The Belted Seas Part 3

"Why, she must've got tanked up bad," he says. "She must have been full up and corked before she'd ever have come prancin' up here. My! my! It's turrible when a decent ship gets an appet.i.te for alcohol. Here she lies!

Shame and propriety forgotten! Immodestly exposed to grinnin' heathens!"

"You let the _Helen Mar_ alone," I says pretty mad. "She ain't so bad as drowned corpses riding mules."

Then Stevey put in cautiously, and said he'd never really made up his mind, and had doubts of it which he was ready to argue, supposing Sadler had any facts to put up as bearing on his and Irish's condition in nature.

Sadler said they had gone up the mule path expecting to climb Sarasara, but getting near the top of her, she began to act as if she disliked them, Sarasara did, and she threw rocks vicious and more than playful; so that they left her, and went on up the pa.s.s to look for the mule train. They didn't know anything had happened in Portate.

We put the mule-drivers up that night and charged them South American rates. That was the way Stevey Todd and I started keeping the _Helen Mar_ as a hotel. Sadler and Irish didn't care for the business. They went down to Portate and got jobs with the Transport Company, but Stevey Todd and I stayed by the _Helen Mar_, and ran the hotel.

All the year through or nearly, the mule trains might come jingling at any day or hour, coming from inland over the pa.s.s to the sea, with the packs and thirsty drivers, who paid their bills sometimes in gum rubber and Peruvian bark. Tobacco planters stopped there too, going down to Portate. Men from the ships in the harbour came out, and carried off advertis.e.m.e.nts of the hotel, and plastered the coast with them. I saw an advertis.e.m.e.nt of the "Hotel Helen Mar" ten years after in a shipping office in San Francisco, and it read:

"Hotel Helen Mar, Portate, Peru. Mountain and Sea Breezes. Board and Lodging Good and Reasonable. Sailor's Snug Harbour. Welcome Jolly Tar.

Thomas Buckingham and Stephen Todd."

That was for foreign patronage. The home advertis.e.m.e.nts were in Spanish and went up country with the mule trains. Up in the Andes they knew more about the Hotel Helen Mar than they did of the Peruvian Government. We ran the hotel to surprise South America.

It was nearly a year before we heard from the ship's owners, though we sent them the proper papers; and then a man came out, and looked at the _Helen Mar_, and says:

"I guess she belongs where she is. Running a hotel, are you?" and he carried off the sails and other rigging.

She was propped up at first only by the bunch of fruit trees, but by-and-by we bedded her in stones. We painted a sign across her forty feet long, but cut no doors, because a seaman won't treat a ship that way. You had to climb ladders to the deck.

Inside she was comfortable. No hotel piazza could equal the _Helen Mar_'s deck on a warm night, with the old southern stars overhead, when a bunch of mule-drivers maybe would be forward talking, and I and Stevey Todd aft with a couple of Spanish planters, or an agent, or the officers of a warship maybe from England or the States. Over on the hillside lay Captain Goodwin and most of the crew of the _Helen Mar_, wishing us well, and close to starboard you heard all night the tinkle of the Jiron River down in its channel. It was twenty feet from the deck of the _Helen Mar_ to the ground, and twenty feet from there to the river.

Portate was a pleasant little city in those days. It had pink-uniformed soldiery for the city guard, and a fat, warm-tempered Mayor, who used often to come up to the hotel and cool off when something had stuck a pin into his dignity that made him feverish. Stevey Todd was cook and I was manager. Business was good and the company good at the Hotel Helen Mar.

CHAPTER IV.

SADLER IN PORTATE. THE NARRATIVE CONTINUED.

I don't know how Sadler got to be Harbour Master for the Transport Company, but so he did, and he was a capable harbour master. The Transport Company thought much of him, only they said he was reckless, and he surely acted youthful to belie his looks. He used to go around in a grimy little tugboat called the _Harvest Moon_, with Irish running the engine below, and himself busy thrashing and blackguarding roustabouts, joyful like a dewy morn; but at night he'd be found on the deck of either the _Helen Mar_ or the _Harvest Moon_, playing a banjo very melancholy, and singing his verses to tunes that he got from secret sources of sorrow maybe, which the verses were interesting, but the tunes weren't fortunate. He was particular about his poetry being accurate to facts, but he'd no gift as to tunes.

The trouble he got into all came from throwing Pedro Hillary off the stern of the _Harvest Moon_, so that Pete went out with the tide, because no one thought him worth fishing out, till it was found that he was a member of some sort of Masonic Society among the negroes in Ferdinand Street, and a British subject too, who came from Jamaica to Portate. But before that time Pete was picked up by a rowboat, and came back to Portate and Ferdinand Street. He and Ferdinand Street were very mad. It was a street occupied by negroes, and Sadler wasn't popular there.

He came up to the _Helen Mar_ the afternoon of the day that Pete went out of the harbour, and lay in a hammock on deck, where one could look down past the fruit trees toward the town and the mouth of the Jiron. He was making a requiem for Pete Hillary, such as he thought he ought to do under those circ.u.mstances, though the requiem was no good and the tune vicious. "Pete Hillary," it began,

"Pete Hillary, I make for you This lonesome, sad complaint.

Alive you wa'nt no use, 'tis true, And dead you prob'ly ain't.

"Pete Hillary, Pete Hillary, I don't know where you are.

Here's luck to you, Pete Hillary, Beyond the harbour bar."

Just then Irish came running up the path, and climbed the ladder on deck, and he cried:

"It's a warrant for ye, Kid I Run! Oh, wirra! What did ye do it for?" He was distracted.

Sadler paid no attention. He only tw.a.n.ged his banjo, and sang casual poetry, and Little Irish ran on:

"'Tis Pete Hillary himself was pulled out forninst the sand-bar," he says, "an' he's back in Ferdinand Street, swearin' for the bucket o'

wather he swallyed. An' 'tis the English consul up to the City Hall says he come from Jamaica, an' a crowd of naygers from Ferdinand Street be the docks. Ah, coom, Kid! Coom quick, for the love of G.o.d!"

And Sadler says: "Gi'n me a kiss," he says,

"Gi'n me a kiss, sweetheart, says he; Don't shed no tears for me, says he, And if I meet a la.s.s as sweet In Paraguay, in Paraguay, I'll tell her this: 'Gi'n me a kiss; You ain't half bad for Paraguay.'"

And Irish says: "An' there's two twin sojers with their guns," he says, "an' belts full of cartridges on the _Harvest Moon_, an' the gentlemen at the Transport says, Hide, dom ye! he says, till they can ship ye wid a cargo to Californy."

Says Sadler:

"The little islands fall asleep, The little wavelets wink.

Aye, G.o.d's on high; the sea is deep; Go, Chepa, get some drink.

Ah, Magdalena----

"_Calm_, Irish! Get _calm!_" he says.

"You mean to say there's twins like that occupying the _Harvest Moon_?--

"Magdalena, First I seen her Underneath an orange-tree--

"They are," says Irish.

"Well--ain't they got nerve!"

"She was swashin'

Suds and washin'

Shirts beneath her orange-tree,"

he says. "Why, I got to go down and spank 'em!" he says, and he rolled out of the hammock and went off down the road toward Portate with Irish pattering after him.

We saw no more of them that day, and we didn't hear any news until the noon following. There was a gale from the northwest in the morning. I went down to the city in the afternoon, and found the Plaza boiling with news.

It seemed that Sadler had gone aboard the _Harvest Moon_ and surprised the two soldiers, and dipped them in the water with their artillery, and sent them uptown with the wet warrant stuck in the muzzle of a gun.

Then he paraded the _Harvest Moon_ the length of Portate's water-front, tooting his steam whistle. Then the Jefe Munic.i.p.al--that's the Mayor--fell into his warmest temper, and sent a company of pink soldiery of the City Guard in the morning, packed close in a tugboat. Then Sadler led them seaward, where the gale was blowing from the northwest and the seas piled past the harbour; so most of the pink soldiers were seasick, not being good mariners, and the gale standing the tugs on their beam-ends, which was no sort of place for a City Guard. They came back unhappy. The _Harvest Moon_ was in again, and now anch.o.r.ed in the harbour. I pa.s.sed the Jefe myself on the City Hall steps, and heard him b-r-r-ring like a dynamo. Then I went down to the harbour.

The _Harvest Moon_ lay rolling a half mile out. I took a rowboat and rowed out. When I drew near, I saw Sadler standing by the rail with the black nozzle of a hose pipe pushed forward, and shading his eyes against the glint of the water. When he saw it was me he took me aboard. But he was thoughtful and depressed. He sat himself on the rail and dangled his boots over the water and described his state of mind.

"What makes a man act so?" he says. "There's my fellow-man. Look at him!

I'm sorry for him. Most of him had hard luck to be born, and yet when he gets in my way I just walk all over him. I can't help it. He's leathery and he's pa.s.sive, my fellow-man. He goes to sleep in the middle of the road. When I ketch one of him, I kicks a hole in his trousers first, and then it occurs to me, 'My sufferin' brother! This is too bad!' Why, Pete Hillary was one of the dumbdest and leatheriest, and here's the Mayor's pink sojers been fillin' me with joy and sorrow, till I laughed from eleven till twelve, and been sheddin' tears ever since. Irish's been three times around his rosary before he got the scare kinks out of him, and between Irish bein' pathetic, and the Mayor and his sojers comin'

out pink and going back jammed to the colour of canned salmon, my feelin's is worked up to bust. What makes a man act so? It must be he has cats in him."

He pulled his moustache and looked gloomy, and I judged his remorse was sincere. I says:

"That's what I don't put together. Why, Kid, look here! If you feel as bad as that three-for-a-cent requiem to Pete Hillary sounded, it's cats all right. It's the same kind that light on back fences and feel sick, and express themselves by clawing faces," I says, "and blaspheming the moon with sounds that never ought to be. That what you mean by 'cats in him'?"