Ainslee's Magazine, February 1913 — page 76: what you’re looking at

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

66 But in spite of his age, the men at Tamale Tom’s who had served under him in better days knew that Joshua Nixon was still the most conscientious of officers afloat, and the most persistent besieger of shipping offices ashore— where, alas! he had latterly spent most of his time. And if, of late, he had reason to regret the days when he wore smartly brass-edged uniforms and com- manded trim freighters, he refrained from recalling them, just as he re- frained from mourning audibly over the heart-breaking monotony of the re- plies of “Nothing to-day!” that filled his hours along the water front. Tamale Tom and the big Swede watched him from the window until he disappeared, with energetic strides, among the warehouses, Then they turned, shaking their heads sympa- thetically, to the more immediate prob- lem of the Cherub. “And whose little gel are you, any- way?” asked Tamale Tom, sinking his huge bulk into the window seat. “Uncle Josh’s little girl,’ replied the Cherub promptly. “Where he git you?’ demanded Jen- sen. “Out of the water,’ replied the Cherub, with convincing candor. “He’s taking me back to papa.” “Whar your pap live?” asked Tamale Tom. “At our house,’ the Cherub re- sponded, after cogitation. “But some- times he lives on a ship like Uncle Josh.” The men exchanged glances and shook their heads again. “De cap’s had her down to Caracas and back,’ said Tamale Tom. ‘Looks to me like it’s been some shanghai job.” He held out a huge hand to the ex- pectant Cherub, and led the way down- stairs. In the little girl’s eyes, Tamale Tom was a hero of delight. The power of his fist and the scars on his face gained in the quelling of many a rough-house afloat and ashore, combined with his ap- pearance of gorillalike ferocity, and his command of strange tongues, to make him altogether a fairy-tale character. AINSLEE’S The Cherub gleefully accompanied him to the yard of what he euphe- mistically described as his “hotel,” where she clung tenaciously to his coat while he proceeded to enroll strike breakers for shipment to Bridgehaven. This was a process that the Cherub found of endless interest, for on these occasions Tom sat humped over a lit- tle desk, handing out advance notes on their pay to a line of as varicolored and hard-shelled a gang of potential cutthroats as ever sought to take the places of striking dock laborers. The provision of such forces was a regular business with Tamale Tom, and he conducted it profitably by an oft- demonstrated readiness to enforce his contracts by the strong arm. The Cherub had seen him through the door of the day room seize his stool by a leg and put to flight a gang of strikers bent on trouble, and, with a child’s de- light in physical prowess and general calamity, she wanted to see him do it again. : Fortune decreed, however, that the militant section of strikers should be engaged at that particular moment in an attack on the men who had taken their own places, and they could spare no time to aid their fellows in Bridge- haven. But the Chicola did not sail un- til the evening, and Tom anticipated an anxious time before his polyglot cargo was delivered f. 0. b. according to his agreement. Until the strike breakers were on board the Chicola, Tom had not earned his money, and there were rumors that emissaries of the Bridge- haven strikers were on the water front for the purpose. of stampeding them. That port. was the real center of the struggle, and dynamite was not the most desperate of the methods em- ployed by the strikers there to gain their ends. Tom felt, as he concluded the signing on of his men, that there was something sinister in the fact that he was allowed to do so without molestation, and color was presently lent to this theory by a policeman who had been marshaling the queue outside the yard, who shouldered his way in and advised Tom in a whis- CEO MUCE OOK (F@)