the ---- has got the evil eye. Says he can see you through a two-inch
bulkhead, and the like. The Chink’s laying in his bunk, turned the
other way. Why don’t you go aboard of him? says I. The Dutcher says
nothing, but goes over to his own bunk and feels under the straw.
When he comes back he’s looking queer. “By God!” says he, “the devil
has swiped my gun!”... Now if that’s true there is going to be hell
to pay in this vessel very quick. I figure I’m still master of this
vessel.
“The evil eye,” I grunted. “Consciences gone wrong there somewhere.”
“Not altogether, Ridgeway. I can see that yellow man peeking. Now just
figure yourself, say, eight thousand miles from home, out on the water
alone with a crowd of heathen fanatics crazy from fright, looking
around for guns and so on. Don’t you believe you’d keep an eye around
the corners, kind of--eh? I’ll bet a hat he was taking it all in,
lying there in his bunk, ‘turned the other way.’ Eh? I pity the poor
cuss--Well, there’s only one more entry after that. He’s good and mad.
Here:
Now, by God! this is the end. My gun’s gone, too; right out from under
lock and key, by God! I been talking with Bach this morning. Not to
let on, I had him into clean my lamp. There’s more ways than one, he
says, and so do I.
McCord closed the book and dropped it on the table. “Finis,” he said.
“The rest is blank paper.”
“Well!” I will confess I felt much better than I had for some time
past. “There’s _one_ ‘mystery of the sea’ gone to pot, at any
rate. And now, if you don’t mind, I think I’ll have another of your
nips, McCord.”
He pushed my glass across the table and got up, and behind his back his
shadow rose to scour the corners of the room, like an incorruptible
sentinel. I forgot to take up my gin, watching him. After an uneasy
minute or so he came back to the table and pressed the tip of a
forefinger on the book.
“Ridgeway,” he said, “you don’t seem to understand. This particular
‘mystery of the sea’ hasn’t been scratched yet--not even
_scratched_, Ridgeway.” He sat down and leaned forward, fixing me
with a didactic finger. “What happened?”
“Well, I have an idea the ‘barbarian’ got them, when it came to the
pinch.”
“And let the--remains over the side?”
“I should say.”
“And they came back and got the ‘barbarian’ and let _him_ over the
side, eh? There were none left, you remember.”
“Oh, good Lord, I don’t know!” I flared with a childish resentment at
this catechizing of his. But his finger remained there, challenging.
“I do,” he announced. “The Chinaman put them over the side, as we have
said. And then, after that, he died--of wounds about the head.”
“So?” I had still sarcasm.
“You will remember,” he went on, “that the skipper did not happen to
mention a cat, a _yellow_ cat, in his confessions.”
“McCord,” I begged him, “please drop it. Why in thunder _should_
he mention a cat?”
“True. Why _should_ he mention a cat? I think one of the reasons
why he should _not_ mention a cat is because there did not happen
to be a cat aboard at that time.”
“Oh, all right!” I reached out and pulled the bottle to my side of the
table. Then I took out my watch. “If you don’t mind,” I suggested, “I
think we’d better be going ashore. I’ve got to get to my office rather
early in the morning. What do you say?”
He said nothing for the moment, but his finger had dropped. He leaned
back and stared straight into the core of the light above, his eyes
squinting.
“He would have been from the south of China, probably.” He seemed to be
talking to himself. “There’s a considerable sprinkling of the belief
down there, I’ve heard. It’s an uncanny business--this transmigration
of souls--”
Personally, I had had enough of it. McCord’s fingers came groping
across the table for the bottle. I picked it up hastily and let it go
through the open companionway, where it died with a faint gurgle, out
somewhere on the river.
“Now,” I said to him, shaking the vagrant wrist, “either you come
ashore with me or you go in there and get under the blankets. You’re
drunk, McCord--_drunk_. Do you hear me?”
“Ridgeway,” he pronounced, bringing his eyes down to me and speaking
very slowly. “You’re a fool, if you can’t see better than that. I’m not
drunk. I’m sick. I haven’t slept for three nights--and now I can’t. And
you say--you--” He went to pieces very suddenly, jumped up, pounded
the legs of his chair on the decking, and shouted at me: “And you say
that, you--you landlubber, you office coddler! You’re so comfortable
sure that everything in the world is cut and dried. Come back to the
water again and learn how to wonder--and stop talking like a damn fool.
Do you know where--Is there anything in your municipal budget to tell
me where Björnsen went? Listen!” He sat down, waving me to do the same,
and went on with a sort of desperate repression.
“It happened on the first night after we took this hellion. I’d stood
the wheel most of the afternoon--off and on, that is, because she sails
herself uncommonly well. Just put her on a reach, you know, and she
carries it off pretty well--”
“I know,” I nodded.
“Well, we mugged up about seven o’clock. There was a good deal of
canned stuff in the galley, and Björnsen wasn’t a bad hand with
a kettle--a thoroughgoing Square-head he was--tall and lean and
yellow-haired, with little fat, round cheeks and white mustache. Not
a bad chap at all. He took the wheel to stand till mid-night, and
I turned in, but I didn’t drop off for quite a spell. I could hear
his boots wandering around over my head, padding off forward, coming
back again. I heard him whistling now and then--an out-landish air.
Occasionally I could see the shadow of his head waving in a block of
moonlight that lay on the decking right down there in front of the
state-room. It came from the companion; the cabin was dark because we
were going easy on the oil. They hadn’t left a great deal, for some
reason or other.”
McCord leaned back and described with his finger where the illumination
had cut the decking.
“There! I could see it from my bunk, as I lay, you understand. I must
have almost dropped off once when I heard him fiddling around out here
in the cabin, and then he said something in a whisper, just to find out
if I was still awake, I suppose. I asked him what the matter was. He
came and poked his head in the door.
“‘The breeze is going out,’ says he. ‘I was wondering if we couldn’t
get a little more sail on her.’ Only I can’t give you his fierce
Square-head tang. ‘How about the tops?’ he suggested.
“I was so sleepy I didn’t care, and I told him so. ‘All right,’ he
says, ‘but I thought I might shake out one of them tops.’ Then I heard
him blow at something outside. ‘Scat, you ----!’ Then: ‘This cat’s
going to set me crazy, Mr. McCord,’ he says, ‘following me around
everywhere.’ He gave a kick, and I saw something yellow floating across
the moonlight. It never made a sound--just floated. You wouldn’t have
known it ever lit anywhere, just like--”
McCord stopped and drummed a few beats on the table with his fist, as
though to bring himself back to the straight narrative.
“I went to sleep,” he began again. “I dreamed about a lot of things. I
woke up sweating. You know how glad you are to wake up after a dream
like that and find none of it is so? Well, I turned over and settled to
go off again, and then I got a little more awake and thought to myself
it must be pretty near time for me to go on deck. I scratched a match
and looked at my watch. ‘That fellow must be either a good chap or
asleep,’ I said to myself. And I rolled out quick and went above-decks.
He wasn’t at the wheel. I called him: ‘Björnsen! Björnsen!’ No answer.”
McCord was really telling a story now. He paused for a long moment, one
hand shielding an ear and his eyeballs turned far up.
“That was the first time I really went over the hulk,” he ran on. “I
got out a lantern and started at the forward end of the hold, and I
worked aft, and there was nothing there. Not a sign, or a stain, or
a scrap of clothing, or anything. You may believe that I began to
feel funny inside. I went over the decks and the rails and the house
itself--inch by inch. Not a trace. I went out aft again. The cat sat
on the wheel-box, washing her face. I hadn’t noticed the scar on her
head before, running down between her ears--rather a new scar--three
or four days old, I should say. It looked ghastly and blue-white in
the flat moonlight. I ran over and grabbed her up to heave her over
the side--you understand how upset I was. Now you know a cat will
squirm around and grab something when you hold it like that, generally
speaking. This one didn’t. She just drooped and began to purr and
looked up at me out of her moonlit eyes under that scar. I dropped her
on the deck and backed off. You remember Björnsen had _kicked_
her--and I didn’t want anything like that happening to--”
The narrator turned upon me with a sudden heat, leaned over and shook
his finger before my face.
“There you go!” he cried. “You, with your stout stone buildings and
your policemen and your neighborhood church--you’re so damn sure. But
I’d just like to see you out there, alone, with the moon setting, and
all the lights gone tall and queer, and a shipmate--” He lifted his
hand overhead, the finger-tips pressed together and then suddenly
separated as though he had released an impalpable something into the
air.
“Go on,” I told him.
“I felt more like you do, when it got right again, and warm and
sunshiny. I said ‘Bah!’ to the whole business. I even fed the cat, and
I slept awhile on the roof of the house--I was so sure. We lay dead
most of the day, without a streak of air. But that night--! Well, that
night I hadn’t got over being sure yet. It takes quite a jolt, you
know, to shake loose several dozen generations. A fair, steady breeze
had come along, the glass was high, she was staying herself like a
doll, and so I figured I could get a little rest, lying below in the
bunk, even if I didn’t sleep.
“I tried not to sleep, in case something should come up--a squall or
the like. But I think I must have dropped off once or twice. I remember
I heard something fiddling around in the galley, and I hollered ‘Scat!’
and everything was quiet again. I rolled over and lay on my left side,
staring at that square of moonlight outside my door for a long time.
You’ll think it was a dream--what I saw there.”
“Go on,” I said.
“Call this table-top the spot of light, roughly,” he said. He placed
a finger-tip about the middle of the forward edge and drew it slowly
toward the center. “Here, what would correspond with the upper side
of the companionway, there came down very gradually the shadow of
a tail. I watched it streaking out there across the deck, wiggling
the slightest bit now and then. When it had come down about half-way
across the light, the solid part of the animal--its shadow, you
understand--began to appear, quite big and round. But how could she
hang there, done up in a ball, from the hatch?”
He shifted his finger back to the edge of the table and puddled it
around to signify the shadowed body.
“I fished my gun out from behind my back. You see, I was feeling funny
again. Then I started to slide one foot over the edge of the bunk,
always with my eyes on that shadow. Now I swear I didn’t make the sound
of a pin dropping, but I had no more than moved a muscle when that
shadowed thing twisted itself around in a flash--and there on the floor
before me was the profile of a man’s head, upside down, listening--a
man’s head with a tail of hair.”
McCord got up hastily and stepped over in front of the state-room door,
where he bent down and scratched a match.
“See,” he said, holding the tiny flame above a splintered scar on the
boards. “You wouldn’t think a man would be fool enough to shoot at a
shadow?”
He came back and sat down.
“It seemed to me all hell had shaken loose. You’ve no idea, Ridgeway,
the rumpus a gun raises in a box like this. I found out afterward the
slug ricochetted into the galley, bringing down a couple of pans--and
that helped. Oh, yes, I got out of here quick enough. I stood there,
half out of the companion, with my hands on the hatch and the gun
between them, and my shadow running off across the top of the house
shivering before my eyes like a dry leaf. There wasn’t a whisper of
sound in the world--just the pale water floating past and the sails
towering up like a pair of twittering ghosts. And everything that crazy
color--
“Well, in a minute I saw it, just abreast of the mainmast, crouched
down in the shadow of the weather rail sneaking off forward very
slowly. This time I took a good long sight before I let go. Did you
ever happen to see black-powder smoke in the moonlight? It puffed
out perfectly round, like a big pale balloon, this did, and for
a second something was bounding through it--without a sound, you
understand--something a shade solider than the smoke and big as a cow,
it looked to me. It passed from the weather side to the lee and ducked
behind the sweep of the mainsail like _that_--” McCord snapped his
thumb and forefinger under the light.
“Go on,” I said. “What did you do then?”
McCord regarded me for an instant from beneath his lids, uncertain. His
fist hung above the table. “You’re--” He hesitated, his lips working
vacantly. A forefinger came out of the fist and gesticulated before my
face. “If you’re laughing, why, damn me, I’ll--”
“Go on,” I repeated. “What did you do then?”
“I followed the thing.” He was still watching me sullenly. “I got up
and went forward along the roof of the house, so as to have an eye on
either rail. You understand, this business had to be done with. I kept
straight along. Every shadow I wasn’t absolutely sure of I _made_
sure of--point-blank. And I rounded the thing up at the very
stem--sitting on the butt of the bowsprit, Ridgeway, washing her yellow
face under the moon. I didn’t make any bones about it this time. I put
the bad end of that gun against the scar on her head and squeezed the
trigger. It snicked on an empty shell. I tell you a fact; I was almost
deafened by the report that didn’t come.
“She followed me aft. I couldn’t get away from her. I went and sat on
the wheel-box and she came and sat on the edge of the house, facing me.
And there we stayed for upwards of an hour, without moving. Finally she
went over and stuck her paw in the water-pan I’d set out for her; then
she raised her head and looked at me and yawled. At sundown there’d
been two quarts of water in that pan. You wouldn’t think a cat could
get away with two quarts of water in--”
He broke off again and considered me with a sort of weary defiance.
“What’s the use?” He spread out his hands in a gesture of hopelessness.
“I knew you wouldn’t believe it when I started. You _couldn’t_.
It would be a kind of blasphemy against the sacred institution of
pavements. You’re too damn smug, Ridgeway. I can’t shake you. You
haven’t sat two days and two nights, keeping your eyes open by sheer
teeth-gritting, until they got used to it and wouldn’t shut any more.
When I tell you I found that yellow thing snooping around the davits,
and three bights of the boat-fall loosened out, plain on deck--you
grin behind your collar. When I tell you she padded off forward
and evaporated--flickered back to hell and hasn’t been seen since
then--why, you explain to yourself that I’m drunk. I tell you--” He
jerked his head back abruptly and turned to face the companionway, his
lips still apart. He listened so for a moment, then he shook himself
out of it and went on:
“I tell you, Ridgeway, I’ve been over this hulk with a foot-rule.
There’s not a cubic inch I haven’t accounted for, not a plank I--”
This time he got up and moved a step toward the companion, where he
stood with his head bent forward and slightly to the side. After what
might have been twenty seconds of this he whispered, “Do you hear?”
Far and far away down the reach a ferryboat lifted its infinitesimal
wail, and then the silence of the night river came down once more,
profound and inscrutable. A corner of the wick above my head sputtered
a little--that was all.
“Hear what?” I whispered back. He lifted a cautious finger toward the
opening.
“Somebody. Listen.”
The man’s faculties must have been keyed up to the pitch of his nerves,
for to me the night remained as voiceless as a subterranean cavern. I
became intensely irritated with him; within my mind I cried out against
this infatuated pantomime of his. And then, of a sudden, there was a
sound--the dying rumor of a ripple, somewhere in the outside darkness,
as though an object had been let into the water with extreme care.
“You heard?”
I nodded. The ticking of the watch in my vest pocket came to my ears,
shucking off the leisurely seconds, while McCord’s finger-nails gnawed
at the palms of his hands. The man was really sick. He wheeled on me
and cried out, “My God! Ridgeway--why don’t we go?”
I, for one, refused to be a fool. I passed him and climbed out of the
opening: he followed far enough to lean his elbows on the hatch, his
feet and legs still within the secure glow of the cabin.
“You see, there’s nothing.” My wave of assurance was possibly a little
overdone.
“Over there,” he muttered, jerking his head toward the shore lights.
“Something swimming.”
I moved to the corner of the house and listened.
“River thieves,” I argued. “The place is full of--”
“_Ridgeway. Look behind you!_”
Perhaps it is the pavements--but no matter; I am not ordinarily a
jumping sort. And yet there was something in the quality of that voice
beyond my shoulder that brought the sweat stinging though the pores of
my scalp even while I was in the act of turning.
A cat sat there on the hatch, expressionless and immobile in the gloom.
I did not say anything. I turned and went below. McCord was there
already, standing on the farther side of the table. After a moment or
so the cat followed and sat on her haunches at the foot of the ladder
and stared at us without winking.
“I think she wants something to eat,” I said to McCord.
He lit a lantern and went out into the galley. Returning with a chunk
of salt beef, he threw it into the farther corner. The cat went
over and began to tear at it, her muscles playing with convulsive
shadow-lines under the sagging yellow hide.
And now it was she who listened, to something beyond the reach of even
McCord’s faculties, her neck stiff and her ears flattened. I looked at
McCord and found him brooding at the animal with a sort of listless
malevolence. “_Quick!_ She has kittens somewhere about.” I shook
his elbow sharply. “When she starts, now--”
“You don’t seem to understand,” he mumbled. “It wouldn’t be any use.”
She had turned now and was making for the ladder with the soundless
agility of her race. I grasped McCord’s wrist and dragged him after
me, the lantern hanging against his knees. When we came up the cat was
already amidships, a scarcely discernible shadow at the margin of our
lantern’s ring. She stopped and looked back at us with her luminous
eyes, appeared to hesitate, uneasy at our pursuit of her, shifted
here and there with quick, soft bounds, and stopped to fawn with her
back arched at the foot of the mast. Then she was off with an amazing
suddenness into the shadows forward.
“Lively now!” I yelled at McCord. He came pounding along behind me,
still protesting that it was of no use. Abreast of the foremast I took
the lantern from him to hold above my head.
“You see,” he complained, peering here and there over the illuminated
deck. “I tell you, Ridgeway, this thing--” But my eyes were in another
quarter, and I slapped him on the shoulder.
“An engineer--an engineer to the core,” I cried at him. “Look aloft,
man.”
Our quarry was almost to the cross-trees, clambering up the shrouds
with a smartness no sailor has ever come to, her yellow body, cut by
the moving shadows of the ratlines, a queer sight against the mat
of the night. McCord closed his mouth and opened it again for two
words: “By gracious!” The following instant he had the lantern and was
after her. I watched him go up above my head--a ponderous, swaying
climber into the sky--come to the cross-trees, and squat there with
his knees clamped around the mast. The clear star of the lantern
shot this way and that for a moment, then it disappeared, and in its
place there sprang out a bag of yellow light, like a fire-balloon at
anchor in the heavens. I could see the shadows of his head and hands
moving monstrously over the inner surface of the sail, and muffled
exclamations without meaning came down to me. After a moment he drew
out his head and called: “All right--they’re here. Heads! there below!”
I ducked at his warning, and something spanked on the planking a yard
from my feet. I stepped over to the vague blur on the deck and picked
up a slipper--a slipper covered with some woven straw stuff and soled
with a matted felt, perhaps a half-inch thick. Another struck somewhere
abaft the mast, and then McCord reappeared above and began to stagger
down the shrouds. Under his left arm he hugged a curious assortment of
litter, a sheaf of papers, a brace of revolvers, a gray kimono, and a
soiled apron.
“Well,” he said when he had come to deck, “I feel like a man who has
gone to hell and come back again. You know I’d come to the place
where I really believed that about the cat. When you think of it--By
gracious! we haven’t come so far from the jungle, after all.”
We went aft and below and sat down at the table as we had been. McCord
broke a prolonged silence.
“I’m sort of glad he got away--poor cuss! He’s probably climbing up
a wharf this minute, shivering and scared to death. Over toward the
gas-tanks, by the way he was swimming. By gracious! now that the
world’s turned over straight again, I feel I could sleep a solid week.
Poor cuss! can you imagine him, Ridgeway--”
“Yes,” I broke in. “I think I can. He must have lost his nerve when
he made out your smoke and shinnied up there to stow away, taking the
ship’s papers with him. He would have attached some profound importance
to them--remember, the ‘barbarian,’ eight thousand miles from home.
Probably couldn’t read a word. I supposed the cat followed him--the
traditional source of food. He must have wanted water badly.”
“I should say! He wouldn’t have taken the chances he did.”
“Well,” I announced, “at any rate, I can say it now--there’s another
‘mystery of the sea’ gone to pot.”
McCord lifted his heavy lids.
“No,” he mumbled. “This mystery is that a man who has been to sea all
his life could sail around for three days with a man bundled up in
his top and not know it. When I think of him peeking down at me--and
playing off that damn cat--probably without realizing it--scared to
death--by gracious! Ridgeway, there was a pair of funks aboard this
craft, eh? Wow--yow--I could sleep--”
“I should think you could.”
McCord did not answer.
“By the way,” I speculated. “I guess you were right about Björnsen,
McCord--that is, his fooling with the foretop. He must have been caught
all of a bunch, eh?”
Again McCord failed to answer. I looked up, mildly surprised, and found
his mouth opened wide. He was asleep.
POPULAR LITTLE BLUE BOOKS
220 Senator Vest’s Tribute to a Dog and Other
Dog Lore
1170 Funny Ghost Stories. Jerome K. Jerome
901 Woman: The Eternal Primitive.
Wm. J. Fielding
229 Ridiculous Women: Comedy of French Life.
Molière
410 Amorous Misadventures. Restif de la Bretonne
810 Some Polite Scandals of Parisian Life
404 Romances of Paris. Alfred de Musset
1062 Humoresque. Fannie Hurst
1115 Ridiculous Stories. Stephen Leacock
659 Two Famous Stories. Theodore Dreiser
661 Neurotic America and the Sex Impulse.
Dreiser
865 Main Street Tales. Sherwood Anderson
866 Untold Lie and Other Tales. Anderson
698 Tales of Chicago Streets. Ben Hecht
699 Broken Necks and Other City Tales.
Ben Hecht
540 Brightly Colored Tales of Love.
Remy de Gourmont
541 Passion Stories of Many Hues.
Remy de Gourmont
1202 Forbidden Love and Other Stories.
Barry Pain
1194 Love’s Heroism and Other Tales
317 Flirtation in the Night and Other Tales.
Chekhov
23 Great Stories of the Sea
145 Great Ghost Stories
938 French Tales of Passion and Cruelty
178 One of Cleopatra’s Nights. Theophile Gautier
230 The Quest for a Blonde Mistress. Gautier.
58 Tales from Boccaccio’s Decameron
12 Tales of Mystery. Edgar Allan Poe
102 Sherlock Holmes Tales. Conan Doyle
783 Mandalay and Other Poems. Rudyard Kipling
795 Gunga Din and Other Poems. Kipling
222 The Vampire and Other Poems. Kipling
815 A Book of Familiar Quotations
367 How to Improve Your Conversation
82 Common Faults in Writing English
697 4,000 Words Often Mispronounced
821 How to Improve Your Vocabulary
1103 A Book of Puzzles and Brainteasers