Moran of the Lady Letty

“In the Marquesas Islands, you mean?” said Wilbur.

“Yessir, they’re queer game. When they ain’t tattoin’ theirselves with Scripture tex’s they git from the missionaries, they’re pullin’ out the hairs all over their bodies with two clam-shells. Hair by hair, y’ understan’?”

“Pull’n out ‘er hair?” said Wilbur, wondering what was the matter with his tongue.

“They think it’s clever—think the women folk like it.”

Wilbur had fancied that the little man had worn a brown sweater when they first met. But now, strangely enough, he was not in the least surprised to see it iridescent like a pigeon’s breast.

“Y’ ever been down that way?” inquired the little man next.

Wilbur heard the words distinctly enough, but somehow they refused to fit into the right places in his brain. He pulled himself together, frowning heavily.

“What—did—you—say?” he asked with great deliberation, biting off his words. Then he noticed that he and his companion were no longer in the barroom, but in a little room back of it. His personality divided itself. There was one Ross Wilbur—who could not make his hands go where he wanted them, who said one word when he thought another, and whose legs below the knee were made of solid lead. Then there was another Ross Wilbur—Ross Wilbur, the alert, who was perfectly clear-headed, and who stood off to one side and watched his twin brother making a monkey of himself, without power and without even the desire of helping him.

This latter Wilbur heard the iridescent sweater say:

“Bust me, if y’ a’n’t squiffy, old man. Stand by a bit an’ we’ll have a ball.”

“Can’t have got—return—exceptionally—and the round table—pull out hairs wi’ tu clamsh’ls,” gabbled Wilbur’s stupefied double; and Wilbur the alert said to himself: “You’re not drunk, Ross Wilbur, that’s certain; what could they have put in your cocktail?”

The iridescent sweater stamped twice upon the floor and a trap-door fell away beneath Wilbur’s feet like the drop of a gallows. With the eyes of his undrugged self Wilbur had a glimpse of water below. His elbow struck the floor as he went down, and he fell feet first into a Whitehall boat. He had time to observe two men at the oars and to look between the piles that supported the house above him and catch a glimpse of the bay and a glint of the Contra Costa shore. He was not in the least surprised at what had happened, and made up his mind that it would be a good idea to lie down in the boat and go to sleep.

Suddenly—but how long after his advent into the boat he could not tell—his wits began to return and settle themselves, like wild birds flocking again after a scare. Swiftly he took in the scene. The blue waters of the bay around him, the deck of a schooner on which he stood, the Whitehall boat alongside, and an enormous man with a face like a setting moon wrangling with his friend in the sweater—no longer iridescent.

“What do you call it?” shouted the red man. “I want able seamen—I don’t figger on working this boat with dancing masters, do I? We ain’t exactly doing quadrilles on my quarterdeck. If we don’t look out we’ll step on this thing and break it. It ain’t ought to be let around loose without its ma.”

“Rot that,” vociferated the brown sweater. “I tell you he’s one of the best sailor men on the front. If he ain’t we’ll forfeit the money. Come on, Captain Kitchell, we made show enough gettin’ away as it was, and this daytime business ain’t our line. D’you sign or not? Here’s the advance note. I got to duck my nut or I’ll have the patrol boat after me.”

“I’ll sign this once,” growled the other, scrawling his name on the note; “but if this swab ain’t up to sample, he’ll come back by freight, an’ I’ll drop in on mee dear friend Jim when we come back and give him a reel nice time, an’ you can lay to that, Billy Trim.” The brown sweater pocketed the note, went over the side, and rowed off.

Wilbur stood in the waist of a schooner anchored in the stream well off Fisherman’s wharf. In the forward part of the schooner a Chinaman in brown duck was mixing paint. Wilbur was conscious that he still wore his high hat and long coat, but his stick was gone and one gray glove was slit to the button. In front of him towered the enormous red-faced man. A pungent reek of some kind of rancid fat or oil assailed his nostrils. Over by Alcatraz a ferry-boat whistled for its slip as it elbowed its way through the water.

Wilbur had himself fairly in hand by now. His wits were all about him; but the situation was beyond him as yet.

“Git for’d,” commanded the big man.

Wilbur drew himself up, angry in an instant. “Look here,” he began, “what’s the meaning of this business? I know I’ve been drugged and mishandled. I demand to be put ashore. Do you understand that?”

“Angel child,” whimpered the big man. “Oh, you lilee of the vallee, you bright an’ mornin’ star. I’m reely pained y’know, that your vally can’t come along, but we’ll have your piano set up in the lazarette. It gives me genuine grief, it do, to see you bein’ obliged to put your lilee white feet on this here vulgar an’ dirtee deck. We’ll have the Wilton carpet down by to-morrer, so we will, my dear. Yah-h!” he suddenly broke out, as his rage boiled over. “Git for’d, d’ye hear! I’m captain of this here bathtub, an’ that’s all you need to know for a good while to come. I ain’t generally got to tell that to a man but once; but I’ll stretch the point just for love of you, angel child. Now, then, move!”

Wilbur stood motionless—puzzled beyond expression. No experience he had ever been through helped in this situation.

“Look here,” he began, “I—”

The captain knocked him down with a blow of one enormous fist upon the mouth, and while he was yet stretched upon the deck kicked him savagely in the stomach. Then he allowed him to rise, caught him by the neck and the slack of his overcoat, and ran him forward to where a hatchway, not two feet across, opened in the deck. Without ado, he flung him down into the darkness below; and while Wilbur, dizzied by the fall, sat on the floor at the foot of the vertical companion-ladder, gazing about him with distended eyes, there rained down upon his head, first an oilskin coat, then a sou’wester, a pair of oilskin breeches, woolen socks, and a plug of tobacco. Above him, down the contracted square of the hatch, came the bellowing of the Captain’s voice:

“There’s your fit-out, Mister Lilee of the Vallee, which the same our dear friend Jim makes a present of and no charge, because he loves you so. You’re allowed two minutes to change, an’ it is to be hoped as how you won’t force me to come for to assist.”

It would have been interesting to have followed, step by step, the mental process that now took place in Ross Wilbur’s brain. The Captain had given him two minutes in which to change. The time was short enough, but even at that Wilbur changed more than his clothes during the two minutes he was left to himself in the reekind dark of the schooner’s fo’castle. It was more than a change—it was a revolution. What he made up his mind to do—precisely what mental attitude he decided to adopt, just what new niche he elected wherein to set his feet, it is difficult to say. Only by results could the change be guessed at. He went down the forward hatch at the toe of Kitchell’s boot—silk-hatted, melton-overcoated, patent-booted, and gloved in suedes. Two minutes later there emerged upon the deck a figure in oilskins and a sou’wester. There was blood upon the face of him and the grime of an unclean ship upon his bare hands. It was Wilbur, and yet not Wilbur. In two minutes he had been, in a way, born again. The only traces of his former self were the patent-leather boots, still persistent in their gloss and shine, that showed grim incongruity below the vast compass of the oilskin breeches.

As Wilbur came on deck he saw the crew of the schooner hurrying forward, six of them, Chinamen every one, in brown jeans and black felt hats. On the quarterdeck stood the Captain, barking his orders.

“Consider the Lilee of the Vallee,” bellowed the latter, as his eye fell upon Wilbur the Transformed. “Clap on to that starboard windlass brake, sonny.”

Wilbur saw the Chinamen ranging themselves about what he guessed was the windlass in the schooner’s bow. He followed and took his place among them, grasping one of the bars.

“Break down!” came the next order. Wilbur and the Chinamen obeyed, bearing up and down upon the bars till the slack of the anchor-chain came home and stretched taut and dripping from the hawse-holes.

“‘Vast heavin’!”

And then as Wilbur released the brake and turned about for the next order, he cast his glance out upon the bay, and there, not a hundred and fifty yards away, her spotless sails tense, her cordage humming, her immaculate flanks slipping easily through the waves, the water hissing and churning under her forefoot, clean, gleaming, dainty, and aristocratic, the Ridgeways’ yacht “Petrel” passed like a thing of life. Wilbur saw Nat Ridgeway himself at the wheel. Girls in smart gowns and young fellows in white ducks and yachting caps—all friends of his—crowded the decks. A little orchestra of musicians were reeling off a quickstep.

The popping of a cork and a gale of talk and laughter came to his ears. Wilbur stared at the picture, his face devoid of expression. The “Petrel” came on—drew nearer—was not a hundred feet away from the schooner’s stern. A strong swimmer, such as Wilbur, could cover the distance in a few strides. Two minutes ago Wilbur might have—

“Set your mains’l,” came the bellow of Captain Kitchell. “Clap on to your throat and peak halyards.”

The Chinamen hurried aft.

Wilbur followed.

II. A NAUTICAL EDUCATION

In the course of the next few moments, while the little vessel was being got under way, and while the Ridgeways’ “Petrel” gleamed off into the blue distance, Wilbur made certain observations.

The name of the boat on which he found himself was the “Bertha Millner.” She was a two-topmast, 28-ton keel schooner, 40 feet long, carrying a large spread of sail—mainsail, foresail, jib, flying-jib, two gaff-topsails, and a staysail. She was very dirty and smelt abominably of some kind of rancid oil. Her crew were Chinamen; there was no mate. But the cook—himself a Chinaman—who appeared from time to time at the door of the galley, a potato-masher in his hand, seemed to have some sort of authority over the hands. He acted in a manner as a go-between for the Captain and the crew, sometimes interpreting the former’s orders, and occasionally giving one of his own.

Wilbur heard the Captain address him as Charlie. He spoke pigeon English fairly. Of the balance of the crew—the five Chinamen—Wilbur could make nothing. They never spoke, neither to Captain Kitchell, to Charlie, nor to each other; and for all the notice they took of Wilbur he might easily have been a sack of sand. Wilbur felt that his advent on the “Bertha Millner” was by its very nature an extraordinary event; but the absolute indifference of these brown-suited Mongols, the blankness of their flat, fat faces, the dulness of their slanting, fishlike eyes that never met his own or even wandered in his direction, was uncanny, disquieting. In what strange venture was he now to be involved, toward what unknown vortex was this new current setting, this current that had so suddenly snatched him from the solid ground of his accustomed life?

He told himself grimly that he was to have a free cruise up the bay, perhaps as far as Alviso; perhaps the “Bertha Millner” would even make the circuit of the bay before returning to San Francisco. He might be gone a week. Wilbur could already see the scare-heads of the daily papers the next morning, chronicling the disappearance of “One of Society’s Most Popular Members.”

“That’s well, y’r throat halyards. Here, Lilee of the Vallee, give a couple of pulls on y’r peak halyard purchase.”

Wilbur stared at the Captain helplessly.

“No can tell, hey?” inquired Charlie from the galley. “Pullum disa lope, sabe?”

Wilbur tugged at the rope the cook indicated.

“That’s well, y’r peak halyard purchase,” chanted Captain Kitchell.

Wilbur made the rope fast. The mainsail was set, and hung slatting and flapping in the wind. Next the for’sail was set in much the same manner, and Wilbur was ordered to “lay out on the ji’boom and cast the gaskets off the jib.” He “lay out” as best he could and cast off the gaskets—he knew barely enough of yachting to understand an order here and there—and by the time he was back on the fo’c’sle head the Chinamen were at the jib halyard and hoisting away.

“That’s well, y’r jib halyards.”

The “Bertha Millner” veered round and played off to the wind, tugging at her anchor.

“Man y’r windlass.”