The Mutiny of the Elsinore | Page 3

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This etext was scanned by David Price, email [email protected]
from the 1915 Mills and Boon edition. It was proofed by Rab Hughes.

THE MUTINY OF THE ELSINORE
by Jack London
CHAPTER I

From the first the voyage was going wrong. Routed out of my hotel on
a bitter March morning, I had crossed Baltimore and reached the pier-
end precisely on time. At nine o'clock the tug was to have taken me
down the bay and put me on board the Elsinore, and with growing
irritation I sat frozen inside my taxicab and waited. On the seat, outside,
the driver and Wada sat hunched in a temperature perhaps half a degree
colder than mine. And there was no tug.
Possum, the fox-terrier puppy Galbraith had so inconsiderately foisted
upon me, whimpered and shivered on my lap inside my greatcoat and
under the fur robe. But he would not settle down. Continually he
whimpered and clawed and struggled to get out. And, once out and
bitten by the cold, with equal insistence he whimpered and clawed to
get back.
His unceasing plaint and movement was anything but sedative to my
jangled nerves. In the first place I was uninterested in the brute. He
meant nothing to me. I did not know him. Time and again, as I drearily
waited, I was on the verge of giving him to the driver. Once, when two
little girls--evidently the wharfinger's daughters-- went by, my hand
reached out to the door to open it so that I might call to them and
present them with the puling little wretch.

A farewell surprise package from Galbraith, he had arrived at the hotel
the night before, by express from New York. It was Galbraith's way.
Yet he might so easily have been decently like other folk and sent
fruit . . . or flowers, even. But no; his affectionate inspiration had to
take the form of a yelping, yapping two months' old puppy. And with
the advent of the terrier the trouble had begun. The hotel clerk judged
me a criminal before the act I had not even had time to meditate. And
then Wada, on his own initiative and out of his own foolish stupidity,
had attempted to smuggle the puppy into his room and been caught by
a house detective. Promptly Wada had forgotten all his English and
lapsed into hysterical Japanese, and the house detective remembered
only his Irish; while the hotel clerk had given me to understand in no
uncertain terms that it was only what he had expected of me.
Damn the dog, anyway! And damn Galbraith too! And as I froze on in
the cab on that bleak pier-end, I damned myself as well, and the mad
freak that had started me voyaging on a sailing-ship around