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Updated: June 11, 2025
"Por Dios, eet is too mooch work!" sighed Perdosa once. "Why don't you kick to the Old Man, then?" sneered Thrackles. The silence that followed, and the sullenness with which Perdosa readdressed himself to his work, was significant enough of Captain Selover's past relations with the men. And how we did clean her!
But the Nigger shook his head, and Perdosa went into an ecstasy of rage. He kicked the fire to pieces; he scattered the unburned wood up and down the beach; he even threw some of it into the sea. "Eef you no cook heem de grub, you no hab my wood!" he shrieked, with enough oaths to sink his soul. Finally Pulz interfered. "Here you damn foreigners," said he, "quit it! Let up, I say! We got to eat.
I pulled the saw-barrelled Colt's 45 and raised it slowly to a level with his breast. "Perdosa," I repeated, "drop that knife." The crisis had come, but my resolution was fully prepared for it. I should not have cared greatly if I had had to shoot the man as I certainly should have done had he disobeyed.
"S'pose we go up the gulch and get it, then," suggested Thrackles. But at this Handy Solomon drew back in evident terror. "Up that hole of hell?" he objected. "Not I. You an' Pulz go." They wrangled over it, Pulz joining. Perdosa, shaken to the soul, crept in, and made a bee-line for the rum barrel. He and the Nigger were frankly scared.
There would then have been one less to deal with in the final accounting, which strangely enough I now for a moment never doubted would come. I had not before aimed at a man's life, so you can see to what tensity the baffling mystery had strung me. Perdosa hesitated a fraction of an instant.
To-night I am the last leaf. 'All his lovely companions are faded and gone, the sprightly Solomon, the psychic Nigger, the amiable Thrackles, the cheerful Perdosa, the genial Pulz, and the high-minded Eagen. Undoubtedly the social atmosphere has cleared; moreover, I am for the first time in my life a landed proprietor.
We stripped her of every stitch and sliver until she floated high, an empty hull, even her spars and running rigging ashore. I understood now the crew's grumbling. We literally went at her with a nail brush. Captain Selover took charge of us when we had reached this period. He and the Nigger and Perdosa had long since finished the installation of the permanent camp.
The only thing that restrained me was the vagueness of the intention, and the fact that the afterguard was armed, and was four to the crew's five. An incident, however, decided me. One evening I was awakened by a sound of violent voices. Captain Selover occasionally juggled the watches for variety's sake, and I now had Handy Solomon and Perdosa. The Nigger, being cook, stood no watch.
There can be no question that he would have done so had not his Mexican impatience betrayed him. He shot too soon. Percy Darrow stopped in his tracks. Although we heard the bullet sing by us, for an instant we thought he was hit. Then Perdosa fired a second time, again without result. Darrow turned sharp to the left and began desperately to scale the steep cliffs.
The affair did not come to blows, but it did come to black looks on meeting, muttered oaths, growls of enmity every time they happened to pass each other on the deck. Perdosa was not so bad; his Mexican blood inclined him to the histrionic, and his Mexican cast lent itself well to evil looks. But Handy Solomon, for the first time in my acquaintance with him, was ridiculous.
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