CHAPTER X.
“The man fascinates me,” said Miss Holmes. “What is he?”
“I don't know,” Sprague answered, under cover of a magazine, “except that he's a Western American, and the mystery of the smoking room.”
“Have you spoken to him?”
“No; no one seems to want to break the ice, and he shows pretty clearly he doesn't.”
“Then how do you know he's a Western American?”
“Look at his clothes—or, rather, his armor. See the jacket, padded inches deep, and reaching to the knee; the peg-top trousers, and bulgent-toed boots ready made to receive his pet bunion? That's the last shriek of fashion anywhere west of Chicago.”
“Really?”
“Oh, there are funnier things than that in America. I once saw a man in Seattle with a gold tooth, and a diamond set in the middle of it. For the rest he was like our friend yonder, except for his tie—that was a really ingenious combination of bow and sailor's knot—and his shoes, which were exactly like red-hot flatirons studded with overgrown drawing pins”
But Miss Holmes was still surreptitiously studying the subject of their conversation over the top of a novel.
“What a jaw!” she murmured admiringly. “Anything would be possible to a man with a jaw like that. And look at his hands—quickly, while he folds up his chair—they're like a brick-layer's.”
Sprague looked up in time to see a broad back disappear into the smoking room.
“Miner,” was his laconic verdict.
From the foregoing it will be fairly apparent that he and the actress were seated on the promenade deck of the Orontes. After three weeks—sometimes before—shipboard amenities are apt to thin down to gossip; but they had been a very pleasant three weeks of blue seas, bluer skies, and tempering trades, and now a cool crossing of the line was having such a benignant influence on the captain that he had given his consent to the old equatorial custom of holding Neptune's court.
The first intimation Sprague had of this was a subdued scream from Miss Holmes, and the startling vision of a “policeman” in full regalia. The man stood before them, resplendent in burned cork and tow, holding a collection box in one hand and a gigantic bludgeon in the other, hugely enjoying his lawful trespass on the sacred saloon deck.
“Exemption tickets five shillings,” he announced, with a grin; and Sprague bought two with an alacrity born of experience.
“It's sheer funk,” he admitted, while the “policeman” repeated his intimidations on a nervous little gentleman in glasses. “It may be funny from the fo'c's'le point of view, but from the victim's it's downright bullying.”
Miss Holmes looked vaguely apprehensive.
“I don't seem to remember anything of the sort coming out,” she observed
“No; they don't have it on the P. & O., and it's dying out on most of the other lines. But come along if you want to be in at the kill.”
Below them on the fore'ard hatch the “court” stood, awaiting Father Neptune, who at last made a sedate entry over the ship's rail, to the accompaniment of a badly played bugle. His flowing beard of rope ends reached to his knees; his trident bore a sorry-looking herring impaled on its points; and the binoculars with which he looked about him were composed of two beer bottles spliced side by side. But he made an impressive figure, and when his murderous-looking courtiers—powerful fo'c's'le hands, blackened from head to foot, and decorated with brightly dyed tufts of tow—rallied about him, more than one passenger was seen drifting quietly toward his cabin.
The “police” were a zealous force, and while the procession filed toward a tank they hustled the “débutants” like sheep onto the lower deck.
The first to be presented was a lanky youth from the steerage, who showed an abject readiness to submit to anything; but his meekness availed him nothing; he was forcibly seized and carried to the hatchway, where he was hoisted onto a form opposite Neptune's “throne.” His shirt was opened, and his chest and face thoroughly plastered with an evil-looking, black concoction which was as thoroughly removed by the “doctor” with a gigantic wooden razor. Then Neptune, bawling at him through a megaphone, demanded how he liked entering his new domain, and when he opened his mouth to answer, the brush with which he had been lathered was thrust into it, the form was tipped up, and he fell headforemost into the tank. The “devils” presiding over this department then proceeded to give him the prescribed ducking, and he finally crawled from their hands like a half-drowned kitten.
“Good Lord!” said Sprague. “Our friend of the lantern jaw is going through with it.”
“I should somehow think he would,” replied Miss Holmes thoughtfully.
He stood in line with the rest, arrayed in peg-top ducks and a tennis shirt, watching the proceedings without a flicker of a smile; and when it came to his turn for presentation he suffered every indignity with a stoicism that robbed it of half its effect.
Sprague was about to vote the entertainment tame, when things took quite an unexpected turn. Once in the tank, the etiquette of Neptune's court allows the victim to fend for himself, and of this largess the American proceeded to take full advantage. Bracing himself in a corner, he stood firm as adamant, resisting every effort to get him under the water. With his soaking shirt clinging to his body, it was at once apparent that the man was possessed of tremendous strength, the muscles of his arms and shoulders playing under the sodden linen like strands of steel, while “devil” after “devil” went in to defeat.
Two he summarily dealt with by knocking their heads together and thrusting them out onto the deck amid terrific applause. A third dived for his legs, and received a submarine kick in the face for his trouble. But the fourth approached the matter warily; making a sudden dive for the hose that kept the tank supplied with water, he dragged it to the surface, and kept a three-hundred-gallon-a-minute jet centered on the American's head until he dived in turn and dragged his assailant, hose and all, below the surface.
For a moment proceedings came to a standstill, and all eyes—from those of the laughing captain on the bridge to those of a rather discomforted Neptune—were centered on the tank, where troubled waters told of the struggle going on below the surface.
When at last the combatants arose, the American climbed leisurely from the tank and picked a dripping way through the cheering crowd to his cabin.
“Wasn't he splendid?” Miss Holmes was clapping her hands like a school-girl at a hockey match.
“I should like to meet that man,” said Sprague.
And that night he did.
Strolling aft in company with a cigar, he came upon the hero of the afternoon leaning over the ship's rail, watching the phosphorescent waters swirling past the great ship's sides. Sprague had half turned to leave him to the solitude he sought when he looked up, and their eyes met. It was almost impossible to avoid speech.
“I congratulate you on your conquest of the 'devils,'” said Sprague.
For a moment the other regarded him with a frankly resentful stare; then his mouth relaxed into a slow smile that imbued his ascetic features with an unlooked-for warmth.
“Thanks,” he said; “they seemed to be looking for horseplay, so I thought I'd give it to them.”
Such was the manner of Sprague's meeting with Nathaniel Stone, a manner surely as fantastic, in the light of after events, as this remarkable small world could furnish.
From that day the two men were almost inseparable. Theirs was one of those friendships, truly mystifying to the outsider, that seem to thrive on dissimilarity of taste and ideals; to find incentive in the clash of widely divergent personalities. To Sprague—inclined to be trivial, even frivolous—there was the fascination of unplumbed depths in Nathaniel Stone; and to the American, Sprague was as a drink of sparkling water to a thirsty soul.
Together they accomplished the morning constitutional on the promenade deck, smoked the postprandial cigar of contentment and companionship at the ship's rail, explored the cinnamon gardens of Colombo and the Arab quarters at Port Said; and each day revealed to Sprague fresh traits in the other's extraordinary personality, for extraordinary it proved to be. He had no sense of humor, and his face betrayed it, its very contour in repose bespeaking a natural gravity, the acceptance of life as a serious business. His conversation, though showing a keen observance of men and things, was never illumined by the faintest glimmering of levity; a joke to him was a sad and sorry affair, and on the few occasions when Sprague launched one for his benefit he accorded him a solemn, undivided attention that went farther to quash the misguided effort than would any failure to comprehend—he saw them, saw them all, and pitied the joker.
Sprague instinctively felt that here was a man with a purpose, a man who had taken life in his two hands and wrestled with it, that there was something behind him that kept him wrestling still; but many days were to pass before he learned what that something was.