“Well, O. D., you know a mule don’t smell like a flower-garden and when you put sixty mules and fifty men in a rat-hole, ’way below fresh air and daylight, there ain’t goin’ to be any perfumery-shop made by doin’ so. Boy, that was one hell of a night. Gas ain’t in it with the fumes that filled that bunking-place. When I woke up in the mornin’ my old bean was so heavy I thought I was wearin’ a cast-iron derby. I believe I’d have suffocated if it wasn’t for a trick that some wise bird played on Johnson, who _cushayed_ in the bunk above. You see, our tier of torture-racks was right below one of those air-funnels, or whatever you call them things on ships that look like big question-marks. ’Bout midnight the funny guy lets a whole bucket of cold water go down that funnel. Course Johnny got most of it in the stomach, but I got enough to kinda revive me. “Soon as I woke up I thought we was out to sea. I felt sick enough to be in the middle of the ocean, but some guy who had been up on deck hollered down that we hadn’t moved a foot from the dock. Sundberg, who had been talkin’ about the motion of the boat, had to crawl under a bunk after that. “The first day on the boat was enough to make me believe that we would all be starved to death before gettin’ to France. They had a Chinese steward named Yung Kow, and that slant-eyed chink hid most of the stuff we were supposed to eat. “His parents would have turned in their grave if they only knew how well his name fitted him. Too bad pig ain’t a Chinese word. Young pig would have been better than Yung Kow. The third night out we caught him and three more almond-eyed cooks storin’ the stuff down in a hold. Didn’t do a thing but turn the deck hose on the crew of ’em. “Before we started loadin’ them wild jackasses and horses on I had a chance to pike the tub off that was to take us across. It was an old Hawaiian line freighter named the _Panaman_. Seemed to be a fair-looking ship—but none too big for nine hundred mules, ninety-nine horses, and two hundred men. “I was talkin’ to a cannibal named Punkjaw who had been a sailor ever since he quit eatin’ people four years before. He couldn’t speak much English, but could sputter some words in Spanish, and as I took a correspondence course in that lingo I got about every tenth word. Along came Bill O’Rourke, actin’ top-kicker, and tells me to haul it down on the dock and lead a few mules aboard. I dragged along and started to do as he said.