Blow The Man Down Part 53

You're a sailor, boy! You know a sailor can't do much when his hands are tied. Stay outside the penitentiary and help me fight this thing."

"I don't know what to do," mourned the young man. "I'm all in a whirl.

I'm no coward, Captain Wa.s.s. I'm willing to face the music. But I'm so helpless."

"Stay outside jail till the fog lifts a bit in this case," adjured his mentor. "Are you going to lie down and stick up your legs to have 'em tied, like a calf bound for market? Here are a few things you can do if you duck out of sight for a little while. I'll go ahead and--"

Suddenly he checked himself. He was facing the window, which commanded a considerable section of street. He wasted no further breath on good advice.

"I know those men coming down there," he cried. "They're bailiffs. I saw them around the court-house. They're after you, Mayo! You run! Get away! There must be a back door here. Scoot!" He pulled the unresisting scapegoat out of his chair and hustled him to the rear of the office.

A young man may have the best intentions. He may resolve to be a martyr, to bow to the law's majesty. But at that moment Mayo was receiving imperious command from the shipmaster whose orders he had obeyed for so long that obedience was second nature. And panic seized him! Men were at hand to arrest him. There was no time to reason the thing out. Flight is the first impulse of innocence persecuted. Manly resolve melted. He ran.

"I'll stay behind and bluff 'em off! I'll say you're just out for a minute, that I'm waiting here for you," cried Captain Wa.s.s. "That will give you a start. Try the docks. You may find one of the boys who will help."

Mayo escaped into a yard, dodged down an alley, planning his movements as he hurried, having a mariner's quickness of thought in an emergency.

He made directly for the pier where steam-vessels took water. A huge ocean-going tug was just getting ready to leave her berth under the water-hose. Her gruff whistle-call had ordered hawsers cast off. Mayo's 'longcoast acquaintance was fairly extensive. This was a coal-barge tug, and he waved quick greeting to the familiar face in her pilot-house and leaped aboard. He climbed the forward ladder nimbly.

"I reckon you'll have to make it h.e.l.lo and good-by in one breath, mate,"

advised the skipper. "I'm off to take a light tow down-coast. Norfolk next stop."

"Let her go--sooner the better," gasped the fugitive. "I'll explain why as soon as you are out of the dock."

"You don't say that you want to take the trip?"

"I've got to take it."

The skipper c.o.c.ked an eyebrow and pulled his bell. "Make yourself to home, mate," he advised. "I hope you ain't in so much of a hurry to get there as you seem to be, for I've got three barges to tow."

Mayo sat down on the rear transom and was hidden from all eyes on the pier.

There was no opportunity for an explanation until the barges had been picked up, for there was much manouver-ing and much tooting. But he found ready sympathy after he had explained.

"The law sharps are always hankering to catch a poor cuss who is trying to navigate these waters and suit the inspectors and the owners at the same time," admitted the master of the tug. "I have read everything the papers had to say about your case, and I figured they didn't give you a fair show. Newspapers and lawyers and owners don't understand what a fellow is up against. I'm glad you're aboard, mate, because I want to hear your side, with all the details."

The threshing over of the matter occupied many hours of the long wallow down the Jersey coast, and the tug captain weighed all features of the case with the care of a man who has plenty of time on his hands and with the zest a mariner displays in considering the affairs of his kind of folk.

"If I didn't know you pretty well, Mayo, and know what kind of a man you got your training with, I might think--just as those law sharps will probably say--that you were criminally careless or didn't know your business. But that dodge she made on you! Two points off her course!

You've got to put your finger right on there and hold it! Let me tell you something. It was a queer thing in my own case. That was a queer thing in your case. Stand two queer things in our business up beside each other and squint at 'em and you may learn something."

"She was on her course--I put her there with my own hands," persisted Mayo.

"Sure! You know your business. If this thing was going to be left to the bunch that know you, you'd go clear. But here's what happened in my case: I had a new man in the wheel-house, here, and he almost rammed me into Cuttyhunk, gave me a touch and go with the Pollock Rip Lightship, and had me headed toward Nauset when the fog lifted. And he was steering my courses to the thinness of a hair, at that! Say, I took a sudden tumble and frisked that chap and dragged a toad-stabber knife out of his pocket--one of those regular foot-long knives. It had been yawing off that compa.s.s all the way from a point to a point and a half. When did you shift wheel-watch?"

"Before we made Vineyard Sound."

"And no trouble coming up the sound?"

"Made n.o.bska and West Chop to the dot."

"Then perhaps your general manager, who was in that pilot-house, had an iron gizzard inside him. Most of them Wall Street fellows do have!" said the skipper, with sarcasm.

"There's something going on in the steamboat business that I can't understand," declared Mayo. "It's high up; it hasn't to do with us chaps, who have to take the kicks. Fogg brought a man aboard the old _Nequa.s.set_, and he didn't bring along a good explanation to go with that man. I have been wondering ever since how it happened that Fogg got to be general manager of the Vose line so almighty sudden."

"Them high financiers play a big game, mate. And if you happened to be a marked card in it, they'd tear you up and toss you under the table without thinking twice. If you'll take a tip from me, you lay low and do a lot of thinking while Uncle Zoradus does his scouting. What are you going to do when you get to Norfolk?"

"I haven't thought."

"Well, the both of us better think, and think hard, mate. If the United States is really after you there'll be a sharp eye at every knot-hole. I can't afford to let 'em get in a crack at me for what I've done."

"I'll jump overboard outside the capes before I'll put you in wrong,"

a.s.serted Mayo, with deep feeling.

That night the captain of the tug took a trick at the wheel in person.

His guest lay on the transom, smoking the skipper's spare pipe, and racking his mind for ways and means. After a time he was conscious that the captain was growling a bit of a song to relieve the tedium of his task. He sang the same words over and over--a tried and true Chesapeake shanty:

"Oh, I sailed aboard a lugger, and I shipped aboard a scow, And I sailed aboard a peanut-sh.e.l.l that had a razor bow.

Needle in a haystack, brick into a wall!

A n.i.g.g.e.r man in Norfolk, he ain't no 'count at all!"

Mayo rolled off the transom and went to the captain's side. "There's more truth than poetry in that song of yours, sir," he said. "You have given me an idea. A n.i.g.g.e.r in Norfolk doesn't attract much attention.

And I haven't got to be one of the black ones, either. Don't you suppose there's something aboard here I can use to stain my face with?"

"My cook is a great operator as a tattoo artist."

"I don't think I want to make the disguise permanent, sir," stated the young man, with a smile.

"What I mean is, he may have something in his kit that he can use to paint you with. What's your idea--stay there? I'm afraid they'll nail you." >

"I'll stay there just long enough to ship before the mast on a schooner.

There isn't time to think up any better plan just now. Anything to keep out of sight until I can make up my mind about what's really best to be done."

"We'll have that cook up here," offered the captain. "He's safe."

The cook took prompt and professional interest in the matter. "Sure!" he said. "I've got a stain that will sink in and stay put for a long time, if no grease paint is used. Only you mustn't wash your face."

"There's no danger of a fellow having any inducement to do that when he's before the mast on a schooner in these days," declared the tug captain, dryly.

An hour later, Captain Boyd Mayo, late of the crack liner _Montana_, was a very pa.s.sable mulatto, his crisply curling hair adding to the disguise. He swapped his neat suit of brown with a deck-hand, and received some particularly unkempt garments.

The next night, when the tug was berthed at the water station, he slipped off into the darkness, as homeless and as disconsolate as an abandoned dog.

XXII - SPECIAL BUSINESS OF A Pa.s.sENGER

O Ranzo was no sailor, He shipped on board a whaler.