A STOWAWAY.

Waikato Times, Volume XXXVIII, Issue 3082, 16 April 1892, Page 1 (Supplement)

A STOWAWAY.

Tug wind was rising and 'he Captain's temper had risen, yet the Anna Maria was but just started on her voyage, with practically begins with the departure of the pilot. Now the pilot was no stoner out of hail, and thus the last landlink severed until the Anna Maria should reach her destination in foreign parts than a most annoying discovery was brought to the Captain's notice. None other than a stowaway, grabbed out by the cook from behind the flour-barrels.

A stunted, wizened, miserable larrikin who would have been seasick but that terror for the moment over mastered him ; on whose skeleton limbs hung the frowsy remnants of other vagrants' clothing down whose dirty cheeks trickled tears which were rubbed and kneaded away with dirty hands. The cook held him by one ear and narrated to the Captain how he had found him and the Captain's majestic figure towered over both and his features bent into a blood-curd-ing frown. The stowaway ever and again glanced furtively upwards, with that mingled propitation and endurance which distinguishes the expression of a much beaten cur.

When the recital came to an end the Captain maintained an awful silence. The Captain looked desparately round on the darkening sky the heaving deck, the blusterous sea. " WHAT DID YOU DO IT I'OR ? " Asked the captain sternly. '• I dunno," muttered the stowaway, and kneaded his 6yes. His red, raw hands were covered with broken chilblains,and one of his bare feet were bound up in a grimy, blood-stained rag. "You thought it was a nice easy do nothing life, with lots to eat and plenty of time to eat it in, eh ?" said the Captain, with such ominous irony in his voice that the stowaway fell to blubbering outright. " You deserve the taste of a rope's end," continued the judge, sternly ; " and the next time I see you on this deck you'll get it, too. Take him for'ard Blake ; he's got a bout of sea-sickness before him, and when he finds his legs again, work him, work him well." From a little distance on the deck three spectators had witnessed this interview. These were Fleet, the first mate ; Macnab, a doctor, who being a friend of the first mate had been allowed to take a passage for health's sake on the Anna Maria ; and Tennyson Tupper, the supercargo. Now when the Captain turned and strode moodily down to dinner they followed him exchanging sundry nods and comments. But the doctor and Mr Tupper took their places at the table in silence. It was only Fleet who, with his jolly laugh, dared plunge at once into the burning question.

" So we've got an addition to our numbers, Sir 1 Well the more the merrier, say I. Let us drink success to the voyage, and to the judicious voung gentleman who, out of all the ships in harbour, selected the Anna Maria for the honour of his Company. " TIIE FIRST OF THE VOYAGE ! "

The Captain gave an oath and an impatient clink to the glass which Fleet held out to him ; at the same moment the ship launched to starboard and the glass and its contents together with two plates and a pickle-fork went spinning off the table into Mr Tupper's cabin, the door of which unfortunately stood open. Before settling to rest in Mr Tupper's berth, one of the plates completely smashed a triple shaving mirror, its owner's most cherished

possession. With renewed objurations, the Captain asked the steward why the devil he didn't put on the fiddles? while Fleet, nothing daunted, tilled a second glass and proposed a <;oast number two.

" Here's to the stowaway ! May He live; to be a credit to the Anna Maria, and add a laurel to the glory of her gallant Captain. !" Fleet and Macnab drank this toast by themselves. The Captain merely gave an exclamation, and refused to carry the wine to his lips ; and Tupper, wondering why the smell of roast pork made him feel so flatulent, mediated a request to the steward for a nip of brandy. " Dinna fash yourself, Captain," said Macnab presently when the wine had warmed him : " it's gran' worruk you'll be doin', Sirr, in' savin' that puir bit laddie frae the untole evils of the stowaway. It's a worruk of pheelanthropy, Sirr! " Unlucky little beggar !" cried Fleet; perhaps he would doubt the philanthropy if he knew what ho had before him. it's a dogs' life for the best of us." Fleet—rosiest, most rubicund of sailors —always spoke of his profession in this disparaging fashion. " X winna deespute he's onconifortable enough at the present niomer.t," agreed Macnab with a chuckle ; "I hear he's verra seek. But it's an nxpeerience, moil, it's in expeerience, and expeerience is the ane royal road to knowledge. "Topperseems a good way atlong the road, then dosen't he?" whispered Fleet nudging the Doctor. The Supercargo had become, indeed, of a cadaverous colour ; although, having obtained the brandy, he was in reality felling better, and anxious to talk to keep up his cour-

" I must have a chat with that boy one of these days," said he ; " there was something in his eye which interested me. And there is also something interesting in his circumstances. Yesterday a denizen of the fetid alley, to day riding on the bosom of the ocean, the centre of immensities! I must find out what impression this sudden introduction to Nature makes upon his young spirit." The Captain had already given signs of a ferocious irritability. Now he broke forth.

" One might be listening to a parcel of vapourish women, rather than sensible men," said he abruptly. " The subject of your conversation is a miserable, ricketty creature, diseased in body and depraved in mind ; the scandalous. PRODUCT OF GENERATIONS OF PAST

Macnab's medicines will more give him health or strength than will Fleet's regimen, and though Tuppcr might perhaps instil a little bad poetry into his feeble brain, I don't see any cause for congratulation in that. The kindest and the wisest course would be to sweep him off the face of the earth altogether, and this could be done by leaving him severely alone. You can read in his face that he has not the vitality to attain manhood. To lend him a fictitious strength is to enable him to hand on the curse he has inherited from his parents, ancl to add another scourge to the inferno of our great cities. Do you imagine that once set down on dry land again he will not drift back to a life as bad or worse than that from which he came 1 There are no more the makings of a sailor in him than there are the makings of anything else that is decent or respectable, and if I could have my way, I would stamp out all such vermin pitilessly, for very humanity's sake, that the plague-spot of their evil living shtJuld not contaminate those around them."

' His listeners exclaimed with warmth against the barbarity of these views, which jarred equally on Fleet's easy tolerance. Macnab's " pheelanthropy," and Tupper's young enthusiasms. "It's a fearfu' thing to talc' life," said Macnab, " withoutten it be in the interests of science, but even she demands the carefu' preesarvation rather than the destruction of every pathological specimen." "And after all," said Fleet, "the poor wretch probably enjoys his life in his own way as much as we do ours. Offer him the most delicate euthanasia from Macnab's phials, and he wouldn't thank you. A living dog, you know, is better than a dead lion."

"lIE IS A HUMAN SOUL,"

said the Supercargo, " and more precious than all the treasures of the deep. The cynical lightness with which you discuss his fate positively revolts mo. The really humane man steps aside to avoid the worm upon his path, and will not crush with his foot the beetle perambulating his cabin floor —he calls in the steward i<> do it instead. But the conversaiion lias entered low, depressing and vulgar channels. Let us for (lie nonce forget the stowaway, fill our glasses, and with our captain's permission, drink to the loved ones at h >ine."

" To my mother ami the flourishing auctioneer sho has just given me for a step-father !" cried Fleet, with a grimanee. "To the douce and bonnie widow wi' the bawbees I am yet to woo and win!" cried Macnab.

" To all the dear creatures," said Tupper, " who at the present moment r6ad my poems and bewail my departure—to Ethel and Maud, Blanche and Alice. Phyllis, Muriel, Dolly." " Whist wi' your clishmaclavers!" interrupted the Doctor; " just han' roun' the whiskey stoup, mon, an' we'll toast all your braw doxies together." The Captain raised his glass in silent abstraction. His eye softened as he thought of his young wife, of his three boys, of the quiet homestead embosomed among English trees, where alone he might unbend from authority and become his kindly self.

THERE WAS A VIOLEXT SnOCIC POR"WARD Everything on the table jerked up into the air as though the board had been struck a sharp blow underneath, A strange, shuddering groan ran through the beams of the ship from prow to stern. A still stranger silence followed. The men rose from the dinnertable and stared at each other in consternation. At the same moment the second mate opened the cabin-door, calling urgently for the Captain. He and the rest ran up on deck to find a scene of unimaginable | confusion. The storm was at its height, wind and water raged tempestuously, all hands were gathered together, all voices clamoured at once. "We've struck . . • we're on the Margaret reef ... we passed the Margaret reef . . . that there's Ness Point . . • we're sinkin' . . . we'll be down in two seconds , . . we'll last awhile yet . . . the water's visin' . . . we're lost! For a moment the Captain stood motionless, while hurrying thoughts clashed with and crossed each other in lii.s brain. Then he realised that any hope; of saving the Anna Maria was gone. She had struck upon a rock, a great hole was bored in her side, and still in sight of shore she was rapidly sinking. He seized a

marlin-spike. " Silence !" he thundered ; " the first man who speaks I fell him to the ground ! " " LOWER TIIK BOATS." His gestures were understood ; his words were inaudible. The men carried out his instruction?, but the sea laughed him to scorn. The waves laid hold-of the poor cockleshells, tossed them hither and thither with contempt, whir-led them round, turned them over, crushed them into match-wood against the sides of the ship, and dispersed the fragments near and far.

The Captain made a trumpet with his hands and shouted to the men who stood three feet away: " There is nothing more to be done. I can save neither you or the ship. In five minutes from now she will have found the bottom. Let every man take a life-belt and strike out for the shore. It is your only chance. Distribute the belts."

There was a belt to every man on board. Each sailor slipped the apparatus over his head and shoulders, looked from the mountainous sea to the face of his Cap* tain, and, obeying the order written there, sprang from the bulwarks to begin the desparately unequal struggle with Fate, For a few seconds a white face gleamed here and there upon the black waters, then the rolling waves carried thorn all from sight. The Captain, Mac Nab, Fleet, and the Supercargo stood together; four belts lay at their feet. A fifth figure drew near and fixed its eyes, full of longing and despair, now on the belts, now on each of the four men to whom they were reserved.

IT MAS TIIE STOWAWAY, and as his sea-sickness had left him through terror of the captain, so this terror in turn had vanished completely before the greater terror of Death. He glared at the coveted belts, and would have taken one by force had he possessed the strength; he would have filched one by fraud could he have found the opportunity. Simultaneously, the four men recognised his presence, and three of the laces expressed a furious egotism that equalled his own. Each saw in him a possible disputant for his own chance of life. Fleet, with cheeks still constitutionally rosy, had lost his habitual smilo; Macnab had braced every nerve and energy to the task of saving the precious disciple of science; Tupper, though scarcely more pale than before, had abandoned affectation and revGaled in every lineament the natural man, a trembling animal, no higher in the social scale than the stowaway himself.

" There is no time to lose," shouted the captain, and before the words were out of his mouth, the three men had seized the belts nearest to them and plunged into the sea. Fleet was the last. He looked back towards the captain. " Come!" he called.

But the captain was attaching the last belt round the shoulders of the stowaway. " You cannot swim? Then keep your mouth shut, don't struggle, but let tho waves carrv you. With God's help you may the shore." At this supreme momen 1 . it did not occur to tho captain which of the two, ho or the stowaway, was fittest to survive; ho was only in tho miserable creature a being whose helplessness laid, a claim upon his own strength. lIE SACRIFICED lIIS LIFE'S CHANCE

FOR HIM as unhesitatingly as he would have sacrificed it for a woman or a child. The action appeared to him so natural and so inevitable that perhaps on this aecouut he deserves no praise. Which was probably the view taken by the stowaway himself, for, without a word of thanks, he turned, ran to the taft-rail, and spraug far out into the sea. The Captain paced his deck a solitary man between the storming wind and waves.

The rats, driven out from their last hiding-place, swarrued about his feet for protection, and he could see their bright and suppliant eyes reading his own. Then, with a roar and rush of water, he and they were swept apart, fathoms down into darkness, and the man, after a brief agony, a long joy-dream, lay at rest. Of the remainder of the crew of the Anna Maria—by one of those strange freaks of Fortune, who seems almost sentient in her malignancy—only

THE SUPERCARGO AND THE STOWAWAY reached the shore alive. Ihey crawled feebly above the tide-line, and for long appeared mere inanimate bundles of drenched cloth and clouts. But when the sun rose next morning these two rose also, recognised each other, and, exchanging glances of contempt and haterd, crept off in different directions. And there, like certain noxious plant-growths, each in his separate sphere thrives apace to this day.— The Argosy.

What advice would it be well to give a careless road surveyor ?—To mend his ways. . , Many kept their reputations polished only that they may outihine their neighbour*. .... A ring around the moon is a sign of rain, and a ring around the eye is a sign of bloiv. The clothing dummy may have its garments stolen, but 'twill be sure t-j have its redress. The telephome is an arrangement by which two men can lie to each other without being confused. A ladv. voting a hospital, gave a soldier, who had lost both his legs, a tract on ihe am of dancing.