AH SING COUNTS HIS NAILS
Captain Threthaway, of the barkentine, _Coryander_, of Boston, should
have heeded the warning he received from his first mate, Peter Gross, to
keep away from the roadstead of Batavia. He had no particular business
in that port. But an equatorial sun, hot enough to melt the marrow in a
man's bones, made the _Coryander's_ deck a blistering griddle; there was
no ice on board, and the water in the casks tasted foul as bilge. So the
captain let his longing for iced tea and the cool depths of a palm-grove
get the better of his judgment.
Passing Timor, Floris, and the other links in the Malayan chain, Captain
Threthaway looked longingly at the deeply shaded depths of the mangrove
jungles. The lofty tops of the cane swayed gently to a breeze scarcely
perceptible on the _Coryander's_ sizzling deck. When the barkentine
rounded Cape Karawang, he saw a bediamonded rivulet leap sheer off a
lofty cliff and lose itself in the liana below. It was the last straw;
the captain felt he had to land and taste ice on his tongue again or
die. Calling his first mate, he asked abruptly:
"Can we victual at Batavia as cheaply as at Singapore, Mr. Gross?"
Peter Gross looked at the shore-line thoughtfully.
"One place is as cheap as the other, Mr. Threthaway; but if it's my
opinion you want, I advise against stopping at Batavia."
The captain frowned.
"Why, Mr. Gross?" he asked sharply.
"Because we'd lose our crew, and Batavia's a bad place to pick up
another one. That gang for'ard isn't to be trusted where there's liquor
to be got. 'Twouldn't be so bad to lose a few of them at
Singapore--there's always English-speaking sailors there waiting for a
ship to get home on; but Batavia's Dutch. We might have to lay around a
week."
"I don't think there's the slightest danger of desertions," Captain
Threthaway replied testily. "What possible reason could any of our crew
have to leave?"
"The pay is all right, and the grub is all right; there's no kicking on
those lines," Peter Gross said, speaking guardedly. "But most of this
crew are drinking men. They're used to their rations of grog regular.
They've been without liquor since we left Frisco, except what they got
at Melbourne, and that was precious little. Since the water fouled on
us, they're ready for anything up to murder and mutiny. There'll be no
holding them once we make port."
Captain Threthaway flushed angrily. His thin, ascetic jaw set with
Puritan stubbornness as he retorted:
"When I can't sail a ship without supplying liquor to the crew, I'll
retire, Mr. Gross."
"Don't misunderstand me, captain," Peter Gross replied, with quiet
patience.
"I'm not disagreeing with your teetotaler principles. They improve a
crew if you've got the right stock to work with. But when you take grog
away from such dock-sweepings as Smith and Jacobson and that little
Frenchman, Le Beouf, you take away the one thing on earth they're
willing to work for. We had all we could do to hold them in hand at
Melbourne, and after the contrary trades we've bucked the past week, and
the heat, their tongues are hanging out for a drop of liquor."
"Let them dare come back drunk," the captain snapped angrily. "I know
what will cure them."
"They won't come back," Peter Gross asserted calmly.
"Then we'll go out and get them," Captain Threthaway said grimly.
"They'll be where they can't be found," Peter Gross replied.
Captain Threthaway snorted impatiently.
"Look here, captain!" Peter Gross exclaimed, facing his skipper
squarely. "Batavia is my home when I'm not at sea. I know its ins and
outs. Knowing the town, and knowing the crew we've got, I'm sure a stop
there will be a mighty unpleasant experience all around. There's a
Chinaman there, Ah Sing, a public-house proprietor and a crimp, that
has runners to meet every boat. Once a man goes into his _rumah makan_,
he's as good as lost until the next skipper comes along short-handed and
puts up the price."
Captain Threthaway smiled confidently.
"Poor as the crew is, Mr. Gross, there's no member of it will prefer
lodging in a Chinese crimp's public house ten thousand miles from home
to his berth here."
"They'll forget his color when they taste his hot rum," Peter Gross
returned bruskly. "And once they drink it, they'll forget everything
else. Ah Sing is the smoothest article that ever plaited a queue, and
they don't make them any slicker than they do in China."
Captain Threthaway's lips pinched together in irritation.
"There are always the authorities," he remarked pettishly, to end the
controversy.
Peter Gross restrained a look of disgust with difficulty.
"Yes, there are always the authorities," he conceded. "But in the
Chinese campong they're about as much use as a landlubber aloft in a
blow. The campong is a little republic in itself, and Ah Sing is the man
that runs it. If the truth was known, I guess he's the boss Chinaman of
the East Indies--pirate, trader, politician--anything he can make a
guilder at. From his rum-shop warrens run into every section of
Chinatown, and they're so well hid that the governor, though he's sharp
as a weasel and by all odds the best man the Dutch ever had here, can't
find them. It's the real port of missing men."
Captain Threthaway looked shoreward, where dusky, breech-clouted natives
were resting in the cool shade of the heavy-leafed mangroves. A bit of
breeze stirred just then, bringing with it the rich spice-grove and
jungle scents of the thickly wooded island. A fierce longing for the
shore seized the captain. He squared his shoulders with decision.
"I'll take the chance, Mr. Gross," he said. "This heat is killing me.
You may figure on twenty-four hours in port."
Twelve hours after the _Coryander_ cast anchor in Batavia harbor, Smith,
Jacobson, and Le Beouf were reported missing. When Captain Threthaway,
for all his Boston upbringing, had exhausted a prolific vocabulary, he
called his first mate.
"Mr. Gross," he said, "the damned renegades are gone. Do you think you
can find them?"
Long experience in the vicissitudes of life, acquired in that best
school of all, the forecastle, had taught Peter Gross the folly of
saying, "I told you so." Therefore he merely replied:
"I'll try, sir."
So it befell that he sought news of the missing ones at the great white
_stadhuis_, where the Heer Sachsen, always his friend, met him and
conceived the inspiration for his prompt recommendation to the
governor-general.
Peter Gross ambled on toward Ah Sing's _rumah makan_ without the
slightest suspicion he was being followed. On his part, Governor-General
Van Schouten was content to let his quarry walk on unconscious of
observation while he measured the man.
"God in Israel, what a man!" his excellency exclaimed admiringly, noting
Peter Gross's broad shoulders and stalwart thighs. "If he packs as much
brains inside his skull as he does meat on his bones, there are some
busy days ahead for my Dyaks." He smacked his lips in happy
anticipation.
Ah Sing's grog-shop, with its colonnades and porticoes and fussy gables
and fantastic cornices terminating in pigtail curlicues, was a squalid
place for all the ornamentation cluttered on it. Peter Gross observed
its rubbishy surroundings with ill-concealed disgust.
"'Twould be a better Batavia if some one set fire to the place," he
muttered to himself. "Yet the law would call it arson."
Looking up, he saw Ah Sing seated in one of the porticoes, and quickly
masked his face to a smile of cordial greeting, but not before the
Chinaman had detected his ill humor.
There was a touch of three continents in Ah Sing's appearance. He sat
beside a table, in the American fashion; he smoked a long-stemmed
hookah, after the Turkish fashion, and he wore his clothes after the
Chinese fashion. The bland innocence of his pudgy face and the seraphic
mildness of his unblinking almond eyes that peeped through slits no
wider than the streak of a charcoal-pencil were as the guilelessness of
Mother Eve in the garden. Motionless as a Buddha idol he sat, except for
occasional pulls at the hookah.
"Good-morning, Ah Sing," Peter Gross remarked happily, as he mounted the
colonnade.
The tiny slits through which Ah Sing beheld the pageantry of a sun-baked
world opened a trifle wider.
"May Allah bless thee, Mr. Gross," he greeted impassively.
Peter Gross pulled a chair away from one of the other tables and placed
it across the board from Ah Sing. Then he succumbed to it with a sigh of
gentle ease.
"A hot day," he panted, and fanned himself as though he found the
humidity unbearable.
"Belly hot," Ah Sing gravely agreed in a guttural voice that sounded
from unfathomable abysses.
"A hot day for a man that's tasted no liquor for nigh three months,"
Peter Gross amended.
"You makee long trip?" Ah Sing inquired politely.
Peter Gross's features molded themselves into an expression eloquently
appreciative of his past miseries.
"That's altogether how you take it, Ah Sing," he replied. "From Frisco
to Melbourne to Batavia isn't such a thunderin' long ways, not to a man
that's done the full circle three times. But when you make the voyage
with a Methodist captain who doesn't believe in grog, it's the longest
since Captain Cook's. Ah Sing, my throat's dryer than a sou'east
monsoon. Hot toddy for two."
Ah Sing clapped his hands and uttered a magic word or two in Chinese. A
Cantonese waiter paddled swiftly outside, bearing a lacquered tray and
two steaming glasses. One he placed before Ah Sing and the other before
Peter Gross, who tossed a coin on the table.
"Pledge your health, sir," Peter Gross remarked and reached across the
board to clink glasses with his Chinese friend. Ah Sing lifted his glass
to meet the sailor's and suddenly found it snaked out of his hands by a
deft motion of Peter Gross's middle finger. Gross slid his own glass
across the table toward Ah Sing.
"If you don't mind," he remarked pleasantly. "Your waiter might have
mistaken me for a plain A. B., and I've got to get back to my ship
to-night."
Ah Sing's bland and placid face remained expressionless as a carved
god's. But he left the glass stand, untasted, beside him.
The _Coryander's_ mate sipped his liquor and sank deeper into his chair.
He studied with an air of affectionate interest the long lane of
quaintly colonnaded buildings that edged the city within a city, the
Chinese campong. Pigtailed Orientals, unmindful of the steaming heat,
squirmed across the scenery. Ten thousand stenches were compounded into
one, in which the flavor of garlic predominated. Peter Gross breathed
the heavy air with a smile of reminiscent pleasure and dropped another
notch into the chair.
"It feels good to be back ashore again for a spell, Ah Sing," he
remarked. "A nice, cool spot like this, with nothing to do and some of
your grog under the belt, skins a blistery deck any day. I don't wonder
so many salts put up here."
Back of the curtain of fat through which they peered, Ah Sing's oblique
eyes quivered a trifle as they watched the sailor keenly.
"By the way," Peter Gross observed, stretching his long legs out to the
limit of their reach, "you haven't seen any of my men, have you? Smith,
he's pock-marked and has a cut over his right eye; Jacobson, a tall
Swede, and Le Beouf, a little Frenchman with a close-clipped black
mustache and beard?"
Ah Sing gravely cudgeled his memory.
"None of your men," he assured, "was here."
Peter Gross's face fell.
"That's too bad!" he exclaimed in evident disappointment. "I thought
sure I'd find 'em here. You're sure you haven't overlooked them? That
Frenchie might call for a hop; we picked him out of a hop-joint at
Frisco."
"None your men here," Ah Sing repeated gutturally.
Peter Gross rumpled his tousled hair in perplexity.
"We-el," he drawled unhappily, "if those chaps don't get back on
shipboard by nightfall I'll have to buy some men from you, Ah Sing. Have
y' got three good hands that know one rope from another?"
"Two men off schooner _Marianna_," Ah Sing replied in his same thick
monotone. "One man, steamer _Callee-opie_. Good strong man. Work hard."
"You stole 'em, I s'pose?" Peter Gross asked pleasantly.
Ah Sing's heavy jowls waggled in gentle negation.
"No stealum man," he denied quietly. "Him belly sick. Come here, get
well. Allie big, strong man."
"How much a head?"
"Twlenty dlolla."
"F. O. B. the _Coryander_ and no extra charges?"
Ah Sing's inscrutable face screwed itself into a maze of unreadable
wrinkles and lines.
"Him eat heap," he announced. "Five dlolla more for board."
"You go to blazes," Peter Gross replied cheerfully. "I'll look up a
couple of men somewhere else or go short-handed if I have to."
Ah Sing made no reply and his impassive face did not alter its
expressionless fixity. Peter Gross lazily pulled himself up in his chair
and extended his right hand across the table. A ring with a big
bloodstone in the center, a bloodstone cunningly chiseled and marked,
rested on the middle finger.
"See that ring, Ah Sing?" he asked. "I got that down to Mauritius. What
d'ye think it's worth?"
Ah Sing's long, claw-like fingers groped avariciously toward the ring.
His tiny, fat-encased eyes gleamed with cupidity.
With a quick, cat-like movement, Peter Gross gripped one of the
Chinaman's hands.
"Don't pull," he cautioned quickly as Ah Sing tried to draw his hand
away. "I was going to tell you that there's a drop of adder's poison
inside the bloodstone that runs down a little hollow pin if you press
the stone just so--" He moved to illustrate.
"No! No!" Ah Sing shrieked pig-like squeals of terror.
"Just send one of your boys for my salts, will you?" Peter Gross
requested pleasantly. "I understand they got here yesterday morning and
haven't been seen to leave. Talk English--no China talk, savvy?"
A flash of malevolent fury broke Ah Sing's mask of impassivity. The rage
his face expressed caused Peter Gross to grip his hand the harder and
look quickly around for a possible danger from behind. They were alone.
Peter Gross moved a finger toward the stone, and Ah Sing capitulated. At
his shrill cry there was a hurried rustle from within. Peter Gross kept
close grip on the Chinaman's hand until he heard the shuffling tramp of
sailor feet. Smith, Jacobson and Le Beouf, blinking sleepily, were
herded on the portico by two giant Thibetans.
Peter Gross shoved the table and Ah Sing violently back and leaped to
his feet.
"You'll--desert--will you?" he exclaimed. Each word was punctuated by a
swift punch on the chin of one of the unlucky sailors and an echoing
thud on the floor. Smith, Jacobson, and Le Beouf lay neatly cross-piled
on one of Ah Sing's broken chairs.
"I'll pay for the chair," Peter Gross declared, jerking his men to their
feet and shoving them down the steps.
Ah Sing shrilled an order in Chinese. The Thibetan giants leaped for
Peter Gross, who sprang out of their reach and put his back to the wall.
In his right hand a gun flashed.
"Ah Sing, I'll take you first," he shouted.
The screen separating them from the adjoining portico was violently
pushed aside.
"Ah Sing!" exclaimed a sharp, authoritative voice.
Ah Sing looked about, startled. The purpled fury his face expressed
sickened to a mottled gray. Adriaan Adriaanszoon Van Schouten,
governor-general of Java, leaning lightly on his cane, frowned sternly
at the scene of disorder. At a cry from their master the two Thibetans
backed away from Peter Gross, who lowered his weapon.
"Is it thus you observe our laws, Ah Sing?" Van Schouten demanded
coldly.
Ah Sing licked his lips. "Light of the sun--" he began, but the governor
interrupted shortly:
"The magistrate will hear your explanations." His eagle eyes looked
penetratingly upon Peter Gross, who looked steadfastly back.
"Sailor, you threatened to poison this man," the governor accused
harshly, indicating Ah Sing.
"Your excellency, that was bluff," Peter Gross replied. "The ring is as
harmless as your excellency's own."
Van Schouten's eyes twinkled.
"What is your name, sailor, and your ship?" he demanded.
"Peter Gross, your excellency, first mate of the barkentine _Coryander_
of Boston, now lying in your excellency's harbor of Batavia."
"Ah Sing," Van Schouten rasped sternly, "if these drunken louts are not
aboard their ship by nightfall, you go to the coffee-fields."
Ah Sing's gimlet eyes shrank to pin-points. His face was expressionless,
but his whole body seemed to shake with suppressed emotion as he choked
in guttural Dutch:
"Your excellency shall be obeyed." He salaamed to the ground.
Van Schouten glared at Peter Gross.
"Mynheer Gross, the good name of our fair city is very dear to us," he
said sternly. "Scenes of violence like this do it much damage. I would
have further discourse with you. Be at the _paleis_ within the hour."
"I shall be there, your excellency," Peter Gross promised.
The governor shifted his frown to Ah Sing.
"As for you, Ah Sing, I have heard many evil reports of this place," he
said. "Let me hear no more."
While Ah Sing salaamed again, the governor strode pompously away,
followed at a respectful distance by Peter Gross. It was not until they
had disappeared beyond a curve in the road that Ah Sing let his face
show his feelings. Then an expression of malignant fury before which
even the two Thibetans quailed, crossed it.
He uttered a harsh command to have the debris removed. The Thibetans
jumped forward in trembling alacrity. Without giving them another glance
he waddled into the building, into a little den screened off for his own
use. From a patent steel safe of American make he took an ebony box,
quaintly carved and colored in glorious pinks and yellows with a flower
design. Opening this, he exposed a row of glass vials resting on beds of
cotton. Each vial contained some nail parings.
He took out the vials one by one, looked at their labels inscribed in
Chinese characters, and placed them on an ivory tray. As he read each
label a curious smile of satisfaction spread over his features.
When he had removed the last vial he sat at his desk, dipped a pen into
India ink, and wrote two more labels in similar Chinese characters. When
the ink had dried he placed these on two empty vials taken from a
receptacle on his desk. The vials were placed with the others in the
ebony box and locked in the safe.
The inscriptions he read on the labels were the names of men who had
died sudden and violent deaths in the East Indies while he had lived at
Batavia. The labels he filled out carried the names of Adriaan
Adriaanszoon Van Schouten and Peter Gross.