Late that night he returned to the pierhouse of the _Hudson_ limping,
with his arm in a sling, his face bruised and an eye blackened. “Turk”
Sturton, whose watch it was, received him without sympathy. “Cap’n
wants to see yuh,” he said sternly. “Where’ve yuh been?”
“Shine’s” face expressed all the bitterness of a soul that had found no
relief in its curses. “Wait!” he said. “Jus’ _you_ wait!”
He went into Keighley’s office. The captain put aside a newspaper that
he had been reading, and looked him over. “Well?”
“Shine” moistened his lips and began his explanations. They were
guiltily ingenious. He had fallen down a hatch in the _Leo_ and had
lain unconscious until the steamer was half way to Coney. Then some
deckmen in the forecastle had heard him groaning and had come to his
rescue. He had been badly shaken up but not seriously hurt, and he had
decided to hurry back to the _Hudson_ by trolley instead of waiting for
the _Leo_ to make her return trip. He borrowed some clothes and went
ashore, but as he was hastening up one of the board walks towards the
street-car line, he was stopped by a number of men who were disputing
about a cane which one of them had “ringed with one o’ them rings that
yuh toss at canes in a ‘Cane-yuh-ring-is-the-cane-yuh-get’ graft.” And
they had demanded that he decide whether the cane had been “ringed” or
not. The ring was resting on the knob of the cane, being too small to
fall down over it. It was a “faked-up” dispute. They were a “gang o’
strong arms,” and when they got him in among them, they started to “go
through” him. He put up a fight. They “got all over” him, knocked him
down, gave him a black eye, and took his money. He had had to walk back
from Coney. He--
“That’ll do,” Keighley cut in. “Take that sling off yer arm. Yuh can’t
come any spiels like that on me.”
“S’welp me, cap, I--”
“Cut it out, now, I tell yuh. Yuh’ve been drunk. Yuh’ve been off duty
ten hours without leave. Yuh’ve either got to gi’ me a straight story
er walk the carpet at Headquarters.”
“Shine” swallowed and looked down at his feet. He was calculating that
Acting-Chief Moran would be lenient with a “Jigger.”
“Yuh’ve been havin’ things pretty much yer own way around here,”
Keighley said. “This’s where yuh take a drop. The Commissioner’s out,
see? He quit this afternoon. Youse fullahs ’er goin’ to do what _I_ say
after this. If yuh go up to Headquarters, yuh don’t come back. Moran
won’t save yuh. He’s got all he can do to save his own neck, now.”
“Shine” looked at the captain, and recognized that his game was up.
“’Twasn’t my fault,” he said. “It was Doherty’s.”
“Doherty! What’d Doherty have to do with it?”
“The damn dip! He done me up,” he said--and plunged into an incoherent
and many-cursed account of what had happened.
Keighley heard him in silence. When Doherty’s part in the affair was
made plain, the captain “sized up” the situation with the frown of a
chess-player studying the board, and said “Ummm” as he saw his play.
“Shine” finished, humble and submissive. Keighley said, “Go to yer
bunk.”
It is the tradition of the department that a captain shall enforce
discipline in his company without sending his men to Headquarters
on every trifling charge that he has against them. Keighley watched
“Shine” out, snorted contemptously through his nose, reached for the
newspaper again, and returned to the column that reported the Fire
Commissioner’s resignation. He had “Shine” where he “wanted” him, as
he would have said. And he had his whole company in the hollow of his
hand.
“Shine” knew it. The “Jiggers” knew it. “It’ll be off to the
goose-pastures fer ours all right,” Cripps said, discussing the
situation with “Shine.” “The chief’ll get back, now, an’ if he don’t
find a way to break us, he’ll ship us off to the Bronx. I don’t care a
damn anyway,” he added in feeble defiance.
“Ner me!” “Shine” clenched his hand. “I’m lookin’ fer Doherty. If they
kick me out o’ the department, I’ll find him all the quicker. An’ I
want youse fullahs to keep yer eyes skinned fer him. Jus’ tell me where
he’s workin’. That’s all! I’ll do the rest.”
Cripps swore plaintively. “After us fightin’ ol’ Clinkers fer him,
too.”
“An’ fer the rest o’ them,” “Shine” cried. “They’ve played us fer
suckers--Moran an’ the whole dirty gang. They’ve used us. An now when
they’re afraid o’ fallin’ down, they’ll chuck us. That’s all we’ll get
out o’ the ‘Jigger’ bus’ness. Yuh’ll see.” He wiped his mouth with the
back of his hand; he was almost “drooling” with disgust and bitterness.
“Never mind. If I ever get ahold o’ Doherty!” he promised himself.
There is nothing persists among these men as an enmity does. A man who
has been wronged sees the scar of the injury as a mark of inferiority
on him, and his pride in himself is never satisfied until he has been
able to “get even,” until he has proved himself the equal of his enemy
by returning the hurt in kind. “Shine” could not even consider his
case in solitude without suffering. When he was among companions, he
could not think of Doherty without breaking out in new threats of
vengeance, as if he would give a sort of promissory note against his
debt of hatred. He asked everywhere for news of Doherty. His first day
off he spent in searching Coney, with his hands clenched ready in his
pockets. When he heard that Doherty had been seen about the docks,
he spent hours at the pierhouse windows watching the river traffic,
and took his weekly holiday lounging about the water-front with the
instinctive patience of a beast of prey. By the time a month had
passed, the desire of revenge had become a sort of subconscious habit
that affected his actions without disturbing his thought. He went about
his work as of old, but silently, as self-contained as a man with a
great ambition. He knew that if he could wait long enough he could get
his man. He was prepared to wait a lifetime.
Then, one day, two things happened: Chief Borden came back to his place
in the department and “Shine” heard that Doherty had been seen working
as a freight-handler again on the Baltic-American wharves. At meal
hour “Shine” did not go to his dinner; he hurried home to change his
uniform, and posted off to the Baltic-American sheds--and he was denied
an entrance by the wharf watchman. Since the fire on the _Sachsen_ the
rule had been strictly enforced that no stranger should be admitted
to the company’s piers without a card from the office. “Shine” did
not care to show the metal fire-badge on his suspender; it was not a
case for an official appearance. He returned to the _Hudson_ hungry
but full of hope. He could wait for his day off, waylay Doherty as the
longshoremen left their work in the evening, and mark him for all time.
As it turned out, he did not have to wait for his day off. He waited
only two days. On the third day the impossible happened.
An alarm of fire was rung in from the Baltic-American piers.
It found Chief Borden closeted with Captain Keighley when the call
came. Under the eye of the head of the department, the crew took their
places with an easy alertness and no confusion. The chief followed them
aboard; the lines were cast off; Keighley nodded an order to the pilot;
and the boat drew out into the stream with as little show of haste as
a fast express pulling out from a railway platform on the tick of the
appointed second.
The sullen glow of a sunset was smoldering dully over the Jersey
shore; and New York was piled up to face it, a Gibraltar of brick
and stone, twinkling with its lighted windows and gay with the blown
plumes of steam from its roofs. A stiff breeze from the north drove the
waves against the bow of the _Hudson_ and hummed in the guys of her
funnel. Keighley and the Chief, facing the bow with their backs to the
wheelhouse, their chins sunken in their collars, were bent against the
rush of air like a pair of old and deaf cronies, their hands behind
them, their heads together as they talked.
“It was about a man named Doherty,” Keighley was explaining
reluctantly. “_You_ remember him, I guess. Some o’ the men didn’t like
it when I got him broke. An’ they made a little trouble fer me--off an’
on.”
“He was a ‘Jigger,’ wasn’t he?”
“Yes.”
“How about that fire on the _Sachsen_? Didn’t Doherty figure in that?”
“Well, I saw him there. He was doin’ ’longshore-work on her. He
might’ve been in it. I don’t know.”
“Didn’t they stack the deal on you there?”
“I think they did. I don’t know. They got foolin’ with a pierhouse
blaze while I was down in her hold.... I tell yuh how it is, chief:
it’s all over. They’re attendin’ to bus’ness. Yuh needn’t be a-scared
of any of ’em in this comp’ny.”
Keighley’s tone was apologetic and conciliatory. It seemed traitorously
so to the chief. “A-scared be damned!” he said. “I got to make _them_
a-scared of _me._ Who was at the head of the game here? Moore?”
Keighley answered, “The man that was at the head of it--he’s lef’ the
comp’ny.”
The chief darted a black look at Keighley under the peak of his cap.
“No one’s left this boat since that fire. I looked her up.”
“No,” Keighley admitted, unabashed. “But he’s left off makin trouble.”
“Now listen to me, Dan,” Borden broke out. “I’ve come back to the
department and I’m counting up my friends. Those that ain’t with me are
against me. That’s the way I look at it.... You know as well as I do
that if I don’t pound these men, they’ll think I’m afraid of them--and
they’ll get to work and knife me.”
“Well--that’s true, too,” Keighley reflected. He glanced up at the
Jersey shore and down at the deck again. “I wish yuh’d leave them be,
though, chief. I got the best crew in the department, now.”
The chief shook his head. “They didn’t leave _me_ be. I can’t let up on
_them._ You know what they’d think.”
“Well,” Keighley said, looking out over the river, “I’ll tell yuh. The
man that was at the head of it--” He blinked the water from his eyes
and peered into the wind--“in this crew--” He raised his arm slowly and
pointed. “What’s that?”
Through the traffic of ferries, car-floats and lighters that crowded
the shore, he could see a big freighter drifting down the piers with a
flotilla of tugs about her. “What’s the matter? Is she afire?”
The chief watched her. “Looks like it, don’t she?”
There was no answer. He turned to see that Keighley had left him; and
he followed back to the wheelhouse, where he found the captain standing
at the pilot’s elbow with the glasses at his eyes.
“It’s a Baltic-American boat, all right--the _Hessen_,” Keighley said.
“No fire ashore. They pulled her out of her dock, I guess. I don’t see
much smoke on her. Lay us alongside, Tom.”
And the chief, mentally putting aside his feud with the “Jiggers”
for the time, said: “They’re keeping it under hatches. Gi’ me the
glasses.... It’s in one of her after holds.”