Chapter I
From the first the voyage was going wrong. Routed out of my hotel on a
bitter March morning, I had crossed Baltimore and reached the pier-end
precisely on time. At nine o'clock the tug was to have taken me down the
bay and put me on board the Elsinore, and with growing irritation I sat
frozen inside my taxicab and waited. On the seat, outside, the driver
and Wada sat hunched in a temperature perhaps half a degree colder than
mine. And there was no tug.
Possum, the fox-terrier puppy Galbraith had so inconsiderately foisted
upon me, whimpered and shivered on my lap inside my greatcoat and under
the fur robe. But he would not settle down. Continually he whimpered
and clawed and struggled to get out. And, once out and bitten by the
cold, with equal insistence he whimpered and clawed to get back.
His unceasing plaint and movement was anything but sedative to my jangled
nerves. In the first place I was uninterested in the brute. He meant
nothing to me. I did not know him. Time and again, as I drearily
waited, I was on the verge of giving him to the driver. Once, when two
little girls--evidently the wharfinger's daughters--went by, my hand
reached out to the door to open it so that I might call to them and
present them with the puling little wretch.
A farewell surprise package from Galbraith, he had arrived at the hotel
the night before, by express from New York. It was Galbraith's way. Yet
he might so easily have been decently like other folk and sent fruit . . . or flowers, even. But no; his affectionate inspiration had to take the form of a yelping, yapping two months' old puppy. And with the advent of the terrier the trouble had begun. The hotel clerk judged me a criminal before the act I had not even had time to meditate. And then Wada, on his own initiative and out of his own foolish stupidity, had attempted to smuggle the puppy into his room and been caught by a house detective. Promptly Wada had forgotten all his English and lapsed into hysterical Japanese, and the house detective remembered only his Irish; while the hotel clerk had given me to understand in no uncertain terms that it was only what he had expected of me.
Damn the dog, anyway! And damn Galbraith too! And as I froze on in the
cab on that bleak pier-end, I damned myself as well, and the mad freak
that had started me voyaging on a sailing-ship around the Horn.
By ten o'clock a nondescript youth arrived on foot, carrying a suit-case, which was turned over to me a few minutes later by the wharfinger. It belonged to the pilot, he said, and gave instructions to the chauffeur how to find some other pier from which, at some indeterminate time, I should be taken aboard the Elsinore by some other tug. This served to increase my irritation. Why should I not have been informed as well as the pilot?
An hour later, still in my cab and stationed at the shore end of the new
pier, the pilot arrived. Anything more unlike a pilot I could not have
imagined. Here was no blue-jacketed, weather-beaten son of the sea, but
a soft-spoken gentleman, for all the world the type of successful
business man one meets in all the clubs. He introduced himself
immediately, and I invited him to share my freezing cab with Possum and
the baggage. That some change had been made in the arrangements by
Captain West was all he knew, though he fancied the tug would come along
any time.
And it did, at one in the afternoon, after I had been compelled to wait
and freeze for four mortal hours. During this time I fully made up my
mind that I was not going to like this Captain West. Although I had
never met him, his treatment of me from the outset had been, to say the
least, cavalier. When the Elsinore lay in Erie Basin, just arrived
from California with a cargo of barley, I had crossed over from New York
to inspect what was to be my home for many months. I had been delighted
with the ship and the cabin accommodation. Even the stateroom selected
for me was satisfactory and far more spacious than I had expected. But
when I peeped into the captain's room I was amazed at its comfort. When
I say that it opened directly into a bath-room, and that, among other
things, it was furnished with a big brass bed such as one would never
suspect to find at sea, I have said enough.