With these untabulated numbers of varied police uniforms, how did I know what law I'd broken? Under whose jurisdiction and what branch of the Argentine Police Department—federal or local—lay the crime I must have committed during one of those black vacuums in my memory of last night?
I scrambled up on the poop, with a vague plan to slide down the hawser, but about the time I reached the rail the little man in olive-green was already coming up the ladder to the deck. In one hand he held a folded blue paper. I've seen court summonses before—blue seemed to be a favorite color. Or was this a warrant? I looked down and a fit of vertigo kept me from going over the side, so I whirled and stumbled to the other side of the ship and tumbled down the ladder on the black gang's section of the deck. The little guy was taking short cuts and gaining on me. My head was beginning to clear now—the rush of air that swept by helped, I guess. I doubled back with some fancy broken field running I'd never believed I was capable of and made the shelter deck of the ship and beat it for the prow. This was getting me. I was breathing hard. I definitely smoked too much. I resolved then and there if I ever got out of this mess I'd quit smoking and burn a candle to St. Christopher...
But that damn Perry had joined the chase and was shouting after me. At last, they had me cornered. There was no sense fighting and adding resisting an officer (or whatever they call a deserving sock at a nasty cop) to whatever crimes in which I'd already become involved. There I was, cornered up on the for'ard end of the deck up against the bulkhead. All I'd ask for I calmly decided—ask for? I'd demand the attention of the United States Ambassador and a fair trial in English. They'd have to wait until I got my own counsel, a young fellow I'd gone to school with in upstate New York who had just become a junior member of a law firm in Weehawken. His name was going to be painted on the door, on the bottom line.
He'd promised me he'd get me out of trouble if I ever got into it just for practice's sake. They'd have to wait until he'd come down here. I'd trust no other barrister to plead my case.
The officious little man faced me, puffing and waving that folded blue paper in front of my nose. Then he insisted I sign some other papers. What—without reading them? Oh no, not me! I'd sign nothing till I heard the charges. Perry added to the din by shouting at both of us, directing his Spanish at me and his English at the uniformed man. Out of the corner of my eye I could see Captain Brandt jutting his bleary head out of his door up on his own deck. He bellowed to the Mate up on the bridge.
Well, I don't see why the Old Man didn't do more than just bellow. After all, it was his ship, and he bloody well had an obligation to me to see that I had a fair trial at least and I—
Perry threw his big arms up in the air and brought them down between the little man and me.
"SH-U-T U-P," he shouted. "Per Ch-r-i-s-t sake, SH-U-T U-P. He just wants ya to sign for a cablegram."
Well, I did. It was a sweet, inane message from that dame up in New York. A forget-me-not sent sixty-five hundred miles—that had created all this furore. I studied it carefully, frowned, and folded it up. Then I thrust it deep in my pocket as if it were something important.
The dame wrote it probably because she'd forgotten to write a letter to be carried on one of the faster ships coming down to the Argentine—as she'd promised. She had money to spare, so she spent it that way on cablegrams.
I thanked the little messenger man and shook hands with Perry, too, to show there was no hard feeling.
"But what'd ya run fer?" he asked.
"Who was running? I wasn't running. Just happened to remember I forgot my glasses up here in our cabin and I was getting them."
"Well, whyn't ya stop when we hollered at ya?"
"I don't hear good—without my glasses."
He blinked, and I walked off before he could think of anything else to say.
The crew thought that the cable carried some weighty message and I did nothing to change their impression. They always maintained a respectful silence about it and never inquired concerning its contents, as if they assumed someday I'd unburden my heart and take them all into my confidence.
Suddenly, it struck me I'd discovered a new and absolute cure for indisposition brought on by excessive indulgence. My head was clear, my innards were settled, and I wanted my breakfast.
Why, perhaps this might be a real contribution to science. It's not the first time a series of mistakes and misunderstandings led some bewhiskered gentleman to a landing on a pedestal immortalized in the Hall of Fame. What about Watt? (I'm not punning—how else could I write that?) Him with his steaming teakettle, or Jenner's this and that with a lumpy milkmaid which finally brought on those dainty vaccinations we all wear more or less proudly.
I understand there's been nothing definite concluded on two popular ailments which afflict us all—the common cold and the head-splitting hangover. As for the former we can't say they haven't tried. It's just that no one has become involved with an experience comparable to Watt's steam kettle, Newton's windfall of apples, Jenner's lumpy milkmaid or my own strenuous gallop around a cluttered iron deck after swallowing a measure (a half pint will do) of warm goat milk, which I am led to believe is a new and absolute cure for a katzenjammer. Granting a scientific experiment must have more than one positive reaction to be considered absolute—well, this goat-milk shake therapy was new anyway.
I've not tried that cure again since then, but now that I remember it, if this New Year's Eve turns out to be as hilarious as it seems to promise, and I can find a cluttered little freighter in the harbor and I can borrow a goat this New Year's Day— I'll play pinochle. And I'll play with a clear head, to win.
16. I Buy a Sombrero
THERE WAS ONE IRREPARABLE LOSS that couldn't be cured with goat's milk. I mean my hat. Somewhere during the night it had disappeared. It wasn't much of a hat, but it was the only hat I owned. I arranged to have Philip, the Captain's messboy, come along as an interpreter and help me buy a new one.
Perry, on whom I depended as my liaison with the untutored Argentinians who spoke no English, was out—or I should have said—in. He'd been jugged along with the Polack guy from Baltimore. And we saw no more of them and they no more of Rio Santiago until they were led meekly back to the ship on the day we weighed anchor and shipped south.
We all had been doing port work. Yes, every last one of those pampered A.B.'s were as greasy and dirty as any of us Cinderella men—the regular day men. And we gloated.
They couldn't stall or finagle any angles—the first few days anyway. Maybe that's the reason Perry and his accomplice pulled what they did. They'd rather languish in the calaboose than lift a hand in honest toil. Under the watchful eye of the Swede Mate, the Bos'n and the young Third Mate—whose business it was to superintend the loading or unloading of the ship, and he was always on deck—the crew worked and got dirty.
The Mate set us to painting oversides, unpleasant work but not very strenuous—the sort of job where you can look as if you're working a lot harder than you are, and it's only you and your conscience that is any the wiser.
We paired off (Slim was my partner) and we dropped heavy, twelve-foot-long planks about ten inches wide over the side. Of course, we had lines tied to both ends of the plank—that is, to the second one Slim and I shoved over. That first one I managed to get over (with my new-found strength from the goat milk) that morning before Slim had tied his line to it. We lashed our lines to the rail and that was our scaffold.