Page:Arthur Stringer - Gun Runner.djvu/21

 slip water; it was a rite of his infinite contempt.

"I'm not going beyond Broadway," the half-repentant Lingg stopped to explain, marvelling at that strange and lonely seaman's fixed distrust of solid land. He did not think it worth while to enlarge on how sick he was of the ship stink and the quietness, of the fumes of rotting fruit, of the heavy musk-smell of harbour water, and the febrile rattle and clatter of donkey engines.

"Yuh'll find bad enough b'tween here and Broadway," avowed the placid misanthrope at the ship's rail, contemplating his pipe-smoke as though it were incense rising before the epitomised wisdom of all the ages.

But Lingg was not altogether looking for the bad. He had been remembering how one of the junior officers of the Pretoria, when in port, spent his two riotous days riding up and down in the Fifth Avenue 'buses, the delirious 'buses, which he described as "bee-hives of swarming beauty," where he was ignored and elbowed and walked over by "the finest women who ever wore feathers," to his hungering heart's content. And Lingg, too, was hungering for some glimpse of life beyond that of a dirty fore-deck; for a sight of faces less satyr-like than that of a brandy-steeped sea captain. He