CHAPTER II
SHANGHAIED
WHEN Billy opened his eyes again he could not recall, for
the instant, very much of his recent past. At last he remembered
with painful regret the drunken sailor it had been his
intention to roll. He felt deeply chagrined that his rightful
prey should have escaped him. He couldn't understand how
it had happened.
"This Frisco booze must be something fierce," thought
Billy.
His head ached frightfully and he was very sick. So sick
that the room in which he lay seemed to be rising and falling
in a horribly realistic manner. Every time it dropped it
brought Billy's stomach nearly to his mouth.
Billy shut his eyes. Still the awful sensation. Billy groaned.
He never had been so sick in all his life before, and, my, how
his poor head did hurt. Finding that it only seemed to make
matters worse when he closed his eyes Billy opened them
again.
He looked about the room in which he lay. He found it a
stuffy hole filled with bunks in tiers three deep around the
sides. In the center of the room was a table. Above the table a
lamp hung suspended from one of the wooden beams of the
ceiling.
The lamp arrested Billy's attention. It was swinging back
and forth rather violently. This could not be a hallucination.
The room might seem to be rising and falling, but that lamp
could not seem to be swinging around in any such manner if
it were not really and truly swinging. He couldn't account for
it. Again he shut his eyes for a moment. When he opened
them to look again at the lamp he found it still swung as
before.
Cautiously he slid from his bunk to the floor. It was with
difficulty that he kept his feet. Still that might be but the
effects of the liquor. At last he reached the table to which he
clung for support while he extended one hand toward the
lamp.
There was no longer any doubt! The lamp was beating
back and forth like the clapper of a great bell. Where was he?
Billy sought a window. He found some little round, glass-covered
holes near the low ceiling at one side of the room. It
was only at the greatest risk to life and limb that he managed
to crawl on all fours to one of them.
As he straightened up and glanced through he was appalled
at the sight that met his eyes. As far as he could see there was
naught but a tumbling waste of water. And then the truth of
what had happened to him broke upon his understanding.
"An' I was goin' to roll that guy!" he muttered in helpless
bewilderment. "I was a-goin' to roll him, and now look here
wot he has done to me!"
At that moment a light appeared above as the hatch was
raised, and Billy saw the feet and legs of a large man descending
the ladder from above. When the newcomer reached the
floor and turned to look about his eyes met Billy's, and Billy
saw that it was his host of the previous evening.
"Well, my hearty, how goes it?" asked the stranger.
"You pulled it off pretty slick," said Billy.
"What do you mean?" asked the other with a frown.
"Come off," said Billy; "you know what I mean."
"Look here," replied the other coldly. "Don't you forget
that I'm mate of this ship, an' that you want to speak
respectful to me if you ain't lookin' for trouble. My name's
MR. Ward, an' when you speak to me say SIR. Understand?"
Billy scratched his head, and blinked his eyes. He never
before had been spoken to in any such fashion--at least not
since he had put on the avoirdupois of manhood. His head
ached horribly and he was sick to his stomach--frightfully
sick. His mind was more upon his physical suffering than
upon what the mate was saying, so that quite a perceptible
interval of time elapsed before the true dimensions of the
affront to his dignity commenced to percolate into the befogged
and pain-racked convolutions of his brain.
The mate thought that his bluster had bluffed the new
hand. That was what he had come below to accomplish.
Experience had taught him that an early lesson in discipline
and subordination saved unpleasant encounters in the future.
He also had learned that there is no better time to put a bluff
of this nature across than when the victim is suffering from
the after-effects of whiskey and a drug--mentality, vitality,
and courage are then at their lowest ebb. A brave man often
is reduced to the pitiful condition of a yellow dog when
nausea sits astride his stomach.
But the mate was not acquainted with Billy Byrne of Kelly's
gang. Billy's brain was befuddled, so that it took some time
for an idea to wriggle its way through, but his courage was all
there, and all to the good. Billy was a mucker, a hoodlum, a
gangster, a thug, a tough. When he fought, his methods would
have brought a flush of shame to the face of His Satanic
Majesty. He had hit oftener from behind than from before. He
had always taken every advantage of size and weight and
numbers that he could call to his assistance. He was an
insulter of girls and women. He was a bar-room brawler, and
a saloon-corner loafer. He was all that was dirty, and mean,
and contemptible, and cowardly in the eyes of a brave man,
and yet, notwithstanding all this, Billy Byrne was no coward.
He was what he was because of training and environment. He
knew no other methods; no other code. Whatever the meager
ethics of his kind he would have lived up to them to the
death. He never had squealed on a pal, and he never had left
a wounded friend to fall into the hands of the enemy--the
police.
Nor had he ever let a man speak to him, as the mate had
spoken, and get away with it, and so, while he did not act as
quickly as would have been his wont had his brain been clear,
he did act; but the interval of time had led the mate into an
erroneous conception of its cause, and into a further rash
show of authority, and had thrown him off his guard as well.
"What you need," said the mate, advancing toward Billy,
"is a bash on the beezer. It'll help you remember that you
ain't nothin' but a dirty damn landlubber, an' when your
betters come around you'll--"
But what Billy would have done in the presence of his
betters remained stillborn in the mate's imagination in the
face of what Billy really did do to his better as that worthy
swung a sudden, vicious blow at the mucker's face.
Billy Byrne had not been scrapping with third- and fourth-
rate heavies, and sparring with real, live ones for nothing.
The mate's fist whistled through empty air; the blear-eyed
hunk of clay that had seemed such easy prey to him was
metamorphosed on the instant into an alert, catlike bundle
of steel sinews, and Billy Byrne swung that awful right with
the pile-driver weight, that even The Big Smoke himself had
acknowledged respect for, straight to the short ribs of his
antagonist.
With a screech of surprise and pain the mate crumpled in
the far corner of the forecastle, rammed halfway beneath a
bunk by the force of the terrific blow. Like a tiger Billy
Byrne was after him, and dragging the man out into the
center of the floor space he beat and mauled him until his
victim's blood-curdling shrieks echoed through the ship from
stem to stern.
When the captain, followed by a half-dozen seamen rushed
down the companionway, he found Billy sitting astride the
prostrate form of the mate. His great fingers circled the man's
throat, and with mighty blows he was dashing the fellow's
head against the hard floor. Another moment and murder
would have been complete.
"Avast there!" cried the captain, and as though to punctuate
his remark he swung the heavy stick he usually carried
full upon the back of Billy's head. It was that blow that
saved the mate's life, for when Billy came to he found himself
in a dark and smelly hole, chained and padlocked to a
heavy stanchion.
They kept Billy there for a week; but every day the
captain visited him in an attempt to show him the error of
his way. The medium used by the skipper for impressing
his ideas of discipline upon Billy was a large, hard stick.
At the end of the week it was necessary to carry Billy above
to keep the rats from devouring him, for the continued beatings
and starvation had reduced him to little more than an
unconscious mass of raw and bleeding meat.
"There," remarked the skipper, as he viewed his work by
the light of day, "I guess that fellow'll know his place next
time an officer an' a gentleman speaks to him."
That Billy survived is one of the hitherto unrecorded
miracles of the power of matter over mind. A man of intellect,
of imagination, a being of nerves, would have succumbed to the
shock alone; but Billy was not as these. He
simply lay still and thoughtless, except for half-formed ideas
of revenge, until Nature, unaided, built up what the captain
had so ruthlessly torn down.
Ten days after they brought him up from the hold Billy
was limping about the deck of the Halfmoon doing light
manual labor. From the other sailors aboard he learned
that he was not the only member of the crew who had been
shanghaied. Aside from a half-dozen reckless men from the
criminal classes who had signed voluntarily, either because
they could not get a berth upon a decent ship, or desired to
flit as quietly from the law zone of the United States as
possible, not a man was there who had been signed regularly.
They were as tough and vicious a lot as Fate ever had
foregathered in one forecastle, and with them Billy Byrne
felt perfectly at home. His early threats of awful vengeance
to be wreaked upon the mate and skipper had subsided with
the rough but sensible advice of his messmates.
The mate, for his part, gave no indication of harboring
the assault that Billy had made upon him other than to
assign the most dangerous or disagreeable duties of the ship
to the mucker whenever it was possible to do so; but the
result of this was to hasten Billy's nautical education, and
keep him in excellent physical trim.
All traces of alcohol had long since vanished from the
young man's system. His face showed the effects of his
enforced abstemiousness in a marked degree. The red, puffy,
blotchy complexion had given way to a clear, tanned skin;
bright eyes supplanted the bleary, bloodshot things that had
given the bestial expression to his face in the past. His
features, always regular and strong, had taken on a peculiarly
refined dignity from the salt air, the clean life, and
the dangerous occupation of the deep-sea sailor, that would
have put Kelly's gang to a pinch to have recognized their
erstwhile crony had he suddenly appeared in their midst in
the alley back of the feed-store on Grand Avenue.
With the new life Billy found himself taking on a new
character. He surprised himself singing at his work--he
whose whole life up to now bad been devoted to dodging
honest labor--whose motto bad been: The world owes me
a living, and it's up to me to collect it. Also, he was
surprised to discover that he liked to work, that he took keen
pride in striving to outdo the men who worked with him, and
this spirit, despite the suspicion which the captain entertained
of Billy since the episode of the forecastle, went far
to making his life more endurable on board the Halfmoon,
for workers such as the mucker developed into are not to be
sneezed at, and though he had little idea of subordination
it was worth putting up with something to keep him in condition
to work. It was this line of reasoning that saved
Billy's skull on one or two occasions when his impudence had
been sufficient to have provoked the skipper to a personal
assault upon him under ordinary conditions; and Mr. Ward,
having tasted of Billy's medicine once, had no craving for
another encounter with him that would entail personal conflict.
The entire crew was made up of ruffians and unhung murderers,
but Skipper Simms had had little experience with
seamen of any other ilk, so he handled them roughshod, using
his horny fist, and the short, heavy stick that he habitually
carried, in lieu of argument; but with the exception of Billy
the men all had served before the mast in the past, so that
ship's discipline was to some extent ingrained in them all.
Enjoying his work, the life was not an unpleasant one
for the mucker. The men of the forecastle were of the kind
he had always known--there was no honor among them, no
virtue, no kindliness, no decency. With them Billy was at
home--he scarcely missed the old gang. He made his
friends among them, and his enemies. He picked quarrels,
as had been his way since childhood. His science and his
great strength, together with his endless stock of underhand
tricks brought him out of each encounter with fresh laurels.
Presently he found it difficult to pick a fight--his messmates
had had enough of him. They left him severely alone.
These ofttimes bloody battles engendered no deep-seated
hatred in the hearts of the defeated. They were part of
the day's work and play of the half-brutes that Skipper
Simms had gathered together. There was only one man
aboard whom Billy really hated. That was the passenger,
and Billy hated him, not because of anything that the man
had said or done to Billy, for he had never even so much
as spoken to the mucker, but because of the fine clothes and
superior air which marked him plainly to Billy as one of that
loathed element of society--a gentleman.
Billy hated everything that was respectable. He had hated
the smug, self-satisfied merchants of Grand Avenue. He had
writhed in torture at the sight of every shiny, purring automobile
that had ever passed him with its load of well-groomed
men and women. A clean, stiff collar was to Billy as a red
rag to a bull. Cleanliness, success, opulence, decency, spelled
but one thing to Billy--physical weakness; and he hated
physical weakness. His idea of indicating strength and manliness
lay in displaying as much of brutality and uncouthness
as possible. To assist a woman over a mud hole would have
seemed to Billy an acknowledgement of pusillanimity--to
stick out his foot and trip her so that she sprawled full
length in it, the hall mark of bluff manliness. And so he
hated, with all the strength of a strong nature, the immaculate,
courteous, well-bred man who paced the deck each day smoking
a fragrant cigar after his meals.
Inwardly he wondered what the dude was doing on board
such a vessel as the Halfmoon, and marveled that so weak
a thing dared venture among real men. Billy's contempt
caused him to notice the passenger more than he would have
been ready to admit. He saw that the man's face was handsome,
but there was an unpleasant shiftiness to his brown
eyes; and then, entirely outside of his former reasons for
hating him, Billy came to loathe him intuitively, as one who
was not to be trusted. Finally his dislike for the man became
an obsession. He haunted, when discipline permitted,
that part of the vessel where he would be most likely to
encounter the object of his wrath, hoping, always hoping, that
the "dude" would give him some slight pretext for "pushing
in his mush," as Billy would so picturesquely have worded it.
He was loitering about the deck for this purpose one
evening when he overheard part of a low-voiced conversation
between the object of his wrath and Skipper Simms--just
enough to set him to wondering what was doing, and to show
him that whatever it might be it was crooked and that the
immaculate passenger and Skipper Simms were both "in on
it."
He questioned "Bony" Sawyer and "Red" Sanders, but
neither had nearly as much information as Billy himself, and
so the Halfmoon came to Honolulu and lay at anchor some
hundred yards from a stanch, trim, white yacht, and none
knew, other than the Halfmoon's officers and her single
passenger, the real mission of the harmless-looking little brigantine.
