FullReads

Obed’s yarn being done, and friend Davidson done too, and brown at that, Peter T. passed around another relay of cigars and we lit up. ‘Twas Cap’n Eri that spoke first.

“Love’s a queer disease, anyway,” says he. “Ain’t it, now? ‘Twould puzzle you and me to figger out what that Saunders girl see to like in the Davidson critter. It must be a dreadful responsible thing to be so fascinating. I never felt that responsibleness but once–except when I got married, of course–and that was a good many years ago, when I was going to sea on long v’yages, and was cruising around the East Indies, in the latitude of our new troubles, the Philippines.

“I put in about three months on one of them little coral islands off that way once. Hottest corner in the Lord’s creation, I cal’late, and the laziest and sleepiest hole ever I struck. All a feller feels like doing in them islands is just to lay on his back under a palm tree all day and eat custard-apples, and such truck.

“Way I come to be there was like this: I was fo’mast hand on a Boston hooker bound to Singapore after rice. The skipper’s name was Perkins, Malachi C. Perkins, and he was the meanest man that ever wore a sou’-wester. I’ve had the pleasure of telling him so sence–’twas in Surinam ‘long in ’72. Well, anyhow, Perkins fed us on spiled salt junk and wormy hard-tack all the way out, and if a feller dast to hint that the same wa’n’t precisely what you’d call Parker House fare, why the skipper would knock him down with a marline-spike and the first mate would kick him up and down the deck. ‘Twan’t a pretty performance to look at, but it beat the world for taking the craving for fancy cooking out of a man.

“Well, when I got to Singapore I was nothing but skin and bone, and considerable of the skin had been knocked off by the marline-spike and the mate’s boots. I’d shipped for the v’yage out and back, but the first night in port I slipped over the side, swum ashore, and never set eyes on old Perkins again till that time in Surinam, years afterward.

“I knocked round them Singapore docks for much as a month, hoping to get a berth on some other ship, but ‘twan’t no go. I fell in with a Britisher named Hammond, ‘Ammond, he called it, and as he was on the same hunt that I was, we kept each other comp’ny. We done odd jobs now ‘n’ again, and slept in sailors’ lodging houses when we had the price, and under bridges or on hemp bales when we hadn’t. I was too proud to write home for money, and Hammond didn’t have no home to write to, I cal’late.

“But luck ‘ll turn if you give it time enough. One night Hammond come hurrying round to my sleeping-room–that is to say, my hemp bale–and gives me a shake, and says he:

“‘Turn out, you mud ‘ead, I’ve got you a berth.’

“‘Aw, go west!’ says I, and turned over to go to sleep again. But he pulled me off the bale by the leg, and that woke me up so I sensed what he was saying. Seems he’d found a feller that wanted to ship a couple of fo’mast hands on a little trading schooner for a trip over to the Java Sea.

“Well, to make a long story short, we shipped with this feller, whose name was Lazarus. I cal’late if the Lazarus in Scriptur’ had been up to as many tricks and had come as nigh being a thief as our Lazarus was, he wouldn’t have been so poor. Ourn was a shrewd rascal and nothing more nor less than a pearl poacher. He didn’t tell us that till after we sot sail, but we was so desperate I don’t know as ‘twould have made much diff’rence if he had.