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Read Ebook: The Story of the Thirty-second Regiment Massachusetts Infantry Whence it came; where it went; what it saw and what it did by Parker Francis J Francis Jewett
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Ebook has 367 lines and 12727 words, and 8 pages
The secretary bent low.
"Your excellency, the fairest flowers of Batavia are his to pick and choose. The good God has given him a brave heart, a comely face, and plenty of flesh to cover his bones. But his only mistress is the sea."
"If I should send him to Bulungan, would that she-devil, Koyala, make the same fool of him that she has of Muller?" the governor demanded sharply.
"Your excellency, the angels above would fail sooner than he."
The governor's fist crashed on the table with a resounding thwack.
"Then he is the man we need!" he exclaimed. "Where shall I find this Peter Gross, Sachsen?"
Van Schouten sprang from his great chair of state like a cockerel fluttering from a roost. He licked his thin lips and curved them into a smile.
"Sachsen," he said, "except myself, you are the only man in Java that knows anything. My hat and coat, Sachsen, and my cane!"
AH SING COUNTS HIS NAILS
"Can we victual at Batavia as cheaply as at Singapore, Mr. Gross?"
Peter Gross looked at the shore-line thoughtfully.
"One place is as cheap as the other, Mr. Threthaway; but if it's my opinion you want, I advise against stopping at Batavia."
The captain frowned.
"Why, Mr. Gross?" he asked sharply.
"Because we'd lose our crew, and Batavia's a bad place to pick up another one. That gang for'ard isn't to be trusted where there's liquor to be got. 'Twouldn't be so bad to lose a few of them at Singapore--there's always English-speaking sailors there waiting for a ship to get home on; but Batavia's Dutch. We might have to lay around a week."
"I don't think there's the slightest danger of desertions," Captain Threthaway replied testily. "What possible reason could any of our crew have to leave?"
"The pay is all right, and the grub is all right; there's no kicking on those lines," Peter Gross said, speaking guardedly. "But most of this crew are drinking men. They're used to their rations of grog regular. They've been without liquor since we left Frisco, except what they got at Melbourne, and that was precious little. Since the water fouled on us, they're ready for anything up to murder and mutiny. There'll be no holding them once we make port."
Captain Threthaway flushed angrily. His thin, ascetic jaw set with Puritan stubbornness as he retorted:
"When I can't sail a ship without supplying liquor to the crew, I'll retire, Mr. Gross."
"Don't misunderstand me, captain," Peter Gross replied, with quiet patience.
"I'm not disagreeing with your teetotaler principles. They improve a crew if you've got the right stock to work with. But when you take grog away from such dock-sweepings as Smith and Jacobson and that little Frenchman, Le Beouf, you take away the one thing on earth they're willing to work for. We had all we could do to hold them in hand at Melbourne, and after the contrary trades we've bucked the past week, and the heat, their tongues are hanging out for a drop of liquor."
"Let them dare come back drunk," the captain snapped angrily. "I know what will cure them."
"They won't come back," Peter Gross asserted calmly.
"Then we'll go out and get them," Captain Threthaway said grimly.
"They'll be where they can't be found," Peter Gross replied.
Captain Threthaway snorted impatiently.
Captain Threthaway smiled confidently.
"Poor as the crew is, Mr. Gross, there's no member of it will prefer lodging in a Chinese crimp's public house ten thousand miles from home to his berth here."
"They'll forget his color when they taste his hot rum," Peter Gross returned bruskly. "And once they drink it, they'll forget everything else. Ah Sing is the smoothest article that ever plaited a queue, and they don't make them any slicker than they do in China."
Captain Threthaway's lips pinched together in irritation.
"There are always the authorities," he remarked pettishly, to end the controversy.
Peter Gross restrained a look of disgust with difficulty.
"Yes, there are always the authorities," he conceded. "But in the Chinese campong they're about as much use as a landlubber aloft in a blow. The campong is a little republic in itself, and Ah Sing is the man that runs it. If the truth was known, I guess he's the boss Chinaman of the East Indies--pirate, trader, politician--anything he can make a guilder at. From his rum-shop warrens run into every section of Chinatown, and they're so well hid that the governor, though he's sharp as a weasel and by all odds the best man the Dutch ever had here, can't find them. It's the real port of missing men."
Captain Threthaway looked shoreward, where dusky, breech-clouted natives were resting in the cool shade of the heavy-leafed mangroves. A bit of breeze stirred just then, bringing with it the rich spice-grove and jungle scents of the thickly wooded island. A fierce longing for the shore seized the captain. He squared his shoulders with decision.
"I'll take the chance, Mr. Gross," he said. "This heat is killing me. You may figure on twenty-four hours in port."
"Mr. Gross," he said, "the damned renegades are gone. Do you think you can find them?"
Long experience in the vicissitudes of life, acquired in that best school of all, the forecastle, had taught Peter Gross the folly of saying, "I told you so." Therefore he merely replied:
"I'll try, sir."
"God in Israel, what a man!" his excellency exclaimed admiringly, noting Peter Gross's broad shoulders and stalwart thighs. "If he packs as much brains inside his skull as he does meat on his bones, there are some busy days ahead for my Dyaks." He smacked his lips in happy anticipation.
Ah Sing's grog-shop, with its colonnades and porticoes and fussy gables and fantastic cornices terminating in pigtail curlicues, was a squalid place for all the ornamentation cluttered on it. Peter Gross observed its rubbishy surroundings with ill-concealed disgust.
"'Twould be a better Batavia if some one set fire to the place," he muttered to himself. "Yet the law would call it arson."
Looking up, he saw Ah Sing seated in one of the porticoes, and quickly masked his face to a smile of cordial greeting, but not before the Chinaman had detected his ill humor.
There was a touch of three continents in Ah Sing's appearance. He sat beside a table, in the American fashion; he smoked a long-stemmed hookah, after the Turkish fashion, and he wore his clothes after the Chinese fashion. The bland innocence of his pudgy face and the seraphic mildness of his unblinking almond eyes that peeped through slits no wider than the streak of a charcoal-pencil were as the guilelessness of Mother Eve in the garden. Motionless as a Buddha idol he sat, except for occasional pulls at the hookah.
"Good-morning, Ah Sing," Peter Gross remarked happily, as he mounted the colonnade.
The tiny slits through which Ah Sing beheld the pageantry of a sun-baked world opened a trifle wider.
"May Allah bless thee, Mr. Gross," he greeted impassively.
Peter Gross pulled a chair away from one of the other tables and placed it across the board from Ah Sing. Then he succumbed to it with a sigh of gentle ease.
"A hot day," he panted, and fanned himself as though he found the humidity unbearable.
"Belly hot," Ah Sing gravely agreed in a guttural voice that sounded from unfathomable abysses.
"A hot day for a man that's tasted no liquor for nigh three months," Peter Gross amended.
"You makee long trip?" Ah Sing inquired politely.
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