Part 23

I don’t know just what he might have done to me if he had been sober--but he wasn’t sober. I was, and my line of work had made me lithe and quick. I snapped my man before he had time to open his mouth, and ran him off that turn-table and presented him to his daughter with my compliments. He kicked and thrashed around in a logy style, and I kept him circling so that he could not get foothold, on the same principle that you keep a boa-constrictor from hooking his tail around a tree.

“Where will you have him delivered, miss?” I asked, as politely as I could.

“Father, you come along with me this instant!” she cried. “We don’t want strangers interfering in our affairs any longer.” She said that to him for my benefit.

“I don’t mean to be interfering, miss,” I pleaded. “I only want to square myself for being thoughtless and starting trouble for you--more trouble, I mean.”

She put her hand against me and pushed me away from her father--no, I can hardly say that I was pushed away. That hand was too little to push a man of my size. But the gesture of pushing was enough for me. I let him loose. She reached for his ear, but he dodged away, cantering like a cart-horse, and whooped that he was bound for the “Barbary Coast.” The human belay-ing-pin with the oakum topknot followed, plainly relishing the fact that the procession had started. The girl took a few steps in pursuit, and then she stopped and began to cry. She had grit--I had seen that--but after a girl gets about so mad she has to cry on general principles.

“Look here,” I told her, “I’m a stranger, all right, but you need a man’s help right now. I’ll help for every ounce that’s in me if you’ll say the word. But I’m a Yankee and I need to be asked.”

“He has a lot of money in his pockets,” she sobbed. “He must pay out that money to-morrow morning. He will be butchered and robbed where he’s going. I never saw him so silly and obstinate before. His head has been turned by some good luck which has come to him. He--”

“I haven’t got time to listen to details, miss. He’s getting out of sight. I’ve got to work quick. I’m square and decent and honest, and I’m mighty sorry for the scrape you are in. Do you want me to chase that father of yours for you?”

“Yes,” she gasped; “yes, I do.”

“About all I’m worth in the world is in that bag there. It’s my diving-dress. I’ve got to leave it.”

“Your name is Sidney!” she cried, her eyes opening wide on me. “You’re the man we came to meet!”

So, after all, I had butted in on my reception committee! “And that’s Captain Holstrom?” I demanded, pointing up the street.

“Yes! Yes! Hurry, sir. I will watch your bag! I will stay here. Hurry, sir! He has gone up Market Street, but he’ll turn to the right pretty soon. That’s the way to the horrible Barbary Coast.”

I patted her shoulder--I couldn’t help it. She looked up at me through her tears. And off I hiked, leaving my earthly possessions in charge of a girl whom I had met for the first time less than ten minutes before.

Of course, I knew what every one knows, whether he has been in San Francisco or not, that Market Street cuts straight across the city from bay to ocean. But at just what street on the course Captain Rask Holstrom proceeded to port his helm and swing to starboard blessed if I had the least idea. I didn’t know the name of another street in the city. I knew what the Barbary Coast was in San Francisco. I had read descriptions of its dance-halls, its dens, its haunts of iniquity, and its dangers. And here I was, galloping straight toward it before the creases of a railroad journey across the continent were out of my clothes. That is to say, I hoped I was galloping toward it, for I wanted to catch father for that nice girl. Captain Holstrom was out of sight among the crowds on that long Market Street before I had started the chase. I didn’t dare to run too fast.

San Francisco, as I have said, seemed to be inclined to let a man tend to his own business, but I didn’t want to provoke some ass to start a “stop thief” yell behind me. I craned and peered ahead as I trotted on. I stopped for a moment at the head of streets which led away to the right--the girl had said he would turn to the right--but I caught no glimpse of a bobbing blue cap nor of a lofty thatch of grizzled beard and whisker.

I took a chance after a while, for Market Street showed ahead an upward slope and I couldn’t spot my man there. I turned off to the right, and hurried. I didn’t know what street I was on. I came to a square at last where there were a statue and a fountain, and there were large buildings on the right. I ran across the square, and the next moment I realized that I was in Chinatown--and I had read of that part of San Francisco, too. I knew then that I was headed toward the Barbary Coast all right, having a memory of what I had read. But in a few minutes I was lost in a maze of narrow streets which traveled up and down the little hills. I was peering and goggling here and there. I must have looked like a tourist trying to do Chinatown in record time. I came into a street or alley that was roofed--and I came out again, for it seemed to be closed in at the upper end. By that time I realized that not only had I lost Capt. Rask Holstrom, but that I had also succeeded in losing myself--a rather silly predicament for a young man who so boldly offered himself as knight errant to a damsel in distress.

I stood still and wiped sweat out of my eyes, and addressed a few pregnant remarks to myself on the subject of a man’s making a fool of himself for a woman. However, I had a mighty good reason of my own for wanting to meet up with Captain Holstrom--and to safeguard that money of his, for I hoped to rake some of it down in wages.

XXVII--MR. BEASON HORNS IN

A WHITE-LIVERED, sneaky-looking chap sidled up to me and stuck out a dirty card.

“That’s my name on there,” said he; “Jake Beason, and I’m the best Chinatown guide that’s on the beat; I’ll show you everything from joss-house to hop-holes.”

“Do you know the Barbary Coast?”

“Do I know--Oh, come now! Why, say, I live over that way,” he snarled through the corner of his mouth; and he looked at me as though I had insulted his intelligence.

I decided that I would be plain and direct with that chap.

“I’m on the trail of a steamboat captain by the name of Holstrom, and he is two-thirds pickled, and has money on him. Do you think you know the places where a man like that would be likely to drop in?”

“What’s the lay--a touch and a divvy?”

“Nothing of the kind. I’m his friend, and I want to catch him and take him home out of trouble.”

“The same old stall,” he sneered. “You’ve got to let me be a friend, too.”

I reached out and got my crowbar clutch on that fellow. “I don’t suppose you ever had a man tell you the truth, son,” I said, “so I’m not going to blame you much. I say that I’m after this man to take him home to his daughter. That’s truth, and it’s on my say-so. If you propose to call me a liar, out with it, and we’ll settle the thing.”

“She stands as you say--and you needn’t pinch so,” he whined.

There’s nothing like a good grip to press home conviction in a sneak.

“I’ll give you ten dollars if you’ll locate that man for me before the evening is over,” I told him. “I’ll make it twenty dollars if you’ll turn the trick inside of an hour.”

“I know all the joints--I know the steamboat hangouts.”

“It ought to be an easy trick. He is with an old belay-ing-pin who has enough hair on his head and face to stuff a bolster--and I heard somebody call him Ike.”

“Aw, that’s ‘Ingot Ike.’ Everybody between Dupont Street and Telegraph Hill knows that old hornbeam and his everlasting hum about three million dollars’ worth of buried gold ingots. Come along! I ought to pull down that twenty easy.”

“Let me tell you one thing,” I said, chasing along with him. “I’m not worth robbing. I’m going to keep close to you, and if you put me against any frame-up I’ll get you first, and I’ll get you quick.” And I grabbed him by the wrist and let him have that honest old grip once more. I kept hold of him. And led thus like a blind man through this street and that, by short cuts along dark alleys, across courts, and now and then skirting vacant lots, we came at last into purlieus that my ears, eyes, and nose told me must be that “Barbary Coast so gay,” as Captain Holstrom had caroled.

Out of open doors came liquor fumes and music blended, if there is any such thing as blending noise and odors; the two seemed to be associated there so regularly and invariably that my senses told me that they were blended.

The women sauntered on the sidewalks; the men loafed there. We two seemed to be about the only ones who were headed for something definite.

“We’ll tap the regular joints first,” said Beason. “If he’s pretty drunk he won’t be using his mind much to think up new places to go. He’ll fall into the rut like a ball in a crooked pin-game.”

I was young enough to be interested in that panorama of iniquity. I would have gaped longer than I did in those places, but Mr. Beason proved to be a very active guide. That matter of twenty dollars proved to be like a bur under a bronco’s saddle. He would gallop into a place, leave me to goggle at the antics on the dance floor; he would weasel his way through the crowd, chop out a few staccato questions, and then yank me out with my eyes behind me and my chin hanging over my shoulder like the tailboard of a cart.

Beason rattled me down another length of street--and if the folks we bumped hadn’t known him I reckon we would have had a few things on our hands besides that man hunt. They all seemed to know Beason. He snapped questions right and left.

All at once my guide got a clue. He barked a few more questions at this illuminative party, and turned and scooted back along our trail.

“The old cuss has taken to a back room,” he gasped. “I ought to have figured that he would be hiding.”

He rushed me around comers, across streets, down alleys, and into more streets. We came up against a saloon at last where the front window was lettered in red paint, “Holding Ground Cove.” Knowing, as a deep-sea diver, that a good holding ground means a mud bottom, I could have thought up a highly moral and somewhat humorous apothegm on that name for a saloon if I had had the time; but Mr. Beason was cutting comers on Time that night. He rushed me into the saloon, into a back room at the rear, and when he didn’t see what we were looking for up-stairs we went. There were cribs of private rooms, furnished with bare tables and hard chairs--drinking-rooms. From the half-open door of one came the cackle of much laughter, and we peeped in.

A girl, whose face was painted in almost as gaudy hues as her red stockings, was standing on a table in the middle of the little room.

Capt. Rask Holstrom was seated in a chair, straddling the back, and was busily engaged in tickling the girl’s nose with the tip of a very long peacock feather--and wherever he secured that feather I never found out. But always leave it to a hilarious drunken man to find something odd to carry around with him. In the room was the human belaying-pin, also seated. But his chair had evidently slipped from under him when he tried to lean against the wall, and he was jack-knifed down in a corner, with his broomstick legs waving in the air, and was surveying the scene between that frame. He was squealing laughter in a key that would have put a guinea-hen out of business.

“There’s Ingot Ike,” affirmed Beason, “and if t’other one is your pertickler friend then I’ll cash in.”

He held up his cheap watch, with his dirty forefinger indicating the hour.

“I get the twenty with nine minutes’ ‘velvet,’ if that’s your friend.”

But Captain Holstrom did not display any very ardent friendship for any one just then. He turned an especially malevolent stare in my direction and poised his peacock feather like lance in rest. I could see that something was going to break loose there mighty soon, and after what I had told Beason I didn’t want that young sneak to overhear. It would be like him to come back with a gang and “do” me on the excuse that I was a stranger who was “frsking” Captain Holstrom for his pocketful.

I hauled out two ten-dollar bills mighty quick, and passed them to Beason. He held one in each hand, pinched between thumb and forefinger, and looked at them in turn, wrinkling his nose with as much disgust as though he were holding lizards by the tails.

“Soft money,” said he, “and the stink of the East still on it! I’ll bet you both of these poultices that you haven’t been in San Francisco twenty-four hours--and how do you happen to be such a pertickler friend of a China Basin steamboat cap’n, hey?”

A freshly arrived Easterner is always given away by his paper money.

“Who’s a friend?” inquired Captain Holstrom, the one eye I could see as staring and as baleful as the “eye” on the peacock feather.

“Look-a-here,” said I, bracing up to him savagely, for I knew that soft soap wouldn’t grease the ways, “I want to know what you mean by running away from me after my telegrams to you.”

I whirled on Beason, pushed him out of the room, and slammed the door in his face.

“You have been paid,” I yelled at him through the crack. “Now, keep your nose out of the rest of the thing, or I’ll pinch it off.”

“See here,” growled Captain Holstrom, vibrating the feather as menacingly as though it were a sled stake, “don’t you know a private party when you see one?”

I walked right up to him.

“My name is Sidney. I’m the diver you are expecting.”

“You’re a liar,” he returned, promptly.

“I tell you you were down to the ferry to meet me. I pulled you off that turn-table!”

“Who are you?”

“I am Ross Sidney, I say! You’re expecting me. I’m a diver.”

But he did not show the least evidence of understanding what I was talking about. It’s a familiar phase of drunkenness in many men--that dogged determination to hang on to one notion and admit no others.

He shook his head and waggled the feather under the girl’s nose.

“This is a private party,” he growled.

“But your daughter is waiting for you--she is very much worried about you and the money.”

“Say, who does this money and this daughter and this room here belong to, anyway? Who do I belong to? Who am I? Ain’t I Rask Holstrom, fifty-six years old, and fully able to take care of myself anywhere between Point Lobo and India Basin?” He squinted at me along the peacock’s plume. “Who are _you?_ You say my girl is at the ferry, hey? How do you know she is there?” He leaned back in his chair, dropped the feather, and yanked a canvas bag from the right-hand pocket of his trousers. It was a plump bag, and a heavy bag, and it plainly contained hard money. He banged it down on the table with such a thump that the girl hopped and squealed, and it barely missed her toes. He pulled another canvas bag from the left-hand pocket, and crashed that down. This time he connected with the girl’s toes. She screamed in pain, leaped down from the table, and began to hop around the room, kicking her foot out behind her. She stumbled into a corner, braced herself there, and began to swear volubly, clutching the tip of her faded red-velvet slipper in both hands.

I had not broken in on his monologue. I could not match him in roaring. Then for the first time he seemed to note that the girl was not in an amiable state of mind.

“You’ve insulted my lady friend. I’ll have your life for that!” He plunged out of his chair and drove against the wall in his unsteadiness.

The girl was profanely advising me--no, entreating me--to kill the “drunken fool.” I didn’t blame her for her fire, and I could excuse her language. To shift from a tickling under the chin to a mally-hackling of toes was a little too strong for a woman’s nature even if the toes had been cracked with money.

That was no time for fine figuring as to ways, means, or chances. Before Captain Holstrom recovered his balance I grabbed his sacks and stuffed them into my pockets. I started for the door. I had a sort of muddled memory of a maxim, or proverb, or something of the kind which says that “where a man’s treasure is there will his heart be also.” It occurred to me that Captain Holstrom’s body would go with his heart if I made off with that money, and I preferred to have the body chase me on two legs rather than be lugged on my shoulders. If he would chase me back to the ferry the situation would be simplified. Of course, mine was a crazy expedient, considering the place where I was, but it was a crazy evening, anyway.

“I’m not stealing it,” I yelled at him as I opened the door. “I’m going to give it to your girl, and if you run hard enough you’ll see me give it to her.”

I had plenty of help in opening that door. There were men outside who helped me so promptly and unanimously that it was evident they had been lying in wait.

Two of them grabbed me by the neck as they would have clutched a bat stick in choosing sides in a game of three old cat. They rammed me back into the room. There were three other men who came in, and one of them was that rat of a Beason.

They were all talking at one another, and Beason was spitting words the fastest. But Captain Holstrom drowned out all other sounds by a bellow of delight. He knew these men, all right. He seemed especially tickled to behold the two men who held me. He slapped them on their backs, cuffed their faces with drunken affection, and adjured them to hold me tighter.

“He took my money! He stole it! He insulted a lady friend of mine. He’s been chasing me and picking a row with me for three days,” he lied, or else the rum he had been drinking had elongated his notions of time.

“You see, I get your twenty, Mr. Keedy,” insisted Beason. “I told you straight. I called the turn on this fly guy. He’s what I told you he was. You just heard what the captain said.”

I was mighty busy just then with the two men who were holding me, and Captain Holstrom was giving me some slaps which were drunkenly heavy, but not affectionate. However, I heard what Beason said, and I saw the man whom he called Keedy pass over a twenty-dollar gold piece. Beason grinned at me and scuttled out of the room. The Keedy person pushed the scolding girl out after him and slammed the door.

I did not like the looks of the Keedy person--no, not at all. I may have instinct in such matters; I don’t know. A diver is obliged to do most of his work in pitch darkness and by the sense of touch, and such work may develop instinct in general. I won’t stop to discuss the question.

But that yellow face with a black mustache smacked across it like a smear of paint, and arrows of eyebrows shooting up northeast and northwest from a regular gouge of a wrinkle between the man’s eyes wasn’t the kind of physog worn by the deacon who takes up the collection in a Sunday-school. He stood with back against the door.

“Go through him, gents,” he directed. “And hand me the gun when you come to it.”

There wasn’t any gun, but they got the two sacks of gold, and my little stock of paper money as well. Then they gave me a shove into a corner, and all of them stood off and looked at me. The excitement had brought old Ingot Ike on to his feet and he joined the ring of spectators.

“You are in bad,” stated Mr. Keedy.

Silence gives consent; so I kept still.

“Who is backing you in this job? Where’s the rest of your gang? You’re in here without a gun. Now, where’s the main party?”

“The main party,” said I, mad enough now to do a little talking, “is down at the ferry, foot of Market Street. She is that old fool’s daughter, and she was crying when I left her. I’m just in from the East, and when I came out on to the street from the ferry this evening, setting foot in San Francisco for the first time--”

“You’re a liar!” yelped Captain Holstrom. “You’ve been on my trail for seven days, and you have just knocked me down when I was entertaining a lady friend and wasn’t looking. You robbed me. The money was found on you. But Rask Holstrom has got friends who won’t see him done. Here they are. And into the dock you go, blast ye!”

“You’re in bad,” reiterated the Keedy person, narrowing the crease between his eyes.

“If you’re a friend of Captain Holstrom, see if you can’t pound it into his head that I’m the diver he is expecting.”

“You’re the what? Is your name Sidney?”

“That is my name.”

“Rask,” snapped Keedy at last, “were you down at the ferry turn-table as this man says? You’ve been pretty drunk. This thing here is taking a new tack. I’d like to believe this chap here if I can.”

“Might have been there,” owned up the captain.

“_Was_ there,” stated that old fool of an Ike, who had been standing by without a word in my behalf. Now he was ready and willing to leap with the popular side. “I was there with him.”

“Was your daughter there with you? Did you leave her there?”

Captain Holstrom looked a little ashamed, and hesitated.

“She was there,” stated Ike. “She was following us and trying to get my noble cap’n to go along with her, but it wasn’t right to bother my noble cap’n when he was happy over a lucky trade.”

“The two of you must have been good and fine,” growled Mr. Keedy. “Look here, Cap, I believe this gent is telling a lot of the truth about you. No matter now about his high jinks with the coin. I want to believe what he says. As your partner, Captain Holstrom, my advice to you is to hustle out, get a cab, and get to that ferry station in quick time. If that diving-suit is there bring it back here.”

The captain rolled out of the room, growling, but subdued.

Mr. Keedy gave me what was for him an affable smile, a hitching up nearer to his nose of that paint-streak mustache.

“We may as well start in an acquaintance,” he said. He passed my pocket-book back. “My name is Marcena Keedy, partner of Cap’n Holstrom. Step up here, gents,” he commanded the two men who had squatted my windpipe. “This is Number-one Jones; this is Number-two Jones.” They ducked salute. They had paint-brush chin beards and cock eyes, and were evidently twins. “First and second mates, new hired for the _Zizania_.” He did not bother to introduce Ingot Ike.

He pushed a button on the wall.

“We’ll take something to gum the edges of sociability, gents. There’s nothing like gents starting in sociable when they can, and staying sociable as long as they can, providing any gent proves himself all right, as he says he is.”

He gave me a significant and mighty sharp look, sat down, and jigged one leg over the other, trying hard to keep up his affable smile.

We kept on being sociable for half an hour or more.

At last back came Capt. Rask Holstrom. He was tugging my duffle-bag, and on his heels was his daughter. She had my little valise. She did not show any especial symptoms of embarrassment at being in such a joint alone with men. She walked straight to me and gave me the valise. What was better, she gave me a smile.

“I misunderstood you, sir, on short acquaintance,” she said. “I hope you will excuse me.”

She looked me straight in the eyes without coquetry, a gaze as level and candid as that of man to man.

I gulped some reply--I don’t know what. I wasn’t half as cool as she was.

Keedy right now put that yellow face between us. The affable smile wasn’t there. I got a quick and sharp impression that he didn’t relish the way the girl and I were getting chummy. She was putting out her hand to me, for I had made a motion as though to shake on our general understanding. He took her hand and whirled her around and pointed to a chair.

“You’d better sit down, Kama dear. We’re going to talk a little business, and you can listen, for you are too much father’s girl to be kept out of any deal of ours.”

She pulled her hand out of his, but she went and sat down without shaking my hand.