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Updated: June 15, 2025
Though mutiny obtains and we are besieged in the high place, the weather is so mild and there is so little call on our men that they have grown careless and sleep aft of the chart-house when it is their watch on deck. Nothing ever happens, and, like true sailors, they wax fat and lazy. Even have I found Louis, the steward, and Wada guilty of cat-napping.
Then I spoke to Wada, the cook, who had the wheel every morning from four to six. "Wada San, to-morrow morning, your watch, you look sharp on weather- bow you see land." And then I went to bed. The die was cast. I had staked my reputation as a navigator. Suppose, just suppose, that at daybreak there was no land. Then, where would my navigation be? And where would we be?
The rest of our retainers have knives and clubs, although Yatsuda, the first sail-maker, carries a hand-axe, and Uchino, the second sail-maker, sleeping or waking, never parts from a claw-hammer. Tom Spink has a harpoon. Wada, however, is the genius. By means of the cabin stove he has made a sharp pike-point of iron and fitted it to a pole. To-morrow be intends to make more for the other men.
But then, as I looked about the room, measured its generous space, realized that I was more comfortably situated than I had ever been on any passenger steamer, I dismissed foreboding thoughts and caught a pleasant vision of myself, through weeks and months, catching up with all the necessary reading which I had so long neglected. Once, I asked Wada if he had seen the crew.
I compromised with the inevitable by having Wada make up my bed on the deck in the shelter of the cabin skylight just for'ard of the jiggermast. Henry, the two sail-makers and the steward, variously equipped with knives and clubs, were stationed along the break of the poop. And right here I wish to pass my first criticism on modern mutiny.
Margaret asked me, shortly after we had left the table. She stood challengingly at my open door, in oilskins, sou'wester, and sea- boots. "I've never seen you with a foot above the deck since we sailed," she went on. "Have you a good head?" I marked my book, rolled out of my bunk in which I had been wedged, and clapped my hands for Wada. "Will you?" she cried eagerly.
It seems that he, the steward, and the two sail-makers foregather each evening in the cook's room all being Asiatics where they talk over ship's gossip. They seem to miss little, and Wada brings it all to me. The thing Wada told me was the curious conduct of Mr. Mellaire. They have sat in judgment on him and they do not approve of his intimacy with the three gangsters for'ard.
Not until Wada brought me breakfast did I learn what had occurred. Larry, with his funny pug nose, his curiously flat and twisted face, and his querulous, plaintive chimpanzee eyes, had been moved by some unlucky whim to venture an insolent remark under the cover of darkness on the main deck. But Mr. Pike, from above, at the break of the poop, had picked the offender unerringly.
The Elsinore has no licence to carry passengers, and I am down on the articles as third mate and am supposed to receive thirty-five dollars a month. Wada is down as cabin boy, although I paid a good price for his passage and he is my servant. Not much time is lost at sea in getting rid of the dead.
The fight began with a fierce onset from the Taira, which drove back their foe. With voice and example Yoshitsuné encouraged his men. For an interval the combat lulled. Then Wada, a noted archer, shot an arrow which struck the junk of a Taira chief. "Shoot it back!" cried the chief. An archer plucked it from the wood, fitted it to his bow, and let it fly at the Minamoto fleet.
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