"I've been around the world, you know that? I sailed with a tramp steamer, the
_Slippery Trick_. I saw the naked savages of Polynesia, and the voodoo witches
that the freed slaves of the Caribbean worship, and the coolies pulling
rickshaws in Peking. It was so _hard_ to come home to Frisco, after five years
at sea."
To my surprise, he sat down next to me, in the dirt and roots at the base of the
tree. "You know, aboard the _Trick_, they called me Runnyguts -- I threw up
every hour for my first month. I was more reliable than the Watch! But they
didn't mean anything by it. When you live with a crew for years, you become a
different person. We'd be out at sea, nothing but water as far as the eye could
see, and we'd be playing cards on-deck. We'd told each other every joke we knew
already, and every story about home, and we knew that deck of cards so well,
which one had salt-water stains on the back and which one turned up at corner
and which one had been torn, and we'd just scream at the sun, so bored! But then
we'd put in to port at some foreign city, and we'd come down the plank in our
best clothes, twenty men who knew each other better than brothers, hard and
brown from months at sea, and it felt like whatever happened in that strange
port-of-call, we'd come out on top."
"And then I came back to the Frisco, and the Captain shook my hand and gave me a
sack of gold and saw me off, and I'd never felt so alone, and I'd never seen a
place so foreign.
"I went back to my old haunts, the saloons where I'd gone for a beer after a
day's work at the docks, and the dance-halls, and the theatres, and I saw my old
chums. That was hard, James."