Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/20

 slowly round towards the solid land that he always seemed to hate.

"Where yuh off to, son?" he asked, as Lingg dropped to the splintered stringpiece of the wharf. The Laminian was chafing and fretting against that stringpiece just as his own soul had been chafing and fretting against the desolation of her empty decks.

"Ashore," Lingg answered, resolutely enough, yet against all the voices of better judgment.

"Wimmin?" demanded the laconic figure against the rail.

"No!" exploded the impatient youth. "Then what yuh after?" persisted his gloomy interlocutor.

"What am I after?" echoed the other, having no answer ready.

"What d'yuh want with all that?" demanded the engineer, with a contemptuous pipe-wave that embraced the entire island of Manhattan.

"I guess I want to mind my own business," was the reproving answer. It was followed by a contemplative eye-blink or two from the man in the carpet-slippers. But the disgust did not go out of his face.

"No good comes o' knowin hell-holes like this," he at last averred, with a slow and sagacious side-wag of his head. He spat into the