As the days passed, the steward took facetious occasions, when he had
drunk five quarts of his daily allowance, to shift his and Kwaque's bunks
about. And invariably Ah Moy shifted, though Daughtry failed to notice
that he never shifted into a bunk which Kwaque had occupied. Nor did he
notice that it was when the time came that Kwaque had variously occupied
all the six bunks that Ah Moy made himself a canvas hammock, suspended it
from the deck beams above and thereafter swung clear in space and
unmolested.
Daughtry dismissed the matter from his thoughts as no more than a thing
in keeping with the general inscrutability of the Chinese mind. He did
notice, however, that Kwaque was never permitted to enter the galley.
Another thing he noticed, which, expressed in his own words, was: "That's
the all-dangdest cleanest Chink I've ever clapped my lamps on. Clean in
galley, clean in steerage, clean in everything. He's always washing the
dishes in boiling water, when he isn't washing himself or his clothes or
bedding. My word, he actually boils his blankets once a week!"
For there were other things to occupy the steward's mind. Getting
acquainted with the five men aft in the cabin, and lining up the whole
situation and the relations of each of the five to that situation and to
one another, consumed much time. Then there was the path of the _Mary
Turner_ across the sea. No old sailor breathes who does not desire to
know the casual course of his ship and the next port-of-call.
"We ought to be moving along a line that'll cross somewhere northard of
New Zealand," Daughtry guessed to himself, after a hundred stolen glances
into the binnacle. But that was all the information concerning the
ship's navigation he could steal; for Captain Doane took the observations
and worked them out, to the exclusion of the mate, and Captain Doane
always methodically locked up his chart and log. That there were heated
discussions in the cabin, in which terms of latitude and longitude were
bandied back and forth, Daughtry did know; but more than that he could
not know, because it was early impressed upon him that the one place for
him never to be, at such times of council, was the cabin. Also, he could
not but conclude that these councils were real battles wherein Messrs.
Doane, Nishikanta, and Grimahaw screamed at each other and pounded the
table at each other, when they were not patiently and most politely
interrogating the Ancient Mariner.
"He's got their goat," the steward early concluded to himself; but,
thereafter, try as he would, he failed to get the Ancient Mariner's goat.
Charles Stough Greenleaf was the Ancient Mariner's name. This, Daughtry
got from him, and nothing else did he get save maunderings and ravings
about the heat of the longboat and the treasure a fathom deep under the
sand.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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