Argosy All-Story Weekly, January 13, 1923 — page 174: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

636 Stebbins. “But this here place ain’t the hull world; they’s other places where a week’s diggin’ would make a man rich, “Ef you’d sailed the seven seas, Jeff, like I hev, ye’d know thet Coonburg is a mighty small dot on the chart, an’ don’t amount ter nothin’. Le’s go in an’ sit down while I tell you all how I missed findin’ a fortune thet’s still waitin’ fer somebody to dig it up, an’ me an’ my partner are goin’ to find it the next time I get round where it is buried. “Ve see,” he went on, casually helping himself to a smoked red herring and a soda cracker as he took his seat, ‘I was kinda beach combin’ after hevin’ swum ashore at Pensacola from a ship thet hed a gun fight- in’ skipper an’ a bucko mate. I run up agenst ’em over scrubbin’ brass work, find- in’ after the rumpus was over thet I was low deuce ag’in’ a pair of aces. So when she dropped her mud hook I took chances on the sharks, fer I knowed I’d never make the round v’y’ge I shipped fer alive, so I slipped over the side. “T kept outa sight after I got ashore, but watched her till I seen her topsels hull down, steerin’ so’th; then I started lookin’ fer another berth with a hooker where the skipper an’ mate’s milk o’ human kindness hedn’t turned inter vinegar. But there was nothin’ doin’ in the shippin’ line jest then, an’ ez I was wonderin’ how I could hustle one square meal fer a change from the raw clams thet I’d been mostly livin’ on, a feller come up an’ axed me, ‘ Are you, my friend, a seafaring man?’ “¢ Meanin’ which?’ T sez, ez I give him the once-over. He looked like halfway be- twixt a college purfesser an’ a barkeep. He “wore a white duck suit 0’ clothes with foul anchors on the sleeves an’ collar of his coat, a white cheesecutter cap with another foul anchor, an’ he had on horn-bowed specs. His nose was as red as the Montauk light, sighted through a fog. “<T inquired if you followed the sea,’ he SeZ. “< Wal, no,’ I sez. ‘It’s tother way round when the tide’s on the flood, but it never -reached me when [I stayed above high-water mark.’ “* How’s thet?’ he sez. ARGOSY-ALLSTORY WEEKLY, “<< Wal, ye see,’ I told him, ‘ clam diggin’ is best done at low tide, an’ the flood fol- lers you up to high-water mark. An’ I’ve been diggin’ clams mostly since I quit the last ship.’ ““* Ah! quite so,’ he sez. ‘ Then you are a sailor, as I judged from the cut of your jib.’ He was tryin’ ter talk like a salt-water man, when, fer all his rig out, he didn’t look ez ef he could tell the dolphin striker from the jib downhaul. “<The skipper an’ the mate o’ the Bal- lyhoo Castle didn’t seem to think so,’ I answers. ‘ Thet’s why I quit ’em without waitin’ fer my pay. But I ken hand, reef, an’ steer—an’—splice the main brace too,’ lookin’ straight at his red nose ez I sed it. T seen right then thet he knowed a little about the fust puinciples o’ navigation, fer he grinned an’ pulled a flask 0’ hooch outa his pocket an’ both of us hed a smile. “*T’m looking for a sailing master,’ he sez. ‘ That’s my yacht out in the stream, the Foaming Wave ’—p’intin’ to a white schooner-rigged craft of about a hunderd tons measurement, flyin’ the New York Yacht Club flag. “ Arter I’d told him thet I hed navigated the seven seas, on all kinds 0’ craft from icebergs an’ dead whales to steamers an’ square riggers, he sed*I was jest the man he needed; so we traded, I shippin’ ez sail- in’ master, he bein’ the commodore or rear admiral, damfino which. His job was to look wise an’ smoke good cigars on the quarter-deck while I run the yacht. ; “ He’d started in life poor, but honest, an’ got ter be a millyunare, buyin’ low an’ sellin’ high, till he got in the highest social circles of New York. His name was Al- gernon Pew Kidd. When he dug up his family tree to show ’em-he was a blueblood he found thet the most distinguished mem- bers of it hed been hung as pirates about a hunderd an’ fifty years before his troubles commenced, one of ’em bein’ Cap’n Kidd an’ the other old Pew. So, seein’ thet his ancestors, before they was hung, hed done about ez well in the seafarin’ line ez he hed done in Wall Street and with pretty much the same principles, he bought a schooner an’ started tryin’ a seagoin’ life by takin’ a cruise in his own yacht, or ez he put it, COPMICGLOOKS (E@)