashore in China was a far cry from the China of my dreams ... the Cathay of Marco Polo, with its towers of porcelain.... I crept, to escape a cold drizzle, under the huge tarpaulin which covered a great stack of tinned goods--army supplies. A soldier on guard over the stack, an American soldier, spotted me.

"Come, my lad," lifting up the tarpaulin, "what are you doing there?"

"--Trying to keep from the wet!"

"--run off from one of the transports?"

"Yes," was as good an answer as any.

"You're pretty cold ... your teeth are chattering. Here, take a swig o' this."

And the sentinel reached me a flask of whiskey from which I drew a nip. Unaccustomed as I was to drink, it nearly strangled me. It went all the way down like fire. Then it spread with a pleasant warmth all through my body....

"Stay here to-night ... rather uncomfortable bed, but at least it's dry. No one 'ull bother you ... in the morning Captain ----, who is in charge of the commissariat here, might give you a job."

* * * * *

That next morning Captain ---- gave me a job as mate, eighty dollars Mex. and a place to sleep, along with others, in a Compound, and find my food at my own expense....

Mate, on a supply-launch that went in and out to and from the transports, that were continually anchoring in the bay. Our job was to keep the officers' mess in supplies....

"And, if you stick to your job six months," I was informed, "you'll be entitled to free transportation back to San Francisco."

My captain was a neat, young Englishman, with the merest hint of a moustache of fair gold.

Our crew--two Chinamen who jested about us between themselves in a continuous splutter of Chinese. We could tell, by their grimaces and gestures ... we rather liked their harmless, human impudence ... as long as they did the work, while we lazed about, talking ... while up and down the yellow sweep of the Pei-ho the little boat tramped.

* * * * *

"It's too bad you didn't arrive on the present scene a few weeks, sooner," said my young captain ... "it was quite exciting here, at that time. I used to have to take the boathook and push off the Chinese corpses that caught on the prow of the boat as they floated down, thick ... they seemed to catch hold of the prow as if still alive. It was uncanny!"

* * * * *

We slept, rolled up in our blankets, on the floor of a Chinese compound ... adventurers bound up and down the river, to and from Tien-Tsin and Woo-shi-Woo and Pekin ... a sort of caravanserai....

* * * * *

Though it was the fall of the year and the nights were cold enough to make two blankets feel good, yet some days the sun blazed down intolerably on our boat, on the river....

When we grew thirsty the captain and myself resorted to our jug of distilled water. I had been warned against drinking the yellow, pea-soup-like water of the Pei-ho....

But one afternoon I found our water had run out.

So I took the gourd used by the Chinese crew, and dipped up, as they did, the river water.

The captain clutched me by the wrist.

"Don't drink that water! If you'd seen what I have, floating in it, you'd be afraid!"

"What won't hurt a Chinaman, won't hurt me," I boasted....

The result of my folly was a mild case of dysentery....

In a few days I was so weak that I went around as if I had no bones left in my body. And I wanted to leave the country. And I repaired to Captain ---- who had given me the job, and asked him for my pay and my discharge. He lit into me, disgusted, upbraiding me for a worthless tramp....

"I might have known that you were of that ilk, from the first, just by looking at you!"

He handed me the eighty dollars in Mexican silver, that was coming to me.... I repaid the captain the forty I had borrowed, for food.

"Sick! yes, sick of laziness!"

Captain ---- was partly right. I had an uncontrollable distaste for the monotony of daily work, repeated in the same environment, surrounded by the same scenery ... but I was also quite weak and sick, and I am persuaded, that, if I had stayed on there, I might have died.

* * * * *

I sat on one of the wharves and played host to a crowd of romantic thoughts that moved in their pageant through my brain ... now I would go on to Pekin and see the great Forbidden City. Now I would dress in Chinese clothes and beg my way through the very heart of the Chinese Empire ... and write a book, subsequently, about my experiences and adventures ... and perhaps win a medal of some famous society for it ... and I had a dream of marrying some quaintly beautiful mandarin's daughter, of becoming a famous, revered Chinese scholar, bringing together with my influence the East and the West....

I reached so far, in the dream, as to buy several novels of the Chinese, printed in their characters, of an itinerant vendor....

The everyday world swung into my ken again.

Three junks, laden with American marines, dropping down the river from Pekin, cut across my abstracted gaze ... the boys were singing.

They marched off on the dock on which I sat. They were stationed right where they deployed from the junks. Men were put in guard over them.

At Tien Tsin they had behaved rather badly, I was told by one of them,--had gone on a Samshu jag ... a Chinese drink, worse than the worst American "rot-gut." ...

"Wisht I c'd git off the dock an' rustle up another drink somewheres."

"They wouldn't let us off this dock fer love nor money," spoke up a lithe, blue-shaven marine to me--the company's barber, I afterward learned him to be....

"Yah, we got ter stay here all afternoon, an' me t'roat's es dry es san'paper."

"Where are they taking you to, from here?"

"Manila!... the _Indiana's_ waitin' out in th' bay fer us."

"--Wish I could get off with you!" I remarked.

"Wot's the matter? On th' bum here?"

"Yes."

Immediately the barber and two others, his pals, became intensely, suspiciously so, interested in my desire to sail with them....

"--Tell you wot," and the company barber reached into his pocket with a surreptitious glance about, "if you'll take these bills an' sneak past to that coaster lyin' along the next dock, the Chinese steward 'ull sell you three bottles o' whiskey fer these," and he handed me a bunch of bills ... "an' w'en you come back with th' booze, we'll see to it that you get took out to the transport with us, all right ... won't we, boys?"

"--betcher boots we will."

* * * * *

"God, but this is like heaven to me," exclaimed the barber, as he tilted up his bottle, while the two others stood about him, to keep him from being seen. The three of them drank their bottles of whiskey as if it was water.

"That saved me life...."

"An' mine, too. You go to Manila wit' us, all right,--kid!"

* * * * *

Toward dusk came the sharp command for the men to march aboard the coaster that had drawn up for them. The boys kept their word. They loaded me down with their accoutrements to carry. I marched up the gangway with them, and we were off to the _Indiana_.

I was the first, almost, to scamper aboard the waiting transport in the gathering dusk ... and, to make sure of staying aboard, I hurried down one ladder after the other, till I reached the heavy darkness of the lowermost hold. Having nothing to do but sleep, I stumbled over some oblong boxes, climbed onto one, and composed myself for the night, using a coil of rope for a pillow.

I woke to find a grey patch of day streaming down the ladder-way. My eyes soon adjusted themselves to the obscurity.

And then it was that I gave a great, scared leap. And with difficulty I held myself back from crying out.

Those curious oblong boxes among which I had passed the night--they were hermetically sealed coffins, and there were dead soldiers in them. Ridges of terror crept along my flesh. Stifling a panic in me, I forced myself to go slow as I climbed the iron rungs to the hold above ... where living soldiers lay sleeping in long rows....

Still undetected, I scrambled along an aisle between them and put myself away in a sort of life-preserver closet. Not till I had heard the familiar throb of the propeller in motion for a long time, did I come forth.

* * * * *

During the voyage of, I believe, eight days, I loafed about, lining up for rations with the boys ... no one questioned me. My engineer's clothes that I had taken, in lieu of part of my wages, from the slop-chest of _The South Sea King_, caused the officers of the marines to think I belonged to the ship's crew ... and the ship-officers must have thought I was in some way connected with the marines ... anyhow, I was not molested, and I led a life much to my liking ... an easy-going and loafing and tale-telling one ... mixing about and talking and listening ... and reading back-number magazines.

* * * * *

One day my friend the barber called me aside:

"Say, kid, I've been delegated to tell you that you've got lice." I flamed indignant.

"That's a God-damned lie! and whoever told you so is a God-damned liar, too! I never had a louse in my life."

"Easy! Easy!... no use gittin' huffy ... if it ain't lice you got, wot you scratchin' all the time fer? Look in the crotch of yer pants and the seams of your shirt, an' see!"

I _had_ been scratching a lot ... and wondering what was wrong ... my breast was all red ... but I had explained it to myself that I was wearing a coarse woolen undershirt next my skin ... that I had picked up from the slop-chest, also.

The barber walked jauntily away, leaving me standing sullenly alone.

I sneaked into the toilet, looking to see if anyone was about. I turned my shirt back. To my horror, my loathing,--the soldier's accusation was true!... they were so thick, thanks to my ignorant neglect, that I could see them moving in battalions ... if I had been the victim of some filthy disease, I could scarcely have felt more beyond the pale, more a pariah. I had not detected them before, because I was ignorant of the thought of having them, and because their grey colour was exactly that of the inside of my woolen shirt.

I threw the shirt away, content to shiver for a few days till we had steamed to warmer weather ... I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed myself.... I had, up to now, had experience with head-lice only ... as a child, in school....

I look back with a shudder even yet to that experience. During my subsequent tramp-career I never could grow callous to vermin, as a few others that I met, did. Once I met a tramp who advised me not to bother about 'em ... and you would soon get used to 'em ... and not feel them biting at all ... but most tramps "boil up"--that is, take off their clothes, a piece at a time, and boil them--whenever they find opportunity.

* * * * *

Manila. A brief adventure there ... a bum for a few weeks, hanging around soldiers' barracks, blacking shoes for free meals ... till Provost Marshal General Bell, in an effort to clear the islands of boys who were vags and mascots of regiments, gave me and several other rovers and stowaways free transportation back to America....

A brief stop at Nagasaki to have a broken propeller shaft mended: a long Pacific voyage ... then hilly San Francisco one golden morning....

* * * * *

All these ocean days I peeled potatoes and helped to dish out rations to the lined-up soldiers at meal-times ... one slice of meat, one or two potatoes, to a tin plate ...

For long hours I listened to their lying tales and boasting ... then lied and boasted, myself....

My most unique adventure aboard the _Thomas_; making friends with a four-times-enlisted soldier named Lang, who liked army life because, he said, outside of drills and dress parade, it was lazy and easy ... and it gave him leisure to read and re-read his Shakespeare. He was a Shakespearean scholar....

"It's the best life in the world ... no worries or responsibilities about food and lodging--it spoils a fellow for any other kind of life ... the officers are always decent to a fellow who respects himself as a soldier and citizen."

Lang and I became good pals. Day after day I sat listening to him, as, to the accompaniment of the rumble and pulse of the great boat a-move, he quoted and explained Shakespeare to me, nearly always without the book.

His talk was fascinating--except when he insisted on repeating to me his own wretched rhymes ... in which he showed he had learned nothing about how to write poetry from his revered Shakespeare ... it was very bad Kiplingesque stuff ... much like my own bad verse of that period....

Once Lang recited by heart the whole of _King Lear_ to me, having me hold a copy of the play, to prove that he did not fumble a single line or miss a single word ... which he did not....

Lang was a prodigious drunkard. At Nagasaki I rescued him from the water-butt. Coming back drunk on rice wine, he had stuck his head down for a cool drink, as a horse does. And in he had tumbled, head-first. If I had not seen his legs wiggling futilely in the air, and drawn him forth, dripping, he would have drowned, as the butt was too solid for his struggles to dump, and he couldn't make a sound for help.

* * * * *

As we neared San Francisco several of the boys spoke to me of taking up a purse for my benefit. Soldiers are always generous and warm-hearted--the best men, individually, in the world.

I said no to them, that they must not take up a collection for me ... I did not really feel that way, at heart, but I liked better seeming proud and independent, American and self-reliant....

Later on, at the very dock, I acceded ... but now I was punished for my hypocrisy. The boys were so eager to be home again, they only threw together about five dollars for me ... when, if I hadn't been foolish, I might have had enough to loaf with, say a month, at San Francisco, and do a lot of reading in the Library, and in books of poetry that I might have picked up at second-hand book stores....

However, I gathered together, before I went ashore, two suits of khaki and two army blankets, and a pair of good army shoes that afterwards seemed never to wear out.

And a young chap named Simmons, who had been sergeant, had joined the army by running away from home, took me to an obscure hotel as his valet ... he wanted to "put on dog," as the Indians say.

He had parents of wealth, back in Des Moines.

I served him as his valet for the two weeks he stayed at the hotel. He had been shot through the left foot so that a tendon was severed, and he had to walk with a cane, with a foot that flopped at every step.

He gave me fifteen dollars for wages. After he had departed I rented a cheap room for a week.

* * * * *

Standing in front of a store on Kearney Street, one afternoon, dressed in my suit of soldier's khaki, looking at the display in the window, I got the cue that shaped my subsequent adventures in California....

"Poor lad," I heard one girl say to another, standing close by, "he looks so sick and thin, I'm sorry for him."

They did not notice that my soldier's uniform had cloth buttons. Simmons had made me put cloth buttons on, at the hotel,--had furnished them to me--

"I don't want you going about the other way ... you're such a nut, you might get into trouble."

Mule-drivers and others in subsidiary service were allowed khaki with cloth buttons only ... at that time ... I don't know how it goes now.

* * * * *

The girls' taking me for a sick, discharged soldier made me think. I would travel in that guise.

* * * * *

With a second-hand Shakespeare, in one volume, of wretched print, with a much-abused school-copy of Caesar, in the Latin (of whose idiomatic Latin I have never tired), an extra suit of khaki, a razor, tooth-brush, and tooth-powder--and a cake of soap--all wrapped up in my army blankets, I set forth on my peregrinations as blanket-stiff or "bindle-bum."

Where I saw I could escape without awkward questioning, I played the convalescent ex-soldier ... I thrived. My shadow-thinness almost turned to fatness. It would have, had there been any disposition toward obesity in me....

At times I was ashamed of doing nothing ... queer spurts of American economic conscience....

Once I worked, plowing ... to drive the horses as far as a tall tree for shade, at the end of the third day, sneak back to the house ... and out to the highway with my bundle and my belongings, kicking up my heels ecstatically, glad to be freed from work.

I plumped down in a fence corner and did not stir till I had read a whole play of Shakespeare, and a snatch of my Caesar.