Dan Merrithew | Page 4

to
turn to ashes. The trouble was, he could not exactly say why this should
be. He finally decided that his prospective sojourn amid the gay life of
the metropolis had not been at all responsible for the mental uplift
which had colored his view of the day.

It had come, he now believed, solely from the attitude of the Captain
and Jeff Morrill the engineer, and Sam Tonkin the deck-hand--soon to
become a mate--and Bill Lawson, another deck-hand; all of whom had
little children at home. Well, he had no little children at home. That
settled the matter so far as he was concerned. Blithely he began to plan
his dinner and select the theatre he should attend. But, no; the old
problem returned insistently, and at length he was obliged to confess
that he could devise no solution, and that he did not feel half as good as
he had a few hours before.
At all events he would be as happy as he could. After leaving the
company's office, where he received a hearty "Merry Christmas" and a
fat yellow envelope, he went to the neat little brick house on Cherry
Street where he had rooms, and learned that Mrs. O'Hare, his landlady,
had gone to her daughter's house on Varick Street to set up a Christmas
tree and help to start things for the children. Dan was sorry. He had
rather looked forward to meeting this cheerful person with her
spectacles and kindly old face, who mothered him so assiduously when
he was ashore.
Why the devil had he not thought of finding out about those
grandchildren and of buying them something for Christmas? But he had
not, and now he did not know whether they were girls or boys or both,
nor how many of them there were. So he had no way of knowing what
to buy, or how much. Somehow he had here a feeling that he had been
on the verge of an interesting discovery. But only on the verge.
He walked slowly out of the house and turned into South Street. In the
life of this quaint thoroughfare he had cast his lot, and here he spent his
leisure hours; not that he had ever found the place or the men he met
there especially congenial. But they were the men he knew, the men he
worked with or worked against; and any young fellow who is lonely in
a big city and placed as Dan was is just as liable, until he has found
himself and located his rut in life, to mingle with persons as strange,
with natures as alien, and to frequent places which in later years fill
him with repulsive memories.
At all events Dan did, and he was not worrying about it a bit, either, as

he sauntered under the Brooklyn Bridge span at Dover Street and
turned into South, where Christmas Eve is so joyous, in its way. The
way on this particular evening was in no place more clearly interpreted
than Red Murphy's resort, where the guild of Battery rowboatmen, who
meet steamships in their Whitehall boats and carry their hawsers to
longshoremen waiting to make them fast to the pier bitts, congregate
and have their social being.
Here, on this day, the wealthy towboat-owners and captains are wont to
distribute their largess to the boatmen as a mark of appreciation for
favors rendered,--a suggestion that future favors are expected,--and
here, also, punch of exalted brew is concocted and drunk.
An occasional flurry of snow swept down the street as Dan reached the
entrance. Murphy was out on the sidewalk directing the adornment of
his doorway with several faded evergreen wreaths, while inside, the
boatmen gathered closer around the genial potstove and were not sorry
that ice-bound rivers and harbor had brought their business to a
temporary standstill. They were discussing the morrow, which logically
led to a consideration of the ice-pack, among other things, and thence
to Cap'n Barney Hodge's ill luck.
"Take a hard and early winter," old Bill Darragh, the dean of the
boatmen, was saying, "then a thaw in the middle o' December, and then
a friz-up, and ye git conditions that ain't propitious, as ye may say, fur
towboatmen--nur fur us, neither."
"True fur ye," said "Honest Bill" Duffy. "Nigh half the tugs in the
harbor is in the Erie Basin with screw blades twisted off by the ice-pack,
or sheathin' ripped. And it's gittin' worse. They'll be little enough
money for us this year--an' I was countin' on a hunder to pay a doctor's
bill."
"Well, maybe you'll get more than you think," said Dan, whose words
always carried weight because he was mate of a deep-sea tug. "Captain
Barney Hodge's Three Sisters was laid up yesterday; a three-foot piece