Adventure, July 1, 1928 — page 77: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

THE ROARING HORN 71 having naught but the generally ragged clothes in which they stood and shivered. Others possessed a few rotten “‘slops” that had perhaps one time belonged to sailors now dead and had been foisted upon them by shore harpies. Nearly all were stony broke. The boarding masters and Bowery doggeries had seen to that! Some seasick, others with “‘hangovers” from having been recently three sheets in the wind, on bootleg, a miserable gang they stood there shuffling on the snow slushed deck, growling and cursing to themselves. Unshaven and grimy faces, foul teeth, rum bleared eyes—as an en- semble of human ugliness, a fine picture! Captain Bohannon addressed them from the break of the poop. His words were few, but pithy. “You sons o’ sculpins, listen to me! Some o’ you never been off soundin’s and don’t know deepwater law, mebbe. So I’m tellin’ you. I’ve washed my face and hands in a bucket o” sea water and by that token land law and all is left behind. I’m the whole sea breeze, now; the full sail and the double reef, all in one, and you ain’t thumb high to a flatfish! Get me? If any o’ you cockabaloos got any contrary notions, don’t try ’em aboard me, or I’ll come across rugged and you'll damn’ soon find the wind took out of your sails, entire. I’m ridin’ this one, and you can lay to that, solid! That’s all, and that’s enough!” Having said which, Bohannon turned and went below for still another glass of grog. HE MATES, on whom devolved the duty of choosing watches, eyed askance their bewildered and booze fuddled raw material. ‘Damn’ few lobscousers we got in this lot, I’m thinkin’,’’ remarked Peter Mayes. Second mate, he; a black Liverpool Irish- man, short and bowlegged; a hard and accurate hitter with belaying pin or fist. “Good thing we got a cat aboard, even a dirty alley cat, for a mascot. Sure, we'll be needin’ one!”’ “Great gang o’ farmers, all right,” as- sented Furlong. ‘Even if most of ’em wasn’t still beered up, carryin’ cargo, they wouldn’t know the truck from the kelson, “Bout all the seamanship they got is to know block an’ fall booze when they see it, drink it, walk a block, an’ fall. But we'll make ’em into proper shellbacks, you can bet an’ risk it! We'll learn ’em or we'll kill ’em, by God!” Thus spake William Furlong, first mate of the China Girl. A six foot six, red headed man mauler was Furlong, with a countenance rendered even more sinister by a bullet wound on the left cheek. He had got that wound in a savage mu- tiny some twenty years agone off the coast of Sumatra. The bullet had stopped in his mouth, after having knocked out two teeth. He had spat the bullet into his hand just before having, with his naked fists, killed the mutineer who had fired it. Ever since that day the nickname “Lead- spitter” had clung to him. The wound had puckered in such a wise as to draw his lip into a perpetual snarl. Even in his calm moods, which were few, Furlong. looked as if about to commit homicide. Now his snarl revealed carious teeth as he repeated— ‘“‘We’ll learn ’em seamanship, by God, or we'll kill ’em!” “Hell of a gang o’ haymakers to take a ship round old Cape Stiff!’ commented the boatswain. Anthony Saltash his name was and by birth a P. I. That name and his long seafaring had given him a monicker less printable than accurate, usually with the adjective “old” prefixed. And a real old salt he was, for all his seventy odd years; tough as pigiron, well dusted by weather and wind, a barnacle from heel to head. Now as he stood there, a squab figured oldster in knee boots, reefer and peaked cap, he sorrily surveyed the crew. “A healthy lot, the body bulk of ’em,” he appraised, “but they'll be healthier afore we're through up wid ’em, or dead!” And he worried at his stringy gray mus- tache. “Turnpikers!” “Ain’t above half a dozen sailormen comnlicloooks.com