Wide Courses Part 29

"Dollar an' a half! It's too much for the father of eight children for one day! But this--see. For baby. And the Lord knows a baby who came through last night and never a yip out of him, he oughter get a million.

Here--put in bank--for baby."

"Ah-h! For baby. Tenk you." She beamed and took the money. "You brave man! Him"--pointing to Jan's back--"brave man too."

"Him, brave--yes. But me? No, no. Me scared blue. He'd 'a' shot me next only I beat him to it."

"Kill baby too." She kissed the baby.

The sun was well up when they reached the top of the hill--a pale, frightened-looking sun, but nevertheless a sun. The bartender took off his cap and saluted it gravely. Below them lay the town.

"We'll go down there," said Jan to Mrs. Goles, "and from there, when you're well, we'll go home--to my mother. But," he added gravely, "we will go by train."

She smiled weakly at him. "I could go without a train--on my hands and knees I could crawl to the mother of you! You don't know it, but when I was growing up it was a man like you I always used to dream about. And I'm not sure I'm not dreaming now!"

"Don't worry," said the bartender. "We're all awake--and alive. And you bet it's great to be alive again! Ain't it,"--he turned to the Finn woman,--"you mother of eight?"

The Finn woman made no answer. She was nursing her baby.

Cogan Capeador

Eight bells had gone, the morning watch was done, it was almost time to eat, and so Kieran, the pump-man, laid aside the tools of his berth and came strolling aft; and swinging down the long gangway he sang:

"There was a girl,--I knew her well,--a girl in Zanzibar-- A bulgeous man of science said you bet her avatar Was Egypt's Cleopatra--and from off a man-o'-war I met her first--and O, her eyes! A blazing polar star!

From which you couldn't head away no more than you could fly-- Gypsy one of Zanzy! For you who wouldn't die!"

It was one of those fine days in the Gulf of Mexico. Abreast of the ship the Florida reefs, low-crested, ragged, and white, loomed above the smooth sea.

Kieran contemplated the line of reefs; presently he leaned over the taffrail and stared down at the whirling propeller; from the screws his gaze shifted to the whirling water above and about them, and thence to the tow in their wake. He put his head to one side, studied the spectacle of the straining hawser and the wallowing barge on the end of it, as if it were a mysterious problem.

"Oh-h, shucks!" He sighed and came suddenly out of his reverie, looked up at the sky, turned wearily inboard, and sat himself on one of the towing bitts.

The pa.s.senger, from the other towing bitt, asked what it was.

"I was just thinking that some of us are tied to the end of a string, just like that barge, and we don't know it any more than she does, and no more able to help ourselves than she can--sometimes."

"I never looked at a towing barge in that light before," said the pa.s.senger, and lit a cigar. He made no offer of one to Kieran, because he had before this learned that Kieran never smoked.

The ship rolled, the barge yawed, the reefs kept sliding by. The pa.s.senger stole a look at the pump-man, and ventured: "Kieran, there used to be, a few years ago, a sprinter, pole-vaulter, and jumper, competing under the name of Campbell in the Hibernian and Caledonian games up north, and you're a ringer for him."

Kieran glanced sidewise at the pa.s.senger. "You must have been in athletics yourself--seems to me I've seen you somewhere too."

"Maybe. My name's Benson."

"I remember--a sprinter. And a good one, too."

"Good enough--with no Wefers or Duffey, or somebody like yourself around," protested the pa.s.senger, but immensely pleased nevertheless to be identified after so many years. And they were both pleased and exchanged rapid comment on a dozen incidents of athletic days; and when two ex-athletes get together they run on interminably.

By and by, but not prematurely, the pa.s.senger asked, "But _was_ there a girl at Zanzibar?"

Kieran made no reply. He seemed to be considering the matter of the barge. After a time he went to the quarter-rail and gazed forward. He came back to his bitt. "I thought so. There's one of those wreckers up ahead. They're always along here--standing by or cruising for any loose wreckage." He waved his hand toward the reefs. "Look. Where their crests don't pierce the surface you know they're there by the surf playing over 'em. Where they lie a little deeper the paler green of the sea shows 'em up. In the deep pockets in between--see?--the sea's of a beautiful deep blue. That's all easy enough, isn't it, but where the drifting clouds shut out the sunlight, where the shadows fall it's all of a color, isn't it? No saying then where it's deep water and where it is shoal. It's the clouds. If the light was always good, there'd be few wrecks along here.

And"--he waved toward the barge astern--"there she is tied to us. If this ship piles up on the reefs, she piles up behind us."

"Couldn't they cut her adrift?"

"H-m-m--a drifting barge and the Florida Keys tide-water, where would she fetch up?" And, after a pause, "no fault of hers either, and that seems hard, too. But there's that wrecker--listen."

A hailing voice came floating aft to them. "Ain't seen nothing 'long de way--nothin' to th' east'ard, has you, capt'n?"

"No, I didn't see nothin'. And if I did, d'y' s'pose I'd tell you, you green-sided, patch-sailed whelp's loafer of a black pirate, do you?"

Without turning their heads Kieran and the pa.s.senger could hear their captain's voice from the bridge, and also without turning their heads they shortly saw the wrecking schooner slide past their quarter. She _was_ green-painted and her sails _were_ a scandal, and it _was_ a very black and big negro who was standing in her waist to catch the reply, and it was very like their captain to answer as he did.

The big negro only flashed his teeth and waved his arm. His little vessel went drifting astern.

"Pirates and wreckers--look pretty much like honest people, don't they?"

commented Kieran. "And they are mostly. At least I've bunked with 'em--white ones, though--and I found 'em pretty much like you and me--except for their ideas in that and maybe one or two other lines. And most people, when you come to know them, aren't so different, except in one way--or maybe two or three ways in some cases. Don't you think so?"

The pa.s.senger countered with another question. "You've met a good many different kinds of people in your time, haven't you?"

The pump-man nodded. After a pause he added, "A few," in an absent manner.

The low-lying reefs sank out of sight, and far astern the green-painted schooner merged into the mists. It was a warm, pleasant day.

Kieran roused himself. "No, there wasn't any girl in Zanzibar. If there had been, a fellow couldn't be advertising her to the crew of an oil-tanker at high-noon, could he? No! But there _was_ a girl, and there was a friend of mine--call him Cogan. Oh, not a bad fellow--no worse, maybe no better, than you or I, or most any of the old crowd we used to know, and he happened to drift down the Isthmus way--into Colon--during the Revolution. Ever there?"

"Once, just after the Revolution."

"And what did you think of it--the Revolution?"

"M-m--it surely did happen most opportunely for our interests."

"Didn't it, though? And did you ever notice that quite a few of the revolutions in those Central American lat.i.tudes happen most opportunely for some northern interest or other? Well, Cogan was there during the Revolution. He told me of a saloon there, about a minute's walk up from the big steamship dock on the street next the water-side--remember that street?"

"Where the railroad starts to cross the Isthmus to Panama?"

"That's it. And this saloon was on that street--it may be there yet--the Fourth of July saloon with its big American ensign painted on the wall opposite the bar. Remember it?"

"M-m-h-h."

"Well, it was run by a Brooklyn Irishman named Martin Jackson, and Cogan said he remembered the shock he got when he first heard him talk. His Irish brogue had a Spanish accent--do you get that? Well, he has nothing to do with the story, only this--Cogan used to have great ideas about revolutions, and Martin, he knocked most of them out of him. He'd seen twenty of them in his time, Martin had, and when he saw one of them coming now, he just ran up his iron shutters and let it roll by.

Business was generally pretty good after a revolution. An easy-going sort of a man, Martin. He didn't even get mad with Cogan when he'd used up hours of his time and then only order ginger ale.