CHAPTER X
Michael left the Makambo as he had come on board, through a
porthole. Likewise, the affair occurred at night, and it was
Kwaque's hands that received him. It had been quick work, and
daring, in the dark of early evening. From the boat-deck, with a
bowline under Kwaque's arms and a turn of the rope around a pin,
Dag Daughtry had lowered his leprous servitor into the waiting
launch.
On his way below, he encountered Captain Duncan, who saw fit to
warn him:
"No shannigan with Killeny Boy, Steward. He must go back to
Tulagi with us."
"Yes, sir," the steward agreed. "An' I'm keepin' him tight in my
room to make safe. Want to see him, sir?"
The very frankness of the invitation made the captain suspicious,
and the thought flashed through his mind that perhaps Killeny Boy
was already hidden ashore somewhere by the dog-stealing steward.
"Yes, indeed I'd like to say how-do-you-do to him," Captain Duncan
answered.
And his was genuine surprise, on entering the steward's room, to
behold Michael just rousing from his curled-up sleep on the floor.
But when he left, his surprise would have been shocking could he
have seen through the closed door what immediately began to take
place. Out through the open porthole, in a steady stream,
Daughtry was passing the contents of the room. Everything went
that belonged to him, including the turtle-shell and the
photographs and calendars on the wall. Michael, with the command
of silence laid upon him, went last. Remained only a sea-chest
and two suit-cases, themselves too large for the porthole but bare
of contents.
When Daughtry sauntered along the main deck a few minutes later
and paused for a gossip with the customs officer and a
quartermaster at the head of the gang-plank, Captain Duncan little
dreamed that his casual glance was resting on his steward for the
last time. He watched him go down the gang-plank empty-handed,
with no dog at his heels, and stroll off along the wharf under the
electric lights.
Ten minutes after Captain Duncan saw the last of his broad back,
Daughtry, in the launch with his belongings and heading for
Jackson Bay, was hunched over Michael and caressing him, while
Kwaque, crooning with joy under his breath that he was with all
that was precious to him in the world, felt once again in the
side-pocket of his flimsy coat to make sure that his beloved jews'
harp had not been left behind.
Dag Daughtry was paying for Michael, and paying well. Among other
things, he had not cared to arouse suspicion by drawing his wages
from Burns Philp. The twenty pounds due him he had abandoned, and
this was the very sum, that night on the beach at Tulagi, he had
decided he could realize from the sale of Michael. He had stolen
him to sell. He was paying for him the sales price that had
tempted him.
For, as one has well said: the horse abases the base, ennobles
the noble. Likewise the dog. The theft of a dog to sell for a
price had been the abasement worked by Michael on Dag Daughtry.
To pay the price out of sheer heart-love that could recognize no
price too great to pay, had been the ennoblement of Dag Daughtry
which Michael had worked. And as the launch chug-chugged across
the quiet harbour under the southern stars, Dag Daughtry would
have risked and tossed his life into the bargain in a battle to
continue to have and to hold the dog he had originally conceived
of as being interchangeable for so many dozens of beer.
The Mary Turner, towed out by a tug, sailed shortly after
daybreak, and Daughtry, Kwaque, and Michael looked their last for
ever on Sydney Harbour.
"Once again these old eyes have seen this fair haven," the Ancient
Mariner, beside them gazing, babbled; and Daughtry could not help
but notice the way the wheat-farmer and the pawnbroker pricked
their ears to listen and glanced each to the other with scant
eyes. "It was in '52, in 1852, on such a day as this, all
drinking and singing along the decks, we cleared from Sydney in
the Wide Awake. A pretty craft, oh sirs, a most clever and pretty
craft. A crew, a brave crew, all youngsters, all of us, fore and
aft, no man was forty, a mad, gay crew. The captain was an
elderly gentleman of twenty-eight, the third officer another of
eighteen, the down, untouched of steel, like so much young velvet
on his cheek. He, too, died in the longboat. And the captain
gasped out his last under the palm trees of the isle unnamable
while the brown maidens wept about him and fanned the air to his
parching lungs."
Dag Daughtry heard no more, for he turned below to take up his new
routine of duty. But while he made up bunks with fresh linen and
directed Kwaque's efforts to cleaning long-neglected floors, he
shook his head to himself and muttered, "He's a keen 'un. He's a
keen 'un. All ain't fools that look it."
The fine lines of the Mary Turner were explained by the fact that
she had been built for seal-hunting; and for the same reason on
board of her was room and to spare. The forecastle with bunk-
space for twelve, bedded but eight Scandinavian seamen. The five
staterooms of the cabin accommodated the three treasure-hunters,
the Ancient Mariner, and the mate--the latter a large-bodied,
gentle-souled Russian-Finn, known as Mr. Jackson through inability
of his shipmates to pronounce the name he had signed on the ship's
articles.
Remained the steerage, just for'ard of the cabin, separated from
it by a stout bulkhead and entered by a companionway on the main
deck. On this deck, between the break of the poop and the
steerage companion, stood the galley. In the steerage itself,
which possessed a far larger living-space than the cabin, were six
capacious bunks, each double the width of the forecastle bunks,
and each curtained and with no bunk above it.
"Some fella glory-hole, eh, Kwaque?" Daughtry told his seventeen-
years-old brown-skinned Papuan with the withered ancient face of a
centenarian, the legs of a living skeleton, and the huge-stomached
torso of an elderly Japanese wrestler. "Eh, Kwaque! What you
fella think?"
And Kwaque, too awed by the spaciousness to speak, eloquently
rolled his eyes in agreement.
"You likee this piecee bunk?" the cook, a little old Chinaman,
asked the steward with eager humility, inviting the white man's
acceptance of his own bunk with a wave of arm.
Daughtry shook his head. He had early learned that it was wise to
get along well with sea-cooks, since sea-cocks were notoriously
given to going suddenly lunatic and slicing and hacking up their
shipmates with butcher knives and meat cleavers on the slightest
remembered provocation. Besides, there was an equally good bunk
all the way across the width of the steerage from the Chinaman's.
The bunk next on the port side to the cook's and abaft of it
Daughtry allotted to Kwaque. Thus he retained for himself and
Michael the entire starboard side with its three bunks. The next
one abaft of his own he named "Killeny Boy's," and called on
Kwaque and the cook to take notice. Daughtry had a sense that the
cook, whose name had been quickly volunteered as Ah Moy, was not
entirely satisfied with the arrangement; but it affected him no
more than a momentary curiosity about a Chinaman who drew the line
at a dog taking a bunk in the same apartment with him.
Half an hour later, returning, from setting the cabin aright, to
the steerage for Kwaque to serve him with a bottle of beer,
Daughtry observed that Ah Moy had moved his entire bunk belongings
across the steerage to the third bunk on the starboard side. This
had put him with Daughtry and Michael and left Kwaque with half
the steerage to himself. Daughtry's curiosity recrudesced.
"What name along that fella Chink?" he demanded of Kwaque. "He no
like 'm you fella boy stop 'm along same fella side along him.
What for? My word! What name? That fella Chink make 'm me cross
along him too much!"
"Suppose 'm that fella Chink maybe he think 'm me kai-kai along
him," Kwaque grinned in one of his rare jokes.
"All right," the steward concluded. "We find out. You move 'm
along my bunk, I move 'm along that fella Chink's bunk."
This accomplished, so that Kwaque, Michael, and Ah Moy occupied
the starboard side and Daughtry alone bunked on the port side, he
went on deck and aft to his duties. On his next return he found
Ah Moy had transferred back to the port side, but this time into
the last bunk aft.
"Seems the beggar's taken a fancy to me," the steward smiled to
himself.
Nor was he capable of guessing Ah Moy's reason for bunking always
on the opposite side from Kwaque.
"I changee," the little old cook explained, with anxious eyes to
please and placate, in response to Daughtry's direct question.
"All the time like that, changee, plentee changee. You savvee?"
Daughtry did not savvee, and shook his head, while Ah Moy's slant
eyes betrayed none of the anxiety and fear with which he privily
gazed on Kwaque's two permanently bent fingers of the left hand
and on Kwaque's forehead, between the eyes, where the skin
appeared a shade darker, a trifle thicker, and was marked by the
first beginning of three short vertical lines or creases that were
already giving him the lion-like appearance, the leonine face so
named by the experts and technicians of the fell disease.
As the days passed, the steward took facetious occasions, when he
had drunk five quarts of his daily allowance, to shift his and
Kwaque's bunks about. And invariably Ah Moy shifted, though
Daughtry failed to notice that he never shifted into a bunk which
Kwaque had occupied. Nor did he notice that it was when the time
came that Kwaque had variously occupied all the six bunks that Ah
Moy made himself a canvas hammock, suspended it from the deck
beams above and thereafter swung clear in space and unmolested.
Daughtry dismissed the matter from his thoughts as no more than a
thing in keeping with the general inscrutability of the Chinese
mind. He did notice, however, that Kwaque was never permitted to
enter the galley. Another thing he noticed, which, expressed in
his own words, was: "That's the all-dangdest cleanest Chink I've
ever clapped my lamps on. Clean in galley, clean in steerage,
clean in everything. He's always washing the dishes in boiling
water, when he isn't washing himself or his clothes or bedding.
My word, he actually boils his blankets once a week!"
For there were other things to occupy the steward's mind. Getting
acquainted with the five men aft in the cabin, and lining up the
whole situation and the relations of each of the five to that
situation and to one another, consumed much time. Then there was
the path of the Mary Turner across the sea. No old sailor
breathes who does not desire to know the casual course of his ship
and the next port-of-call.
"We ought to be moving along a line that'll cross somewhere
northard of New Zealand," Daughtry guessed to himself, after a
hundred stolen glances into the binnacle. But that was all the
information concerning the ship's navigation he could steal; for
Captain Doane took the observations and worked them out, to the
exclusion of the mate, and Captain Doane always methodically
locked up his chart and log. That there were heated discussions
in the cabin, in which terms of latitude and longitude were
bandied back and forth, Daughtry did know; but more than that he
could not know, because it was early impressed upon him that the
one place for him never to be, at such times of council, was the
cabin. Also, he could not but conclude that these councils were
real battles wherein Messrs. Doane, Nishikanta, and Grimahaw
screamed at each other and pounded the table at each other, when
they were not patiently and most politely interrogating the
Ancient Mariner.
"He's got their goat," the steward early concluded to himself;
but, thereafter, try as he would, he failed to get the Ancient
Mariner's goat.
Charles Stough Greenleaf was the Ancient Mariner's name. This,
Daughtry got from him, and nothing else did he get save
maunderings and ravings about the heat of the longboat and the
treasure a fathom deep under the sand.
"There's some of us plays games, an' some of us as looks on an'
admires the games they see," the steward made his bid one day.
"And I'm sure these days lookin' on at a pretty game. The more I
see it the more I got to admire."
The Ancient Mariner dreamed back into the steward's eyes with a
blank, unseeing gaze.
"On the Wide Awake all the stewards were young, mere boys," he
murmured.
"Yes, sir," Daughtry agreed pleasantly. "From all you say, the
Wide Awake, with all its youngsters, was sure some craft. Not
like the crowd of old 'uns on this here hooker. But I doubt, sir,
that them youngsters ever played as clever games as is being
played aboard us right now. I just got to admire the fine way
it's being done, sir."
"I'll tell you something," the Ancient Mariner replied, with such
confidential air that almost Daughtry leaned to hear. "No steward
on the Wide Awake could mix a high-ball in just the way I like, as
well as you. We didn't know cocktails in those days, but we had
sherry and bitters. A good appetizer, too, a most excellent
appetizer."
"I'll tell you something more," he continued, just as it seemed he
had finished, and just in time to interrupt Daughtry away from his
third attempt to ferret out the true inwardness of the situation
on the Mary Turner and of the Ancient Mariner's part in it. "It
is mighty nigh five bells, and I should be very pleased to have
one of your delicious cocktails ere I go down to dine."
More suspicious than ever of him was Daughtry after this episode.
But, as the days went by, he came more and more to the conclusion
that Charles Stough Greenleaf was a senile old man who sincerely
believed in the abiding of a buried treasure somewhere in the
South Seas.
Once, polishing the brasswork on the hand-rails of the cabin
companionway, Daughtry overheard the ancient one explaining his
terrible scar and missing fingers to Grimshaw and the Armenian
Jew. The pair of them had plied him with extra drinks in the hope
of getting more out of him by way of his loosened tongue.
"It was in the longboat," the aged voice cackled up the companion.
"On the eleventh day it was that the mutiny broke. We in the
sternsheets stood together against them. It was all a madness.
We were starved sore, but we were mad for water. It was over the
water it began. For, see you, it was our custom to lick the dew
from the oar-blades, the gunwales, the thwarts, and the inside
planking. And each man of us had developed property in the dew-
collecting surfaces. Thus, the tiller and the rudder-head and
half of the plank of the starboard stern-sheet had become the
property of the second officer. No one of us lacked the honour to
respect his property. The third officer was a lad, only eighteen,
a brave and charming boy. He shared with the second officer the
starboard stern-sheet plank. They drew a line to mark the
division, and neither, lapping up what scant moisture fell during
the night-hours, ever dreamed of trespassing across the line.
They were too honourable.
"But the sailors--no. They squabbled amongst themselves over the
dew-surfaces, and only the night before one of them was knifed
because he so stole. But on this night, waiting for the dew, a
little of it, to become more, on the surfaces that were mine, I
heard the noises of a dew-lapper moving aft along the port-
gunwale--which was my property aft of the stroke-thwart clear to
the stern. I emerged from a nightmare dream of crystal springs
and swollen rivers to listen to this night-drinker that I feared
might encroach upon what was mine.
"Nearer he came to the line of my property, and I could hear him
making little moaning, whimpering noises as he licked the damp
wood. It was like listening to an animal grazing pasture-grass at
night and ever grazing nearer.
It chanced I was holding a boat-stretcher in my hand--to catch
what little dew might fall upon it. I did not know who it was,
but when he lapped across the line and moaned and whimpered as he
licked up my precious drops of dew, I struck out. The boat-
stretcher caught him fairly on the nose--it was the bo's'n--and
the mutiny began. It was the bo's'n's knife that sliced down my
face and sliced away my fingers. The third officer, the eighteen-
year-old lad, fought well beside me, and saved me, so that, just
before I fainted, he and I, between us, hove the bo's'n's carcass
overside."
A shifting of feet and changing of positions of those in the cabin
plunged Daughtry back into his polishing, which he had for the
time forgotten. And, as he rubbed the brass-work, he told himself
under his breath: "The old party's sure been through the mill.
Such things just got to happen."
"No," the Ancient Mariner was continuing, in his thin falsetto, in
reply to a query. "It wasn't the wounds that made me faint. It
was the exertion I made in the struggle. I was too weak. No; so
little moisture was there in my system that I didn't bleed much.
And the amazing thing, under the circumstances, was the quickness
with which I healed. The second officer sewed me up next day with
a needle he'd made out of an ivory toothpick and with twine he
twisted out of the threads from a frayed tarpaulin."
"Might I ask, Mr. Greenleaf, if there were rings at the time on
the fingers that were cut off?" Daughtry heard Simon Nishikanta
ask.
"Yes, and one beauty. I found it afterward in the boat bottom and
presented it to the sandalwood trader who rescued me. It was a
large diamond. I paid one hundred and eighty guineas for it to an
English sailor in the Barbadoes. He'd stolen it, and of course it
was worth more. It was a beautiful gem. The sandalwood man did
not merely save my life for it. In addition, he spent fully a
hundred pounds in outfitting me and buying me a passage from
Thursday Island to Shanghai."
"There's no getting away from them rings he wears," Daughtry
overheard Simon Nishikanta that evening telling Grimshaw in the
dark on the weather poop. "You don't see that kind nowadays.
They're old, real old. They're not men's rings so much as what
you'd call, in the old-fashioned days, gentlemen's rings. Real
gentlemen, I mean, grand gentlemen, wore rings like them. I wish
collateral like them came into my loan offices these days.
They're worth big money."
"I just want to tell you, Killeny Boy, that maybe I'll be wishin'
before the voyage is over that I'd gone on a lay of the treasure
instead of straight wages," Dag Daughtry confided to Michael that
night at turning-in time as Kwaque removed his shoes and as he
paused midway in the draining of his sixth bottle. "Take it from
me, Killeny, that old gentleman knows what he's talkin' about, an'
has been some hummer in his days. Men don't lose the fingers off
their hands and get their faces chopped open just for nothing--nor
sport rings that makes a Jew pawnbroker's mouth water."
