The Road | Page 4

with
flying spray, they fought a typhoon with me off the coast of Japan.
They loaded and unloaded cargo with me in all the ports of the Seven
Seas. I took them to India, and Rangoon, and China, and had them
hammer ice with me around the Horn and at last come to moorings at
Montreal.
And then they said to wait a moment, and one policeman went forth
into the night while I warmed myself at the stove, all the while racking
my brains for the trap they were going to spring on me.
I groaned to myself when I saw him come in the door at the heels of the
policeman. No gypsy prank had thrust those tiny hoops of gold through
the ears; no prairie winds had beaten that skin into wrinkled leather; nor
had snow-drift and mountain-slope put in his walk that reminiscent roll.
And in those eyes, when they looked at me, I saw the unmistakable
sun-wash of the sea. Here was a theme, alas! with half a dozen
policemen to watch me read -- I who had never sailed the China seas,
nor been around the Horn, nor looked with my eyes upon India and
Rangoon.
I was desperate. Disaster stalked before me incarnate in the form of that
gold-ear-ringed, weather-beaten son of the sea. Who was he? What was
he? I must solve him ere he solved me. I must take a new orientation,
or else those wicked policemen would orientated me to a cell, a police
court, and more cells. If he questioned me first, before I knew how
much he knew, I was lost.
But did I betray my desperate plight to those lynx-eyed guardians of the
public welfare of Winnipeg? Not I. I met that aged sailorman glad-eyed
and beaming, with all the simulated relief at deliverance that a

drowning man would display on finding a life-preserver in his last
despairing clutch. Here was a man who understood and who would
verify my true story to the faces of those sleuth-hounds who did not
understand, or, at least, such was what I endeavored to play-act. I
seized upon him; I volleyed him with questions about himself. Before
my judges I would prove the character of my savior before he saved
me.
He was a kindly sailorman -- an "easy mark." The policemen grew
impatient while I questioned him. At last one of them told me to shut
up. I shut up; but while I remained shut up, I was busy creating, busy
sketching the scenario of the next act. I had learned enough to go on
with. He was a Frenchman. He had sailed always on French merchant
vessels, with the one exception of a voyage on a "lime-juicer." And last
of all -- blessed fact! -- he had not been on the sea for twenty years.
The policeman urged him on to examine me.
"You called in at Rangoon?" he queried.
I nodded. "We put our third mate ashore there. Fever."
If he had asked me what kind of fever, I should have answered,
"Enteric," though for the life of me I didn't know what enteric was. But
he didn't ask me. Instead, his next question was: --
"And how is Rangoon?"
"All right. It rained a whole lot when we were there."
"Did you get shore-leave?"
"Sure," I answered. "Three of us apprentices went ashore together."
"Do you remember the temple?"
"Which temple?" I parried.
"The big one, at the top of the stairway."

If I remembered that temple, I knew I'd have to describe it. The gulf
yawned for me.
I shook my head.
"You can see it from all over the harbor," he informed me. "You don't
need shore-leave to see that temple."
I never loathed a temple so in my life. But I fixed that particular temple
at Rangoon.
"You can't see it from the harbor," I contradicted.
You can't see it from the town. You can't see it from the top of the
stairway. Because -- " I paused for the effect. "Because there isn't any
temple there."
"But I saw it with my own eyes!" he cried.
"That was in -- ?" I queried.
"Seventy-one."
"It was destroyed in the great earthquake of 1887," I explained. "It was
very old."
There was a pause. He was busy reconstructing in his old eyes the
youthful vision of that fair temple by the sea.
"The stairway is still there," I aided him. "You can see it from all over
the harbor. And you remember that little island on the right-hand side
coming into the harbor?" I guess there must have been one there (I was
prepared to shift it over to the left-hand side), for he nodded. "Gone," I
said. "Seven fathoms of water there now."
I