“You nev--You don’t--You ain’t ever--” Ike took another drag at
the gingerbread, and swallowed hard. “Why, the Snohomish Glutton is
known--the Snohomish Glutton, he has eat at one setting--Oh, shucks,
if you ain’t ever heard, what’s the use!” He started on, but whirled and
came back and shook the hunk of gingerbread under my nose. “I suppose if
it had been writ and printed in a book you Eastern perfessers would know
all about it. Thank God, in the West we know a lot of things that ain’t
printed in a book!” Then he stumped away.
Well, I concluded I would stroll along to the galley and take a look at
the cook, and be able thereafter to say that at least I had seen this
notable of the Pacific.
There was a spacious galley on the old _Zizania_. I looked in through
an open window which commanded the port alley. A fat man was chopping
kindlings. He was a thing of rolls and folds of fat--a gob of a man.
There were narrow slits near his nose marking his eyes, but his eyes
seemed to be shut by fat. A little, round, pursed-up mouth was in the
middle of his face, and from this came wheezy grunts as he chopped.
While I was watching him, an object bounded into the galley door and
leapfrogged him, darting past me through the window. Before I could turn
my head the thing, whatever it was, had disappeared around the corner of
the alley.
The cook straightened up, and by an effort opened his eyes enough
to stare at me. I expected a deep, gruff voice, But he had a real
tin-whistle pipe.
“What did you throw at me?”
“I didn’t throw anything. Something rushed through the galley--I didn’t
see what.”
“Things don’t hit a man unless they are thrown,” he insisted. “I may
look funny, but I ain’t funny. I don’t relish having things thrown at
me.”
He gave up trying to hold his eyes open, and went on chopping.
I was getting my breath ready to protest when the thing came through
once more. It was a monkey. But it missed the cook’s back, for the broad
shoulders heaved as the ax came up. The monkey slipped, slid across
the chopping-block, and down came the ax. The animal squealed horribly,
flung itself past me through the open window, and fled. It went like a
shot, but I got the fleeting impression that its tail was gone.
“What did you do then?” asked the cook, squinting at me suspiciously.
“I tell you I haven’t done anything at all. That was a monkey. He came
from somewhere. He ran through here. I think you have cut off his tail.”
He peered about. “There ain’t no tail here,” he whined. “There couldn’t
have been any monkey here. This ain’t any place for a monkey to be.
There may be monkey business here--and you’re getting it up. You go away
from here!”
I’m afraid the Snohomish Glutton and I would have had trouble then and
there, but just then a man came rushing into the door of the galley. He
had the monkey under his arm, upside down, and he was pointing quivering
finger at a bleeding stump of a tail. I couldn’t understand what he
was bawling. I found out afterward that he was a Russian Finn and could
command only a few English words even when he was perfectly calm. He was
not calm now. I never heard a man rave so. The monkey joined him with
hideous screams.
The cook listened for a time, puckering his fat forehead. When he found
that the man was talking a foreign language he upraised his ax and
swished it around in circles near the Finn’s head. A cook in his galley
is lord supreme in his domain, and the sailor probably knew as much. The
ax was menacing; it was coming very close, and the Finn already had one
exhibit of that cook’s ferocity under his arm. He allowed himself to be
backed out, and the cook slammed and barred the door.
“What did he say?” he asked me, in his piping tones.
“I don’t know what he said.”
“I reckoned it was some kind of Dago swearing, and I don’t allow a man
to swear at me. Most likely it was swearing.”
“You cut off that monkey’s tail,” I insisted. “I thought so when he
squealed. Now I’m sure of it.”
He went to peering around again, whining to himself like a fat porcupine
who is being badgered.
“There ain’t no tail here. I didn’t cut off his tail. I didn’t see him
so that I could cut off his tail.” He started toward the window with a
look as if he proposed to resent my suggestion that he had been cutting
off monkeys’ tails. I passed on. I figured that I might as well try to
argue with a Sussex shote as with that shapeless mass of fat. I would
have saved a nasty bit of trouble for myself, perhaps, if I had remained
and argued. And my trouble later that day--and that monkey with the
missing tail--was the seed from which--But that’s getting ahead of the
story.
There were really three messes aboard the _Zizania_. There was the
captain’s mess aft, with special dishes, which was entirely distinct
from the crew’s food. On the port side was set out the food for the
black half of the checker-board crew, and on the starboard side the
white half received their provender.
We were at dinner in the captain’s mess. It was our first meal at
sea--our first meeting at table.
When Miss Kama came in we were just sitting down. The captain was
with us, having left one of the Joneses at the wheel. Keedy lifted his
paint-streak mustache against his nose in a smile, and pulled out a
chair beside his own.
“Sit here, my dear,” he said to the girl.
She walked past the chair, came around to my side of the table, and sat
down. She did not toss her chin or sniff, as some girls would have done,
to show dislike of Keedy. She was a cool proposition, that girl was.
That left the chair beside Keedy the only vacant one at the table. A
plump little man had been standing off at one side, waiting for the
last choice of seats. He looked rather bashful, and his round face was
shining with soap, and his hair was plastered down at the sides and
combed up in front in a fancy cowlick. You could see that he realized
that he did not exactly belong at that table. Therefore he had scrubbed
himself up for the occasion.
Captain Rask Holstrom did not trouble himself with any of the finer
graces of society. He gruffly introduced the little man as Romeo Shank,
chief engineer, and told Shank to slide into the chair beside Keedy.
“We ain’t drawing any fine lines between ship’s officers on this trip,”
stated the captain, bluntly, for the benefit of all concerned. “Get
to table while the grub is hot, and get it into you--that’s the motto.
Business before style is the idea aboard this boat.”
He began to shovel food industriously with his knife.
Keedy hitched away from his table-mate a few inches, and looked across
at me, and deepened the wrinkle between his eyes. But he could not spoil
my appetite. Something else which happened the next moment pretty nigh
did it, though.
A black man leaped into the saloon through the forward door by which the
waiter came and went. Two other black men were at his back. They stopped
just inside the door and dragged off their knitted caps. They had the
appearance of being a delegation, and an excited delegation at that. It
was plain to be seen that they had come rushing aft without stopping to
figure on consequences. The leader carried something in front of him,
and it was looped over the blade of a wicked-looking-knife. He held the
object at arm’s length toward Captain Holstrom, pointed at it with the
vibrating finger of his left hand, and yelped shrilly like a dog. He was
too excited and too furious to put his complaint into words.
“What have ye got there--a snake?” yelped the captain, gulping down a
mouthful, and wrinkling his nose like one who had suddenly come upon
something disgusting.
“We find him in our kittle--we find him dere. Yassuh! We eat ’most to de
bottom, and den we find him,” raved the negro.
Captain Holstrom snapped up from the table and strode over and squinted
at the object which dangled from the knife blade.
“Dey cook for us in our kittle a monkey tail--dem white men cook dat for
us, and laugh,” squealed the negro.
“And you think that some of those cheap white jokers put it in, eh?”
“Dey laugh all de time since when we pull him out. Yassuh, it’s a lot of
fun for dem men.”
Captain Holstrom rubbed his nose thoughtfully, and stared down on the
thing which had savored the black men’s dinner.
A happy thought seemed to strike him. He turned his head and winked at
me.
“Take that thing out and whack it across the face of the white man you
find laughing the hardest,” he commanded. “When he gets up to hit you
pitch in.” He came lurching back to the table. “I didn’t intend to have
the row till to-morrow,” he informed us, in an undertone. “But this is
too good a chance to miss. We’ll get that checker-board crew on a war
basis where they’ll stay put.”
The black men were lingering at the door, trying to get the captain’s
meaning through their wool.
“Excuse me, Captain Holstrom,” I said, “but I think I know how this
thing happened--and I feel it’s too bad to have innocent men beaten up.”
I started to tell what I had seen, but he swore and broke in on me.
“Don’t butt into something that’s none of your business!” he snapped. He
roared at the men: “Go do what I told you to do. Go punch the jokes out
of that white gang or you’ll have no peace the rest of the voyage. Get
out of here before I kick you out!”
It sounded like a very pretty row, judging it from where we were sitting
in the saloon. It began in a very few minutes.
“Mr. Number-two Jones,” directed the captain, “go out there and oversee,
and let me know when it’s time to break the clinch.” He loaded up his
plate once more and kept on eating.
In about five minutes the mate returned. “I reckon it’s about time to
knock ’em apart, Captain Holstrom,” he advised, shoving his head in at
the door. “No great harm done, but they’re chewing each other bad, and
that means expense for plaster and salve.”
If I hadn’t already lost my appetite for dinner, that grisly statement
from Mr. Number-two Jones would have fixed me. I pushed back from the
table.
“Come along, Sidney,” commanded the captain, kicking his chair out from
under him. “Come settle your dinner. I’ll find a club for you.”
“I’ll obey the orders you gave me first, sir,” I called after him; “I
won’t butt into something that’s none of my business.”
“Do you mean to say--” He had stopped and whirled on me.
I was sore because he had snapped me up so short before them all. I
thought my explanation should have been considered.
“I mean to say that this fight was needless. You started it; now you can
stop it.”
Mr. Keedy had been lighting a cigar, and it was plain that he did not
intend to venture out into the mêlée.
“Look here--I tell you to come along,” yelled the captain. “It’s your
duty.”
“Not on your life. I’m no ship’s officer! I’m along as a diver, not as a
prize-fighter.”
Captain Holstrom looked ugly enough just then to tackle me as a preface
to his job forward, but after cursing a moment he followed the mate. The
riot was increasing, and it was plain that he was needed in the field.
Keedy leaned back and scowled at me through his cigar smoke.
“I didn’t know I had picked a quitter,” he sneered. “We’re tackling a
job that needs sand. You ain’t a tin horn, are you?”
I didn’t answer and the back of my neck began to itch; I suppose if
I had had hair there like a dog’s, the hair would have bristled. That
itching in the neck when you’re mad is a survival of the old days when
men had lots of hair on ’em.
I started to walk out of the saloon. Miss Kama was sitting there,
looking at us, and her presence rather complicated matters for a man who
was getting madder all the time, as I was. The other officers had chased
along on the trail of Captain Holstrom.
“A second-hand diving-suit doesn’t stack up very high against what we’re
putting into this thing--Captain Holstrom and myself,” he insisted.
“There was something going in from your side in addition to the
divingsuit, as I understand it. But a coward can’t invest grit.”