job, forgot the whole blamed shooting-match. And
he ain’t never remembered them since. The
doctors have names for that kind o’ thing.
It seems it does happen now and again. Well,
he turned to an’ began sailoring first off—soon
as the hospitals and medicos were done with him—an’
him not having any friends as you might say, he was
let go his own gait. He got to be third mate of
some kind o’ dough-dish down Mexico way; and
then I got hold o’ him an’ took him into
the Comp’ny. He’s been with me ever
since. He ain’t got the faintest kind o’
recollection o’ his Methody days, an’ believes
he’s always been a sailorman. Well, that’s
his business, ain’t it? If he takes
my orders an’ walks chalk, what do I care about
his Methody game? There, boys, is the origin,
history and development of Slick Dick Nickerson.
If you take up this sea-otter deal and go to Point
Barrow, naturally Nick has got to go as owner’s
agent and representative of the Comp’ny.
But I couldn’t send a easier fellow to get along
with. Honest, now, I couldn’t. Boys,
you think over the proposition between now and tomorrow
an’ then come around and let me know.”
And the upshot of the whole matter was that one month
later the Bertha Millner, with Nickerson, Hardenberg,
Strokher and Ally Bazan on board, cleared from San
Francisco, bound—the papers were beautifully
precise—for Seattle and Tacoma with a cargo
of general merchandise.
As a matter of fact, the bulk of her cargo consisted
of some odd hundreds of very fine lumps of rock—which
as ballast is cheap by the ton—and some
odd dozen cases of conspicuously labeled champagne.
The Pacific and Oriental Flotation Company made this
champagne out of Rhine wine, effervescent salts, raisins,
rock candy and alcohol. It was from the same
stock of wine of which Ryder had sold some thousand
cases to the Coreans the year before.
“Not that I care a curse,” said Strokher,
the Englishman. “But I put it to you squarely
that this voyage lacks that certain indescribable
charm.”
The Bertha Millner was a fortnight out, and
the four adventurers—or, rather, the three
adventurers and Nickerson—were lame in every
joint, red-eyed from lack of sleep, half-starved,
wholly wet and unequivocally disgusted. They
had had heavy weather from the day they bade farewell
to the whistling buoy off San Francisco Bay until
the moment when even patient, docile, taciturn Strokher
had at last—in his own fashion—rebelled.
“Ain’t I a dam’ fool? Ain’t
I a proper lot? Gard strike me if I don’t
chuck fer fair after this. Wot’d I come
to sea fer—an’ this ’ere go
is the worst I ever knew—a baoat
no bigger’n a bally bath-tub, head seas, livin’
gyles the clock ’round, wet food, wet clothes,
wet bunks. Caold till, by cricky! I’ve
lost the feel o’ mee feet. An’ wat
for? For the bloomin’ good chanst o’
a slug in mee guts. That’s wat for.”
At little intervals the little vociferous colonial,
Ally Bazan—he was red-haired and speckled—capered
with rage, shaking his fists.
