Off Sandy Hook and Other Stories
9781465633248
311 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
On board the Rampatina liner, eleven days and a half out from Liverpool, the usual terrific sensation created by the appearance of the pilot-yacht prevailed. Necks were craned and toes were trodden on as the steamer slackened speed, and a line dexterously thrown by a blue-jerseyed deck-hand was caught by somebody aboard the yacht. The pilot, not insensible to the fact of his being a personage of note, carefully divested his bearded countenance of all expression as he saluted the Captain, and taking from the deck-steward’s obsequiously proffered salver a glass containing four-fingers of neat Bourbon whisky, concealed its contents about his person without perceptible emotion, and went up with the First Officer upon the upper bridge as the relieved skipper plunged below. The telegraphs clicked their message—the leviathan hulk of the liner quivered and began to forge slowly ahead, and an intelligent-looking, thin-lipped, badly-shaved young man in a bowler, tweeds, and striped necktie, introduced himself to the Second Officer as an emissary of the Press. “Mr. Cyrus K. Pillson, New York Yeller.... Pleased to know you, sir,” said the Second Officer; “step into the smoke-room, this way. Bar-steward, a brandy cocktail for me, and you, sir, order whatever you are most in the habit of hoisting. Whisky straight! Now, sir, happy to afford you what information I can!” “I presume,” observed the young gentleman of the Press, settling himself on the springy morocco cushions and accepting the Second Officer’s polite offer of a green Havana of the strongest kind, “that you have had a smooth passage, considerin’ the time of year?” “Smooth....” The Second Officer carefully reversed in his reply the Pressman’s remark: “Well, yes, the time of year considered, a smooth passage, I take it, we have had.” “No fogs?” interrogated the young gentleman, clicking the elastic band of a notebook which projected from his breast-pocket. “Fogs?... No!” said the Second Officer. “You didn’t chance,” pursued the young gentleman of the Press, taking his short drink from the steward’s salver and throwing it contemptuously down his throat, “to fall in with a berg off the Bank, did you?” “Not a smell of one!” replied the Second Officer with decision. “Ran into a derelict hencoop, perhaps?” persisted the young gentleman, concealing the worn sole of a wearied boot from the searching glare of the electric light by tucking it underneath him, “or an old lady’s bonnet-box? ... or a rubber doll some woman’s baby had lost overboard? No?” he echoed, as the Second Officer shook his head. “Then, how in thunder did you manage to lose twenty feet of your port-rail?” “Carried away,” said the Second Officer, offering the young Press gentleman a light. “No, thanks. Always eat mine,” said the young Press gentleman gracefully. “Matter of taste,” observed the Second Officer, blowing blue rings. “I guess so; and I’ve a taste for knowing how you came,” said the young Pressman, “to part with that twenty foot of rail.” “Carried away,” said the Second Officer. “I kin see that,” retorted the visitor. “It was carried away,” said the Second Officer, “by an elephant.” “A pet you had running about aboard?” queried the Pressman, with imperturbable coolness. “A passenger,” returned the Second Officer, with equal calm. There was a snap, and the Pressman’s notebook was open on his knee. The pencil vibrated over the virgin page, when a curious utterance, between a wail, a cough, and a roar, made the hand that held it start. “Yarr-rr! Ohowgh! Yarr!” The melancholy sound came from without, borne on the cool breeze of a late afternoon in March, through the open ventilators. “Might that,” queried the young gentleman of the Press, “be an expression of opinion on the part of the elephant?” “Lord love you, no!” said the Second Officer. “It’s the leopard.” He added after a second’s pause: “Or the puma.” “Do you happen to have a menagerie aboard?” inquired the Pressman, making a note in shorthand.
