Michael left the _Makambo_ as he had come on board, through a port-hole.
Likewise, the affair occurred at night, and it was Kwaque's hands that
received him. It had been quick work, and daring, in the dark of early
evening. From the boat-deck, with a bowline under Kwaque's arms and a
turn of the rope around a pin, Dag Daughtry had lowered his leprous
servitor into the waiting launch.
On his way below, he encountered Captain Duncan, who saw fit to warn him:
"No shannigan with Killeny Boy, Steward. He must go back to Tulagi with
us."
"Yes, sir," the steward agreed. "An' I'm keepin' him tight in my room to
make safe. Want to see him, sir?"
The very frankness of the invitation made the captain suspicious, and the
thought flashed through his mind that perhaps Killeny Boy was already
hidden ashore somewhere by the dog-stealing steward.
"Yes, indeed I'd like to say how-do-you-do to him," Captain Duncan
answered.
And his was genuine surprise, on entering the steward's room, to behold
Michael just rousing from his curled-up sleep on the floor. But when he
left, his surprise would have been shocking could he have seen through
the closed door what immediately began to take place. Out through the
open port-hole, in a steady stream, Daughtry was passing the contents of
the room. Everything went that belonged to him, including the turtle-
shell and the photographs and calendars on the wall. Michael, with the
command of silence laid upon him, went last. Remained only a sea-chest
and two suit-cases, themselves too large for the port-hole but bare of
contents.
When Daughtry sauntered along the main deck a few minutes later and
paused for a gossip with the customs officer and a quartermaster at the
head of the gang-plank, Captain Duncan little dreamed that his casual
glance was resting on his steward for the last time. He watched him go
down the gang-plank empty-handed, with no dog at his heels, and stroll
off along the wharf under the electric lights.
Ten minutes after Captain Duncan saw the last of his broad back,
Daughtry, in the launch with his belongings and heading for Jackson Bay,
was hunched over Michael and caressing him, while Kwaque, crooning with
joy under his breath that he was with all that was precious to him in the
world, felt once again in the side-pocket of his flimsy coat to make sure
that his beloved jews' harp had not been left behind.
Dag Daughtry was paying for Michael, and paying well. Among other
things, he had not cared to arouse suspicion by drawing his wages from
Burns Philp. The twenty pounds due him he had abandoned, and this was
the very sum, that night on the beach at Tulagi, he had decided he could
realize from the sale of Michael. He had stolen him to sell. He was
paying for him the sales price that had tempted him.
For, as one has well said: the horse abases the base, ennobles the noble.
Likewise the dog. The theft of a dog to sell for a price had been the
abasement worked by Michael on Dag Daughtry. To pay the price out of
sheer heart-love that could recognize no price too great to pay, had been
the ennoblement of Dag Daughtry which Michael had worked. And as the
launch chug-chugged across the quiet harbour under the southern stars,
Dag Daughtry would have risked and tossed his life into the bargain in a
battle to continue to have and to hold the dog he had originally
conceived of as being interchangeable for so many dozens of beer.
* * * * *
The _Mary Turner_, towed out by a tug, sailed shortly after daybreak, and
Daughtry, Kwaque, and Michael looked their last for ever on Sydney
Harbour.
"Once again these old eyes have seen this fair haven," the Ancient
Mariner, beside them gazing, babbled; and Daughtry could not help but
notice the way the wheat-farmer and the pawnbroker pricked their ears to
listen and glanced each to the other with scant eyes. "It was in '52, in
1852, on such a day as this, all drinking and singing along the decks, we
cleared from Sydney in the _Wide Awake_. A pretty craft, oh sirs, a most
clever and pretty craft. A crew, a brave crew, all youngsters, all of
us, fore and aft, no man was forty, a mad, gay crew. The captain was an
elderly gentleman of twenty-eight, the third officer another of eighteen,
the down, untouched of steel, like so much young velvet on his cheek. He,
too, died in the longboat. And the captain gasped out his last under the
palm trees of the isle unnamable while the brown maidens wept about him
and fanned the air to his parching lungs."
Dag Daughtry heard no more, for he turned below to take up his new
routine of duty. But while he made up bunks with fresh linen and
directed Kwaque's efforts to cleaning long-neglected floors, he shook his
head to himself and muttered, "He's a keen 'un. He's a keen 'un. All
ain't fools that look it."
The fine lines of the _Mary Turner_ were explained by the fact that she
had been built for seal-hunting; and for the same reason on board of her
was room and to spare. The forecastle with bunk-space for twelve, bedded
but eight Scandinavian seamen. The five staterooms of the cabin
accommodated the three treasure-hunters, the Ancient Mariner, and the
mate--the latter a large-bodied, gentle-souled Russian-Finn, known as Mr.
Jackson through inability of his shipmates to pronounce the name he had
signed on the ship's articles.
Remained the steerage, just for'ard of the cabin, separated from it by a
stout bulkhead and entered by a companionway on the main deck. On this
deck, between the break of the poop and the steerage companion, stood the
galley. In the steerage itself, which possessed a far larger
living-space than the cabin, were six capacious bunks, each double the
width of the forecastle bunks, and each curtained and with no bunk above
it.
"Some fella glory-hole, eh, Kwaque?" Daughtry told his seventeen-years-
old brown-skinned Papuan with the withered ancient face of a centenarian,
the legs of a living skeleton, and the huge-stomached torso of an elderly
Japanese wrestler. "Eh, Kwaque! What you fella think?"
And Kwaque, too awed by the spaciousness to speak, eloquently rolled his
eyes in agreement.
"You likee this piecee bunk?" the cook, a little old Chinaman, asked the
steward with eager humility, inviting the white man's acceptance of his
own bunk with a wave of arm.
Daughtry shook his head. He had early learned that it was wise to get
along well with sea-cooks, since sea-cocks were notoriously given to
going suddenly lunatic and slicing and hacking up their shipmates with
butcher knives and meat cleavers on the slightest remembered provocation.
Besides, there was an equally good bunk all the way across the width of
the steerage from the Chinaman's. The bunk next on the port side to the
cook's and abaft of it Daughtry allotted to Kwaque. Thus he retained for
himself and Michael the entire starboard side with its three bunks. The
next one abaft of his own he named "Killeny Boy's," and called on Kwaque
and the cook to take notice. Daughtry had a sense that the cook, whose
name had been quickly volunteered as Ah Moy, was not entirely satisfied
with the arrangement; but it affected him no more than a momentary
curiosity about a Chinaman who drew the line at a dog taking a bunk in
the same apartment with him.
Half an hour later, returning, from setting the cabin aright, to the
steerage for Kwaque to serve him with a bottle of beer, Daughtry observed
that Ah Moy had moved his entire bunk belongings across the steerage to
the third bunk on the starboard side. This had put him with Daughtry and
Michael and left Kwaque with half the steerage to himself. Daughtry's
curiosity recrudesced.
"What name along that fella Chink?" he demanded of Kwaque. "He no like
'm you fella boy stop 'm along same fella side along him. What for? My
word! What name? That fella Chink make 'm me cross along him too much!"
"Suppose 'm that fella Chink maybe he think 'm me kai-kai along him,"
Kwaque grinned in one of his rare jokes.
"All right," the steward concluded. "We find out. You move 'm along my
bunk, I move 'm along that fella Chink's bunk."
This accomplished, so that Kwaque, Michael, and Ah Moy occupied the
starboard side and Daughtry alone bunked on the port side, he went on
deck and aft to his duties. On his next return he found Ah Moy had
transferred back to the port side, but this time into the last bunk aft.
"Seems the beggar's taken a fancy to me," the steward smiled to himself.
Nor was he capable of guessing Ah Moy's reason for bunking always on the
opposite side from Kwaque.
"I changee," the little old cook explained, with anxious eyes to please
and placate, in response to Daughtry's direct question. "All the time
like that, changee, plentee changee. You savvee?"
Daughtry did not savvee, and shook his head, while Ah Moy's slant eyes
betrayed none of the anxiety and fear with which he privily gazed on
Kwaque's two permanently bent fingers of the left hand and on Kwaque's
forehead, between the eyes, where the skin appeared a shade darker, a
trifle thicker, and was marked by the first beginning of three short
vertical lines or creases that were already giving him the lion-like
appearance, the leonine face so named by the experts and technicians of
the fell disease.
As the days passed, the steward took facetious occasions, when he had
drunk five quarts of his daily allowance, to shift his and Kwaque's bunks
about. And invariably Ah Moy shifted, though Daughtry failed to notice
that he never shifted into a bunk which Kwaque had occupied. Nor did he
notice that it was when the time came that Kwaque had variously occupied
all the six bunks that Ah Moy made himself a canvas hammock, suspended it
from the deck beams above and thereafter swung clear in space and
unmolested.
Daughtry dismissed the matter from his thoughts as no more than a thing
in keeping with the general inscrutability of the Chinese mind. He did
notice, however, that Kwaque was never permitted to enter the galley.
Another thing he noticed, which, expressed in his own words, was: "That's
the all-dangdest cleanest Chink I've ever clapped my lamps on. Clean in
galley, clean in steerage, clean in everything. He's always washing the
dishes in boiling water, when he isn't washing himself or his clothes or
bedding. My word, he actually boils his blankets once a week!"
For there were other things to occupy the steward's mind. Getting
acquainted with the five men aft in the cabin, and lining up the whole
situation and the relations of each of the five to that situation and to
one another, consumed much time. Then there was the path of the _Mary
Turner_ across the sea. No old sailor breathes who does not desire to
know the casual course of his ship and the next port-of-call.
"We ought to be moving along a line that'll cross somewhere northard of
New Zealand," Daughtry guessed to himself, after a hundred stolen glances
into the binnacle. But that was all the information concerning the
ship's navigation he could steal; for Captain Doane took the observations
and worked them out, to the exclusion of the mate, and Captain Doane
always methodically locked up his chart and log. That there were heated
discussions in the cabin, in which terms of latitude and longitude were
bandied back and forth, Daughtry did know; but more than that he could
not know, because it was early impressed upon him that the one place for
him never to be, at such times of council, was the cabin. Also, he could
not but conclude that these councils were real battles wherein Messrs.
Doane, Nishikanta, and Grimahaw screamed at each other and pounded the
table at each other, when they were not patiently and most politely
interrogating the Ancient Mariner.
"He's got their goat," the steward early concluded to himself; but,
thereafter, try as he would, he failed to get the Ancient Mariner's goat.
Charles Stough Greenleaf was the Ancient Mariner's name. This, Daughtry
got from him, and nothing else did he get save maunderings and ravings
about the heat of the longboat and the treasure a fathom deep under the
sand.
"There's some of us plays games, an' some of us as looks on an' admires
the games they see," the steward made his bid one day. "And I'm sure
these days lookin' on at a pretty game. The more I see it the more I got
to admire."
The Ancient Mariner dreamed back into the steward's eyes with a blank,
unseeing gaze.
"On the _Wide Awake_ all the stewards were young, mere boys," he
murmured.
"Yes, sir," Daughtry agreed pleasantly. "From all you say, the _Wide
Awake_, with all its youngsters, was sure some craft. Not like the crowd
of old 'uns on this here hooker. But I doubt, sir, that them youngsters
ever played as clever games as is being played aboard us right now. I
just got to admire the fine way it's being done, sir."
"I'll tell you something," the Ancient Mariner replied, with such
confidential air that almost Daughtry leaned to hear. "No steward on the
_Wide Awake_ could mix a highball in just the way I like, as well as you.
We didn't know cocktails in those days, but we had sherry and bitters. A
good appetizer, too, a most excellent appetizer."
"I'll tell you something more," he continued, just as it seemed he had
finished, and just in time to interrupt Daughtry away from his third
attempt to ferret out the true inwardness of the situation on the _Mary
Turner_ and of the Ancient Mariner's part in it. "It is mighty nigh five
bells, and I should be very pleased to have one of your delicious
cocktails ere I go down to dine."
More suspicious than ever of him was Daughtry after this episode. But,
as the days went by, he came more and more to the conclusion that Charles
Stough Greenleaf was a senile old man who sincerely believed in the
abiding of a buried treasure somewhere in the South Seas.
Once, polishing the brass-work on the hand-rails of the cabin
companionway, Daughtry overheard the ancient one explaining his terrible
scar and missing fingers to Grimshaw and the Armenian Jew. The pair of
them had plied him with extra drinks in the hope of getting more out of
him by way of his loosened tongue.
"It was in the longboat," the aged voice cackled up the companion. "On
the eleventh day it was that the mutiny broke. We in the sternsheets
stood together against them. It was all a madness. We were starved
sore, but we were mad for water. It was over the water it began. For,
see you, it was our custom to lick the dew from the oar-blades, the
gunwales, the thwarts, and the inside planking. And each man of us had
developed property in the dew-collecting surfaces. Thus, the tiller and
the rudder-head and half of the plank of the starboard stern-sheet had
become the property of the second officer. No one of us lacked the
honour to respect his property. The third officer was a lad, only
eighteen, a brave and charming boy. He shared with the second officer
the starboard stern-sheet plank. They drew a line to mark the division,
and neither, lapping up what scant moisture fell during the night-hours,
ever dreamed of trespassing across the line. They were too honourable.
"But the sailors--no. They squabbled amongst themselves over the dew-
surfaces, and only the night before one of them was knifed because he so
stole. But on this night, waiting for the dew, a little of it, to become
more, on the surfaces that were mine, I heard the noises of a dew-lapper
moving aft along the port-gunwale--which was my property aft of the
stroke-thwart clear to the stern. I emerged from a nightmare dream of
crystal springs and swollen rivers to listen to this night-drinker that I
feared might encroach upon what was mine.
"Nearer he came to the line of my property, and I could hear him making
little moaning, whimpering noises as he licked the damp wood. It was
like listening to an animal grazing pasture-grass at night and ever
grazing nearer.
"It chanced I was holding a boat-stretcher in my hand--to catch what
little dew might fall upon it. I did not know who it was, but when he
lapped across the line and moaned and whimpered as he licked up my
precious drops of dew, I struck out. The boat-stretcher caught him
fairly on the nose--it was the bo's'n--and the mutiny began. It was the
bo's'n's knife that sliced down my face and sliced away my fingers. The
third officer, the eighteen-year-old lad, fought well beside me, and
saved me, so that, just before I fainted, he and I, between us, hove the
bo's'n's carcass overside."
A shifting of feet and changing of positions of those in the cabin
plunged Daughtry back into his polishing, which he had for the time
forgotten. And, as he rubbed the brass-work, he told himself under his
breath: "The old party's sure been through the mill. Such things just
got to happen."
"No," the Ancient Mariner was continuing, in his thin falsetto, in reply
to a query. "It wasn't the wounds that made me faint. It was the
exertion I made in the struggle. I was too weak. No; so little moisture
was there in my system that I didn't bleed much. And the amazing thing,
under the circumstances, was the quickness with which I healed. The
second officer sewed me up next day with a needle he'd made out of an
ivory toothpick and with twine he twisted out of the threads from a
frayed tarpaulin."
"Might I ask, Mr. Greenleaf, if there were rings at the time on the
fingers that were cut off?" Daughtry heard Simon Nishikanta ask.
"Yes, and one beauty. I found it afterward in the boat bottom and
presented it to the sandalwood trader who rescued me. It was a large
diamond. I paid one hundred and eighty guineas for it to an English
sailor in the Barbadoes. He'd stolen it, and of course it was worth
more. It was a beautiful gem. The sandalwood man did not merely save my
life for it. In addition, he spent fully a hundred pounds in outfitting
me and buying me a passage from Thursday Island to Shanghai."
* * * * *
"There's no getting away from them rings he wears," Daughtry overheard
Simon Nishikanta that evening telling Grimshaw in the dark on the weather
poop. "You don't see that kind nowadays. They're old, real old. They're
not men's rings so much as what you'd call, in the old-fashioned days,
gentlemen's rings. Real gentlemen, I mean, grand gentlemen, wore rings
like them. I wish collateral like them came into my loan offices these
days. They're worth big money."
* * * * *
"I just want to tell you, Killeny Boy, that maybe I'll be wishin' before
the voyage is over that I'd gone on a lay of the treasure instead of
straight wages," Dag Daughtry confided to Michael that night at turning-
in time as Kwaque removed his shoes and as he paused midway in the
draining of his sixth bottle. "Take it from me, Killeny, that old
gentleman knows what he's talkin' about, an' has been some hummer in his
days. Men don't lose the fingers off their hands and get their faces
chopped open just for nothing--nor sport rings that makes a Jew
pawnbroker's mouth water."