THE MATE’S YARN.
Mr. Brown was soliloquizing.
“Nothing so bad as fire at sea,” said he. “Take any typical case. The
old man thinks he can fight it down and so do most of his crew. And so
they let it run on till it’s too late, and then it’s all off.
“I was on a coal ship once, Frisco to Hong-kong. Fire started in the
bunkers in mid-Pacific. We passed two or three ships while it was still
smoldering and you could smell the coal gas a mile away.
“Think the old man would call for help? Not much. If he did, his owners
would have jumped him for costing them salvage money! That’s another
reason so many ships sink and are burned,” he added in parenthesis.
“Well, sir, that old fire went from bad to worse. The crew had to berth
aft and the decks,—she was a steel ship,—began to get so hot that you
had to walk pussy-footed on ’em. But still the old man wouldn’t quit.
“‘If we only get a wind,’ he says, ‘I’ll bring her into port even if she
busts up when we tie to the dock.’
“‘If you get a wind,’ says I, ‘you won’t have to wait fer that. She’ll
go skyrocketing without any by your leave or thank you.’
“‘Pshaw, Brown, you’re nervous!’ says he.
“‘Of course I am,’ says I; ‘who wouldn’t be, going to sea with a
bloomin’ stove full of red-hot coals under their boots, instead of a
good wholesome ship? Keel-haul me if ever I sail again with coal,’ says
I.
“Things goes along this way for about two weeks, and then comes the
grand bust-up. We couldn’t eat, we couldn’t sleep, we could hardly
breathe.
“‘Get out the boats,’ says the old man at last, as if he’d made up his
mind that it was really time to get away.
“Well, sir, to see the way those bullies jumped for the boats you’d have
thought there was pocket money in every one of ’em, or a prize put up by
the old man to see who’d be overboard first.
“We got away, all right, the skipper last, of course. But he had to go
below to save his pet parrot. He’d just about reached the deck,
when—confusion!—up she goes.
“The whole blows up sky high and the skipper with it. One of the men
said he had stopped to light his pipe, and the flame of the match
touched off all that gas. But I dunno just how that might be. Anyhow,
for quite a while we could see that old skipper sailing up to
heaven,—’twas the only way he’d ever get there, I heard one of the men
say. Then down he comes, kerplunk!
“It was a hard job for us in the boat to reckernize him. You see, he’d
had a fine, full beard when he went up, but he come down clean shaved!
And the parrot,—well, sir, that parrot looked like a ship without a
rudder. Its gum-gasted tail had followed the skipper’s whiskers into
oblivion,—as Shakespeare says. Well, we got him into the boat, and two
days after we were picked up, but neither the skipper nor the parrot
were ever the same man or the same bird again.”
At the conclusion of this touching narrative, Jack saw fit to put a
question.
“By the way, what was the name of that ship, Mr. Brown?” he asked
mischievously.
“The name?” asked Mr. Brown, with a twinkle in his eyes.
“Yes, I’d like to look that craft up.”
“Well, sir, I’ll not deceive you,” said Mr. Brown. “Her name was the
_Whatawhopper_. It’s an Injun name, they tell me, but gracious, I don’t
know anything about those matters! We had on board, besides the coal, a
cargo of beans,—took ’em on at Boston,—but they got wet and swelled and
we thought——”
But this was too much even for Jack.
“Mr. Brown, you’ve missed your vocation,” he said.
“How’s that?” inquired the mate with a serious face.
“You should have been a novelist,” laughed Jack. “With your imagination,
you’d have made a fortune.”
“Well, I’ll never make one at sea, that’s one sure thing,” said Mr.
Brown, with a conviction born of experience.
The crew managed the boat silently. They were cheered by Mr. Brown’s
extensive vocabulary and picturesque speech, and stuck to their duties
like real seamen.
As time passed, however, and there was not a sign of boats on the sea,
and the sparkling water danced emptily under the burning sun, some of
the crew become restive.
“Aw, you cawn’t moike me believe there’s a bloomin’ thing in this bally
wireless,” muttered a British sailor. “It’s awl a bloomin’ bit of spoof,
that’s what it is, moites. We moight as well go a choising the ghost of
Admiral Nelson as be chivvying arter this old crawft.”
His attitude toward wireless was typical of that of most sailors, and it
may be added—some landsmen!
Their intelligence appears to balk at grasping the idea of an electric
wave being volleyed through space, although they accept hearing and
eyesight,—dependent, both of them, on sound and sight waves,—as an
everyday fact.
Jack felt like giving a little lecture on wireless right then and there.
It nettled him to think that the wonderful invention which has done so
much to render sea-travel safe, accounts of which appear in the columns
of the newspapers every day, should be belittled by the very men who
owed so much to it.
“But what’s the use,” thought he. “It would only be wasted breath. But
if everyone could know it as I do, the world would be full of wireless
enthusiasts; and then what a job we’d have picking up messages!”
But as they sailed on and no sign of any boats appeared, even Jack’s
faith began to waver.
Could the message have been a hoax?
Such things, incredible as they may seem, have been known. The sailors
began to look at him derisively.
“I guess that kid dreamed that stuff about the bird cage aloft,”
muttered one. “It stands to reason there ain’t no way of sending
messages without wires. You might as well try to eat food without a
thing on yer plate!”
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