CAPTAIN GRUMMITT GETS WET
The gateway to Sydney, by water, is said to be the most beautiful
natural harbor in the world, and Dave leaned over the taffrail
spellbound as the dawn dyed the sea a deep red. The rusty old tramp
was only one of a hundred vessels that were threading their way into
or out from Australia’s chief port. Birdlike sailing craft, crowded
with canvas to catch the least puff of wind, drifted along in leisurely
fashion; weather-beaten steamers from all parts of the world chugged
towards their goal, sometimes ten thousand miles away; and a cloud of
sea-birds, among them great fellows whose wing-tips seemed to stretch
full five feet apart, crowded round the stern of the _Neptune_.
“Well, my boy, what do you think of Sydney harbor?” said a voice at
Dave’s shoulder. It was Captain Phelps who spoke.
“It’s great, sir,” the junior deck-hand replied.
“It is,” said the skipper; “but don’t you say that to a Melbourne
man. They have no harbor to speak of at Melbourne, and the two places
are powerfully jealous of one another. Sydney folk always start a
conversation with a stranger by saying ‘Have you seen our harbor?’
and if it happens to be a Melbourne man they’re talking to, he says,
‘Nature made your harbor――why don’t you build a decent town on it?’ All
the same, there’s many a time I’ve been thankful enough, when running
before a snorter, to creep into this refuge, and I dare say the time
will come when you’ll do the same after you get command. How are you
getting on with your studies, eh? You’ve a lot to learn before you can
hold a master’s certificate, you know.”
Dave had kept up his reading until his books were lost on the
_Kingfisher_, and he received a congratulatory word when he explained
to Captain Phelps how far he had progressed.
“That’s the style. Stick to it, youngster,” said the skipper, “and
you’ll be pacing the bridge before long.”
Tempest and Dave had renewed their wardrobe from the slop-chest, and
still had enough money to draw in wages to give them time to look about
when they got ashore. The first thing they did was to make inquiries
about the boat they expected to find running to the South Sea Islands,
and here they faced a disappointment. The company had only three
vessels engaged in the trade, and they usually left at intervals of
about six weeks. Two days before the _Neptune_ arrived at Sydney one
of the three had sailed, and so Dave and his companion found they
would have to spend forty or fifty days ashore waiting for the next
one, called the _Manihiki_, to depart. Long before then they would be
reduced to their last penny.
“Well, what do you suggest?” Dave asked.
“It seems to me,” Tempest replied, “that we shall be under the painful
necessity of working, not being millionaires, but the problem is, at
what? Some of the things I have seen men do ashore for a living would
certainly not suit my constitution, and I wouldn’t recommend them for
you.”
“We might sign on a coastal boat for a few weeks,” Dave suggested.
“Yes, and just when we want to be in Sydney find ourselves in some
out-of-the-way hole. You don’t know these Australian trading coasters
as I do, my son. They go when they want to and get back when they get
back if they don’t happen to pick up a chance cargo for somewhere else.
I know what would be good sport, as I did it myself once, about five
years ago.”
“What is that?”
“A kangaroo shooting trip. I went into the bush with an old hand at the
game, and we had a perfectly gorgeous time barring when a snake crept
over me while I was sleeping. Nice little fellow he was, all the colors
of the rainbow. I could see the colors perfectly, as the moon was
shining, and I took particular notice of him because only the previous
day I’d had his tribe described to me. The old kangaroo hunter had been
saying there wasn’t a snake in the bush that he really minded except
that sort, as once he had a partner who trod on one and tied himself
into seventeen different kinds of knots before he died, all in the
course of ten minutes.”
“Did you get any kangaroos?”
“Lots of ’em, and wallabys and things. We skinned the beasts and hung
the pelts on trees in a straight line so that we could find them all
again. We were in the bush about two months, and came back with all
the skins our pack horses could carry. I’d signed on as a sort of
supercargo for that trip, not being an expert shot, but I got a third
of the proceeds, which amounted to seventy pounds, or about three
hundred and fifty dollars in American money.”
“Let’s go kangaroo hunting,” Dave urged, hugely delighted at the
prospect of life in the bush. “I can’t shoot, but I can cook finely.”
Tempest grinned.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” he said. “You tell me where we can put our
hands on the price of horses and guns, and enough grub to last a couple
of months, and then find a kangaroo hunter who is willing to take us
along, and I’ll fix the trip up, sure enough.”
“Is that all!” Dave said resignedly. “It does look as though we shall
have to work. But, I say, why didn’t you go with your old partner
again?”
“Two reasons,” Tempest replied. “First, I know that somewhere in the
vast Australian bush that nice, colored little snake is still prowling
around if he hasn’t had a cold or measles or something that stopped him
from prowling evermore; and moreover, he has a few million cousins
and sisters and aunts, and I wouldn’t have one of them crawl over me
in the moonlight again for all the kangaroo pelts in the country. I
fancied I could feel the knots coming on――all the seventeen different
kinds――while he was peeking at me through his nasty little eyes. No,
siree, I like snakes――to keep away from me. The other reason why I
didn’t go back was because my old partner got it into his crazy head
to go gold mining, as there was a ‘rush’ in Western Australia just
then, and as he’d had some luck at it once he thought he would have
another try. I never heard how he came out, though, because when I drew
what I had coming I sold my horse and took a trip to Ceylon and back
on an Orient boat as a passenger, just to see what it felt like to be
really respectable again. Heigh-o, I landed back in this very port
with exactly one enormous appetite, two white flannel suits, and three
Australian pennies; and I had to take to cleaning trolley cars the same
afternoon or sleep on a seat in the park.”
“That’s a good idea,” Dave put in. “Couldn’t we do that for the next
six weeks?”
“What? Sleep in the park?” Tempest said, aghast.
“No. Clean trolley cars.”
“Not on your life,” replied Tempest, pulling a wry face. “It’s good,
honest work, but I’d rather spend the day cleaning out the bilges of
ships than cleaning cars. There doesn’t seem to be any romance about
those things. Let’s find accommodation for the present, and something
will turn up.”
They soon found a clean boarding house, not far from the harbor, and
most of the next two days was spent in sight-seeing. In the city itself
they found more than one opportunity of getting work, but they were
not desperately hard up, and Tempest scorned the idea of cleaning out
stables, while he positively refused to agree to Dave tackling the job
of elevator boy in a hotel.
“How do you think you’ll learn sailoring by shooting up and down an
elevator shaft all day?” he asked. “No, my son. Our business is the
sea. From now on we’ll haunt the docks till our chance comes. I would
rather be tarring the sides of a coal hulk than cleaning out stables.”
Work that would meet their requirements, however, was not easy to get.
Tempest, rather than go on loafing, started as a “lumper,” as the men
are called who load and unload ships. The vessel was laden with heavy
planks of wood, each of which had to be carried off on the shoulder and
deposited on a cart. The work was too hard for Dave to tackle. Tempest
was in perfect physical trim, but only an experienced “lumper” can
stand heavy beams of timber on his shoulder from morning till night.
The pad he wore soon cut through into the flesh, and by noon he had to
throw up the job.
“I’ll go back to that when I’m forced to, and not before,” he told
Dave, filling his pipe contentedly. “Sailoring is sailoring, and I
don’t mind anything that comes along to be done, even if the ship is
trying to stand on its head in a gale, but I do bar turning myself into
a perambulating steam winch.”
It was not merely the sheer hard work that Bruce Tempest objected to.
There is a traditional feeling among sailors that dock laboring is not
their job. Tempest disappeared several evenings in succession, saying
he was looking for work. In reality he was earning good money with
strenuous labor on those occasions, for funds to keep them going, but
it was his whim not to mention that fact to Dave. Although a good many
years the lad’s senior, he found Dave a congenial companion in many
ways, and was looking forward to the trip with him in the South Seas.
They had been in Sydney a week, and Dave and Tempest were walking
along the wharves when the boy happened to notice an extremely fat man
attempting the somewhat perilous feat of walking across a very narrow
gangway to a steam tug. The gangway consisted merely of a plank,
which had never been intended for traffic. The wind was blowing in
violent gusts, and the plank wobbled in alarming fashion when the fat
man reached the middle of it. Suddenly either his foot slipped, the
wobbling of the plank was too much for him, or a puff of wind upset his
balance.
Waving his arms like a windmill, and emitting a hoarse cry of alarm, he
toppled over, disappearing into the water.
The whole thing occurred in a few seconds, while Tempest was looking
in another direction. With a shout, Dave leaped forward, and arrived
at the side of the dock just as the fat man bobbed up to the surface
like a very animated cork. He splashed furiously and bellowed, but Dave
could see at a glance that the man was not able to swim a stroke.
Without pausing a second, he jumped off the pier, landing within a few
feet of the drowning man.
“Heave a line,” he shouted to Tempest; “then I can manage him all
right!”
Dave knew better than to let the heavy man in the water clutch him.
He took a couple of strokes forward and grabbed the back of the fat
man’s coat with one hand, keeping himself afloat with the other, while
Tempest bounded across the plank on to a tug. In less than half a
minute the boy heard a shout from his friend and saw a rope shoot out.
He grasped the end of it, and then, taking a firm hold of the fat man’s
arm, was drawn to the side of a dory.
“Jumping Cæsar!” spluttered the rescued man, when his paw had closed
on the “gun’le.” “Me, at my time of life, too! Now, young man, I’ll
trouble you and your friend to heave on me a bit. I’m not so thin as I
was. That’s better. Phew!”
He sat on a seat in the dory and regarded his saturated figure with a
quaint expression.
“Man and boy, I’ve followed the sea all my life,” he went on, “and
that’s the very first time I’ve been overboard. Wait till I climb on
board the _Mary Ellen_, and I’ll fire every soul there is on her!”
Two or three faces had appeared over the rail of the tug, but the
threat did not seem to create any dismay.
“You lubbers!” exclaimed the fat man, shaking his fist at the faces.
“Are ye all fast asleep, or is it that ye don’t care if your old
skipper goes to Davy Jones’s locker? I’ll have ye remember that besides
being skipper I’m part owner of this packet, and I’ll fire every man
Jack of ye for leaving it to a baby in long clothes to pull me out.”
“We didn’t hear nothing, Cap’n. We was all down below,” said a voice.
“Well, youngster,” said the corpulent skipper amiably, having
apparently forgotten his wrath, “I’ve got an account to settle with you
and your friend. Cap’n Grummitt isn’t hauled out of a dock every day of
his life. What can I do for ye, eh? Come on board, me hearties, and
wait till I change, else my wife will be nursing a pneumonia patient.
Ye’d better slip them wet things off, too. There will be something on
board for ye to wear till yours dry in the engine-room.”
Tempest lit his pipe and smoked placidly while the two were changing.
“Now,” said Captain Grummitt, emerging a few moments later in dry
garments, “ye can’t put thanks in the bank. What d’ye mean by hanging
around my ship, anyway?”
Good humor was now shining in his rubicund countenance.
“Looking for work,” Dave said quietly.
“And I don’t know that ye deserve it,” commented the skipper, “having
just done my wife out of her insurance money. Are ye both sailors?”
“Yes.”
“Well, if ye fancy the notion of knocking about on an old tug where
there’s nothing to do, as far as I can make out, but eat and draw your
pay, along with the laziest crew that ever drew breath, why don’t ye
come with me?”