Old Fires and Profitable Ghosts | Page 7

his feet. The other
swung back, with its brass latch showing. The men kept these latches in
a high state of polish.
Across the angle of the wall, to the left of the door, and behind it when
it opened, three hammocks were slung, one above another. No one slept
in the uppermost.
But the feature of the hut was its fireplace; and this was merely a
square hearth-stone, raised slightly above the floor, in the middle of the
room. Upon it, and upon a growing mountain of soft grey ash, the fire
burned always. It had no chimney, and so the men lost none of its
warmth. The smoke ascended steadily and spread itself under the
blackened beams and roof-boards in dense blue layers. But about
eighteen inches beneath the spring of the roof there ran a line of small
trap-doors with sliding panels, to admit the cold air, and below these

the room was almost clear of smoke. A newcomer's eyes might have
smarted, but these men stitched their clothes and read in comfort. To
keep the up-draught steady they had plugged every chink and crevice in
the match-boarding below the trap-doors with moss, and payed the
seams with pitch. The fire they fed from a stack of drift and wreck
wood piled to the right of the door, and fuel for the fetching strewed the
frozen beach outside--whole trees notched into lengths by lumberers'
axes and washed thither from they knew not what continent. But the
wreck-wood came from their own ship, the J. R. MacNeill, which had
brought them from Dundee.
They were Alexander Williamson, of Dundee, better known as The
Gaffer; David Faed, also of Dundee; George Lashman, of Cardiff;
Long Ede, of Hayle, in Cornwall; Charles Silchester, otherwise The
Snipe, of Ratcliff Highway or thereabouts; and Daniel Cooney, shipped
at Tromso six weeks before the wreck, an Irish-American by birth and
of no known address.
The Gaffer reclined in his bunk, reading by the light of a smoky and
evil-smelling lamp. He had been mate of the J. R. MacNeill, and was
now captain as well as patriarch of the party. He possessed three
books--the Bible, Milton's "Paradise Lost," and an odd volume of "The
Turkish Spy." Just now he was reading "The Turkish Spy." The
lamplight glinted on the rim of his spectacles and on the silvery hairs in
his beard, the slack of which he had tucked under the edge of his
blanket. His lips moved as he read, and now and then he broke off to
glance mildly at Faed and the Snipe, who were busy beside the fire
with a greasy pack of cards; or to listen to the peevish grumbling of
Lashman in the bunk below him. Lashman had taken to his bed six
weeks before with scurvy, and complained incessantly; and though they
hardly knew it, these complaints were wearing his comrades' nerves to
fiddle-strings--doing the mischief that cold and bitter hard work and the
cruel loneliness had hitherto failed to do. Long Ede lay stretched by the
fire in a bundle of skins, reading in his only book, the Bible, open now
at the Song of Solomon. Cooney had finished patching a pair of
trousers, and rolled himself in his hammock, whence he stared at the
roof and the moonlight streaming up there through the little trap-doors

and chivying the layers of smoke. Whenever Lashman broke out into
fresh quaverings of self-pity, Cooney's hands opened and shut again,
till the nails dug hard into the palm. He groaned at length, exasperated
beyond endurance.
"Oh, stow it, George! Hang it all, man! . . ."
He checked himself, sharp and short: repentant, and rebuked by the
silence of the others. They were good seamen all, and tender dealing
with a sick shipmate was part of their code.
Lashman's voice, more querulous than ever, cut into the silence like a
knife--
"That's it. You've thought it for weeks, and now you say it. I've knowed
it all along. I'm just an encumbrance, and the sooner you're shut of me
the better, says you. You needn't to fret. I'll be soon out of it; out of
it--out there, alongside of Bill--"
"Easy there, matey." The Snipe glanced over his shoulder and laid his
cards face downward. "Here, let me give the bed a shake up. It'll ease
yer."
"It'll make me quiet, you mean. Plucky deal you care about easin' me,
any of yer!"
"Get out with yer nonsense! Dan didn' mean it." The Snipe slipped an
arm under the invalid's head and rearranged the pillow of skins and
gunny-bags.
"He didn't, didn't he? Let him say it then . . ."
The Gaffer read on, his lips moving silently. Heaven knows how he had
acquired this strayed and stained and filthy