Frederick R. Bechdolt

“ Lighthouse Tom was fumbling in his trousers pockets. He brought forth a dollar and a half dollar. “Here,” said he. “Up on Market Street, a matter of five blocks, there is an employment agency. Ye can get a job there fer the dollar; the rest will stake ye fer a bed and meal. Ye’ll do well to steer clear of the city front when the whalers is in port.”
When the boy had got over his astonishment and had departed, Lighthouse Tom nodded to my look of inquiry. “That ‘big tramp steamer’ is the whaler out there in the stream,” said he; “and Puget Sound would be two years in the Arctic fer that lad.” ”

“ Me and the lass left Mother Martin’s boarding house and found a little shack on the side of Rincon Hill. I started out to look fer a job. To this day when I see a lad a-castin’ his eye around fer work and gettin’ none, my heart goes out to him. There’s nawthin’ makes a man feel so down and out as getting turned away. ”

“ What’s more we met head-winds and a heavy sea. So me month was up, that I had figured that evenin’ before I cleared the Henry Buck’s rail.
“Lad, I made for Rincon Hill with all sail on and a fair wind. I do not call to mind one thing from the dock to the shack where. I had left the lass, only that I had collisions with two or three that was slow in getting acrost me bows; and a cop was set on taking me to the station fer a crazy man. I come to the place at last. I went up to the door on a run, all out of wind. Mother Martin opened it in me face.
“‘So,’ says she, ‘ye’re back in port. ”

“ He laughed down at me—fer big as I was then, he was half a head the loftier—and, says he, ‘Better for the lass, she come to ye. I like me liquor and me bulldog too well to make fast with a woman. I know it, if I didn’t know it then. Ye fought me fer her and ye won, Lighthouse Tom. And I have lost too many bets on Sunday coursin’ races to raise a roar when all was fair and above board,’ says he. ‘We’ll make fer the bunkers now; the timekeeper is there.’
“So that arternoon I shoveled coal under the hatchway of a big bellied tramp along with Big Joe and twenty other Lack, hairy, sweatin’ devils. ”

“ Sometimes I would not come home until midnight or after. That was in the beginning of the winter when the colliers was comin’ into port every day or two, and the gang used to be working overtime. Six bits an hour fer that and God knows we ’arned it, too. When we knocked off the balance of them would head fer the saloons; and on Sundays they would gamble away their wages on the coursin’ races or backing Big Joe’s bulldog ag’in a pit dog from up in the Mission. But I had none of that. I took me money home to the lass and she stowed it away in the locker ag’in the boy that was to come. ”

“ Well, there was a whole string of little half-way ports to make, and the Bertha was no ocean grayhound any how. So we took a matter of three weeks and more before we entered Puget Sound. I had to loaf about Seattle for another two days, a-waiting for the sailing of a Frisco boat. I worked me passage down in the fireroom, and one mornin’ I walked down the gangplank to the wharf over there. ”

“ I told ye of one of them; the other was when I was a slip of a lad and it didn’t count. One ship was the same as another in them days, and the sea was the best place fer me. But this was after I had married and settled down and I had it in mind never to go to sea ag’in.
“Ye remember how I stole the missus from Old Pedro, her father, when Big Joe was about to marry her? And ye mind how Old Mother Martin helped me and give me seventy-five dollars advance money for the v’y’ge. ’Twas enough fer any man to make his start with. ”