Adventure, July 1, 1928 — page 80: what you’re looking at

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

74 GEORGE ALLAN ENGLAND outline took form, of what must have. happened. He recalled having left his own ship, the steamer Lyndon Castle, lying at Pier 89, East River. That had been at night; but what night, how long ago, he could not tell. Somewhere at the back of his mind, uncertain memories wove. He seemed to have approached a subway station, with purpose to go uptown to a movie. Then—but though film flickers palely irradiated the dark places of his mind, nothing grew coherent there. He rubbed his wounded head, once more. “Batted me!” he growled. ‘Took me abaft, all right. And maybe dosed me with knockout drops into the bargain. I wouldn’t so much mind being capsized in a fair fight, but this! Well, by the mighty typhoon, somebody’s going to pay for this, that’s sure!” SE unsteady on his legs—hard- muscled through the dirty and ragged dungarees that now encased them instead of the trim blue he last re- called having worn—he made his way aft. His gait, for all its weakness, revealed him as a sailor. Only a sailor meets the deep sea roll under his boots as he met it. He passed the galley, the sailmaker’s and boatswain’s quarters and the carpenter’s shop, all in the forward house on which a boat lay bottom up. Purposeful was his going. No one gave him any heed. Two or three raynicks were sweeping, clumsily coiling braces. A couple of the more experienced, with greenhorns to help them and be cursed, were busy lashing spare spars that lay along the deck. Why should any notice him? Dirt and misery, were they not too common aboard the China Girl to excite even a passing glance? With the walk and set up of a true deep waterman, hesteadfastly kepton. Instinc- tively he cast an eye aloft. He saw a few men—the best, these—placing crows’ nests or pudding bags on the mainstay, forestays and crosstree horns. “Getting the bagwrinkle on her, he?” thought he, and knew it prophesied a long passage. The ship, he sensed, was dingy and ill found, with slovenly Irish pennants flickering from her gear aloft, and Geordie patches spotting her canvas. Nothing truiy shipshape and Bristol fashion here! Yet, outraged and suffering though he was, still something stirred within him; some recognition of the beauty of mast and sail that not even time’s decay and the neglect of man had quite been able to obliterate. Loftily sparred, built on graceful models of old days, the ship still met her ancient comrades, wind and sea, with something of her one time joyance. The shanghaied man breathed now more deeply as with rucked up hair and smoldering eyes he trod the scarred, foul deck. He passed the main hatch, came abreast of the main fiferail, and still pro- ceeded aft. There, all at once, a harsh voice hailed him: “Here, you! Where the devil you goin’ ?”’ The man stopped short, peered from beneath contracting brows. He saw a huge, red headed, lumbering figure with a scarred cheek, advancing upon him from the weather side of the big iron watertank just abaft the after hatch. ““Heave to, there! Where you goin’?”’ “Going?” the shanghaied man _ re- peated the word. “Going aft, sir.” “What for?” was Leadspitter’s sum- mary question. “I want a word with the captain, sir.” “Oh, you do, do you? Well, this ain’t no time for questions. Get along forrard!” The eyes of the shanghaied man com- menced to glower in his head. For a moment silence fell, silence save for the thudding swish of waters along the hull, the muffled plaints of the old ship’s creak- ing in the seaway. Into that silence shocked seven metallic clangs struck by the wry leg Newfoundlander at the wheel, followed by seven from the bell stand at the break of the forecastle head—seven bells of the afternoon watch. Leadspitter ordered again: “Get along forrard, I tell you! This comnlicloooks.com