Sonnie-Boy's PeopleConnolly, James B. (James Brendan)
General
Sonnie-Boy's People
Connolly, James B. (James Brendan)
Sea stories; Short stories, American
"'Vessel and opium both gone--I wonder how Durks is feeling now,' says
Archie; 'and we with his--but how much is it altogether, Alec?' And that
reminded me, and I says to Archie, 'Where'd you leave your two hundred
dollars?' and he stops and swears. He'd left it under his mattress in
the cabin of the _Hattie_. And I'd left my five hundred hanging up in my
coat in the cabin of the _Hattie_, and there she was in ten fathom of
water. I broke the news to Archie.
"Archie said he'd be damned. Then: 'How'll we get out of here? For we
gotta go east after this, Alec.'
"And Johnnie Sing, listening, takes the five hundred I'd given him and
hands it to me. I don't want to take it, and he says, 'Plenty
more--see,' and with his jackknife begins opening the wadding of his
coat, and out come bills and bills and bills. All his property,
twenty-odd thousand dollars, was sewed up there in big bills. And when
'twas all out he offers it to us, telling us to help ourselves. And
Archie and me said no, the five hundred would do us to pay our way back
to Gloucester here, and meals on the way, o' course. And Johnnie, by
our advice, he comes east, too, with his little wife, and stepped off in
New York; and that's where we left him.
"A fine little team, Johnnie and his wife. And the _Hattie_? If there's
any of you never seen her, then you ought to when she was alive. A great
little vessel, the _Hattie Rennish_!"
KILLORIN'S CARIBBEAN DAYS
Revolutions? These days? In those South American countries? Sh-h, boy,
sh-h--you don't know. In th' old gunboat days in the Caribbeans we never
called it a good week 'nless we suppressed three or four. And at that I
think we used to miss some.
Believe me, son, those were the days when they knew how to
revolutionize. You'd turn in of a night with the Blues or the Reds or
Greens, in, and have breakfast maybe in the mornin' with the Purples or
the Violets and brass bands celebratin' the vict'ry in the Palace
square.
And the first thing every new party did when they got in was to start up
the Bureau of Printin' 'nd Engravin' and roll off a few billion dollars
of gover'ment money. In Guadalquique the money for all parties was the
same, except each party used to rubber-stamp its name across the face.
An old navy yeoman hit the beach there one time named Tommie Anderson
and he was made chief of the Bureau o' Printin' 'nd Engravin' by the
Greens because he could make a rubber hand-stamp while they waited.
Some traitor who didn't get his 'd absconded with the 'ficial one,
Tommie said.
Of course that kind o' work tends to debilitate the best kind o' money.
In Almatara, which was one o' the best little revolutionary countries
ever I struck, you could see nigger boot-blacks shootin' crap for two or
three thousand dollars a throw of a holiday in the market square. It
used to cost a thousand dollars for a shine--that's a first-class shine
for a foreigner, I mean. The natives didn't have to pay that much.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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