CHAPTER V.
A BURGLAR IN THE CABIN.
“OH, this is ahead of being a cabin passenger on one of the big liners!” Kit said to himself, as he hurried through the brick tunnel that led to the wharf of Martin’s Stores. “The passenger knows where he’s going, so he doesn’t have the fun of wondering. But I don’t know. Maybe the ship has been chartered for China while I’ve been away; or it might be for Russia, to carry grain. There’s no seaport in the world that we mightn’t go to. I think one will suit me just about as well as another, though I’d rather like to cross the ocean.”
Tom Haines was one of the first men he met on deck.
“Well, have you made up your mind where you’re going to take the yacht to this voyage?” Kit asked, as they shook hands.
“Don’t call her a yacht!” Tom laughed. “We’d have too many big bills to pay if she was our yacht. It’s better as it is: we get a salary and a sea-voyage at the same time. Yes, we’re chartered for Nassau this trip, to bring back pineapples and sponges; and we’ll be off in four or five days.”
“For Nassau!” Kit repeated; “why, that’s—” but there he stopped.
“That’s right,” Tom said, still laughing. “Stick to your old rule and never say you don’t know a thing, but go and find it out. I know what you’re thinking about. You want to go down in the cabin and look at the map to see where Nassau is. But I’ll save you the trouble. It’s the capital of the Bahama Islands, in the northern West Indies, and about a thousand miles from New York; so that will make a short voyage. But there’s more news for you: you have a new cabin steward.”
“No!” Kit answered, not at all sorry to hear it. “Where’s the old steward?”
“I should think in Bellevue Hospital by this time,” Tom replied, “unless he’s reformed. He got on a terrible spree and fell to breaking the crockery, so the Captain sent him off in a hurry. The new man is a Scotchman named MacNish, and that’s all I can tell you about him. There’s a new galley boy, too; but that doesn’t count for much.”
“Not to you,” Kit declared, “but it does to me, because now I’m not the newest hand on the ship. But I must go down and report myself.”
He did not see the new steward, who was at work in the pantry; but Captain Griffith called him into his stateroom.
“I am glad you are back promptly,” he said, “for to-morrow we begin taking in cargo for Nassau, and I want you to keep tally as it comes on board. It is not exactly cabin boy’s work, but you do it carefully, and it is good experience for you.”
“I am only too glad to do it, sir,” Kit answered. “I want to make myself useful.”
“I thought of raising your pay two or three dollars a month for this extra work,” the Captain went on, “but I have concluded not to do it at present. I don’t want to make a pet of you; it’s better that you should work your way gradually like other people. You can go to the steward now and see whether he has anything for you to do.”
There was nothing to be done at the moment, for the new steward had everything in order. Kit had never seen the pantry so clean, nor the cabin brass-work so well polished. Mr. MacNish was apparently about forty years old, a plump man of medium height, his florid round face smooth except for a little tuft of iron-gray whiskers under each ear.
“Looks more like an Englishman than a Scotchman,” Kit said to himself; and his accent certainly was more English than Scotch; but his manner was much pleasanter than the other steward’s, and he used so many biblical quotations when he talked that Kit thought he must be a very devout man.
For the next four days the cabin boy was busy keeping tally of the general cargo as it came aboard, and after the same performance as before of anchoring by the Liberty statue and the Captain coming out in a tug, the North Cape got under way for Nassau. There was not much to be seen of the New Jersey coast this time, for she stood out to the southeastward all the first night, and in two days and a half crossed the Gulf Stream and ran into warmer weather. And every day Kit thought more and more of the new steward. He was so kind and gentle, so willing to do things himself rather than give Kit trouble, so neat and industrious, and above all so pious in his conversation, that it worried the cabin boy to see that Captain Griffith treated him rather abruptly, as if he did not care much for him.
“Was that a little Bible I saw you have last night, my boy?” Mr. MacNish asked Kit one morning. “Ah, I thought so. I like to see boys read their Bible. And maybe you’d lend it to me sometimes. Mine must have been stolen, I’m afraid, for I always carry it in my satchel. Oh, it’s a great comfort, lad, in times of trouble. My good old father” (his voice grew a little husky) “taught me to read my chapter every day, and I don’t like to miss it. I hope to see the day when we’ll have morning and evening service on every ship afloat.”
On the sixth day after leaving New York they sighted Nassau, and Kit was delighted with the appearance of the place from the water. The big square stone houses, with their upper and lower balconies enclosed with green Venetian blinds; the red tiled roofs, white streets running up a steep hill, palm trees waving gracefully over many of the roofs, old forts, half in ruins, to the right and left of the town, and the warm summer weather in midwinter, made it seem like a little fairy-land. But these things had to be seen from a distance, for the North Cape drew too much water to cross the bar. She anchored outside, half a mile from the town, close under the long narrow strip of rock called Hog Island, where she was exposed to the north wind and would have to hoist anchor and put to sea if a gale came.
By the next day the lighters were ready, for the cargo had to be landed in lighters as it had been in Sisal, though the distance was not as great, and Kit was set ashore early to check off every package as it was put on the wharf. He was no beginner at this work now, and as the people spoke English he found it much easier than at Sisal, though the boatmen and ’longshoremen were all negroes, and spoke a mixed jargon of Congo African and Colonial English that was sometimes almost as hard to understand as the Spanish. The day was intensely hot, and there was no tree or building on the wharf to give him shelter, and the lighters arrived so fast that he not only had no chance to see anything of the city, but had not even time to stop for dinner.
The only break in the long day was when the mail steamer, the Santiago, arrived from New York. She also was too large to cross the bar, and a little tug went out to her and carried her passengers and mails ashore.
When the day’s work was over, Kit was quite ready to return to the ship and eat his supper; but while they were washing dishes the steward proposed that they should get permission and spend the evening on shore.
“I feel so lost without the Holy Scriptures I brought from home,” he said, “and the precious hymn book I used when I was younger than you are. Ah, how many times they have made my heart light when it was sore with trouble. I can buy new ones on shore, but they’ll not be like the ones I used so long. And I want to mail a letter to my dear old father. I think the Captain would let us go if you were to ask him.”
Kit was rapidly gaining experience of the world, but he still had a great deal to learn about the people who live in it. That there are men who try to hide their wickedness under a cloak of deep piety he had no suspicion. It was very nice in the new steward, he thought, to take the first opportunity to replace his lost Bible and mail a letter to his aged father; and though he felt more like going to bed, he went to the Captain and readily got permission for them both to go ashore, without the least suspicion that the steward would much have preferred to go alone, but was using him as a cat’s-paw because the Captain would be more likely to oblige him.
They were taken to the landing-steps in the gig, with the understanding that the boat would return for them at half-past ten, Mr. MacNish carrying along a small leather satchel, strongly mounted with brass, that looked quite luxurious for the steward of a tramp steamship.
“I want to make a few trifling purchases,” he explained, “and this will be handy to carry them aboard in. Perhaps I can’t find what I want, but I’ll not worry over it; ‘sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.’”
As they climbed up the slippery stone steps Kit noticed two men who looked like Americans sitting on a bench in the little park, and imagined that they looked very hard and sharp at him and his companion. And he saw that the steward noticed them too; indeed there was little that Mr. MacNish did not notice, now that they were ashore. He looked around as if there might be highwaymen behind the trees, and clutched his satchel a little tighter, though it was too dark for him to see the men distinctly.
When they crossed the small park they were in Bay Street, the main business street of the place; and they had not gone far before they were in front of a dingy saloon, with doors standing wide open.
“I feel the chill of the night air,” Mr. MacNish said, stopping before the door, “and it is dangerous to be chilled in the tropics. Let us go in and get something to warm us.”
“I am warm enough, thank you,” Kit answered; “I don’t care for anything.”
“You know the apostle advises us to take a little wine for the stomach’s sake,” the steward urged.
“My stomach’s all right!” Kit laughed. “I suppose they didn’t have any quinine in those days; quinine’s much better.”
“Then hold my satchel till I come out,” the steward said, putting it in Kit’s hands; and a minute later he stood in front of the bar, pouring out a tumblerful of something that looked stronger than wine.
While the steward was in the saloon, the two men who had been sitting in the park passed by on the other side of the street, and Kit noticed again that they were looking sharply at him and at Mr. MacNish. He was positive now that they were watched, and it startled him; but he was relieved to see that the two men paused and exchanged a few words with a Nassau policeman a little further up the street. They could hardly be highwaymen, he thought, if they were known to the police. When Mr. MacNish came out of the saloon he spoke about them.
“Two men who look like Americans seem to be taking a great interest in us,” he said. “They watched us pretty closely when we landed, and they just walked past here, looking at us again.”
“What’s that!” MacNish exclaimed; “two men! What did they look like?”
Kit wondered that such a trifling thing should excite him so much, but he described the men as well as he could.
“Oh, it’s nothing,” MacNish said, though his manner belied his words. “You just imagine it. Here, we’ll turn up this way toward the hill; I think the stores are better in the street above. You carry the satchel for me a bit, my lad.”
They turned into a dark side street, and were no sooner around the corner than the steward quickened the pace almost to a run. His manner was so changed that Kit for the first time became suspicious, and thought that he had better have nothing to do with the satchel.
“Here, you take your satchel, Mr. MacNish,” he said; “I can keep up with you better if I have nothing to carry. We don’t need to hurry so much, do we?”
MacNish snatched the satchel from his hands without replying, and before they had taken ten steps more Kit was almost knocked down by two men who sprang out from an alley and seized the steward by both arms as if they were used to such work. By the dim light from a neighboring shop window Kit saw that they were the men who had been in the park.
“Now, then, Slippery Jim, we want you,” one of the men said. “No nonsense, unless you want some lead in you.”
Kit was too much astonished to speak, but the steward was equal to the emergency. With a powerful jerk he wrenched himself free, and the next moment Kit saw the gleam of a revolver in his hand and heard a shot fired. It was done so quickly, however, that the bullet flew wide; and the next minute two policemen in uniform emerged from the alley, and all four men grappled with the desperate steward and bore him down.
His language as he lay struggling on his back on the sidewalk was anything but pious; but he submitted to the inevitable when the officers put handcuffs on his wrists and stood him on his feet.
“I am afraid you have made a mistake, gentlemen,” Kit at length said; “this man is Mr. MacNish, steward of the steamship North Cape.”
“Steward nothing!” one of the men answered, contemptuously. “This man is Slippery Jim, with fifty other names, and one of the slickest bank burglars in the world. He’s the man that tapped the North Western bank for a hundred and forty thousand dollars ten days ago, and I only hope he’s got it in that satchel. Steward, indeed! He’s smart enough to turn his hand to anything, and he took that way to escape from New York with his booty. See here.”
As he spoke the man took hold of the whiskers on both sides of MacNish’s face, and being false ones they came off very easily. Then he rubbed his handkerchief across the steward’s face, and wiped off a big patch of the pink stain that had given him a florid appearance.
“We got on his track just after you sailed,” the man continued, “and followed him in the mail steamer. We are detectives from New York, and you are a lucky boy that we don’t take you in as an accomplice.”
Meanwhile the other stranger had been trying to open the satchel. Finding it securely locked, he impatiently took his knife and cut a long slit in the leather and thrust in his hand.
“Here we have it!” he exclaimed, “or some of it. We’ll count it over at the police station.”
Kit’s eyes bulged when he saw a big handful of greenbacks and bonds taken from the satchel; not covetously, but in awe when he thought of the great amount of stolen money he had been carrying.
The steward, seeing that his game had reached an end, was inclined to laugh over his experiences on the North Cape.
“You’ll be wanting a new steward on the ship, Spooney,” he laughed, “for I’ve accepted a steady situation on shore. I hope you’ll lend your Bible to the next man; I found it awfully comforting. But I guess I’ll not mail that letter to-night to my dear old papa; the old chap was hanged about thirty years ago. I kept your blooming cabin in good shape, anyhow, for a man with a hundred and forty thousand dollars in his satchel.”
It was a relief to Kit when the officers took his former companion away. He had heard of such desperate criminals, but had never been face to face with one before. He had an hour yet before the boat would come, and spent the time walking the streets, feeling sick at heart and a little out of patience with himself.
“I don’t wonder he called me ‘Spooney,’” he reflected. “I ought to have been smart enough to see through the man at once, as I think the Captain did, to some extent. How easily he might have got me into a heap of trouble if it had been worth his while! Even a poor boy with nothing to be robbed of, has to be careful whom he associates with. So remember that in the future, Mr. Kit Silburn!”
The Captain’s only remark, when he returned to the ship and told what had happened, put Kit in a little better spirits.
“So that leaves us without a cabin steward,” the Captain said, “in a small port where we can’t get another. I wish I could cut you right straight in two, Christopher, for I want you in two places at once. As soon as we have the cargo out you must act as steward till we get back to New York; but for the present I must have you on shore.”
“I think I can manage with the steward’s work, sir,” Kit answered; “and the cargo ought to be out in two or three days now.”
“And till then the engineers’ boy must look after the cabin too,” the Captain added.
That night Kit had many things to think of as he lay in his berth. Everybody feels a little sheepish to be so thoroughly deceived, and he was no exception. But there were more important things to consider than that. It was only a wretched burglar who had called him a spooney, and his employer liked him well enough to want him in two places at once. Kit was a good fellow, but he was human, like the rest of us, and that remark of the Captain’s made him feel pretty well satisfied with himself. And here was the steward’s place vacant. If he did good work there for a week or two, he could get the place permanently, he felt almost sure of that. But did he want it? He was not quite sure about that. On the one hand it would bring him better pay, and on the other hand if he became a steward he probably would never get any higher. And after all, maybe the Captain would think him too young; and a dozen more ifs and ands, and in the midst of it all he fell asleep.
For the next week he was the busiest boy in the Bahama Islands. As far as possible he set things right for the day in the cabin before he went ashore, then stood all day in the sun, checking off cargo, and was back to the ship again in time to attend to supper. In the evening he washed the dishes and cleaned up the pantry, and turned in early because he had to turn out early. In those days it was only by good management that he could get ten minutes of his own to write a short letter home.
“Well, you are a softy!” Chock Cheevers said to him one morning in the cabin—for it was Chock who had to wait on the Captain in Kit’s absence. “Here you’re doing the steward’s work, and the cabin boy’s, and the supercargo’s, all for six dollars a month. I’d strike for double pay, anyhow, if I was you. I’m going to strike, myself, pretty soon if this double work keeps on.”
“My child,” Kit laughed (he hardly noticed it himself, but he always spoke to the mess-room boy now as if he were indeed the supercargo, instead of only the cabin boy), “if I had time I would tell you how many millions strikes cost every year without doing any good, for I read it one day in an old newspaper. But I haven’t time; the boat is waiting for me. You do the striking, and I’ll do the working. The fellows who work don’t generally need to strike. Besides, I like to do it.”
That evening Captain Griffith called Kit into his stateroom when his work in the pantry was done.
“I want you to make me out a complete list of everything that has been landed so far,” he said, “so that the agent ashore can receipt for the goods. I suppose you see by this time something of what a supercargo’s work is on board ship.”
“Yes, sir,” Kit answered; “he has to see that the whole cargo is taken out and landed, and receipted for by the agent.”
“Yes, that and much more,” the Captain continued. “He is the agent on board of the parties that charter the ship, and must look after their interests in every way. He is not an employee of the ship, but of the charterers. Suppose the North Cape is chartered by John Smith & Co. to carry a cargo to Rio Janeiro. They deliver their goods on the wharf, and we load them and carry them to Rio, but beyond loading, carrying, and unloading them, we legally have nothing to do with them. It is the supercargo’s business to tally the goods delivered on the wharf and put on board, see them safely landed at their destination, and take the consignee’s receipt for them. But more than that, he must take care of the cargo on the voyage. If there is live stock, he sees that it is fed and cared for. If there are fruits or vegetables, he takes care that they are kept cool in hot climates, and kept from freezing in northern latitudes. In short,” he concluded, “the supercargo must take as great care of the cargo as if it belonged to him, always under the owners’ orders. And he is a passenger on the ship, living in the cabin with the captain, and having nothing to do, of course, with the management of the vessel. There are always two interests on a chartered ship,—the interest of the ship, which the captain takes care of, and the interest of the cargo, which is the supercargo’s work. Unfortunately we have had only small charters lately, that did not warrant the employment of a supercargo, so his work has been left for me to do. When we are chartered for large and valuable cargoes, the charterers always put a supercargo on board.”
Kit’s work on shore did not end when the small general cargo was discharged, as he expected. Nassau business men have an easy way of thinking that things can be done just as well to-morrow as to-day; and when the North Cape was empty her return cargo of sponges and pineapples was not ready. He had to make frequent visits to Mr. Johnson, the pineapple man, and Mr. Sawyer, the sponge man, to hurry them up.
“I am just going out to the pine fields now,” Mr. Johnson said when Kit first visited him; “come along, and see for yourself how things are.”
Kit climbed into the carriage with him, and they drove out about two miles back of the city to the nearest fields, where he saw for the first time how pineapples grow. The field was a large one of twenty or thirty acres, very rocky, but with soil between the protruding rocks that was almost as red as bricks, and covered with plants from three to four feet high, each plant with many long, narrow, stiff “leaves,” and each leaf sharp with spines along its sides and a needle-like point. The score of colored men who were cutting the pines all wore leather leggings, he noticed, to protect them from the sharp points.
“And only one pineapple to a plant!” Kit exclaimed; “I thought they would bear more than that.”
“Only one,” Mr. Johnson laughed. “The pine is a very large fruit to grow on so small a plant, and each plant produces only one. When it is ripe, we cut it, and that plant’s usefulness is over, except that it sends out a great many little shoots, called slips, which we take up and plant for next year’s crop. You see the pine grows on a long stalk in the middle of the plant, and shoots up like a big cabbage head out of a bush.”
With the promise of enough pines to begin loading next day, Kit went to Mr. Sawyer’s sponge yard to hurry matters there, and was told that Mr. Sawyer was at the Sponge Exchange; and through going there to find him he learned enough about sponges to make him open his eyes wide. The Exchange was a large stone building on one of the wharves, with a series of broad open arches on each side, so that it seemed to have no walls; and its concrete floor was covered with separate heaps of sponge.
“This is the most important industry we have in Nassau,” Mr. Sawyer explained, “and this Exchange is the largest sponge market in the world. The merchants fit out small sailboats for sponging, and the colored men who navigate them get the sponges sometimes by diving, sometimes by grasping them with long-handled rakes, like oyster tongs. The sponges are cleaned with lime and sea-water, and then are brought here and sold by auction. The members of the Exchange are so expert at the business that for a pile of sponges worth two hundred dollars, the bids frequently do not vary more than five or six cents. From here they go to the sponge yard of the purchaser, where they are cleaned again and sorted, and pressed into bales. I will go up to my yard with you and see what the prospects are.”
The ground of the sponge yard was covered a foot deep with bits of waste sponge, and a dozen colored men and women were sitting about with scissors in their hands, examining the sponges, feeling them, cutting out rough bits of stone or coral, and sometimes sewing loose ends together to give the sponge a better shape. A rough, ragged, shapeless sponge, after it went through these black hands, came out smooth and shapely.
“Here is where we make the bales,” Mr. Sawyer explained, leading Kit into a shed where a pile of sponge as big as a room was put under a powerful press and squeezed down to the size of a cotton bale. “Sponge is very compressible, of course. Some of these colored men take a sponge as big as a bushel basket, and with crude levers press it into a small cigar box. It is not only my own sponge, of course, that you are to be loaded with; I buy wherever I can, and I think I can promise you five hundred bales by two o’clock to begin on.”
With his mission successfully accomplished, Kit returned to the ship and began his new duties as steward.
“Two more things to stow away in my knowledge box,” he said to himself. “I’ve had precious little time to learn from books, but my work has taught me some things from experience; all about Sisal hemp, to begin with, and now about pineapples and sponges. And maybe a little about people, too, for I’ve seen some queer ones.”
In the two weeks more that the North Cape lay at Nassau, waiting for a cargo that was made ready for her very slowly, Kit managed the steward’s work in such a way that no complaints were made; and that he reasonably considered a sure sign that he gave satisfaction, for the officers of a freight ship are not slow to find fault when anything goes wrong. While the loading was still in progress the mail steamer returned from her visit to the south side of Cuba, and after touching at Nassau went on to New York, carrying northward for trial and punishment the man of many names and crimes, MacNish, the steward, who had been lying in the Nassau prison. And when the North Cape once more lay in front of Martin’s Stores, the newspapers were printing long accounts of his attempted escape as steward of a freight steamer, and his arrest in the West Indies.