“Aye, aye, sir!” murmured a rapidly retreating
voice.
Campbell closed and locked the door and turned back
to Harrigan with a grin.
“The world’s a wide place,” he said,
“but there’s few enough in it who know
our Bobbie, God bless him! When I’ve found
one, shall I let him go down to the fireroom?
Ha! Now tell me what’s wrong between you
and McTee.”
“I will not talk,” said Harrigan with
another bold stroke of diplomacy, “till I hear
the rest of that song. The true Scotch comes hard
on my tongue, but I’ll learn it.”
“You will, laddie, for your heart’s right.
Man, man, I’m nothing now, but you should have
heard me sing in the old days—”
“When we were in Glasgow,” grinned Harrigan.
“In Glasgow,” repeated Campbell, and then
lifted his head and finished the song. “Now
for the story, laddie.”
Harrigan started, as though recalled from a dream
built up by the music. Then he told briefly the
tale of the tyranny aboard the Mary Rogers,
now apparently to be repeated.
“So I thought,” he concluded, “that
it was to be the old story over again—look
at my hands!”
He held them out. The palms were still red and
deeply scarred. Campbell said nothing, but his
jaw set savagely.
“I thought it was to be this all over again,”
went on Harrigan, “till I met you, chief.
But with you for a friend I’ll weather the storm.
McTee’s a hard man, but when Scot meets Scot—I’ll
bet on the Campbells.”
“Would you bet on me against Black McTee?”
queried the engineer, deeply moved. “Well,
lad, McTee’s a dour man, but dour or not he shall
not run the engine room of the Heron.”
And he banged on the table for emphasis.
“Scrub down the bridge every morning, as they
tell you, but when they send you below to pass the
coal, come and report to me first. I’ll
have work for you to do—chiefly practicing
the right accent for Bobbie’s songs. Is
not that a man’s work?”
To make good this promise, Campbell straightway sang
for Harrigan’s delectation two or three more
of his favorite selections. It was evening, and
the shift in the fireroom was ended before Harrigan
left the engineer’s room. On his way to
the deck he passed the tired firemen from the hole
of the ship. They stared at the Irishman with
wide eyes, for it was known that he had been hi the
chief engineer’s room for several hours; they
looked upon nun as one who has been in hell and has
escaped from thence to the upper air.
He was, in fact, a marked man when he reached the
forecastle. Rumor travels through a ship’s
crew and it was already known that Black McTee hated
the Irishman and that White Henshaw had commenced to
persecute him in a new and terrible manner.
This would have been sufficient tragedy to burden
the shoulders of any one man, however strong, and
when to this was added the fact that he had been kept
by the grim chief engineer for several hours in the
chief’s own room, and finally considering that
this man had passed through a shipwreck, one of three
lone survivors, it is easy to understand why the sailors
gave him ample elbow room.
