Page:The Cannery Boat.pdf/41

Rh men, looking for the addresses of their families and getting everything ready in case the worst came to the worst. It wasn’t the pleasantest of jobs. As they worked they had the feeling that they were examining their own remains. Various parcels and letters addressed to women relatives were discovered in the missing men’s baggage. Among one man’s things there was a letter written in a mixture of the two scripts, Katakana and Hiragana, obviously with a frequently licked pencil. This was passed from one rough sailor’s hand to another’s. Each one spelled the words out to himself laboriously, but with intense interest, and shaking his head passed it on to his neighbour. It was a letter from the man’s child.

One man raised his head from the page and whispered, “It’s all through Asakawa. If we know for sure he’s dead we’ll revenge him.” The speaker was a big, hefty fellow who had left a past behind him in the interior of Hokkaido. In a still lower voice one young, round-shouldered fisherman said, “I reckon we could beat-up one like him.”

“Ah, that letter was no good; it’s made me homesick.”

“Look here,” said the first speaker, “if we don’t look out the swine will get us. We’ve got to look out for ourselves.”

One man who had been sitting in the corner with his knees up, biting his thumb-nails and listening to every word, remarked, “Leave it to me; when the time comes. I’ll lay into the swine!”

They were all silent, but they felt relieved.