Read Ebook: The S.S. Glory by Niven Frederick Holmes Fred Illustrator

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Ebook has 739 lines and 40948 words, and 15 pages

e shed. In the wall of this box contrivance a small window opened on his arrival, and a clerk was beheld within.

Candlass said: "Line up, boys; one at a time."

Mike elbowed himself to leading position, looking round at his new friend. "You come with me, lad." And when some grumbled, "Well, well," he said. "We all have a chance."

The man to whom Candlass had decided to give another trial strolled backward and stood beyond the group so as to be last in the string.

"Now then, come along," said Smithers, and tapped twice with the end of a fountain pen on the little ledge before the diminutive window. The "Push," realising that all would have a chance, seeing how few there were, did not crowd now. There was more of: "You go ahead"--"No, that's all right, you go!"--than of anxiety. One by one they stepped up to the wicket, to one side of which Smithers leant, and in front of which Candlass had taken his stand. Each in turn exchanged a few quiet words with these two; the clerk within, pen in hand, bent over his tome, giving ear at the window. Once or twice Candlass looked round and beckoned to a man, when the group, milling instead of retaining the queue, was slow to decide who should go next. He did this by raising a hand, thumb and forefinger in air, looking keen and cold in some man's eye, and then flicking down the forefinger and dropping his hand to his side again. While this signing on was still in progress there entered the shed, slowly swinging his legs forward, clad in dirty khaki, large-hatted like the young man of whom we have already heard, a close-lipped, short-nosed youth. Candlass remarked him as he came in and said: "All right, you. Come ahead."

"One of the fellows what come down in the cars," it was suggested, or explained.

A little later there came a man in a long coat, tweed cap, heavy boots, leggings, wearing spectacles.

"What's this blown in?" one asked.

Smithers, by the side of the wicket, drew a deep breath.

"All right. Come ahead," called Candlass.

Mike, standing over to one side with those who had already signed on, offered explanation:

"He's one of them young fellers from up behind somewheres. Comes from feedin' pigs, and doin' the chores, and what they call learnin' farmin'." He noticed that his newly adopted friend had allowed some others to precede him and had not yet signed on. "Go on there forward, young feller," he admonished. "Take your turn there after Four Eyes with the coat."

"Go on, then, go on," chorussed several of the "Push," and he who, though he wore the Hat of the Great Plains, had not come down on the cars with cattle, as indeed had that other large-hatted recent arrival, stepped up to the wicket. The onlookers noticed that with him, as with others, there was evidently a little bargaining being done.

"No--'e's not goin' fer nuthin'; 'e's all right," said Cockney to Mike.

Mike merely turned his head toward Cockney and then turned it away again.

When the young man to whom Mike had extended kindness passed from the wicket, having agreed to tend cattle across the Atlantic for the sum of fifteen shillings, he found that he had already been christened. Perhaps his lack of diffidence in signing his name in the book which was turned round to him by the clerk, after the quiet discussion of terms was over, had suggested the new name to Mike.

"That's right, Scholar," he said.

"How much are you going to get?" asked the Inquisitive One, jumping forward, left shoulder advanced, and thrusting his face close to Scholar.

"He's after getting as much as you!" said Mike. "Don't you be telling him, Scholar, or he'll be running back to the wicket and saying: 'I want as much as the other feller there.'"

The Inquisitive One contented himself by looking at Mike's boots, trousers and belt, torn waistcoat, shirt, and black-and-white scarf, briefly at his face, and then, turning about, executed a heel and toe movement of right foot and left foot alternately, looking at the others and inclining his head towards Mike, in a kind of silent, noncommittal: "You observe?" Mike, too, observed, as his slight drawing erect signified, the slight toss of his chin, a dismissing toss, somewhat leonine. Then his eye rested on the youth in the long coat, and disapproval was in his eye. He had no objection to cattlemen in big hats from "beyant," who had come down in the cars with cattle, continuing across the Atlantic. He had no objection to other young men in big hats, who had not come down with cattle, but who wanted to cross the Atlantic. But that heavy, stolid, long-coated, legginged, spectacled lout seemed to him an indignity thrust upon them. He studied him a long while, with his weight now upon left foot, right advanced, toe tapping the cobbles, anon shifting weight to his right foot, leaning back, left foot advanced and left shoulder almost in a fighting attitude. The man in the long coat did not seem to be one of them. He might be going over this way simply to save money, not because he was hard up. It was different with the short-nosed man in the old soiled khaki; he did not seem to be by any means on his uppers, but he looked as one to whom all this was part of the day's work. His arrival had shown more clearly that Scholar might not be typical of men from "beyant," or "the Great Plains where the cattle comes from," despite his hat, but Scholar still remained not anathema; he was brown with the sun and the open air, and he had that touch of vagabondage that made him welcome although an outsider. He had come into their midst with an air of "If you don't mind, boys," but that long-coated, and leggined, and spectacled one didn't come in at all; he was just there. Mike had to ask the opinions of the others at this stage.

"What do you think of that?" he said quietly. "Is that a Jonah? Don't like the look of it. Looks a Jonah."

Long Jack's partner, whose name was Johnnie, and who had a way of varying the double-shuffling to the mouth-organ by striking belligerent attitudes at the others and making feints at them with a fist, paused in his mixture of double-shuffle and pugilistic rehearsal, to look at the subject of Mike's doubt.

"Yus," said Cockney. "That's wot 'e is."

Mike's expression was like that of a man disgusted. Had he not already told them this? Candlass put an end, for the time being, to farther speculation.

"Get on to the main deck, you fellows," he ordered, "and you'll see some bales of hay there. Cut them open and bed down."

The "Push" began to swarm up one of the gangways, the one nearer to them, that led to the lower deck. Mike looked at it; its condition showed that lower deck cattle were already on board.

"Indade," he said, "there's no sense in dirtying your shoes before ye nade to," and he led the way to the second gangway, which was canted up to the main deck, and was clean. The ascent was not much steeper, for the gangway was longer and led off from farther back on the wharf.

"Oh, all right," said Candlass, as he saw his men going up in two portions. "It's all the same." But he called after those who were going up to the lower deck: "Don't you fellows hang about down there when you get aboard."

They nodded, and some responded with an "Aye, aye, sir," and up they ran, talking and laughing among themselves in jeering fashion. Candlass stood on the dock and waited till they were on board, so that those that turned their heads, when they stepped on deck, to look down, met his eye. The "Push" gathered on the main deck. Those who had gone direct to it, looking down the hatches, could see, what those who had come up the other way already knew, that the lower deck cattle were already all on board. The full complement was already there; and beyond the docks were now the cling-clang of an advancing bell, a locomotive bell, and more lowing of cattle. Amidships many bales of hay had been tumbled.

"Now we want an axe," said Mike.

"There's a queer fellow below with an axe," volunteered one of those who had come up by the lower deck. "Here he comes."

He came. He came as if to slaughter them all, a man of maybe fifty, shirt open, one brace sustaining his trousers, bald-headed, almost toothless, scarred upon the forehead. He was neither fat nor lean, showing at once many protuberant bones, cheek and chin and breast bones, and rolls of fat under chin, and on abdomen, to which his shirt clung, damp from excessive labour in the stuffy ship. He charged upon the bales of hay, smote furiously at the wires that bound them, heedless of the possible scratches when they sprung apart, and yelling, "Here you are! Roll it away--roll that away now," rolled the bale over himself so that it fell apart as in compressed cakes or slices. "Well, if you won't roll, carry away, carry away," he went on, hitting the next bale; and, dodging his axe, the "Push" gathered armfuls and hastened off to shake and to tease out these armfuls into the strong pens ranged all round the ship's sides and down the ship's centre, ranged so closely that if two men passed abreast they had need to be slender men. Hardly had they finished coming and going on this employment than the ki-yi-ing of men's voices, and the lowing of beasts caused the bedders-down to pause and give ear. The man who had broken open the bales suddenly appeared again, screaming oaths. "Come along here, and tie up!"

Blundering up the deck, up the gangway, came steer after steer. When they found themselves aboard, with bars such as the corral bars that they knew of old before them, they wheeled sharply and away they went running, lowing, away forward, then across the ship and down the other side. The man with the axe rushed across, and every here and there thrust a plank from front barrier to ship's side, turning the long corral that ran round the ship into many smaller pens. Then came a cessation in the river of steers that ran aboard.

"Come over here and I'll show you, Scholar," said Mike. What Mike had to show to the tenderfoot cattleman was how to take the ropes that hung all along the pen fronts, throw them over the steers' necks, pull the slack end through a hole in the flat front board, knot it, and then let it go. The hole in each case was only large enough to admit of the rope, consequently the knot upon the end was all that was necessary for making fast. It was a duty not without some excitement, for the steers, arranged now in pens, thanks to the boards that the Mad Boss had thrust across , would persist in milling. Round and round they moved, and before each pen a man, or two men, worked. After a few minutes the steers in the pen before which Mike and Scholar laboured had each a rope tied round its neck. That was the first duty done, not without scrimmage. And now they went on to the second part of that work, the making fast. As steer by steer was hauled up to the board, and the rope pulled through, there was trouble.

"Watch your hands!" shouted Mike, hanging on to a halter while Scholar tried to affix the knot. His shout was barely in time. The steer flung backward, and smack went Scholar's hand against the board, for he still clung tenaciously to the rope's end. "All right!" he replied, for he had succeeded in making the knot just in time, and when the steer strained back the knot also smacked on the board. A tug of war began upon the next one. Farther away a sudden shout arose, and they looked along the deck. The Mad Boss, who had been armed with an axe a short time previously, was now blaspheming against the ship's side. He had jumped into one of the pens, armed with a stick, in an endeavour to make the animals face the front board, and one of them now had propped itself against him. There was an unholy glee on the faces of some of the men, those who looked upon the squeeze that he was getting as good punishment for his method of treating them.

Scholar could lend a hand. He grabbed up a piece of stick and vaulted into the pen. After all, he had signed on as a cattleman, and a long horn must not intimidate him. He hoped that even if he had not signed on his pause before leaping to the rescue would have been of no longer duration. The very close proximity of the steers among which he leapt was his salvation. There was not room for them to run upon him, heads down. He gave two twists to the tail of the steer that had pinned the mad foreman; it relaxed and swung round facing the tying board, where Mike adroitly grabbed the rope, hauled the loose end through, and knotted it--just in time. Back went the animal's head, and smack came the knot against the board.

"Now, you," said the mad-looking boss to Scholar. "Take care of yourself. I'm all right now--aisy there. Slip over."

Scholar watched for his chance; but he did not slip over. The chance came to slip under, and he did so, coming on to the alley-way with a kind of side dive, while the man to whose rescue he had gone, seizing a favourable opportunity, dodged into the neighbouring pen and from thence gained the alley-way.

"That's being a man!" he said, nodding to Scholar. "Rafferty won't forget ye."

"Who is he?" asked Scholar of Mike.

"Him? Oh, he's bossing the Lower Deck, but he's come up here till Candlass comes aboard, I suppose."

Perhaps two hours later this instalment of steers was all tied up, and the remaining space of deck, awaiting the next batch, was almost all strewn with hay. Many of the men seemed bored. There was a constant hinting that an adjournment for liquor should be made. Candlass had not yet appeared; Rafferty had disappeared; the "Push" was alone, and Mike seemed to be half in command.

"I tell yez," he said, "there's nobody going ashore till the bedding-down's finished."

"Never mind what Candlass told me. I'm telling you that if Candlass comes aboard and finds that we haven't finished bedding-down entoirely it's me he'll jump on."

"Well, good luck, here's beddin'-dahn," said Cockney.

Mike drew erect, stretched, blew a great breath, and wiped his forehead with the back of his hand.

"I could be doing with a drop meself," he said, "but duty's duty."

There was a halt in the arrival of the hay.

"Where's them lads bringing the hay?" he asked.

"Perhaps there ain't no more bales," said Cockney.

It might have been the Devil that prompted Scholar at that moment. Perhaps he was feeling a little gay after his bout with the steers; perhaps he thought how funny it would be if Mike led the way ashore for refreshment after having so recently proclaimed that no man would go ashore for that purpose until the bedding-down was over. Perhaps he thought to make some sign to these men that he appreciated the fact that they had not all cold-shouldered him as an outsider, and could think of only one way to do it that would seem expressive to them.

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