Arthur Colton

“ We knew when we had arrived, for there appeared a long range of roofs through the stems of a palm grove, and a broad path led to it through bushes covered with red thick-scented flowers. It was King Julius's palace. The front of it was all one piazza, maybe two-hundred feet long and forty deep, with slim bamboo pillars; and men seemed to be still shingling one end of it with layers of plantain leaves. But the king was out in a sort of square to one side, and had about fifty warriors with feathers in their hair, practising spears at a mark. ”

“ Kamelillo suddenly sat up. “Hear im?” he says.
There was a great noise over in the channel out of sight, a kind of splashing, thumping, and blowing, and the waves rolled into the harbour. We ran along the shore and came to the bluffs. There was Liebchen! She appeared to have grounded in the channel, trying to get in quick at low tide. But there were two harpoons, more than the bamboo, sticking in her very deep, and the lines were hitched to a longboat, the longboat coming inshore now full of men. Veronica squatting on the thwart of the same, comfortable and dignified. ”

“ Veronica belonged to the ship, but had never been cooked, being thin and stringy; and Kamelillo was a silent, sulky Kanaka that had lived up and down the Pacific, and harpooned whales, and been shipwrecked now and then, and was sometimes drunk and sometimes starved, and had no opinion on these things, except that he'd rather be drunk than starved. I never knew one that took less interest in life, provided he was let alone. ”

“ I never agreed with Clyde in argument, more than did Stevey Todd. A man falls in with various folks by sea and land, and he finds many that are made up of ill-fitting parts. Clyde was an odd man and a bold one, though old and dry. Monson I took for a loud and joyful one, simple and open in his mind, and violent in his habits and free of language, and yet he acted to me both secret and moderate, and I guess I mistook him.
Stevey Todd and I went to sea again in the coasting trade, and mainly to the south, and saw the coasts and parts we knew in the Hebe Maitland days. ”

“ The afternoon slipped on, hour by hour, and the fire snapped and cast its red light in our faces, and the kettle sung and the storm outside kept up its mad business, and the surf its monotone.
“I was so, when I was a lad of eighteen or nineteen,” Captain Buckingham said. “I was a wild one, though not large, but limber and clipper-built, and happy any side up, and my notion of human life was that it was something like a cake-walk, and something like a Bartlett pear, as being juicy anywhere you bit in.” ”

“ He was no hand at poetry. Nor was he romantic to look at, but thin, and sinewy, and one-eyed, and some dried up, clean shaven except for a wisp of greyish whisker on his chin, and always neatly dressed now. When he'd laugh to himself, the wrinkles would spread around his eyes, one blind, and the other calm and calculating, and absent-minded. He'd sit with his cigar tilted up in one corner of his mouth, and his hat tilted forward, and whittle sticks. He'd talk with anybody, but mostly with me and Kamelillo, whom he appeared to be asking for information. ”

“ When we came out to look up the valley to the open country, we saw no signs of fighting, nor any one moving about. Through the valley, as we went up it, there was no smoke from the huts, no women bruising nuts and ground roots into meal, no fat man before the hut with two doors sitting on his mats, not a soul in the village. ”

“ That's the way of it in South America with all but the politics and the climate. The politics and the climate are like this; when they're quiet, they're asleep; and when they're not, politics are revolutions and guns, and the climate is letting off stray volcanoes and shaking up earthquakes.
But it was pleasant to be in the harbour of Portate. Everything there seemed lazy. You could lie on a bunch of sail cloth, and see the city, the sand, and the bluffs, and the valley of the Jiron up to the nearer Andes. ”

“ Why, Kid, look here! If you feel as bad as that three-for-a-cent requiem to Pete Hillary sounded, it's cats all right. It's the same kind that light on back fences and feel sick, and express themselves by clawing faces,” I says, “and blaspheming the moon with sounds that never ought to be. That what you mean by 'cats in him'?”
“Precise, Tommy, precise.”
“Well, I don't put it together,” I says. “I wouldn't feel like that for the satisfaction of drowning all Ferdinand Street. Why, poetical habits and habits of banging folks don't seem to me to fit. ”

“ Madame Bill said we'd leave him there, which we did, after closing the shutters. We left him drinking iced wine, eating mangoes, blowing smoke, and looking like a porpoise in respect to complexion, but shorter and fatter than a porpoise, and remarkable youthful.
It came on the Monday following and my cargo was shipped. There was a platform put up on the Plaza, and I heard Flannagan making a speech there, in which the feeling was eloquent, and the languages as they came along. The tin-type man, under the platform, was taking tin-types to make a man remember how he was depraved. ”

“ Why should they care what became of their gifts? From Maya Dala's talk one seemed to catch a glimpse of the idea, which occurred to old Lo Tsin Shan, that fishy Oriental, one day forty years before, and sent him up the river to interview King Tharawady on his gold-lacquer and mosaic throne. Yet he had let the profits lie there, if there were any, maybe thinking all along of the handsome tomb he was putting up for himself, when his time came. You couldn't guess all his Mongolian thoughts, nor those of his son, Fu Shan, of whom Sadler asked medicine for a dyspeptic soul. ”

“ I knew it must be Billy Corliss, though I didn't know him, nor did Uncle Abimelech, nor Stevey Todd. He might have blown down from Labrador, or eloped out of Nova Scotia.
Pemberton and Corliss went out together. Then Stevey Todd spoke up cautiously:
“When I look at it,” he said, “when I asks myself: 'Is he right or is he not?' I don't hear no objections. And further,” he said, leaning forward and speaking low, “it's my opinion there's a woman out there.”
Uncle Abimelech lifted his eyes from the kettle that hung over the fire, and stared about and seemed to be alarmed. ”

“ But Fu Shan says, Lum would rather come over to America and go into business in Saleratus. Lum Shan don't like his temple, but I don't know why. Well, then, I says, 'Speak up, Fu Shan. Don't be bashful, Asia. If you've got a medicine for the hopeless, let it come, Asia. What's five thousand years got to say to a man with an absolute constitution, a stomach voracious and untroubled, who looks around him and sees no utility anywhere? ”

“ A typhoon is to an ordinary storm what a surf is to a deep-sea wave, for it's short but ugly. When it was done with us the Anaconda began to leak fearful in the waist, and I dare say the typhoon was excuse enough if she'd broken in two. She went down easy and slow, with all I had and owned sticking in her. It's bad luck to give a ship an outlandish name.
There were two large boats and a small one, and trouble came from Kreps' tin cans of specimens, for the captain wouldn't take them in his boat, nor the first mate in his, so Kreps wanted to put them in the small boat. ”

“ They left us in canvas hammocks on the ground floor of the Tower of Ananias. It was three stories high, the top story opened to seaward, with its lanterns and tin reflectors.
The darkness came on, as its habits are in the tropics, like a lamp blown out. I could see the stars through the square seaward window of the tower, and heard the keeper go softly up the stairs, and I went to sleep, very weak and faint. ”

“ He sat, solemn and still, while Sadler was unloading his mind, and it seemed to me that Kiyi was mysterious, same as the bronze Buddhas in the cone pagoda.
“He's got it,” says Sadler, speaking husky. “Worse'n I did.”
“Got what?” I says.
Sadler's face had grown tired, sort of heavy and worn, while he was looking down at Kiyi. “Born with it. He got injected with the extract of misery beforehand,” he says. “He was born wishing he wasn't. I know what it is, but he don't know what it is, Kiyi don't. He don't know what's the matter. First thing he saw was the cholera.” ”

“ Flannagan looked at Madame Bill. The crowd was shouting more in unison now. They says, “Vivo Alvarez!” and “Bill al fuego!” which the latter means, as you or I might say, “To hell with Bill!” The Minister shivered and struggled, but more moderate.
“The military will be confused, will do nothing without order!” he pleaded to Madame Bill.
“The military,” says the tin-type man, from the shutters, speaking through his nose, soft and scornful, “they appear to feel tolerable good. ”

“ I sat on my bunk and wondered why a man like me was always having trouble.
Then I took a lantern and went exploring down in the hold of the ship, which was pretty much empty of cargo, and foul, and smelt as if things had rotted there a hundred years. There were barrels and boxes and old canvas, and heaps of scrap iron, and some lead pipe, and coils of bad rope. Afterward I came on deck, and had supper and talked with Monson. He kept nudging me now and then, and saying, “It's that way;” and me answering, “There's reason in it, when it's put that way.” ”

“ It was a great life. Sometimes I catch myself heaving a sigh for the old man that's dead, and saying to myself, “That was a great life yonder.”
My recollection is, it was a sub-agent in Cuba who turned evidence on Clyde at last, for a gunboat missed us by only a few miles coming down by St. Christopher, as I heard afterward. Then a Spanish cruiser ran us down, at last, under a corner of a little island among the Windwards, about thirty miles east of Tobago, where Clyde's cleverness came to nothing. ”

“ Sadler went aft, dragging the long black hose, and sat on the rail till the Juanita drew in to forty feet away, and through the deckhouse windows you could see the tufted caps of the suppressed soldiery. Then he let a steaming arch out of the hose pipe, that vaulted the distance and soaked the steersman, who howled and lay down. Then the Juanita ploughed on, and Sadler played his hose, as she passed, through the windows of the deck house, where there were crashes and other noises, and Irish's engine kept on chug-chugging in the chest of the Harvest Moon. ”

“ But when Stevey Todd offered to admit that it blew “brisk, but when you say hard, I argue it;” and when Uncle Abimelech piped:
“She blows aloft, she blows alow, Take in your topsails early;”
Then Captain Buckingham, who sat leaning forward smoking, with his elbows on his knees, staring at the fire, at last, without stirring in his chair, he spoke up, and said, “She blows all right,” and we waited, thinking he might say more.
“Pemberton,” he went on, “the seaman follows his profit and luck around the world. You sit by your chimney and they come to you. ”

“ The next thing I knew we were shooting past the upper town, up the valley of the Jiron, and there wasn't any lower town to be seen. We were bound for the Andes. The crest of the wave was a few rods ahead, and the air was full of spray. I saw the Sarasara too, having a nice time spitting things out of her mouth, and it looked to me like she waggled her head with the fun she was having. But the Helen Mar was having no fun, nor me, nor Stevey Todd. ”

“ Is it for nothing that you're a man of romance? Is it for nothing that you long to permeate, to expand? The soul of man' I says, 'is airy; it's full of draughts. Your soul, J. R., flaps like a tent,' I says, 'in the breezes of dawn. The world is round. Time is fleeting. ”

“ He was a medium-sized man, with light hair and eyebrows, and a yellowish face, and a frame lean, though sinewy, and had only one good eye, the other pale like a fish's. His business eye always looked like it was boring a hole in some ingenious idea. As an arguer on the Hebe Maitland his style was airy and gorgeous, contrary to the style of Stevey Todd, who was a cautious arguer, and gingerly.
Craney was about forty years old at the time of the Hebe Maitland's loss, and Sadler about the same. ”

“ British majesty pacified, Ferdinand Street solid for a Mayor that puts that value on Pete Hillary, Transport Company don't object. Everybody happy, except me. Don't mind me. I go my lonesome way.”
Sadler turned away, depressed, and looked at the chain gang in the Plaza. The Mayor's eyes glistened. Dorcas pulled his beard, and he says:
“There'd be more in it for you, Excellency, that's a fact.”
The Mayor came over and patted Sadler on the shoulder, and his voice showed emotion.
“My friend, be not sad. To be sacrificed to public policy is noble.” ”