"Well," asked Burrell gruffly, "you can shake hands, can't you?"
Sullivan, grinning sheepishly, held up a muffled paw. "I reckon not, sir," he said.
"What's the matter with 'em?" the Captain demanded.
"Blistered th'm, sir," Sullivan responded with solemn joy. "Blistered th'm, walkin'."
"H'm," the Captain muttered. His eyes were burning into the man. "Sullivan," he said abruptly, "there's a can of bacon in my haversack that belongs to you."
Sullivan gulped. Discipline had him by the heels again. "Beg y' pardon, sir," he mumbled nervously. "I reckon I must a been sort of loco that day."
"Well," said the Old Man of B Company gravely, "maybe I'll let it go this time. But see it don't happen again. H'm."
This Fortune you speak of, tell me, what sort of creature is she, to have the good things of the world so in her hands?--_The Inferno of Dante Alighieri_.
The second of my Argonauts was of quite another sort. Whatever graces of body and mind Nature has to give, she had given him--and he had wasted them. With his invincible and dauntless youth he might have been a companion for Cortez and stout Bernal Diaz, a Crusader, almost anything he chose, and he was--I borrow the phrase of a better man than I--a Camp-Follower of Fortune, a wasted man. The outskirts of the world are full of them. That such things can be, that men can be born so strong, so lovable, and then be wasted, seems to me the most inexplicable of the caprices of that Fortune which puzzled Dante Alighieri long ago.
Mid-heaven high, the morning sun blazed above the forlorn little lumber-port, calling the inhabitants thereof to arise and make hay diligently during the few weeks it still had to shine before the change of monsoons and the rainy season blotted the world in mist. The call seemed to arouse little enthusiasm. Over the channel, where the Rio Bagalayag winds out by the bar, a pair of gulls wheeled aimlessly, plunging into the yellow water now and then, and rising with harsh cries. Out beyond them in the distance, where Point Bagalayag wavered in the heat, a lorcha drifted with limp sails, becalmed in the lee of Mount Bagalayag. In the one street of Bagalayag itself, the grassy lane which follows the curve of the shore, two Chinamen with a long whip-saw were gnawing a plank from a four-foot log of molave, sawing steadily with the patient endurance of their race, brown arms swinging in and out, brown bodies swaying. At the end of each stroke, they grunted rhythmically, and the music of their industry--_Ugh! Kch-chee-e-e-Arghh! Kch-chee-e-e-Ugh!_--was the only sound in Bagalayag that morning, save the raucous complaint of the distant gulls.
