“‘Yankee ship come down the ribber!’” the sea-lawyer’s voice rolled out as he led the anchor song.

“‘Pull, my bully boys, pull!’” roared back the old familiar chorus, the men’s bodies lifting and bending to the rhythm.

Bub Russell paid the boatman and stepped on deck.  The anchor was forgotten.  A mighty cheer went up from the men, and almost before he could catch his breath he was on the shoulders of the captain, surrounded by his mates, and endeavoring to answer twenty questions to the second.

The next day a schooner hove to off a Japanese fishing village, sent ashore four sailors and a little midshipman, and sailed away.  These men did not talk English, but they had money and quickly made their way to Yokohama.  From that day the Japanese village folk never heard anything more about them, and they are still a much-talked-of mystery.  As the Russian government never said anything about the incident, the United States is still ignorant of the whereabouts of the lost poacher, nor has she ever heard, officially, of the way in which some of her citizens “shanghaied” five subjects of the tsar.  Even nations have secrets sometimes.

THE BANKS OF THE SACRAMENTO

  “And it’s blow, ye winds, heigh-ho,
  For Cal-i-for-ni-o;
  For there’s plenty of gold so I’ve been told,
  On the banks of the Sacramento!”

It was only a little boy, singing in a shrill treble the sea chantey which seamen sing the wide world over when they man the capstan bars and break the anchors out for “Frisco” port.  It was only a little boy who had never seen the sea, but two hundred feet beneath him rolled the Sacramento.  “Young” Jerry he was called, after “Old” Jerry, his father, from whom he had learned the song, as well as received his shock of bright-red hair, his blue, dancing eyes, and his fair and inevitably freckled skin.

For Old Jerry had been a sailor, and had followed the sea till middle life, haunted always by the words of the ringing chantey.  Then one day he had sung the song in earnest, in an Asiatic port, swinging and thrilling round the capstan-circle with twenty others.  And at San Francisco he turned his back upon his ship and upon the sea, and went to behold with his own eyes the banks of the Sacramento.

He beheld the gold, too, for he found employment at the Yellow Dream mine, and proved of utmost usefulness in rigging the great ore-cables across the river and two hundred feet above its surface.

After that he took charge of the cables and kept them in repair, and ran them and loved them, and became himself an indispensable fixture of the Yellow Dream mine.  Then he loved pretty Margaret Kelly; but she had left him and Young Jerry, the latter barely toddling, to take up her last long sleep in the little graveyard among the great sober pines.

Old Jerry never went back to the sea.  He remained by his cables, and lavished upon them and Young Jerry all the love of his nature.  When evil days came to the Yellow-Dream, he still remained in the employ of the company as watchman over the all but abandoned property.