FullReads

The big Texan read it through carefully, handed it back without a comment or word of sympathy, and then, with a glance around him, as if in fear of being overheard, asked:

“Can you keep your nerve in a mix-up?”

“Do you mean a fight?” queried the Actor.

“Maybe.”

“I don’t like fights–never did.” Anything that would imperil his safe return was to be avoided.

“I neither–but sometimes you’ve got to. Are you handy with a gun?”

“Why?”

“Nothing–I’m only asking.”

Carhart, the Man-Who-Knew-It-All, here lounged over from his seat by the table and dropped into a chair beside them, cutting short his reply. The Texan gave a significant look at the Actor, enforcing his silence, and then buried his face in a newspaper a month old.

Carhart spread his legs, tilted his head back on the chair, slanted his stiff-brim hat until it made a thatch for his nose, and began one of his customary growls: to the room–to the drenched port-holes–to the brim of his hat; as a half-asleep dog sometimes does when things have gone wrong with him–or he dreams they have.

“This ship reminds me of another old tramp, the Persia,” he drawled. “Same scrub crew and same cut of a Captain. Hadn’t been for two of the passengers and me, we’d never got anywhere. Had a fire in the lower hold in a lot of turpentine, and when they put that out we found her cargo had shifted and she was down by the head about six feet. Then the crew made a rush for the boats and left us with only four leaky ones to go a thousand miles. They’d taken ’em all, hadn’t been for me and another fellow who stood over them with a gun.”

The Bum Actor raised his eyes.

“What happened then?” he asked in a nervous voice.

“Oh, we pitched in and righted things and got into port at last. But the Captain was no good; he’d a-left with the crew if we’d let him.”

“Is the shifting of a cargo a serious matter?” continued the Actor. “This is my second crossing and I’m not much up on such things.”

“Depends on the weather,” interpolated a passenger.

“And on how she’s stowed,” continued Car-hart. “I’ve been mistrusting this ship ain’t plumb on her keel. You can tell that from the way she falls off after each wave strikes her. I have been out on deck looking things over and she seems to me to be down by the stern more than she ought.”

“Maybe she’ll be lighter when more coal gets out of her,” suggested another passenger.

“Yes, but she’s listed some to starboard. I watched her awhile this morning. She ain’t loaded right, or she’s loaded wrong,-purpose. That occurs sometimes with a gang of striking stevedores.”

The noon whistle blew and the talk ended with the setting of everybody’s watch, except the Bum Actor’s, whose timepiece decorated a shop-window in the Bowery.

*****

That night one of those uncomfortable rumors, started doubtless by Carhart’s talk, shivered through the ship, its vibrations even reaching the widow lying awake in her cabin. This said that some hundreds of barrels of turpentine had broken loose and were smashing everything below. If any one of them rolled into the furnaces an explosion would follow which would send them all to eternity. That this absurdity was immediately denied by the purser, who asserted with some vehemence that there was not a gallon of turpentine aboard, did not wholly allay the excitement, nor did it stifle the nervous anxiety which had now taken possession of the passengers.

As the day wore on several additional rumors joined those already extant. One was dropped in the ear of the Texan by the Bum Actor as the two stood on the upper deck watching the sea, which was rapidly falling.

“I got so worried I thought I’d go down into the engine room myself,” he whispered. “I’m just back. Something’s wrong down there, or I’m mistaken. I wish you’d go and find out. I knew that turpentine yarn was a lie, but I wanted to be sure, so I thought I’d ask one of the stokers who had come up for a little air. He was about to answer me when the Chief Engineer came down from the bridge, where he had been talking to the Captain, and ordered the man below before he had time to fill his lungs. I waited a little while, hoping he or some of the crew would come up again, and then I went down the ladder myself. When I got to the first landing I came bump up against the Chief Engineer. He was standing in the gangway fooling with a revolver he had in his hand as if he’d been cleaning it. ‘I’ll have to ask you to get back where you came from,’ he said. ‘This ain’t no place for passengers’–and up I came. What do you think it means? I’d get ugly, too, if he kept me in that heat and never let me get a whiff of air. I tell you, that’s an awful place down there. Suppose you go and take a look. Your knowing the Captain might make some difference.”