The three put out in a dingy they let over the side and the blackguards rowed toward us. Our engines had stopped and we were slowly and helplessly drifting toward this hell-ship.
"Hey, kid. Grab hold. What you stalling for—?" The Bos'n had come out of the shelter deck with an armful of gear. The big fellow climbed aboard—the one with the immense gray mustaches—on the rope ladder the Bos'n and I had dropped over the side. He climbed up over our rail and brought his hand stiffly up to the brim of his big high-crowned black sombrero, as he gave the Bos'n a buenos dias and the Bos'n mumbled something and indicated the bridge. Our big boarder spread his fingers wide on either side of his potbelly, snorted, and twisted his head up to look at the wheelhouse and then strode off with a "Now I'll take command" air.
As we watched him in his tightly buttoned, dark suit climb up to the bridge, since our engines had started up again and we were leaving that ship behind, I said sotto voce to the little Bos'n, "Now what?"
"Now what?"
He looked at me. "What?"
"What are we gonna do about him—?"
"About him? You mean the pilot?"
"Oh, that was the pilot?"
"Sure, he's the pilot. What'd you think we'd do—pick up passengers in mid-Atlantic?"
"Then that red and black ship back there was the pira—, I mean, the pilot boat?"
"Yeh."
"Oh," I said and went off to supper.
Next morning Mush and I tumbled out early and dressed quickly in all the clothes we had. It was cold and damp in our cabin. When we got out on deck we found we were enveloped in a clinging, chilly fog. The water was an oily gray, and we moved slowly. Somewhere during the night or about dawn a couple of tugs had picked us up. They were guiding us through the channel between the buoys which were scattered irregularly up ahead of us, and we drifted along in their wake.
We rushed through breakfast so we could get back to the deck for our first view of Argentina. The crew was scattered along the rail. Through the mist we could see the shore line stretched out ahead—swampy-looking trees with no foliage. It was the tail end of winter down here. I remember telling that to Old Man McQuarrie when I worked for him again some time later—that the Argentine had its winter when we have our summer, summer when we were making snowballs—and the old dodo scowled at me suspiciously. He thought I was ribbing him—he didn't know that. Guess he thought we in the Western Hemisphere—what with our Good Neighbor policies, share-and-share-alike since we're all republics—ought to get equal breaks in the weather. The science columns of the newspapers he read hadn't prepared him for the difference in seasons between America del Norte and America del Sur.
I peered ahead trying to get my first glimpse of Argentinian civilization—some buildings or people. We were being towed up one of the small rivers that emptied into La Platte now.
Perry, the Portuguese, leaning way over side, suddenly yipped:
"There she is, kid. Rio Santiago, d'Argentine."
I followed the direction of his finger and dimly I could make out some large four-story factory buildings ahead of us up river. There was a big black-and-white painted sign on the first of these.
"What's that sign say, Mush?" I asked.
Mush, in spite of the glandular pop of his watery blue eyes, could see well.
"There's some little lettering on the second line I can't make out, but the upper sez—she sez—A—R—"
"Argentine? Looks like an Argentine-Welcomes-You sign."
What I can't see, I usually guess at.
"Naw, it can't be Argentine. It's A-R-M-0-U-R. That's it. Armour Packing Company, it must be—the ham what am. That Spanish written below it must mean that."
"It's beef they slaughters down here. They don't have pigs down here," said the Fat Guy further down the rail.
"They have now," mumbled Mush.
"Didya ever have sow belly and turnip greens?" Slim the Georgia Boy asked me, moodily.
"Have 'em—you mean to eat?"
"Yeah. M'mammy cooks 'em good."
"Dey got big packing houses down here. Dat's Armour's and look dere—dat's Swift's." Perry shouted in his effort to help me see better, but he didn't have to—it was clear even to my eyes. "And furder up you see d'Bethlehem steel sign, huh? They get these big boilers we're carrying."
That was a little disappointing, my first view of a distant land should be of big signs, signs I could read as if I hadn't gone anywhere.
"I could have seen as much in Astoria."
"What's Astoria?" asked Mush.
I hadn't realized I'd thought out loud, so I said, "Just a place."
That big pilot who had come aboard was out on the bridge bellowing orders at the two little tugs that were shoving us about on the river. Our ship was eased up alongside the bank. As we moved slowly into place we found ourselves staring down at about a couple of hundred Argentine longshoremen who stood there in grim silence staring back up at us.
If I thought those three on the pilot boat were tough—huh— those were violets compared with this gang who glowered back at us. A description of one will suffice for them all, since outside of a few minor details every one of those hundreds of black-mustachioed cutthroats looked like the bogy that mamas scare their children with. The one I pick is a vicious-looking, triangle-faced guy with the national big coal-black whiskers standing out straight from his face—those mustachios. He is capped by a beret pulled forward on his head. He wears a big-sleeved, cocoa-colored heavy shirt tight at the cuffs. His throat is wrapped in a black scarf. Around his belly is wound some heavy folds of cloth. His trousers are loose and he's shod in those trick, rope-soled, canvas slippers that the French, too, think is a bargain in footwear—and one of the reasons middle-aged Argentinians and Frenchmen take to holding themselves up with walking sticks so early in life.
The horrible few hundred—all of them, every last man— had an immense cargo hook slung around his neck with the round handles of them resting on their chests like huge lavalieres, but the vile points of those hooks were no ornaments...
Their ominous silence as they stood glowering back at us was, to say the least, just a mite inhospitable. They might have given us a wave of the hand, a smile or even a good-natured wink to indicate they were glad to see us. After all, we were bringing them business—unloading our ship—since they were longshoremen and that was their business. Or were they dissatisfied and all yearned to express themselves and be a lot of wild Apache dancers which they looked like? Anyway, they were not cheerful and I was a little apprehensive as I stretched out and looked along the rail at our own good-natured crew smiling down at this gang. We seemed too little and too few compared with that bunch.
Our ship was almost in place before I realized there was nothing to worry about—nothing would or could happen. For right in front of this murderous-looking mob of a couple of hundred cutthroats with their rapier-tipped cargo hooks stood the Port Police of Rio Santiago, Argentine, to maintain order.
He was a ruddy-faced stocky little man (with the traditional black mustachios). His uniform, a dark-blue worsted sailor suit with white piping, was complete with a fine white braided cord that draped into his breast pocket attached to—yes, you guessed—a silver whistle: the same kind of sailor suit (with a whistle) they used to dress us up in when we were young and we wore it proudly because we didn't know how silly we looked. And the arm of the law grasped firmly a ten-inch length of white policeman's club. Thus he was prepared for any emergency. We threw a short rope ladder over side. Then the Bos'n tapped me.