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Ebook has 1631 lines and 87193 words, and 33 pages

OCEAN TRAMPS

I--BUD AND BILLY

The moon was rising over Papaleete, over the Pacific Ocean and the bay where the anchor lights were spilling their amber on the water, over the palm trees and flame trees and the fragrant town from which, now clear, now sheltered by the sea wind, came the voices of girls singing to the tune of Hawaiian guitars.

Mixed with the breathing of the tepid wind in the trees, the voices of the girls and the tune of the guitars, came the murmur and sigh of the beach, the last note wanted, the last touch, to a scene of absolutely absurd and impossible loveliness, amidst which, by the water's edge, casting a thirty-foot shadow on the hard white sand, Mr. Harman was walking, blind to the Eden around him.

Billy was on the beach in more senses than one. He was down and out, without friends, without food, without drinks, and almost without tobacco, starving in the midst of plenty, for in Papaleete, if you are a cadger, you may live for ever on the fat of the land, and not only live, but love, drink, smoke, dream under tree shadows and bathe in a sea warm with perpetual summer.

But that was not Billy's way. This gig, four-square, blue-eyed man out of San Francisco could do anything but cadge. It wasn't a question of morals, it was more a question of simplicity.

Billy's morals had mostly been forgotten by Nature, or maybe they had been extracted by San Franciscans and shore-along toughs from Valparaiso up, anyhow and however that may be, the resulting vacuum seemed to have filled itself up with simplicity, not stupidity, just simplicity. The simplicity of a child that allowed him to go into the most desperate and questionable deals in ward politics and doubtful sea practice, wide-eyed, blue-eyed, and reproaching others for their moral lapses with the unchanging formula: "It don't pay."

"Crooked dealing don't pay," said Mr. Harman after some crooked deal had failed--never before.

Yet somehow, in some extraordinary way, Billy was lovable, there was nothing mean about him, and that was maybe why he couldn't cadge, and he had behind those blue eyes and that honest-dog looking, tanned face, a power of cool, uncalculating daring that might have landed him anywhere if he had come on a decent jumping-off place.

As he turned back along the beach, the moonlight struck a figure coming towards him. It was Davis. Fate or some strange chance had thrown Davis and Harman together on the same beach at the same time, and though there was a world of difference between their faces, forms, characters and dispositions, they were alike in this--they couldn't cadge.

Davis was a lean slip of a man with a chin tuft and a terrific past about which he was quite open. Never satisfied or driven by the craze of adventure, he had overrun two or three fortunes and had beached at Papaleete from a B.P. boat which had picked him up from a trading station down somewhere in the Paumotus, and was glad to get rid of him on the terms of a twenty-dollar loan. The captain laughed when Davis had entered the loan in a pocket-book, but it would be returned with interest some time or another if the borrower lived. That was Davis.

The one remarkable thing about this plain-looking man with the chin tuft and the flat cheek-bones was his quietude, nothing hurried or flurried him. That was perhaps the secret behind his shooting. He was more than a good shot with a revolver. He was inevitable.

"That's done," said Davis, coming up with the other. "Penhill and Jarvis are highballing it at the club, and their Kanakas are playing hopscotch with the hula-hula girls. What's the matter with you? Don't go saying you've got cold feet."

"Oh, close up!" said Davis. "Didn't I tell you that Penhill can't move against us, once I get his ship out, his feet are cut off. I'm the one man living that he's afraid of, because I'm the one man living that can put him in quod without hurting myself. This thing isn't running off with a ship. It's Providence."

"How do you get at that?" asked Billy doubtfully.

Harman, resting his hand on the gunnel, looked about him for a moment at the deserted beach, still undecided.

His dunnage left at the house of a native woman where he had lodged was unprocurable, he owed a bill. As he stood considering this and other matters, from the groves by the beach diffusing itself through the night, came the voice of a native singing a love song, tender, plaintive, old as Papaleete and focussing in itself all the softness and beauty that the active soul of Billy Harman had learnt to hate.

He seized the gunnel of the boat and assisted by Davis, shoved her off.

Out on the moonlit water, the town showed up fairylike, its lights twinkling amidst the moving foliage. Away on Huahine, rising steeply like a wall of velvety blackness to the stars, the lights of tiny villages showed like fireflies come to rest; fronting and beneath all this mystery and loveliness showed the definite amber glow of the club where Penhill and Jarvis were drinking themselves blind. That was Papaleete.

"They're a sprightly lot," said Harman as the main boom swung to starboard and the great sail filled, tugging at the sheet. "Monkeys to jump an' no tongues to ask questions."

"That's Penhill," said Davis, "he's milled them into brute beasts, not that they wanted much milling, but there you are, he done his best and I reckon we're profiting by it."

He said he reckoned that Penhill had deserved what he got and Harman concurred.

They sat in judgment on Penhill and brought him in guilty. Harman almost felt virtuous.

"I reckon he'll learn it don't pay to run crooked," said he. "I've took notice that them sort of chaps always gets scragged in the end. What's this you said he did you out of?"

"Seventy dollars, and left me on the beach," replied Davis.

"Same as we've done him," said Harman. "No, it don't pay. It don't pay no-how."

"Sell her on the hoof," said Davis, "innards, outwards, hump, tail and all, that's my idea. There are ten cent mail boats that'll take us anywhere up or down the coast, Valparaiso for choice, once we've got the dollars in our pockets; there's big things to be done in Chili with a few dollars by fellows that know the ropes."

Mr. Harman concurred.

"I've been done there myself," said he, "by chaps that hadn't cents in their pockets, let alone dollars. Skinned alive I was of every buck to my name in a faro joint at Cubra, and me winning all the time. Hadn't got half-way down the street to my ship with a pocket full of silver dollars when I put my hand in my pocket and found nothing but stones, filled me up they had with pebbles off the beach, playin' guitars all the time and smokin' cigarettes and pretendin' to hasty-manyana.

"Well, I'm not against landin' this hooker on them, but I tell you, Bud, it's my experience, before we comes to close grips with them we'll be wantin' to fix our skins on with seccotine."

"You leave them to me," said Bud Davis.

"I've known the insides and outsides of Chinks," went on the other, "and I've had dealin's with Greeks up Susun way, oyster boat Levantines will take your back teeth whiles you're tellin' them you don't want buyin' their dud pearls, but these chaps are in their own class. Jim Satan, that's what they are, and there's not a 'Frisco Jew sellin' dollar watches can walk round the brim of their sombreros."

On and on with a gentle roll over the wind-speckled blue of the endless swell, lifting nothing but ocean, and over ocean vast dawns that turned to torrid noons and died in sunsets like the blaze of burning worlds; till one morning the cry of the Kanaka look-out answered the cry of a great gull flying with them and there before them stood the coast boiling where the sun was breaking above it and stretching to north and south of the sun blaze, solid, remote, in delicately pencilled hills dying from sight in the blue distance. Davis, who knew the coast, altered the helm. They were forty miles or so to the north of their right position, and it was not till afternoon that the harbour of Buenodiaz lay before them with the flame trees showing amidst the flat-topped houses and the blue water lapping the deserted mole. The quay by the mole was deserted and La Plazza, the public square, distinctly to be seen from the sea, lifted slightly as it was by the upward trend of the ground, was empty. Through the glass the houses showed, their green shutters tightly shut and not a soul on the verandas.

It was almost as though some Pel?e had erupted and covered the place with the lava of pure desolation clear as glass.

"Taking their siestas," said Davis. "Keep her as she goes. I know this harbour and it's all good holding ground, beyond that buoy."

The rattle of the anchor chain made Buenodiaz open one eye. A boat slipped out from the mole. It was the Port Doctor.

Buenodiaz flings its slops into the street and its smells are traditional, but it has a holy horror of imported diseases and its Port Doctor never sleeps--even in siesta time.

With the Doctor came the Customs, smelling of garlic, with whom Davis conversed in the language of the natives, while Harman attended to the liquor and cigars.

"Ain't like cotton," said he, "don't know what it's worth, but I'll put it at four thousand and not a cent under, at four thousand we shan't be losers."

"Well, I reckon we wouldn't be losers at four cents," said Harman, "seein' how we got it, and how about the hooker?"

"Five thousand," said Davis, "and that's not half her worth. Nine thousand the lot and I'll throw the chronometer in."

"Have you fixed what to do with the Kanakas?" asked the other. "There's eight of them and they've all mouths."

"There's never a Kanaka yet could talk Spanish," said Davis, "and I don't propose to learn them, but I'll give them fifty dollars apiece--maybe--if I make good. But there's time enough to think of that when we have the dollars."

It was the second day after their arrival at Buenodiaz, the sun was setting and the sound of the band playing on La Plazza came across the water; mixed with the faint strains of the band came the sounds of a guitar from one of the ships in the anchorage, and in lapses of the breeze from the sea the scent of the town stole to them, a bouquet co-mingled from drains, flowers, garlic, earth and harbour compounds.

Harman was in one of his meditative fits.

"That chap you brought aboard to-day," said he, "the big one with the whiskers, was he Alonez or was it the little 'un?"

"The big one," said Davis. "He's the chap that'll take the cargo off us and the little one will take the ship--I haven't said a word of the price, haven't said I was particularly wanting to sell, but I've given them a smell of the toasted cheese, and if I know anything of anything, they're setting on their hind legs now in some caf? smoothing their whiskers and making ready to pounce. They're partners, they own all that block of stores on the Calle San Pedro, and the little one does the shipping business. He's Portuguese, pure. Pereira's his name. I'm going up to his house to-night to talk business."

"Well," said Harman, "if he's going to buy, he's got the specifications, he's been over her from the truck to the lazarette, and I thought he'd be pullin' the nails out of her to see what they were like. When are you goin'?"

Harman absorbed this news without interest, merely reminding the other that they weren't "dealin' in fruit," but as two more days added themselves together producing nothing but church processions, brass bands and fireworks, Mr. Harman fell out of tune with himself and the world and the ways of this "dam garlic factory." Davis was acting strangely, nearly always ashore and never returning till midnight. He said the deal was going through, but that it took time, that they weren't selling a mustang, that he wouldn't be hustled and that Harman, if he didn't like waiting, had better go and stick his head in the harbour.

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