Wide Courses. James B. Connolly

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СКАЧАТЬ exist? they asked, and shipped it by mistake to the new commandant.

      "'And how the hell do I know?' says the new commandant, but not in writing, and passes it on to the old Savannah captain, who was now rear-admiral, with a division in the East waiting him to come and hoist his pennant. And so again it was a chase of the Texarkhoma, which was on her way to the Philippines via Honolulu and way ports. They were too late for her at Honolulu, and at Guam, and again at Yokohama; but they overhauled her at Hong-kong, where she'd been lying at anchor for a week.

      "The admiral had a lot of mail that morning in Hong-kong harbor, but nothing to speed up his brain till he came to the hose-pipe thing. 'Twas then he went up on the quarter-deck and did a Marathon for an hour or so, while the officer of the deck and every blessed marine and flat-foot on duty stepped softly till he ducked below again.

      "By and by, in his cabin, the admiral presses the buzzer, and in comes his trusty yeoman, the same he'd carried from the days of the Savannah, and to him the admiral says: 'Willoughby'—call him Willoughby—' Willoughby, how long you been in the service?'

      "'Nineteen years, sir.'

      [pg 35]

      "'Nineteen? H'm! Then by this time you probably know a little something of the ways that shore-going departments invent to worry us poor fellows to sea,' He held up the hose-pipe thing. 'You've seen this before, Willoughby?'

      "'Oh yes, sir,' says Willoughby."

      "'I dare say, and so have I, and if there's a sea-going or shore-going officer in the service that hasn't bumped into it, then he must have been on the sick-list for the last few dozen years. Well, Willoughby, do you take it, this nightmare—that I thought was dead and buried a dozen times—take it and study it over, from alow and aloft, from for'ard and aft, inside and outside and topside and 'tween-decks, from mast-head to keelson, from figure-head to jack-staff; study it and stay with it, and from out of your nineteen years' experience—and you're no green apprentice-boy, Willoughby—see if you can't construct an endorsement that will lay the damned ghost of it for good and all.'

      "'Aye, aye, sir,' says the trusty yeoman, and takes it off to his office and looks it over. A wonderful thing it was by now, with its sixty-seven endorsements winged out on the back of it. Just to read them took the Admiral's yeoman an hour, and he wasn't too slow a reader, either. Well, he spreads it out and sizes it up. And sucks three pipefuls, and takes a cruise down the passageway and has a chat with his old-time shipmates, the [pg 36] boson and the gunner. The boson was Mr. Kiley, the same old boson of the Savannah, been with the Old Man when he was a middy in sailing-ship days—couldn't lose each other. A lot of things about the new Navy the boson and the gunner couldn't savvy, and when they got talking things over together they left their blue-book etiquette in their lockers. The admiral's yeoman tells 'em what the Old Man has caught in his mail, and then he asks the boson, 'Did you try to use that hose at all that day?'

      "Try to? No, but I did. D' y' s'pose I was goin' to lose out on a little thing like that 'cause of regulations? And 'specially after the officer of the deck goes inside the bulkhead to give me a chance?'

      "'He didn't go inside to give you any chance,' says the admiral's yeoman. 'That was to write a message to the skipper.'

      "' Sho-oo boy—bubbles! He was young enough, was Mr. Renner, but not so young he didn't know enough not to bother the ship's boson when he's gettin' results. And I snakes the hose off that scrap-heap, and before he's back on the quarter I had it bustin' with navy-yard water-pressure, and you betcher he sees it over the side, but he don't look too hard at it. No, sir, he don't,' goes on the boson. 'And now take a word from me—and it ain't out of any drill-book your division officer 'll [pg 37] read to you. Let me have that endorsement gadjet and I'll lash it to the fluke of one of our mudhooks next time we come to anchor, and after it's laid a while on the bottom of Singapore harbor, or wherever it is we next let go, under twenty, thirty, or forty fathom of water, whatever it is, I'll let you see what it looks like.'

      "'No, no, Kiley, don't you do it,' says the gunner. 'Don't you do it. Some crazy Parsee diver might spot it and go down and bring it up; and besides, you oughtn't let it get wet—it'd spoil all that nice typewriting. Give it up to me and I'll take it up on the after-bridge, and if it's too stiff for wadding, I'll tie it across the muzzle of the first six-pounder we salute the port with, and let you see how it looks then.'

      "'What you two pirates need,' says the admiral's yeoman, 'is to learn a little respect for the shore-going departments where your orders are made out,' and goes back to his office and takes that hose-pipe communication and reads through the sixty-seven endorsements again, and then he carefully typewrites on a new leaf:

      "'Endorsement No. 68 U.S.S. Texarkhoma, Hong-kong, China, Date So and so.

      [pg 38]

      "'Respectfully returned, with the information that the need of the section of hose-pipe no longer exists, for the reason that we filled the Savannah's tanks with it seven years ago.

      "'Very respectfully,

      "'Your obedient servant,'

      and signs his own name and rating, Percy Algernon Willoughby—call him that—Chief Yeoman, U.S. Navy, and glues that on behind the other sixty-seven endorsements and gloats over it, and for a few minutes feels like a bureau chief himself. Then for another minute or two he thought of mailing it to them. And he could see them reading that in Washington! There would be an endorsement to go ringing down the departmental ancestral halls! And as for the other yeomen, his colleagues in the service, for generations his name would resound among 'em. But he decided that that would be too much glory for one yeoman, and besides, he didn't know where he could start in at $70 a month (with additions) and all found, at his age, after being nineteen years on one job. And right here, he had to admit to himself, he didn't have so very much the best of Heels of the navy-yard. So he looks it over again; fat as a history of the Roman Empire, and hefted it and—well, there were young apprentice-boys aboard that didn't weigh any more. [pg 39] But to make sure, he lashes it to the butt-end of a fourteen-pound shell the gunner had once given him for a desk-weight. He hated to lose that desk-weight, a relic of the Santiago fight, but a good cause this—a good cause. He starts to unscrew his air-port, but come to think, it was still daylight, and so he waits for the shades of night to fall.

      "Well, that night—three bells just gone in the mid-watch it was—the marine guarding the patent life-buoy on the port side of the quarter-deck, fell into a reverie. He ought to have been on the qui vive, so to speak—alert, active, wide-awake, pacing his post briskly of course, according to instructions; and if it was daylight when the officer of the deck could see him, you betcher he would. But it was the middle of the night, and a night in the Orient, with a sky of studded velvet and a sea that flowed by like a smooth roll of dark belting, and he was only—Tolliver was his name, from Georgia—only a slim young Southern boy dreaming of home and mother, and maybe of a girl he had left behind him, and he looked up at the emblazoned firmament and again at the flashing sea, and then he rested his head on the top chain-rail.

      "For just a second. He had said to himself he wouldn't go to sleep; but all at once he heard a move below him, as of somebody unscrewing an air-port, and then he heard a voice say, 'Well, here [pg 40] goes a ghost that will stay laid!' and then a plash, a pl-m-p! and looking over quickly, he saw plain as could be the phosphorus hole in the sea, then a quarter of a second later something white as a man's face, and then it was gone into the ship's wake.

      "'Man overboard!' he yells, and snaps the patent life-buoy over the side, and the marine on the starboard side of the quarter he yells, 'Man overboard!' and the marine on the after-bridge he yells, 'Man overboard!' and the two СКАЧАТЬ