The Boy Scouts Book of Stories Part 39

[Ill.u.s.tration]

XIV--The Dollar[M]

_By Morgan Robertson_

HIS name was Angus Macpherson--p.r.o.nounced MacPh_ai_rson--but he was so intensely Scotch that in every ship he had sailed in men called him Scotty. He had a face like a harvest-moon, with a sorrowful expression of the eyes, a frame like a gladiator's, a brogue modified from its original consistency to an understandable dialect, and the soul of a Scotchman--which means that he was possessed by two dominant and conflicting pa.s.sions, love of G.o.d and love of Mammon. Add to these attributes a masterful knowledge of seamanship and an acquaintance with navigation, and you have a rough sketch of him as he stood at the wheel of a tow-barge just out of New York.

Her name was the _Anita_, and she was the second barge in a tow of two.

Ahead of her, at the end of a ninety-fathom steel tow-line, was the sister barge _Champion_, and at an equal distance farther ahead was the steamer _Proserpine_. Each barge carried stump spars and mutton-leg canvas--which was why Scotty, weary of the endless work in the deep-water windjammers, had gone "tow-barging"--and the three craft belonged to one owner.

The skipper, a young man with a humorous face and democratic manner, as became a lowly barge skipper, appeared before the Scotsman, jingling in his hand a number of bright silver dollars. Scotty eyed them hungrily.

"Fine, aren't they, Scotty?" he said. "How many of these plunkers does the devil need to buy your soul?"

"More than you can count, Cappen Bolt," answered Scotty, gravely. "My soul no belongs to me, but to my Maker."

"Nonsense," laughed the captain. "A Scot loves the siller first, his Maker next. Why, a Jew can't make a living in your country, Scotty."

"Possibly not, cappen; but it's no because Scotchmen are dishonest. The Lord has given us wits--that's all."

"Dead broke, Scotty?" asked Captain Bolt, idly.

"I banked the most o' my pay, sir. Ay, I'm what you might call broke."

"Too bad! Ought to have held some out. There'll be no money at Philadelphia. Owner's kickin'. Wants to save the interest, and he won't pay off till we get back."

Scotty's face a.s.sumed a rueful expression, and Captain Bolt watched it from the tail of his eye; then, before Scotty could speak, the prolonged clatter of the steward's dinner-bell began, and the captain moved towards the companion, pocketing the coins as he went. One fell on the deck, the noise of the bell preventing its fall being heard, and the captain did not see it. But Scotty did, and he watched it roll back towards the taffrail, a.s.sume a spiral motion, and lie down just aft of the quarter-bitt. The captain was now down in the cabin, but Scotty picked up the coin to hold for him until he came up. He should have let it lie.

For it was bright and beautiful to look at, hard and slippery to the touch as he held it in his trousers pocket, a pleasing contrast to the coming emptiness of that pocket in Philadelphia. Scotty's soul went through the usual conflict in such cases, and when Captain Bolt came up, rubbing his mouth, love of Mammon had won over love of G.o.d, and he said nothing about it. Shortly after, he was relieved, and he went forward.

On the way a revulsion set in, and he turned back, resolved to hand it over, as though he had forgotten; but the captain had stepped below again, and with the memory of his boasted honesty and the certainty of the captain's skepticism and ridicule in his mind, he turned again and went to the forecastle. When he had eaten his dinner, and slept four hours, he found on waking that his inclination to return it was stronger than at noon; but the certainty of being disbelieved had gained equally in strength, and the dollar remained in his pocket--a source of guilty joy and expectant misgiving. He longed for the day when it would be spent and off his mind, and calculated the days and hours before the tow would reach Philadelphia.

But Scotty did not reach Philadelphia; he fell overboard just within the Delaware capes and though he bawled l.u.s.tily as the black side of the barge slipped by him in the darkness, and was answered in kind by his watchmates above, the noise did not reach the relentless power eleven hundred feet away, and he was left behind. But one had thrown him a life-buoy, and on this he floated until daylight, when an outbound tug picked him up. The tug was bound to Boston.

"I'll e'en make the best o' it," said Scotty, as he wrung out his wet clothing in the tug's small forecastle. "And I'll regard the dollar as a special deespensation of an all-wise Providence; for what would I do in Boston wi'oot a bit o' money in my clothes?"

But he did not reach Boston. The tug had a full crew, scant accommodations, and a hard-hearted captain, who decreed that Scotty should be put aboard the first craft that would take him. This happened to be a three-skysail-yard American ship--the _Baltimore_--two days out from New York for Shanghai, whose skipper backed his yard in answer to the tug-captain's offer to give him a sailor, and whose third-mate received Scotty--not with open arms, but clinched fists, as he dropped, swearing, to the deck in a bosun's chair.

"You ought to be glad you're alive," said her skipper, harshly, when Scotty had, later, come aft to protest against his abduction. "He pulled you out of a life-buoy, where you'd ha' drowned 'fore the next craft came along, and puts you aboard a big, safe ship where you couldn't fall overboard if you tried. Get forward, now, and stop this talk."

"And am I to be put on the articles?" demanded Scotty. "I expect to wark where'er I be; but do I get pay, I'm askin'?"

"No. My articles are full. You'll _wark_ your pa.s.sage."

"Four months' sleevery in a h.e.l.l-ship," growled Scotty, as he went forward. "This comes o' back-sleedin'. Lord forgi' me for it, but the punishment is hard. Howe'er, I'll just hang on to the dollar. I'll ha'

earned it long this side o' the cape."

He did, and continued to earn it until the ship had neared the Yangtse-Kiang. Marked for the officers' attentions by his initial profane and irreverent comment on his transferral by the tug-captain, he was a.s.saulted on the slightest provocation by the mates--no bigger than he or more skillful of fist, but justified by the law--and, though easily the best sailorman of the mixed crew, was put at distasteful tasks while inferior men worked at sailorly work on ropes and rigging.

There was nothing of this in the watch below, for Scotty could thrash the best two men forward, and led them all in forecastle discourse; but as it was a mixed crew, none too honest, in his opinion, he made a monk-bag--a leather pocket--for his dollar, and hung it around his neck; and, to further protect the precious coin, forswore his religion, called himself a Catholic and the monk-bag a phylactery, with a saint's relic within. This brought him to the notice of a gentle-souled Portuguese of the crew, a true believer, who made friends with the Scot and earned his confidence before he learned of the shamness of the phylactery. Scotty, on lookout one night, told him this in a burst of confidence that also included a confession of his peculation. His friend, horrified, not at the theft, but at the sacrilegious fraud, informed him that the coin was accursed, that his soul was accursed, and that the only salvation for him in this life and the next was, first, that he return the stolen dollar by hand to its rightful owner, next that he become a real believer in the only true church instead of an impostor.

"If you do not," he said, "you have alla time badda luck till you die, then purgatory and the flame."

Perhaps the flames of Sheol could not have turned Scotty from his faith; but he was certainly impressed with the first clause of the obligation.

"Ye maun be right, Manuel," he said; "for, though I thought it a deespensation, I find that all my hard luck came after it. I'll gie it back when I may."

"Who's on lookout here?" demanded the burly third mate as he climbed the forecastle steps. "Hey, who's on lookout?"

"I am, sir," answered Scotty, as Manuel drew out of the way.

"Get down on the main-deck, you dago son of a thief," bellowed the officer, aiming a kick at the retreating Portuguese. "D' ye see that light?" he said to Scotty. "With a man to help you keep lookout, d' ye see it?"

Scotty, derelict in his duty, did not see it for some moments--in fact, not until the third mate was through with him. Then he looked through closing eyes to where the third mate pointed--dead ahead, where a white light shone faintly in the darkness.

"Ay, ay, sir," he said, thickly. "I see it; and I'll e'en remember this night when I meet ye on sh.o.r.e, Mr. Smart. I'm no shipped in the craft, and it's a matter for the underwriters to know--puttin' me on lookout.

As it is, I doot I'd meet trouble should I pull yer head off the noo.

I'm no a shipped man, d' ye hear?"

The last was like the roar of an angry bull, and the officer backed away from the enraged Scotchman. Then he descended the steps, and in a minute a man came up and relieved him.

The light did not move, and, the wind being gentle, the day broke before the ship had come up to it. Then they saw a black tramp steamer, rolling easily in the trough, with a string of small flags flying from aloft and the English ensign from the flag-staff at the taffrail. There was an exchange of signals between the two crafts until eight bells struck, and then Scotty, just about to sit down to his breakfast, was called aft and told to get his belongings ready for another trans-shipment. Scotty's belongings, the few rags he had collected by various methods from his shipmates, were hardly worth taking; but he regretted his breakfast, though glad to quit the ship. As he slid down the davit-tackle he surmised the meaning of the change by the expression on the third mate's face as he peered over the rail, and some words uttered by the captain, among which he only made out one--"underwriters."

"I'm told," said the semi-uniformed captain of the tramp, "that you are a castaway, picked up on the American coast, and are discontented with the ship."

"I dinna ken what the sleeve-drivers telt ye, cappen," answered Scotty, his brogue a little thicker from his emotions, "but I agree that I'm discontented."

"What's wrong with your face?"

"Ran foul o' the third mate's fist for no seem' your light. I were no one o' the crew, yet they put me on lookout. And I strongly suspect, cappen, that I'm bundled off mair on account o' that than because of my discontent."

"Possibly; but I'm a man short, and will sign you at Shanghai wages--three pounds a month. You will not be struck here, and will be well treated while you do your work. We're bound for Boston, and will go on when the engine is mended."

"I'm obleeged to ye, sir," said Scotty, radiantly. "And Boston's the port for me, sir. I've strong reasons for strikin' that coast."

He still had his dollar secure in its leather casing, hung to his neck, but in this ship he said nothing about it.

Nothing unpleasant happened to him on this pa.s.sage homeward; and he fondly believed that his sincere intent to return the dollar to Captain Bolt had changed his luck--that his painful friction with Mr. Smart's fist was a providential happening; but Providence had ordered otherwise, and in this manner: The steamer captain, ahead of his reckoning while approaching the coast in thick fog, ran his ship at full speed onto the sands of Cape Cod. He was unable to back off; a rising wind and sea threw the steamer broadside to the beach, and here she churned a hole for herself from which a wrecking tug could hardly pull her.

But a wrecking tug was sent for, by signals to the sh.o.r.e when the fog lifted, and in time one arrived, with a lifeboat in tow--which was a lucky forethought of some one, for the rising wind and sea had developed into a storm that was breaking the ship in pieces. Anch.o.r.ed well out, and steaming with full power into the teeth of the gale, the tug slacked down the lifeboat, and one by one the crew sprang into the sea and was pulled in. Six trips in and out completed the rescue, and Scotty came out on the last, with the frantic captain, who never ceased his bitter self-reproach.

But Scotty, irresponsible, had troubles of his own; he was wet and cold--for it was midwinter--and once aboard the wrecking tug, he fled the captain's inward objurgations, and sought the warmth of the firehold. Here he burrowed far along beside the boilers, and being utterly exhausted as well as chilled and drenched, and far from the captain's voice, fell into a sleep which lasted until the tug had tied up at Boston; then he came out, to find his shipmates gone ash.o.r.e.

"Are you the missing man o' that crew?" asked the mate of the tug. "Your skipper says to stay here, and he'll bring you your pay."