Dan Merrithew | Page 4

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 of piling bedded in an ice-cake got caught in her screw, and--zip! The other fellows are feeling so good about it that I think they'll be apt to be generous."
"We'll drink to Barney's bad health," said Darragh, raising his glass. "I saw him half an hour gone. He looked like a dead man. Cap'n Jim Skelly o' the John Quinn piloted Gypsum Prince inter her dock last night. No one ever handled her afore but Cap'n Barney. An' the Kentigern from Liverpool is due to-night. Skelly's