The Road | Page 4

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 had gained a moment for breath. While he pondered on time's changes, I prepared the finishing touches of my story.
"You remember the custom-house at Bombay?"
He remembered it.
"Burned to the ground," I announced.
"Do you remember Jim Wan?" he came back at me. "Dead," I said; but who the devil Jim Wan was I hadn't the slightest idea.
I was on thin ice again.
"Do you remember Billy Harper, at Shanghai?" I queried back at him quickly.
That aged sailorman worked hard to recollect, but