The Lord only knows what trouble you’ll be in when this gets to
China. My advice is to quit it and come home. I’m worried about
you. Bill Maguire has rounded to, understand? His busted main hatch
sort of mended itself by degrees. He had symptoms before you left,
and you ought to have waited, but I suppose you can’t help being
young and Irish.
He was terrible melancholy at first, and he ain’t real spry yet. I
found his wife and little girl for him in Baltimore, and made them
come on here. You guessed right about the wax doll. I bought the
darndest, biggest one I could find. Bill feels that the family is
living on my charity, and being morbid and down-hearted, he frets a
whole lot about being broke and stranded. He’ll be no good to go to
sea again. It gives him the shivers to talk about it. I don’t need
him as a farm-hand in the winter, and as for having his wife as a
steady house-keeper, I’m fussy and set in my ways.
Bill got up against an awful bad combination in China. I won’t tell
you where it was, for I don’t want you to find it. Maybe you’ll run
across a man named McDougal out there. He was with Bill when they
got in trouble. Bill saw a chance to get away in the night, but he
stood the crowd off somehow to give McDougal leeway to join him.
And this McDougal lit out with never a thought for Bill. There was
something wrong with McDougal, as I figure it out. Maybe he was a
good man, but here was one time when he fell down on his job. None
of us say much about it, Captain Mike, but we all pray we won’t get
caught that way. You know what I mean. We’re afraid there may be a
weak spot in us that we don’t know is there until we have to face
the music. Anyhow, as I gather from Bill, McDougal was a quitter.
If I know anything about men, he has wished a hundred times since
that he had stayed to take his medicine with Bill. We would a heap
sight rather see you come home alive than to go monkeying with
the Painted Joss. Nothing much has happened except a dry spell in
August and corn and potatoes set back. Hens are laying well.
Your friend,
J. KENT.
Captain O’Shea chuckled and then became thoughtful. Paddy Blake and
McDougal. Charley Tong Sin and the wreck of the _Whang Ho_. Wang-Li-Fu
and the terrible Chung. Much can happen within the space of a few weeks
to a man that will seek the long trail. Presently he took from his
leather bill-book several slips of paper which he had received from the
Yokohama Specie Bank in exchange for his gold bars and silver “shoes.”
After making sundry calculations with a pencil, he said to himself:
“The share of Jim Eldridge, alias Bill Maguire, is nine thousand
eight hundred and sixty-two dollars and eleven cents, and ’tis here
all ship-shape in two drafts on New York. My piece of the loot is the
same. But the red-headed sailorman will never be the lad he was, and he
should not be worried by the lack of money to live on. And could any
money pay for what he went through? ’Tis easy to know what I should do.
I will not take a cent of the plunder. My share I will give to Bill,
and with his bit of it he will be comfortably fixed.”
An expression of boyish satisfaction brightened his resolute features
as he added:
“A man would be ashamed to take money for such a pleasant vacation as
this one has been. Now, I will send a cable message to Bill Maguire and
it will cheer him a lot. His account is squared. And I think I have put
a crimp in _The Sect of the Fatal Obligation_.”