Once an officer came up and examined the
straining rope to see if it were chafing, but Bub
cowered away in the shadow undiscovered.
This, however, gave him an idea which
concerned the lives and liberties of twenty-two
men, and which was to avert crushing sorrow
from more than one happy home many
thousand miles away.
In the first place, he reasoned, the crew were
all guiltless of any crime, and yet were being
carried relentlessly away to imprisonment in Siberia—a living death, he had
heard, and he believed it implicitly. In the second place, he was a prisoner, hard
and fast, with no chance of escape. In the third, it was possible for the twenty-two
men on the Mary Thomas to escape. The only thing which bound them was a
fourinch hawser. They dared not cut it at their end, for a watch was sure to be
maintained upon it by their Russian captors; but at this end, ah! at his end
Bub did not stop to reason further. Wriggling close to the hawser, he opened his
jack-knife and went to work. The blade was not very sharp, and he sawed away,
rope-yarn by rope-yarn, the awful picture of the solitary Siberian exile he must
endure growing clearer and more terrible at every stroke. Such a fate was bad
enough to undergo with one’s comrades, but to face it alone seemed frightful. And
besides, the very act he was performing was sure to bring greater punishment
upon him.
In the midst of such somber thoughts, he heard footsteps approaching. He
wriggled away into the shadow. An officer stopped where he had been working,
half-stooped to examine the hawser, then changed his mind and straightened up.
For a few minutes he stood there, gazing at the lights of the captured schooner,
and then went forward again.
Now was the time! Bub crept back and went on sawing. Now two parts were
severed. Now three. But one remained. The tension upon this was so great that it
DUTCH COURAGE AND OTHER STORIES
24
readily yielded. Splash! The freed end went overboard. He lay quietly, his heart in
his mouth, listening. No one on the cruiser but himself had heard.
He saw the red and green lights of the Mary Thomas grow dimmer and dimmer.
Then a faint hallo came over the water from the Russian prize crew. Still nobody
heard. The smoke continued to pour out of the cruiser’s funnels, and her propellers
throbbed as mightily as ever.
What was happening on the Mary Thomas? Bub could only surmise; but of one
thing he was certain: his comrades would assert themselves and overpower the
four sailors and the midshipman. A few minutes later he saw a small flash, and
straining his ears heard the very faint report of a pistol. Then, A joy! both the red
and green lights suddenly disappeared. The Mary Thomas was retaken!
Just as an officer came aft, Bub crept forward, and hid away in one of the boats.
Not an instant too soon. The alarm was given. Loud voices rose in command. The
cruiser altered her course. An electric search-light began to throw its white rays
across the sea, here, there, everywhere; but in its flashing path no tossing
schooner was revealed.
Bub went to sleep soon after that, nor did he wake till the gray of dawn. The
engines were pulsing monotonously, and the water, splashing noisily, told him the
decks were being washed down. One sweeping glance, and he saw that they were
alone on the expanse of ocean. The Mary Thomas had escaped. As he lifted his
head, a roar of laughter went up from the sailors. Even the officer, who ordered
him taken below and locked up, could not quite conceal the laughter in his eyes.
Bub thought often in the days of confinement which followed, that they were not
very angry with him for what he had done.
He was not far from right. There is a certain innate nobility deep down in the
hearts of all men, which forces them to admire a brave act, even if it is performed
by an enemy. The Russians were in nowise different from other men. True, a boy
had outwitted them ; but they could not blame him, and they were sore puzzled as
to what to do with him. It would never do to take a little mite like him in to
represent all that remained of the lost poacher.
So, two weeks later, a United States man-of-war, steaming out of the Russian port
of Vladivostok, was signaled by a Russian cruiser. A boat passed between the two
ships, and a small boy dropped over the rail upon the deck of the American
vessel. A week later he was put ashore at Hakodate, and after some telegraphing,
his fare was paid on the railroad to Yokohama.
From the depot he hurried through the quaint Japanese streets to the harbor, and
hired a sampan boatman to put him aboard a certain vessel whose familiar rigging
had quickly caught his eye. Her gaskets were Off, her sails unfurled; she was just
starting back to the United States. As he came closer, a crowd of sailors sprang
DUTCH COURAGE AND OTHER STORIES
25
upon the forecastle head, and the windlass-bars rose and fell as the anchor was
torn from its muddy bottom.
“‘Yankee ship come down the ribber!’ ” the sea-lawyer’s voice rolled out as he led
the anchor song.
“‘Pull, my bully boys, pull!”‘ roared back the old familiar chorus, the men’s bodies
lifting and bending to the rhythm.
Bub Russell paid the boatman and stepped on deck. The anchor was forgotten. A
mighty cheer went up from the men, and almost before he could catch his breath
he was on the shoulders of the captain, surrounded by his mates, and endeavoring
to answer twenty questions to the second.
The next day a schooner hove to off a Japanese fishing village, sent ashore four
sailors and a little midshipman, and sailed away. These men did not talk English,
but they had money and quickly made their way to Yokohama. From that day the
Japanese village folk never heard anything more about them, and they are still a
much-talked-of mystery. As the Russian government never said anything about
the incident, the United States is still ignorant of the whereabouts of the lost
poacher, nor has she ever heard, officially, of the way in which some of her
citizens “shanghaied” five subjects of the tsar. Even nations have secrets
sometimes.
The Banks of the Sacramento
(First published in The Youth’s Companion, v. 78, March 17, 1904: 129-130)
“And it’s blow, ye winds, heigh-ho,
For Cal-i-for-ni-o;
For there’s plenty of gold so I’ve been told,
On the banks of the Sacramento!”
It was only a little boy, singing in a shrill treble the sea chantey which seamen
sing the wide world over when they man the capstan bars and break the anchors
out for “Frisco” port. It was only a little boy who had never seen the sea, but two
hundred feet beneath him rolled the Sacramento. “Young” Jerry he was called,
after “Old” Jerry, his father, from whom he had learned the song, as well as
received his shock of bright-red hair, his blue, dancing eyes, and his fair and
inevitably freckled skin.
DUTCH COURAGE AND OTHER STORIES
26
For Old Jerry had been a sailor, and had followed the sea till middle life, haunted
always by the words of the ringing chantey. Then one day he had sung the song in
earnest, in an Asiatic port, swinging and thrilling round the capstan-circle with
twenty others. And at San Francisco he turned his back upon his ship and upon
the sea, and went to behold with his own eyes the banks of the Sacramento.
He beheld the gold, too, for he found employment at the Yellow Dream mine, and
proved of utmost usefulness in rigging the great ore- cables across the river and
two hundred feet above its surface.
After that he took charge of the cables and kept them in repair, and ran them and
loved them, and became himself an indispensable fixture of the Yellow Dream
mine. Then he loved pretty Margaret Kelly; but she had left him and Young Jerry,
the latter barely toddling, to take up be, last long sleep in the little graveyard
among the great sober pines.
Old Jerry never went back to the sea. He remained by his cables, and lavished
upon them and Young Jerry all the love of his nature. When evil days came to the
Yellow Dream, he still remained in the employ of the company as watchman over
the all but abandoned property.
But this morning he was not visible. Young Jerry only was to be seen, sitting on
the cabin step and singing the ancient chantey. He had cooked and eaten his
breakfast all by himself, and had just come out to take a look at the world. Twenty