“He might,” replied Harman. “Anyhow, we can try.”
Harman, unlike Blood, was a typical sailor of the tramp school, a man who knew more about steam winches and cargo handling than masts and yards. He was all right to look at, a stocky man with a not unpleasant face, a daring eye, and a fresh colour, but his certificates were not to match. Drink had been this gentleman’s ruin. Had he been a lesser man, drink would have crushed him down into the fo’c’sle. As it was, he managed to get along somehow by his wits. He had not made a voyage for two years now, but he had managed to make a living; he had been endowed by nature with a mind active as a squirrel. He was in with a number of men: ward politicians knew him as a useful man, and used him occasionally. Crimps knew him, and tavern keepers. Had he been more of a scamp and less of a dreamer, he might have risen high in life. His dream was of a big fortune to be “got sudden and easy,” and this dream, stimulated at times by alcohol, managed somehow to keep him poor.
The public life of Frisco, like a rotten cheese, supports all sorts of mites and maggots, and the wharf edge is of all cheese the most rotten part.
Harman could put his hand on men to vote at a city election, or men to man a whaler; he was under political protection, he was in with the port officers and the customs, and he could have been a very considerable person despite his lack of education but for the drink. Drink is fatal to successful scoundrelism, and the form in which it afflicted Harman is the most fatal of all, for he was not a consistent toper. He would go sober for months on end, and then, having made some money and some success, he would “fly out.”
Having reached Market Street, Harman led his companion into a big building where an elevator whisked them up to the fifth floor.
Here, at the end of a concrete passage, Harman pushed open a door inscribed with the legend “The Wolff Syndicate,” and, entering an outer office, inquired for Mr. Shiner. They were shown into a comfortably furnished room where at a roll-top desk a young man was seated busily at work with a stenographer at his side. He asked them to be seated, finished the few words he had to dictate, and then, having dismissed the stenographer, turned to Harman.