Michael, Brother of Jerry

J >> Jack London >> Michael, Brother of Jerry


"Steward," Nishikanta said, "go below and pack my bedding. I'll take
care of the rest."

"Mr. Nishikanta, you can go to hell, sir, and all the rest as well," was
Daughtry's quiet response, although in the same breath he was saying,
respectfully and assuringly, to the Ancient Mariner: "You hold Killeny,
sir. I'll take care of your dunnage. Is there anything special you want
to save, sir?"

Jackson joined the four men below, and as the five of them, in haste and
trepidation, packed articles of worth and comfort, the _Mary Turner_ was
struck again. Caught below without warning, all were flung fiercely to
port and from Simon Nishikanta's room came wailing curses of announcement
of the hurt to his ribs against his bunk-rail. But this was drowned by a
prodigious smashing and crashing on deck.

"Kindling wood--there won't be anything else left of her," Captain Doane
commented in the ensuing calm, as he crept gingerly up the companionway
with his chronometer cuddled on an even keel to his breast.

Placing it in the custody of a sailor, he returned below and was helped
up with his sea-chest by the steward. In turn, he helped the steward up
with the Ancient Mariner's sea-chest. Next, aided by anxious sailors, he
and Daughtry dropped into the lazarette through the cabin floor, and
began breaking out and passing up a stream of supplies--cases of salmon
and beef, of marmalade and biscuit, of butter and preserved milk, and of
all sorts of the tinned, desiccated, evaporated, and condensed stuff that
of modern times goes down to the sea in ships for the nourishment of men.

Daughtry and the captain emerged last from the cabin, and both stared
upward for a moment at the gaps in the slender, sky-scraping top-hamper,
where, only minutes before, the main- and mizzen-topmasts had been. A
second moment they devoted to the wreckage of the same on deck--the
mizzen-topmast, thrust through the spanker and supported vertically by
the stout canvas, thrashing back and forth with each thrash of the sail,
the main-topmast squarely across the ruined companionway to the steerage.

While the mother-whale expressing her bereavement in terms of violence
and destruction, was withdrawing the necessary distance for another
charge, all hands of the _Mary Turner_ gathered about the starboard boat
swung outboard ready for lowering. A respectable hill of case goods,
water-kegs, and personal dunnage was piled on the deck alongside. A
glance at this, and at the many men of fore and aft, demonstrated that it
was to be a perilously overloaded boat.

"We want the sailors with us, at any rate--they can row," said Simon
Nishikanta.

"But do we want you?" Grimshaw queried gloomily. "You take up too much
room, for your size, and you're a beast anyway."

"I guess I'll be wanted," the pawnbroker observed, as he jerked open his
shirt, tearing out the four buttons in his impetuousness and showing a
Colt's .44 automatic, strapped in its holster against the bare skin of
his side under his left arm, the butt of the weapon most readily
accessible to any hasty dip of his right hand. "I guess I'll be wanted.
But just the same we can dispense with the undesirables."

"If you will have your will," the wheat-farmer conceded sardonically,
although his big hand clenched involuntarily as if throttling a throat.
"Besides, if we should run short of food you will prove desirable--for
the quantity of you, I mean, and not otherwise. Now just who would you
consider undesirable?--the black nigger? He ain't got a gun."

But his pleasantries were cut short by the whale's next attack--another
smash at the stern that carried away the rudder and destroyed the
steering gear.

"How much water?" Captain Doane queried of the mate.

"Three feet, sir--I just sounded," came the answer. "I think, sir, it
would be advisable to part-load the boat; then, right after the next time
the whale hits us, lower away on the run, chuck the rest of the dunnage
in, and ourselves, and get clear."

Captain Doane nodded.

"It will be lively work," he said. "Stand ready, all of you. Steward,
you jump aboard first and I'll pass the chronometer to you."

Nishikanta bellicosely shouldered his vast bulk up to the captain, opened
his shirt, and exposed his revolver.

"There's too many for the boat," he said, "and the steward's one of 'em
that don't go along. Get that. Hold it in your head. The steward's one
of 'em that don't go along."

Captain Doane coolly surveyed the big automatic, while at the fore of his
consciousness burned a vision of his flat buildings in San Francisco.

He shrugged his shoulders. "The boat would be overloaded, with all this
truck, anyway. Go ahead, if you want to make it your party, but just
bear in mind that I'm the navigator, and that, if you ever want to lay
eyes on your string of pawnshops, you'd better see that gentle care is
taken of me.--Steward!"

Daughtry stepped close.

"There won't be room for you . . . and for one or two others, I'm sorry
to say."

"Glory be!" said Daughtry. "I was just fearin' you'd be wantin' me
along, sir.--Kwaque, you take 'm my fella dunnage belong me, put 'm in
other fella boat along other side."

While Kwaque obeyed, the mate sounded the well for the last time,
reporting three feet and a half, and the lighter freightage of the
starboard boat was tossed in by the sailors.

A rangy, gangly, Scandinavian youth of a sailor, droop-shouldered, six
feet six and slender as a lath, with pallid eyes of palest blue and skin
and hair attuned to the same colour scheme, joined Kwaque in his work.

"Here, you Big John," the mate interfered. "This is your boat. You work
here."

The lanky one smiled in embarrassment as he haltingly explained: "I tank
I lak go along cooky."

"Sure, let him go, the more the easier," Nishikanta took charge of the
situation. "Anybody else?"

"Sure," Dag Daughtry sneered to his face. "I reckon what's left of the
beer goes with my boat . . . unless you want to argue the matter."

"For two cents--" Nishikanta spluttered in affected rage.

"Not for two billion cents would you risk a scrap with me, you
money-sweater, you," was Daughtry's retort. "You've got their goats, but
I've got your number. Not for two billion billion cents would you excite
me into callin' it right now.--Big John! Just carry that case of beer
across, an' that half case, and store in my boat.--Nishikanta, just start
something, if you've got the nerve."

Simon Nishikanta did not dare, nor did he know what to do; but he was
saved from his perplexity by the shout:

"Here she comes!"

All rushed to holding-ground, and held, while the whale broke more
timbers and the _Mary Turner_ rolled sluggishly down and back again.

"Lower away! On the run! Lively!"

Captain Doane's orders were swiftly obeyed. The starboard boat, fended
off by sailors, rose and fell in the water alongside while the remainder
of the dunnage and provisions showered into her.

"Might as well lend a hand, sir, seein' you're bent on leaving in such a
hurry," said Daughtry, taking the chronometer from Captain Doane's hand
and standing ready to pass it down to him as soon as he was in the boat.

"Come on, Greenleaf," Grimshaw called up to the Ancient Mariner.

"No, thanking you very kindly, sir," came the reply. "I think there'll
be more room in the other boat."

"We want the cook!" Nishikanta cried out from the stern sheets. "Come
on, you yellow monkey! Jump in!"

Little old shrivelled Ah Moy debated. He visibly thought, although none
knew the intrinsicness of his thinking as he stared at the gun of the fat
pawnbroker and at the leprosy of Kwaque and Daughtry, and weighed the one
against the other and tossed the light and heavy loads of the two boats
into the balance.

"Me go other boat," said Ah Moy, starting to drag his bag away across the
deck.

"Cast off," Captain Doane commanded.

Scraps, the big Newfoundland puppy, who had played and pranced about
through all the excitement, seeing so many of the _Mary Turner's_ humans
in the boat alongside, sprang over the rail, low and close to the water,
and landed sprawling on the mass of sea-bags and goods cases.

The boot rocked, and Nishikanta, his automatic in his hand, cried out:

"Back with him! Throw him on board!"

The sailors obeyed, and the astounded Scraps, after a brief flight
through the air, found himself arriving on his back on the _Mary
Turner's_ deck. At any rate, he took it for no more than a rough joke,
and rolled about ecstatically, squirming vermicularly, in anticipation of
what new delights of play were to be visited upon him. He reached out,
with an enticing growl of good fellowship, for Michael, who was now free
on deck, and received in return a forbidding and crusty snarl.

"Guess we'll have to add him to our collection, eh, sir?" Daughtry
observed, sparing a moment to pat reassurance on the big puppy's head and
being rewarded with a caressing lick on his hand from the puppy's
blissful tongue.

No first-class ship's steward can exist without possessing a more than
average measure of executive ability. Dag Daughtry was a first-class
ship's steward. Placing the Ancient Mariner in a nook of safety, and
setting Big John to unlashing the remaining boat and hooking on the
falls, he sent Kwaque into the hold to fill kegs of water from the scant
remnant of supply, and Ah Moy to clear out the food in the galley.

The starboard boat, cluttered with men, provisions, and property and
being rapidly rowed away from the danger centre, which was the _Mary
Turner_, was scarcely a hundred yards away, when the whale, missing the
schooner clean, turned at full speed and close range, churning the water,
and all but collided with the boat. So near did she come that the rowers
on the side next to her pulled in their oars. The surge she raised,
heeled the loaded boat gunwale under, so that a degree of water was
shipped ere it righted. Nishikanta, automatic still in hand, standing up
in the sternsheets by the comfortable seat he had selected for himself,
was staggered by the lurch of the boat. In his instinctive, spasmodic
effort to maintain balance, he relaxed his clutch on the pistol, which
fell into the sea.

"_Ha-ah_!" Daughtry girded. "What price Nishikanta? I got his number,
and he's lost you fellows' goats. He's your meat now. Easy meat? I
should say! And when it comes to the eating, eat him first. Sure, he's
a skunk, and will taste like one, but many's the honest man that's eaten
skunk and pulled through a tight place. But you'd better soak 'im all
night in salt water, first."

Grimshaw, whose seat in the sternsheets was none of the best, grasped the
situation simultaneously with Daughtry, and, with a quick upstanding, and
hooking out-reach of hand, caught the fat pawnbroker around the back of
the neck, and with anything but gentle suasion jerked him half into the
air and flung him face downward on the bottom boards.

"Ha-ah!" said Daughtry across the hundred yards of ocean.

Next, and without hurry, Grimshaw took the more comfortable seat for
himself.

"Want to come along?" he called to Daughtry.

"No, thank you, sir," was the latter's reply. "There's too many of us,
an' we'll make out better in the other boat."

With some bailing, and with others bending to the oars, the boat rowed
frantically away, while Daughtry took Ah Moy with him down into the
lazarette beneath the cabin floor and broke out and passed up more
provisions.

It was when he was thus below that the cow grazed the schooner just
for'ard of amidships on the port side, lashed out with her mighty tail as
she sounded, and ripped clean away the chain plates and rail of the
mizzen-shrouds. In the next roll of the huge, glassy sea, the mizzen-
mast fell overside.

"My word, some whale," Daughtry said to Ah Moy, as they emerged from the
cabin companionway and gazed at this latest wreckage.

Ah Moy found need to get more food from the galley, when Daughtry,
Kwaque, and Big John swung their weight on the falls, one at a time, and
hoisted the port boat, one end at a time, over the rail and swung her
out.

"We'll wait till the next smash, then lower away, throw everything in,
an' get outa this," the steward told the Ancient Mariner. "Lots of time.
The schooner'll sink no faster when she's awash than she's sinkin' now."

Even as he spoke, the scuppers were nearly level with the ocean, and her
rolling in the big sea was sluggish.

"Hey!" he called with sudden forethought across the widening stretch of
sea to Captain Doane. "What's the course to the Marquesas? Right now?
And how far away, sir?"

"Nor'-nor'-east-quarter-east!" came the faint reply. "Will fetch Nuka-
Hiva! About two hundred miles! Haul on the south-east trade with a good
full and you'll make it!"

"Thank you, sir," was the steward's acknowledgment, ere he ran aft,
disrupted the binnacle, and carried the steering compass back to the
boat.

Almost, from the whale's delay in renewing her charging, did they think
she had given over. And while they waited and watched her rolling on the
sea an eighth of a mile away, the _Mary Turner_ steadily sank.

"We might almost chance it," Daughtry was debating aloud to Big John,
when a new voice entered the discussion.

"Cocky!--Cocky!" came plaintive tones from below out of the steerage
companion.

"Devil be damned!" was the next, uttered in irritation and anger. "Devil
be damned! Devil be damned!"

"Of course not," was Daughtry's judgment, as he dashed across the deck,
crawled through the confusion of the main-topmast and its many stays that
blocked the way, and found the tiny, white morsel of life perched on a
bunk-edge, ruffling its feathers, erecting and flattening its rosy crest,
and cursing in honest human speech the waywardness of the world and of
ships and humans upon the sea.

The cockatoo stepped upon Daughtry's inviting index finger, swiftly
ascended his shirt sleeve, and, on his shoulder, claws sunk into the
flimsy shirt fabric till they hurt the flesh beneath, leaned head to ear
and uttered in gratitude and relief, and in self-identification: "Cocky.
Cocky."

"You son of a gun," Daughtry crooned.

"Glory be!" Cooky replied, in tones so like Daughtry's as to startle him.

"You son of a gun," Daughtry repeated, cuddling his cheek and ear against
the cockatoo's feathered and crested head. "And some folks thinks it's
only folks that count in this world."

Still the whale delayed, and, with the ocean washing their toes on the
level deck, Daughtry ordered the boat lowered away. Ah Moy was eager in
his haste to leap into the bow. Nor was Daughtry's judgment correct that
the little Chinaman's haste was due to fear of the sinking ship. What Ah
Moy sought was the place in the boat remotest from Kwaque and the
steward.

Shoving clear, they roughly stored the supplies and dunnage out of the
way of the thwarts and took their places, Ah Moy pulling bow-oar, next in
order Big John and Kwaque, with Daughtry (Cocky still perched on his
shoulder) at stroke. On top of the dunnage, in the sternsheets, Michael
gazed wistfully at the _Mary Turner_ and continued to snarl crustily at
Scraps who idiotically wanted to start a romp. The Ancient Mariner stood
up at the steering sweep and gave the order, when all was ready, for the
first dip of the oars.

A growl and a bristle from Michael warned them that the whale was not
only coming but was close upon them. But it was not charging. Instead,
it circled slowly about the schooner as if examining its antagonist.

"I'll bet it's head's sore from all that banging, an' it's beginnin' to
feel it," Daughtry grinned, chiefly for the purpose of keeping his
comrades unafraid.

Barely had they rowed a dozen strokes, when an exclamation from Big John
led them to follow his gaze to the schooners forecastle-head, where the
forecastle cat flashed across in pursuit of a big rat. Other rats they
saw, evidently driven out of their lairs by the rising water.

"We just can't leave that cat behind," Daughtry soliloquized in
suggestive tones.

"Certainly not," the Ancient Mariner responded swinging his weight on the
steering-sweep and heading the boat back.

Twice the whale gently rolled them in the course of its leisurely
circling, ere they bent to their oars again and pulled away. Of them the
whale seemed to take no notice. It was from the huge thing, the
schooner, that death had been wreaked upon her calf; and it was upon the
schooner that she vented the wrath of her grief.

Even as they pulled away, the whale turned and headed across the ocean.
At a half-mile distance she curved about and charged back.

"With all that water in her, the schooner'll have a real kick-back in her
when she's hit," Daughtry said. "Lordy me, rest on your oars an' watch."

Delivered squarely amidships, it was the hardest blow the _Mary Turner_
had received. Stays and splinters of rail flew in the air as she rolled
so far over as to expose half her copper wet-glistening in the sun. As
she righted sluggishly, the mainmast swayed drunkenly in the air but did
not fall.

"A knock-out!" Daughtry cried, at sight of the whale flurrying the water
with aimless, gigantic splashings. "It must a-smashed both of 'em."

"Schooner he finish close up altogether," Kwaque observed, as the _Mary
Turner's_ rail disappeared.

Swiftly she sank, and no more than a matter of moments was it when the
stump of her mainmast was gone. Remained only the whale, floating and
floundering, on the surface of the sea.

"It's nothing to brag about," Daughtry delivered himself of the _Mary
Turner's_ epitaph. "Nobody'd believe us. A stout little craft like that
sunk, deliberately sunk, by an old cow-whale! No, sir. I never believed
that old moss-back in Honolulu, when he claimed he was a survivor of the
sinkin' of the _Essex_, an' no more will anybody believe me."

"The pretty schooner, the pretty clever craft," mourned the Ancient
Mariner. "Never were there more dainty and lovable topmasts on a three-
masted schooner, and never was there a three-masted schooner that worked
like the witch she was to windward."

Dag Daughtry, who had kept always footloose and never married, surveyed
the boat-load of his responsibilities to which he was anchored--Kwaque,
the Black Papuan monstrosity whom he had saved from the bellies of his
fellows; Ah Moy, the little old sea-cook whose age was problematical only
by decades; the Ancient Mariner, the dignified, the beloved, and the
respected; gangly Big John, the youthful Scandinavian with the inches of
a giant and the mind of a child; Killeny Boy, the wonder of dogs; Scraps,
the outrageously silly and fat-rolling puppy; Cocky, the white-feathered
mite of life, imperious as a steel-blade and wheedlingly seductive as a
charming child; and even the forecastle cat, the lithe and tawny slayer
of rats, sheltering between the legs of Ah Moy. And the Marquesas were
two hundred miles distant full-hauled on the tradewind which had ceased
but which was as sure to live again as the morning sun in the sky.

The steward heaved a sigh, and whimsically shot into his mind the memory-
picture in his nursery-book of the old woman who lived in a shoe. He
wiped the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand, and was
dimly aware of the area of the numbness that bordered the centre that was
sensationless between his eyebrows, as he said:

"Well, children, rowing won't fetch us to the Marquesas. We'll need a
stretch of wind for that. But it's up to us, right now, to put a mile or
so between us an' that peevish old cow. Maybe she'll revive, and maybe
she won't, but just the same I can't help feelin' leary about her."




CHAPTER XVI


Two days later, as the steamer _Mariposa_ plied her customary route
between Tahiti and San Francisco, the passengers ceased playing deck
quoits, abandoned their card games in the smoker, their novels and deck
chairs, and crowded the rail to stare at the small boat that skimmed to
them across the sea before a light following breeze. When Big John,
aided by Ah Moy and Kwaque, lowered the sail and unstepped the mast,
titters and laughter arose from the passengers. It was contrary to all
their preconceptions of mid-ocean rescue of ship-wrecked mariners from
the open boat.

It caught their fancy that this boat was the Ark, what of its freightage
of bedding, dry goods boxes, beer-cases, a cat, two dogs, a white
cockatoo, a Chinaman, a kinky-headed black, a gangly pallid-haired giant,
a grizzled Dag Daughtry, and an Ancient Mariner who looked every inch the
part. Him a facetious, vacationing architect's clerk dubbed Noah, and so
greeted him.

"I say, Noah," he called. "Some flood, eh? Located Ararat yet?"

"Catch any fish?" bawled another youngster down over the rail.

"Gracious! Look at the beer! Good English beer! Put me down for a
case!"

Never was a more popular wrecked crew more merrily rescued at sea. The
young blades would have it that none other than old Noah himself had come
on board with the remnants of the Lost Tribes, and to elderly female
passengers spun hair-raising accounts of the sinking of an entire tropic
island by volcanic and earthquake action.

"I'm a steward," Dag Daughtry told the _Mariposa's_ captain, "and I'll be
glad and grateful to berth along with your stewards in the glory-hole.
Big John there's a sailorman, an' the fo'c's'le 'll do him. The Chink is
a ship's cook, and the nigger belongs to me. But Mr. Greenleaf, sir, is
a gentleman, and the best of cabin fare and staterooms'll be none too
good for him, sir."

And when the news went around that these were part of the survivors of
the three-masted schooner, _Mary Turner_, smashed into kindling wood and
sunk by a whale, the elderly females no more believed than had they the
yarn of the sunken island.

"Captain Hayward," one of them demanded of the steamer's skipper, "could
a whale sink the _Mariposa_?"

"She has never been so sunk," was his reply.

"I knew it!" she declared emphatically. "It's not the way of ships to go
around being sunk by whales, is it, captain?"

"No, madam, I assure you it is not," was his response. "Nevertheless,
all the five men insist upon it."

"Sailors are notorious for their unveracity, are they not?" the lady
voiced her flat conclusion in the form of a tentative query.

"Worst liars I ever saw, madam. Do you know, after forty years at sea, I
couldn't believe myself under oath."

* * * * *

Nine days later the _Mariposa_ threaded the Golden Gate and docked at San
Francisco. Humorous half-columns in the local papers, written in the
customary silly way by unlicked cub reporters just out of grammar school,
tickled the fancy of San Francisco for a fleeting moment in that the
steamship _Mariposa_ had rescued some sea-waifs possessed of a cock-and-
bull story that not even the reporters believed. Thus, silly reportorial
unveracity usually proves extraordinary truth a liar. It is the way of
cub reporters, city newspapers, and flat-floor populations which get
their thrills from moving pictures and for which the real world and all
its spaciousness does not exist.

"Sunk by a whale!" demanded the average flat-floor person. "Nonsense,
that's all. Just plain rotten nonsense. Now, in the 'Adventures of
Eleanor,' which is some film, believe me, I'll tell you what I saw happen
. . . "

So Daughtry and his crew went ashore into 'Frisco Town uheralded and
unsung, the second following morning's lucubrations of the sea reporters
being varied disportations upon the attack on an Italian crab fisherman
by an enormous jellyfish. Big John promptly sank out of sight in a
sailors' boarding-house, and, within the week, joined the Sailors' Union
and shipped on a steam schooner to load redwood ties at Bandon, Oregon.
Ah Moy got no farther ashore than the detention sheds of the Federal
Immigration Board, whence he was deported to China on the next Pacific
Mail steamer. The _Mary Turner's_ cat was adopted by the sailors'
forecastle of the _Mariposa_, and on the _Mariposa_ sailed away on the
back trip to Tahiti. Scraps was taken ashore by a quartermaster and left
in the bosom of his family.

And ashore went Dag Daughtry, with his small savings, to rent two cheap
rooms for himself and his remaining responsibilities, namely, Charles
Stough Greenleaf, Kwaque, Michael, and, not least, Cocky. But not for
long did he permit the Ancient Mariner to live with him.

"It's not playing the game, sir," he told him. "What we need is capital.
We've got to interest capital, and you've got to do the interesting. Now
this very day you've got to buy a couple of suit-cases, hire a taxicab,
go sailing up to the front door of the Bronx Hotel like good pay and be
damned. She's a real stylish hotel, but reasonable if you want to make
it so. A little room, an inside room, European plan, of course, and then
you can economise by eatin' out."

"But, steward, I have no money," the Ancient Mariner protested.

"That's all right, sir; I'll back you for all I can."

"But, my dear man, you know I'm an old impostor. I can't stick you up
like the others. You . . . why . . . why, you're a friend, don't you
see?"