Kieran shot a side glance at the passenger. "H-m-m--a good thing he
didn't know it if he was. He was irresponsible enough without having
that excuse. If he thought then that it was poetry in him which kept him
hopping about the world, he'd have been no good at all. He did enough
dreaming as it was. It was probably only the discipline of a warship,
of having to do a daily stint, that kept him from loafing all his time
away, for, as maybe I've said, a power used to take hold of him at times
and swing him. An idea would come to him and he'd follow it like a guide
to heaven.
"He wondered what had become of her, and one day, being now free of the
navy, he took a bald-headed schooner out of Portland, Oregon, with a
load of lumber for Callao. Between watches he studied a
Spanish-Without-A-Master for one dollar. The lumber schooner never
reached Callao, but she did make one of those volcanic islands to the
south side of the harbor--piled up there and began to fill, which forced
the crew to leave in a hurry and row into Callao harbor in their
quarter-boat. From Callao the crew took a trolley to Lima to see the
American consul. In Lima they became scattered, and Cogan and an old
fellow named Tommie Jones found themselves together. Cogan had met
Tommie in a restaurant in Portland at about the time Tommie was taking
notice of a tall, well-nourished, red-headed lass waiting on table
there. Tommie was a hearty lad of fifty-four or so, and Cogan had helped
the little romance along, and because of his interest in the case was
how Cogan and Tommie came to ship together. Well, here was Tommie adrift
in Lima after five weeks to sea, and in all that time he hadn't had a
drink, and he wanted one now. He had no money, but Cogan had a
half-dollar, and American silver is good money in Peru; so Cogan bought
Tommie three drinks of some kind of Spanish wine and himself one
lemonade for the half-dollar.
"It couldn't have been the wine--he hadn't had enough of that. Maybe it
was the reaction from the excitement of the wreck that made Tommie
sleepy. He wanted to turn in, and it being now night-time they went into
a park where a fine band was playing. It was a beautiful night, with a
moon; and under the moon, while the music rolled out, dark-eyed
señoritas with their mothers strolled up and down, and the young fellows
hung around and got in a word when they could. On the edges the police
kept an eye on the loafers.
"The night breeze which made the trees almost talk, the water of the
fountain arching under the colored lights, the scent of the flowering
bushes--Tommie and Cogan after their five weeks at sea just sat there
till long after the music had stopped and everybody gone home. Then
Tommie fell asleep, full length under a tree. Cogan tried to stand watch
but he was tired, too, and after a while, with his back against the same
tree, and the water-play of the fountain still tinkling in his ears, he
fell asleep alongside Tommie.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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