: Ocean Tramps by Stacpoole H De Vere Henry De Vere - Short stories; Sea stories; Oceania Fiction; Pacific Ocean Fiction

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OCEAN TRAMPS

I--BUD AND BILLY

I

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.

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