LITMIR.BIZ

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a thousandfold by the jangle of his tortured nerves.

      In vain he searched himself for the white powder. Satisfied that it was gone, he staggered from his bunk and stood for a moment gazing around. He was not a fool, and by the lamp swinging in gimbals he decided that he was aboard a ship; also he knew that he was extremely seasick.

      Overcome by nausea, he opened a door before him and reeled out into a passage. He missed the companion ladder, the hatch of which was down, but finally wandered into the galley, where a yellow-skinned cook received him with much Oriental profanity. The cook, however, assisted him in relieving his anguished stomach, in the midst of which operation a rough voice broke in upon them.

      “Damn my eyes, if it aint Parson! Hey, Parson! You git below with the change o’ watch, or I’ll be up to drag ye down! Give him some chow, John, so’s he can hold up his end with the black gang.”

      Venable recognized the man Stormalong, and with a weak effort he inquired about Garrity.

      “Garrity?” rejoined the other jeeringly. “He’s five hundred mile back in Frisco—where you’ll wish you was if you don’t buck up an’ git to work! ”

      With this, Stormalong vanished. Venable was too weak and sick to give further heed to anything. How he had come aboard this ship, he neither knew nor cared. He begged the cook for morphine or opium, but the yellow man only shrugged his shoulders.

      An hour later, scarce able to crawl for the sickness that was on him, Venable emerged on deck, painfully dragging himself aft. To his amazement he found there was no storm; the steamer was chugging through bright sunlight and sparkling waters; her decks seemed white and deserted, and all around was a horizon of long, rolling billows. She was not a large ship by any means, and Venable halted at sight of the stenciled name on boats and preservers—John Ferguson.

      Why, that was Garrity’s ship, surely! Even in his racked condition, Venable remembered the name. And Garrity five hundred miles away, back in Frisco? How did it happen?

      PUZZLING over this strange fact, Venable halted to stare around him. No one was in sight, and the ship seemed to be going her business of her own accord. Suddenly he was aware that a man had appeared and was approaching him—a rather small man, wearing a faded cap and faded blue clothes.

      “What are you doing here?” said the stranger.

      “Looking for the captain,” answered Venable feverishly. “Tell me—”

      “I’m the skipper. Oh, you’re Parson, are you?” The other man gave him a keen, searching look. “Well, what d’you want?”

      “I—I—for the love of heaven, give me some morphia!” begged Venable with piteous force. “I’m going to pieces—”

      “Get below, you old fool,” snapped the skipper, “and clear out of this part of the ship! You’ll get all the stimulant you want in the boiler-room—”

      “There’s been a mistake!” broke in Venable. “I—I never meant to be aboard here.”

      “You, Stormalong!” The skipper lifted his voice to some one forward. “Get this bum for’ard where he belongs and keep him there! Tryin’ to tell me he was shanghaied, the dopy old fool! Clear him out, now.”

      Stormalong appeared, gathered up the protesting but helpless Venable, and dragged him below again in short order.

      Thus ended the primary stage of Venable’s sea-education. The secondary stage was one of horror, humiliation and utter torment. Every man aboard ship knew that he was a dope-victim; and every man knew that a dope-victim is the most degraded of men. Only Garrity knew that his friend was a victim of fate, and not of opium products.

      To the mind of Venable, at least, the intolerable torture which he now faced consisted of two salient features: he was kept at work shoveling coal, and he could get neither drug nor liquor. For a while he was close to madness. Perhaps Shinski saved him from madness; perhaps it was the steel within himself that saved him. Some men can go through agonies of suffering and labor, and the more they endure, the more spring comes into the steel of their souls; others, made of iron instead of steel, go to pieces and must be slowly welded or not at all. In Venable’s case it was steel, and it was proven.

      Shinski was a man in his watch. When Venable crawled into his bunk the second night of his deprivation and torment, he was groaning bitterly, half raving. Shinski came to him, an odd little man, tenderly pitiful, speaking accented English, and like an angel of mercy gave Venable a tiny bit of white powder.

      There was something to Shinski. Usually silent, once or twice his voice leaped out across “glory-hole” discussions; then it became a flaming, vitriolic voice that burned and bit, the words terrific and pregnant. Twice he lectured the gentry of die watch on radical lines. Shinski was a Red, an anarch. Too tender-hearted to kill a cockroach, Shinski believed in slaughtering the privileged classes, and had done his share of the slaughtering; it was muttered that he had been through the worst of the Russian shambles, a crimsoned figure. Glory-hole gossip made of him a Robespierre, and probably with truth. His presence here was wholly a mystery. He was no opium-victim; yet he had found the powder for Venable.

      WHEN Venable went to work again, it was quite obvious that the drug was uplifting him, and about six bells he collapsed. He said nothing, and how the secret became known was untold; but something happened to Shinski. He was shifted to the other watch, so that Venable saw no more of him.

      At the end of a week Venable was reacting very well. His brain was clearing out. Stormalong drove him mercilessly, yet not with the brutal fury applied to the other men, for Parson, as he was now known, gave himself to the work and did not slack. Finding that he was indeed at sea and bound for Asia, Venable accepted the situation and made the best of it. Patching together the shreds of his vague memories, he could connect Terence Garrity with his presence here in a very slight manner; besides, was not Garrity his friend? It was inexplicable. How he had come aboard the ship, he could not understand.

      Meantime his body throve under punishment and hearty food. The gaunt frame hardened and became a powerful machine, with a vigor it had lacked for years past. Saved only by a narrow margin from mental collapse, Venable had no time for any thought or theorizing. He worked, ate, slept, in a monotonous sequence that filled all his day. His brain lay unused, fallow.

      Of this, a fortnight in all. It was not much, as time goes, certainly not enough to pull Eric Venable out of all temptation and make of him a new man; but it was sufficient to clean and renew him in mind and body. And when the time was past, came—Garrity.

      It was noon. Stormalong ordered Venable on deck, without explanation, shortly before watches changed. Out in the sunlight, awaiting him, Parson found the copper-thatched Garrity.

      “It’s me,” Garrity grinned, hand outstretched. “Ye need not stare so! It’s me.”

      “Why!” Venable took the proffered hand, whereat Garrity’s starry blue eyes lighted up. “They told me that you were back in—”

      “I know all about it,” intervened the other bluntly. “Listen, now! ’Twas me had ye brought aboard, Parson—had ye shanghaied, no less, and it was for your own good. Ye’ll not love me for it, but that’s the truth: I could not bear to leave ye, goin’ the way you was back there! I know that ye do not want a boost up, but none the less I gave it. Now, if ye hate me for it, I can’t help it none.”

      Venable said nothing; he could find no words. A furious, gusty anger leaped up within him as he comprehended. He stood impassive, towering over the engineer, staring down into those stark blue eyes that glimmered from the brick-red face with its broken nose.

      Gradually there smote into his brain some realization of the simple, lucid honesty that lay in Garrity’s eyes. A week previously, he might have sprung upon the other in furiously insane passion; now he merely stood and realized the truth. Accustomed to weighing men and their motives, accustomed to viewing the spiritual side of things as the average man sees the practical, he comprehended the

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