Chapter XL
Another brutal sea-superstition vindicated. From now on and for always
these imbeciles of ours will believe that Finns are Jonahs. We are west
of the Diego de Ramirez Rocks, and we are running west at a twelve-knot
clip with an easterly gale at our backs. And the carpenter is gone. His
passing, and the coming of the easterly wind, were coincidental.
It was yesterday morning, as he helped me to dress, that I was struck by
the solemnity of Wada's face. He shook his head lugubriously as he broke
the news. The carpenter was missing. The ship had been searched for him
high and low. There just was no carpenter.
"What does the steward think?" I asked. "What does Louis think?--and
Yatsuda?"
"The sailors, they kill 'm carpenter sure," was the answer. "Very bad
ship this. Very bad hearts. Just the same pig, just the same dog. All
the time kill. All the time kill. Bime-by everybody kill. You see."
The old steward, at work in his pantry, grinned at me when I mentioned
the matter.
"They make fool with me, I fix 'em," he said vindictively. "Mebbe they
kill me, all right; but I kill some, too."
He threw back his coat, and I saw, strapped to the left side of his body, in a canvas sheath, so that the handle was ready to hand, a meat knife of the heavy sort that butchers hack with. He drew it forth--it was fully two feet long--and, to demonstrate its razor-edge, sliced a sheet of newspaper into many ribbons.
"Huh!" he laughed sardonically. "I am Chink, monkey, damn fool, eh?--no
good, eh? all rotten damn to hell. I fix 'em, they make fool with me."
And yet there is not the slightest evidence of foul play. Nobody knows
what happened to the carpenter. There are no clues, no traces. The
night was calm and snowy. No seas broke on board. Without doubt the
clumsy, big-footed, over-grown giant of a boy is overside and dead. The
question is: did he go over of his own accord, or was he put over?
At eight o'clock Mr. Pike proceeded to interrogate the watches. He stood
at the break of the poop, in the high place, leaning on the rail and
gazing down at the crew assembled on the main deck beneath him.
Man after man he questioned, and from each man came the one story. They
knew no more about it than did we--or so they averred.
"I suppose you'll be chargin' next that I hove that big lummux overboard
with me own hands," Mulligan Jacobs snarled, when he was questioned. "An'
mebbe I did, bein' that husky an' rampagin' bull-like."
The mate's face grew more forbidding and sour, but without comment he
passed on to John Hackey, the San Francisco hoodlum.
It was an unforgettable scene--the mate in the high place, the men, sullen and irresponsive, grouped beneath. A gentle snow drifted straight down through the windless air, while the Elsinore, with hollow thunder from her sails, rolled down on the quiet swells so that the ocean lapped the mouths of her scuppers with long-drawn, shuddering sucks and sobs. And all the men swayed in unison to the rolls, their hands in mittens, their feet in sack-wrapped sea-boots, their faces worn and sick. And the three dreamers with the topaz eyes stood and swayed and dreamed together, incurious of setting and situation.
And then it came--the hint of easterly air. The mate noted it first. I
saw him start and turn his cheek to the almost imperceptible draught. Then I felt it. A minute longer he waited, until assured, when, the dead carpenter forgotten, he burst out with orders to the wheel and the crew. And the men jumped, though in their weakness the climb aloft was slow and toilsome; and when the gaskets were off the topgallant-sails and the men on deck were hoisting yards and sheeting home, those aloft were loosing the royals.
While this work went on, and while the yards were being braced around, the Elsinore, her bow pointing to the west, began moving through the water before the first fair wind in a month and a half.
Slowly that light air fanned to a gentle breeze while all the time the
snow fell steadily. The barometer, down to 28.80, continued to fall, and
the breeze continued to grow upon itself. Tom Spink, passing by me on
the poop to lend a hand at the final finicky trimming of the
mizzen-yards, gave me a triumphant look. Superstition was vindicated. Events had proved him right. Fair wind had come with the going of the carpenter, which said warlock had incontestably taken with him overside his bag of wind-tricks.