The Mutiny of the Elsinore

and frankness about it.  On the other hand, that it should be directed at my misfortune was exasperating.  I suppose my perplexity showed in my face, for when she had eased her laughter and looked at me with a sobering countenance, she immediately went off into more peals.

“You poor child,” she gurgled at last.  “And when I think of all the cream of tartar I made you consume!”

It was rather presumptuous of her to poor-child me, and I resolved to take advantage of the data I already possessed in order to ascertain just how many years she was my junior.  She had told me she was twelve years old the time the Dixie collided with the river steamer in San Francisco Bay .  Very well, all I had to do was to ascertain the date of that disaster and I had her.  But in the meantime she laughed at me and my hives.

“I suppose it is—er—humorous, in some sort of way,” I said a bit stiffly, only to find that there was no use in being stiff with Miss West, for it only set her off into more laughter.

“What you needed,” she announced, with fresh gurglings, “was an exterior treatment.”

“Don’t tell me I’ve got the chicken-pox or the measles,” I protested.

“No.”  She shook her head emphatically while she enjoyed another paroxysm.  “What you are suffering from is a severe attack . . . ”

She paused deliberately, and looked me straight the eyes.

“Of bedbugs,” she concluded.  And then, all seriousness and practicality, she went on: “But we’ll have that righted in a jiffy.  I’ll turn the Elsinore’s after-quarters upside down, though I know there are none in father’s room or mine.  And though this is my first voyage with Mr. Pike I know he’s too hard-bitten” (here I laughed at her involuntary pun) “an old sailor not to know that his room is clean.  Yours” (I was perturbed for fear she was going to say that I had brought them on board) “have most probably drifted in from for’ard.  They always have them for’ard.

“And now, Mr. Pathurst, I am going down to attend to your case.  You’d better get your Wada to make up a camping kit for you.  The next couple of nights you’ll spend in the cabin or chart-room.  And be sure Wada removes all silver and metallic tarnishable stuff from your rooms.  There’s going to be all sorts of fumigating, and tearing out of woodwork, and rebuilding.  Trust me.  I know the vermin.”

CHAPTER XIV

Such a cleaning up and turning over!  For two nights, one in the chart-room and one on the cabin sofa, I have soaked myself in sleep, and I am now almost stupid with excess of sleep.  The land seems very far away.  By some strange quirk, I have an impression that weeks, or months, have passed since I left Baltimore on that bitter March morning.  And yet it was March 28, and this is only the first week in April.

I was entirely right in my first estimation of Miss West.  She is the most capable, practically masterful woman I have ever encountered.  What passed between her and Mr. Pike I do not know; but whatever it was, she was convinced that he was not the erring one.  In some strange way, my two rooms are the only ones which have been invaded by this plague of vermin.  Under Miss West’s instructions bunks, drawers, shelves, and all superficial woodwork have been ripped out.  She worked the carpenter from daylight till dark, and then, after a night of fumigation, two of the sailors, with turpentine and white lead, put the finishing touches on the cleansing operations.  The carpenter is now busy rebuilding my rooms.  Then will come the painting, and in two or three more days I expect to be settled back in my quarters.

Of the men who did the turpentining and white-leading there have been four.  Two of them were quickly rejected by Miss West as not being up to the work.  The first one, Steve Roberts, which he told me was his name, is an interesting fellow.  I talked with him quite a bit ere Miss West sent him packing and told Mr. Pike that she wanted a real sailor.

This is the first time Steve Roberts has ever seen the sea.  How he happened to drift from the western cattle-ranges to New York he did not explain, any more than did he explain how he came to ship on the Elsinore .  But here he is, not a sailor on horseback, but a cowboy on the sea.  He is a small man, but most powerfully built.  His shoulders are very broad, and his muscles bulge under his shirt; and yet he is slender-waisted, lean-limbed, and hollow-cheeked.  This last, however, is not due to sickness or ill-health.  Tyro as he is on the sea, Steve Roberts is keen and intelligent . . . yes, and crooked.  He has a way of looking straight at one with utmost frankness while he talks, and yet it is at such moments I get most strongly the impression of crookedness.  But he is a man, if trouble should arise, to be reckoned with.  In ways he suggests a kinship with the three men Mr. Pike took so instant a prejudice against—Kid Twist, Nosey Murphy, and Bert Rhine.  And I have already noticed, in the dog-watches, that it is with this trio that Steve Roberts chums.

The second sailor Miss West rejected, after silently watching him work for five minutes, was Mulligan Jacobs, the wisp of a man with curvature of the spine.  But before she sent him packing other things occurred in which I was concerned.  I was in the room when Mulligan Jacobs first came in to go to work, and I could not help observing the startled, avid glance he threw at my big shelves of books.  He advanced on them in the way a robber might advance on a secret hoard of gold, and as a miser would fondle gold so Mulligan Jacobs fondled these book-titles with his eyes.

And such eyes!  All time bitterness and venom Mr. Pike had told me the man possessed was there in his eyes.  They were small, pale-blue, and gimlet-pointed with fire.  His eyelids were inflamed, and but served to ensanguine the bitter and cold-blazing intensity of the pupils.  The man was constitutionally a hater, and I was not long in learning that he hated all things except books.

“Would you care to read some of them?” I said hospitably.

All the caress in his eyes for the books vanished as he turned his head to look at me, and ere he spoke I knew that I, too, was hated.

“It’s hell, ain’t it?—you with a strong body and servants to carry for you a weight of books like this, and me with a curved spine that puts the pot-hooks of hell-fire into my brain?”

How can I possibly convey the terrible venomousness with which he uttered these words?  I know that Mr. Pike, dragging his feet down the hall past my open door, gave me a very gratifying sense of safety.  Being alone in the room with this man seemed much the same as if I were locked in a cage with a tiger-cat.  The devilishness, the wickedness, and, above all, the pitch of glaring hatred with which the man eyed me and addressed me, were most unpleasant.  I swear I knew fear—not calculated caution, not timid apprehension, but blind, panic, unreasoned terror.  The malignancy of the creature was blood curdling; nor did it require words to convey it: it poured from him, out of his red-rimmed, blazing eyes, out of his withered, twisted, tortured face, out of his broken-nailed, crooked talons of hands.  And yet, in that very moment of instinctive startle and repulsion, the thought was in my mind that with one hand I could take the throat of the weazened wisp of a crippled thing and throttle the malformed life out of it.

But there was little encouragement in such thought—no more than a man might feel in a cave of rattlesnakes or a pit of centipedes, for, crush them with his very bulk, nevertheless they would first sink their poison into him.  And so with this Mulligan Jacobs.  My fear of him was the fear of being infected with his venom.  I could not help it; for I caught a quick vision of the black and broken teeth I had seen in his mouth sinking into my flesh, polluting me, eating me with their acid, destroying me.

One thing was very clear.  In the creature was no fear.  Absolutely, he did not know fear.  He was as devoid of it as the fetid slime one treads underfoot in nightmares.  Lord, Lord! that is what the thing was, a nightmare.

“You suffer pain often?” I asked, attempting to get myself in hand by the calculated use of sympathy.

“The hooks are in me, in the brain, white-hot hooks that burn an’ burn,” was his reply.  “But by what damnable right do you have all these books, and time to read ’em, an’ all night in to read ’em, an’ soak in them, when me brain’s on fire, and I’m watch and watch, an’ me broken spine won’t let me carry half a hundredweight of books about with me?”

Another madman, was my conclusion; and yet I was quickly compelled to modify it, for, thinking to play with a rattle-brain, I asked him what were the books up to half a hundredweight he carried, and what were the writers he preferred.  His library, he told me, among other things included, first and fore-most, a complete Byron.  Next was a complete Shakespeare; also a complete Browning in one volume.  A full hall-dozen he had in the forecastle of