Jack London - Michael, Brother of Jerry

“You mean . . . ?” Daughtry asked.

“Just that. There isn’t any treasure. There never was one—any more than the Lion’s Head, the longboat, or the bearings unnamable.”’

Daughtry rumpled his grizzled thatch of hair in his perplexity, as he admitted:

“Well, you got me, sir. You sure got me to believin’ in that treasure.”

“And I acknowledge, steward, that I am pleased to hear it. It shows that I have not lost my cunning when I can deceive a man like you. It is easy to deceive men whose souls know only money. But you are different. You don’t live and breathe for money. I’ve watched you with your dog. I’ve watched you with your nigger boy. I’ve watched you with your beer. And just because your heart isn’t set on a great buried treasure of gold, you are harder to deceive. Those whose hearts are set, are most astonishingly easy to fool. They are of cheap kidney. Offer them a proposition of one hundred dollars for one, and they are like hungry pike snapping at the bait. Offer a thousand dollars for one, or ten thousand for one, and they become sheer lunatic. I am an old man, a very old man. I like to live until I die—I mean, to live decently, comfortably, respectably.”

“And you like the voyages long? I begin to see, sir. Just as they’re getting near to where the treasure ain’t, a little accident like the loss of their water-supply sends them into port and out again to start hunting all over.”

The Ancient Mariner nodded, and his sun-washed eyes twinkled.

“There was the Emma Louisa . I kept her on the long voyage over eighteen months with water accidents and similar accidents. And, besides, they kept me in one of the best hotels in New Orleans for over four months before the voyage began, and advanced to me handsomely, yes, bravely, handsomely.”

“But tell me more, sir; I am most interested,” Dag Daughtry concluded his simple matter of the beer. “It’s a good game. I might learn it for my old age, though I give you my word, sir, I won’t butt in on your game. I wouldn’t tackle it until you are gone, sir, good game that it is.”

“First of all, you must pick out men with money—with plenty of money, so that any loss will not hurt them. Also, they are easier to interest—”

“Because they are more hoggish,” the steward interrupted. “The more money they’ve got the more they want.”

“Precisely,” the Ancient Mariner continued. “And, at least, they are repaid. Such sea-voyages are excellent for their health. After all, I do them neither hurt nor harm, but only good, and add to their health.”

“But them scars—that gouge out of your face—all them fingers missing on your hand? You never got them in the fight in the longboat when the bo’s’n carved you up. Then where in Sam Hill did you get the them? Wait a minute, sir. Let me fill your glass first.” And with a fresh-brimmed glass, Charles Stough Greanleaf narrated the history of his scars.

“First, you must know, steward, that I am—well, a gentleman. My name has its place in the pages of the history of the United States , even back before the time when they were the United States . I graduated second in my class in a university that it is not necessary to name. For that matter, the name I am known by is not my name. I carefully compounded it out of names of other families. I have had misfortunes. I trod the quarter-deck when I was a young man, though never the deck of the Wide Awake , which is the ship of my fancy—and of my livelihood in these latter days.

“The scars you asked about, and the missing fingers? Thus it chanced. It was the morning, at late getting-up times in a Pullman , when the accident happened. The car being crowded, I had been forced to accept an upper berth. It was only the other day. A few years ago. I was an old man then. We were coming up from Florida . It was a collision on a high trestle. The train crumpled up, and some of the cars fell over sideways and fell off, ninety feet into the bottom of a dry creek. It was dry, though there was a pool of water just ten feet in diameter and eighteen inches deep. All the rest was dry boulders, and I bull’s-eyed that pool.

“This is the way it was. I had just got on my shoes and pants and shirt, and had started to get out of the bunk. There I was, sitting on the edge of the bunk, my legs dangling down, when the locomotives came together. The berths, upper and lower, on the opposite side had already been made up by the porter.

“And there I was, sitting, legs dangling, not knowing where I was, on a trestle or a flat, when the thing happened. I just naturally left that upper berth, soared like a bird across the aisle, went through the glass of the window on the opposite side clean head-first, turned over and over through the ninety feet of fall more times than I like to remember, and by some sort of miracle was mostly flat-out in the air when I bull’s-eyed that pool of water. It was only eighteen inches deep. But I hit it flat, and I hit it so hard that it must have cushioned me. I was the only survivor of my car. It struck forty feet away from me, off to the side. And they took only the dead out of it. When they took me out of the pool I wasn’t dead by any means. And when the surgeons got done with me, there were the fingers gone from my hand, that scar down the side of my face . . . and, though you’d never guess it, I’ve been three ribs short of the regular complement ever since.

“Oh, I had no complaint coming. Think of the others in that car—all dead. Unfortunately, I was riding on a pass, and so could not sue the railroad company. But here I am, the only man who ever dived ninety feet into eighteen inches of water and lived to tell the tale.—Steward, if you don’t mind replenishing my glass . . . ”

Dag Daughtry complied and in his excitement of interest pulled off the top of another quart of beer for himself.

“Go on, go on, sir,” he murmured huskily, wiping his lips, “and the treasure-hunting graft. I’m straight dying to hear. Sir, I salute you.”

“I may say, steward,” the Ancient Mariner resumed, “that I was born with a silver spoon that melted in my mouth and left me a proper prodigal son. Also, that I was born with a backbone of pride that would not melt. Not for a paltry railroad accident, but for things long before as well as after, my family let me die, and I . . . I let it live. That is the story. I let my family live. Furthermore, it was not my family’s fault. I never whimpered. I never let on. I melted the last of my silver spoon—South Sea cotton, an’ it please you, cacao in Tonga , rubber and mahogany in Yucatan . And do you know, at the end, I slept in Bowery lodging-houses and ate scrapple in East-Side feeding-dens, and, on more than one occasion, stood in the bread-line at midnight and pondered whether or not I should faint before I fed.”

“And you never squealed to your family,” Dag Daughtry murmured admiringly in the pause.

The Ancient Mariner straightened up his shoulders, threw his head back, then bowed it and repeated, “No, I never squealed. I went into the poor-house, or the county poor-farm as they call it. I lived sordidly. I lived like a beast. For six months I lived like a beast, and then I saw my way out. I set about building the Wide Awake . I built her plank by plank, and copper-fastened her, selected her masts and every timber of her, and personally signed on her full ship’s complement fore-and-aft, and outfitted her amongst the Jews, and sailed with her to the South Seas and the treasure buried a fathom under the sand.

“You see,” he explained, “all this I did in my mind, for all the time I was a hostage in the poor-farm of broken men.”

The Ancient Mariner’s face grew suddenly bleak and fierce, and his right hand flashed out to Daughtry’s wrist, prisoning it in withered fingers of steel.