“I got into my own bunk and slept like a dead policeman till Buck
dragged me out.
“‘Tug’s along,’ says he, ‘and there’s a good wind, but I can’t wake
that blighter. He’s still in the arms of Bacchus and I’m just going to
take him along, Bacchus and all.’
“I came on deck and there was a little tinpot tug hauling the timber
schooner out so’s to free us, with the dawn breaking over the bay.
“‘But Lord, Buck!’ I says. ‘What are you going to do with him if you
take him along, he’s no mascot by the look of him, and no sailor-man
neither. What are you going to do with him?’
“‘Save him from the police,’ says he, ‘and from liquor and make a man
of him or kill him, he’s no tough, by his face, just a softy that’s
got into bad hands maybe, or just run crooked because of the drink.
Curse the drink,’ says Buck, ‘I’ve seen its black work in my family
and that’s why I’ve always steered clear of it, and if it was only to
spite John Barleycorn I’d take a dozen guys like that, let alone one.’
“I didn’t argue. I had my hands full directing the crew, and I had it
in my mind that Buck was as keen of cheating the Penitentiary as he
was of spiting John Barleycorn. Like most Irishmen he had a mortal
hatred of policemen and prisons, and I don’t blame him, neither.
“We were kept on deck till we were clear of the bar and running on a
sou’-west course, doing seven knots, with the sea piling up and more
wind coming, then I dropped below for a cup of coffee and a bite of
food, and looking at the chap in the bunk saw he was still snoring.
“The parcel had dropped out of the bunk owing to the rolling in
crossing the bar, and the brown paper covering had got a bit loose and
I couldn’t for the life of me help poking round with my finger and
loosening it a bit more so’s to have a look at what might be inside. I
was thinking it might be banknotes or boodle of some sort, but what I
come on was a female’s silk petticoat. I was more shook up than if I’d
hit on a rattlesnake, and, calling Buck down, I says to him, ‘Buck,
this sleeping beauty of yours has been murdering a female.’ That’s how
the business struck me first. Why else should he have been running
away with the thing and the police after him?
“Buck takes one squint, then he begins the Sherlock Holmes business,
looking for dagger marks and bloodstains, but there weren’t none, the
article looked pretty new, with nothing a Sherlock Holmes could lay
hold of but the letters J.B. worked in black thread very small on the
band of it, and no doubt the initials of the party owning the concern.
Buck puts the thing away in a locker and we sits down to breakfast,
arguing and talking all the time, the professor of somnology snoring
away in his bunk, the schooner getting further to sea and the sea
piling bigger behind her, with the wind rising to a tearing gale.
“I was kept on deck all that morning, at the wheel most of the time,
for we were running before it and if she’d broached to we’d have gone
truck over keel to perdition.
“Buck comes up at eight bells, saying the petticoat man had woke up
wanting to know where he was and asking to be taken to Los Angeles. I
didn’t bother about the chap, didn’t see him till next morning, when I
turned out to find the gale gone into a six-knot breeze and Buck and
him sitting at breakfast.
“He’d washed and brushed and looked more like a human being, and he’d
given up wantin’ to be taken to Los Angeles and he’d settled down to
his gruel.
“We were keen to have his story out of him and know what the crime
was, but we had no time for tale-telling with the damage on deck, for
we’d lost several spars in the blow, so we just left him to smoke and
think over his sins and didn’t tackle him till two days later, when he
told us the whole yarn right off, and without winking, so’s that we
couldn’t help believing him.
“This is it, as far as I can remember, with nothing left out that
matters.