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Updated: June 28, 2025
"Well, from all signs for'ard, you had better overhaul your medicine chest. You will have a patient or two to sniffle over to-morrow morning." The lady shuddered ever so slightly at Swope's words, and her features contracted, as though with pain. Just for an instant then she was serenity again, and she gazed forward, as Swope bade, and silently watched the mates at their work.
Our sympathies were all with the lady, and the lady's feelings, we knew, were all with Newman. So it was upon Yankee Swope's unheeding head we rained our black curses. The lady was doing what she could to aid us. She held, every morning, a levee in the cabin for the lame and sick, all who could drag themselves aft, and tended them skillfully. But this did not help the bedridden ones.
Yet Newman was more than a foremast hand. God knew who he was, or what his business in the ship, but it was plain he was Swope's enemy, and there was a private feud between them. His mere appearance had caused the Old Man to run below, and remain hidden for three days! . . . There was the lady. She was Newman's friend. She knew the Old Man's moods, and she was positive about it.
Of course, we told each other, he would appear in them after death. And, of course, he was bound to come back. Didn't murdered men always come back? So we assured each other; and the older men began spinning yarns about other ghosts in other ships. Aye, we talked so much we were afraid to turn in. Captain Swope's words about the ghost crew in the Golden Bough impressed us mightily.
Mister Lynch tried to help him; and by his action indicated plainly what was his position in the matter of the arrest. He crossed the deck, and examined the prisoner's wrists. "These irons are too tight, and will torture the man," he said to the captain. "In my judgment, sir, it is not necessary to secure him in this fashion." "In my judgment it is," was Swope's bland response.
For I must explain something of my state of mind on that morning, so you will understand how I got Into Yankee Swope's blood-ship. It was the heyday of the crimps, and I walked through the very heart of crimpdom, along the old East street. It is not a very prepossessing thoroughfare even to-day, when it masquerades as the Embarcadero, a sinner reformed.
I had not seen him turn around even, and there he was at arm's grips with the captain. There was another flash from Swope's revolver, in Newman's very face. It was a miss, for Newman's hands helpless lumps of flesh but a few moments before closed upon Swope's neck. I saw Newman's face. It was a terrible face, the face of an enraged and smiting god.
Swope's articles which appeared in the NewYorkWorld were immediately republished by him in a book called "Inside the German Empire." In Mr.
I thought I recognized Fitzgibbon's handiwork in this torture; though I dare say it was originally Swope's invention. But we had seen Fitzgibbon use this same method of inflicting pain and terror, we men forward. One day, for an imagined insolence, he had trussed up Nigger to the mainmast in this very fashion, and left him there for a short half-hour. After five minutes Nigger was wild with pain.
Fitzgibbon was truculence personified. The expression in Swope's face when he looked at Newman was so terrible it might almost of itself make a lad stop breathing an expression of gloating, pitiless, triumphant cruelty. Lynch, in charge of the deck, stood apart from the others, but he too was looking aft, not at me, but at Newman.
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