The Ship of Shadows. H. Bedford-Jones

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      3. At Sea

      CHAPTER III

       Table of Contents

      At Sea

      VENABLE awoke to a racking headache, a violent nausea and a nerve-shattering need of morphia. His box of white powders was gone. This discovery startled him into immediate wakefulness.

      He found his surroundings woefully strange. He was in a bunk that heaved oddly; everything around him seemed to be in the throes of an earthquake. Other men lay in other bunks; in the air was an odor of dirt and whisky and sweat. His bodily misery was acute, and was intensified a thousandfold by the jangle of his tortured nerves.

      In vain he searched himself for the white powder. Satisfied that it was gone, he staggered from his bunk and stood for a moment gazing around. He was not a fool, and by the lamp swinging in gimbals he decided that he was aboard a ship; also he knew that he was extremely seasick.

      Overcome by nausea, he opened a door before him and reeled out into a passage. He missed the companion ladder, the hatch of which was down, but finally wandered into the galley, where a yellow-skinned cook received him with much Oriental profanity. The cook, however, assisted him in relieving his anguished stomach, in the midst of which operation a rough voice broke in upon them.

      “Damn my eyes, if it aint Parson! Hey, Parson! You git below with the change o’ watch, or I’ll be up to drag ye down! Give him some chow, John, so’s he can hold up his end with the black gang.”

      Venable recognized the man Stormalong, and with a weak effort he inquired about Garrity.

      “Garrity?” rejoined the other jeeringly. “He’s five hundred mile back in Frisco—where you’ll wish you was if you don’t buck up an’ git to work! ”

      With this, Stormalong vanished. Venable was too weak and sick to give further heed to anything. How he had come aboard this ship, he neither knew nor cared. He begged the cook for morphine or opium, but the yellow man only shrugged his shoulders.

      An hour later, scarce able to crawl for the sickness that was on him, Venable emerged on deck, painfully dragging himself aft. To his amazement he found there was no storm; the steamer was chugging through bright sunlight and sparkling waters; her decks seemed white and deserted, and all around was a horizon of long, rolling billows. She was not a large ship by any means, and Venable halted at sight of the stenciled name on boats and preservers—John Ferguson.

      Why, that was Garrity’s ship, surely! Even in his racked condition, Venable remembered the name. And Garrity five hundred miles away, back in Frisco? How did it happen?

      PUZZLING over this strange fact, Venable halted to stare around him. No one was in sight, and the ship seemed to be going her business of her own accord. Suddenly he was aware that a man had appeared and was approaching him—a rather small man, wearing a faded cap and faded blue clothes.

      “What are you doing here?” said the stranger.

      “Looking for the captain,” answered Venable feverishly. “Tell me—”

      “I’m the skipper. Oh, you’re Parson, are you?” The other man gave him a keen, searching look. “Well, what d’you want?”

      “I—I—for the love of heaven, give me some morphia!” begged Venable with piteous force. “I’m going to pieces—”

      “Get below, you old fool,” snapped the skipper, “and clear out of this part of the ship! You’ll get all the stimulant you want in the boiler-room—”

      “There’s been a mistake!” broke in Venable. “I—I never meant to be aboard here.”

      “You, Stormalong!” The skipper lifted his voice to some one forward. “Get this bum for’ard where he belongs and keep him there! Tryin’ to tell me he was shanghaied, the dopy old fool! Clear him out, now.”

      Stormalong appeared, gathered up the protesting but helpless Venable, and dragged him below again in short order.

      Thus ended the primary stage of Venable’s sea-education. The secondary stage was one of horror, humiliation and utter torment. Every man aboard ship knew that he was a dope-victim; and every man knew that a dope-victim is the most degraded of men. Only Garrity knew that his friend was a victim of fate, and not of opium products.

      To the mind of Venable, at least, the intolerable torture which he now faced consisted of two salient features: he was kept at work shoveling coal, and he could get neither drug nor liquor. For a while he was close to madness. Perhaps Shinski saved him from madness; perhaps it was the steel within himself that saved him. Some men can go through agonies of suffering and labor, and the more they endure, the more spring comes into the steel of their souls; others, made of iron instead of steel, go to pieces and must be slowly welded or not at all. In Venable’s case it was steel, and it was proven.

      Shinski was a man in his watch. When Venable crawled into his bunk the second night of his deprivation and torment, he was groaning bitterly, half raving. Shinski came to him, an odd little man, tenderly pitiful, speaking accented English, and like an angel of mercy gave Venable a tiny bit of white powder.

      There СКАЧАТЬ