Two days later, as the steamer Mariposa plied1 her customary route between Tahiti and San Francisco, the passengers ceased playing deck quoits, abandoned their card games in the smoker2, their novels and deck chairs, and crowded the rail to stare at the small boat that skimmed to them across the sea before a light following breeze. When Big John, aided by Ah Moy and Kwaque, lowered the sail and unstepped the mast, titters and laughter arose from the passengers. It was contrary to all their preconceptions of mid-ocean rescue of ship-wrecked3 mariners5 from the open boat.
It caught their fancy that this boat was the Ark, what of its freightage of bedding, dry goods boxes, beer-cases, a cat, two dogs, a white cockatoo, a Chinaman, a kinky-headed black, a gangly pallid-haired giant, a grizzled Dag Daughtry, and an Ancient Mariner4 who looked every inch the part. Him a facetious6, vacationing architect’s clerk dubbed7 Noah, and so greeted him.
“I say, Noah,” he called. “Some flood, eh? Located Ararat yet?”
“Catch any fish?” bawled8 another youngster down over the rail.
“Gracious! Look at the beer! Good English beer! Put me down for a case!”
Never was a more popular wrecked crew more merrily rescued at sea. The young blades would have it that none other than old Noah himself had come on board with the remnants of the Lost Tribes, and to elderly female passengers spun9 hair-raising accounts of the sinking of an entire tropic island by volcanic10 and earthquake action.
“I’m a steward11,” Dag Daughtry told the Mariposa’s captain, “and I’ll be glad and grateful to berth12 along with your stewards13 in the glory-hole. Big John there’s a sailorman, an’ the fo’c’s’le ’ll do him. The Chink is a ship’s cook, and the nigger belongs to me. But Mr. Greenleaf, sir, is a gentleman, and the best of cabin fare and staterooms’ll be none too good for him, sir.”
And when the news went around that these were part of the survivors14 of the three-masted schooner15, Mary Turner, smashed into kindling16 wood and sunk by a whale, the elderly females no more believed than had they the yarn17 of the sunken island.
“Captain Hayward,” one of them demanded of the steamer’s skipper, “could a whale sink the Mariposa?”
“She has never been so sunk,” was his reply.
“I knew it!” she declared emphatically. “It’s not the way of ships to go around being sunk by whales, is it, captain?”
“No, madam, I assure you it is not,” was his response. “Nevertheless, all the five men insist upon it.”
“Sailors are notorious for their unveracity, are they not?” the lady voiced her flat conclusion in the form of a tentative query18.
“Worst liars20 I ever saw, madam. Do you know, after forty years at sea, I couldn’t believe myself under oath.”
* * * * *
Nine days later the Mariposa threaded the Golden Gate and docked at San Francisco. Humorous half-columns in the local papers, written in the customary silly way by unlicked cub21 reporters just out of grammar school, tickled22 the fancy of San Francisco for a fleeting23 moment in that the steamship24 Mariposa had rescued some sea-waifs possessed25 of a cock-and-bull story that not even the reporters believed. Thus, silly reportorial unveracity usually proves extraordinary truth a liar19. It is the way of cub reporters, city newspapers, and flat-floor populations which get their thrills from moving pictures and for which the real world and all its spaciousness26 does not exist.
“Sunk by a whale!” demanded the average flat-floor person. “Nonsense, that’s all. Just plain rotten nonsense. Now, in the ‘Adventures of Eleanor,’ which is some film, believe me, I’ll tell you what I saw happen . . . ”
So Daughtry and his crew went ashore27 into ’Frisco Town uheralded and unsung, the second following morning’s lucubrations of the sea reporters being varied28 disportations upon the attack on an Italian crab29 fisherman by an enormous jellyfish. Big John promptly30 sank out of sight in a sailors’ boarding-house, and, within the week, joined the Sailors’ union and shipped on a steam schooner to load redwood ties at Bandon, Oregon. Ah Moy got no farther ashore than the detention31 sheds of the Federal Immigration Board, whence he was deported32 to China on the next Pacific Mail steamer. The Mary Turner’s cat was adopted by the sailors’ forecastle of the Mariposa, and on the Mariposa sailed away on the back trip to Tahiti. Scraps33 was taken ashore by a quartermaster and left in the bosom34 of his family.
And ashore went Dag Daughtry, with his small savings35, to rent two cheap rooms for himself and his remaining responsibilities, namely, Charles Stough Greenleaf, Kwaque, Michael, and, not least, Cocky. But not for long did he permit the Ancient Mariner to live with him.
“It’s not playing the game, sir,” he told him. “What we need is capital. We’ve got to interest capital, and you’ve got to do the interesting. Now this very day you’ve got to buy a couple of suit-cases, hire a taxicab, go sailing up to the front door of the Bronx Hotel like good pay and be damned. She’s a real stylish36 hotel, but reasonable if you want to make it so. A little room, an inside room, European plan, of course, and then you can economise by eatin’ out.”
“But, steward, I have no money,” the Ancient Mariner protested.
“That’s all right, sir; I’ll back you for all I can.”
“But, my dear man, you know I’m an old impostor. I ca............