The Red Book Magazine/Volume 4/Number 6/Bill Slocum, Honest Smuggler

By ROY E. NORTON

“My mother once says to me, says she, ‘Bill, whatever you do, be on the square. It pays even if you’re in the thievin’ business.’ I don’t reckon mother knew enough about the latter to write a dictionary on it, but she was loaded to the muzzle with smokeless powder when it came to human nature. That’s been my rule throughout the game ever since, and I’ve found that the old shorthorn who said there was ‘honor among thieves’ was all right, except that he hadn’t been to China to work his puzzle out.”

It was on one of those delightful, sun-swept and breeze-gladdened days of summer that my friend William Slocum thus addressed me, as we sprawled on a coil of rope on the San Francisco docks, and lazily watched the Chinese stewards of the Mariposa, who with deftness were hurrying stores aboard in preparation for the trans-Pacific voyage.

“And why the exception among Chinese, Bill?” I asked in the silence which followed, as Bill busied himself, fixing with marked dexterity a wad of concealing tinfoil into the holes of a much-plugged half-dollar, with the evident laudable intention of raising it to par value for future use.

“Because it’s me that knows,” was the reply. And then, his task satisfactorily completed, he closed his knife, slipped the deceptive coin into his pocket, and straightened himself to an easier position so that his six feet of brawn settled comfortably into his tarry resting place, while he told me this tale of Oriental dishonesty.

“No one can accuse me of being crooked, or even curved,” he continued ruminatingly, “whether I was ingloriously sober, or so jubilantly drunk that I used a fried egg for an eye poultice. I’m always on the straight and narrow—I am. Never had nothing else to be proud of except spontaneous honesty, and on that I can let the average congressman have marked cards and still beat him out.

“Met a feller here one time I knowed back in the cow country.

“‘What you doing?’ says I.

“‘Capitalist,’ says he.

“‘How’d you do it?’ I remarked cautiously, feeling I was about to learn something worth while, and being some ambitious to get my own occupation in that directory class.

“‘Smuggling,’ he explains, and then you can guess I was mighty interested, having been a foreign and home missionary of that kind myself once, down Sonora way.

“I jumps at him and says, ‘Where? Lead me to the trough.’ And then he plants me next to his brand, and tells me where burro-loads of coin could be made over in China handling opium. That tickled me like the sight of the black ball does a rancher betting on a shell game, because I could talk pretty fair Chinese myself.

“‘Me no more to the impecunious, Bill,’ says I, addressing myself about a month later when I lands in Hongkong, because there I was pronto, being with that like everything else—thought ’twas no use to cogitate over shooting unless you drew your gun.

“Old Miss Mascot must have been with me that trip, because ’twould surprise you how lucky I was.

“I loped into the American consul’s and told him I was a poor busted United-stateser who had been up country and was broke.

“‘Suppose you want passage home,’ he says.

“‘Not me,’ I answers, puffing up like a reform party candidate, ‘I would scorn to accept gratootus charity. What I want is work.’

“‘What can you do?’ says the old boy with whiskers, and then I tells him I can talk Chinese and had worked in the custom house down in New Orleans, and would like to get such a layout there.

“Well, he studies a while, and in about a week I won the job. Thirty taels a month and find yourself. ‘Reedeeckulously small compensation,’ an Englishman who was already working there told me when I showed up, but being some frugal, full of enterprise, aggravatingly ambitious and surely honest, I thought I could make it do for a little while.

“‘Where there’s a will, there’s a way,’ Mother used always to tell me when I was a little feller, so having this in mind it wasn’t more’n six months until I had formed a kind of corporation for the promotion of smuggling, with me the real old Pierp as the head of the trust.

“Took me nearly a year to get that business on a real paying basis. I fell in with an old codger whose name was Wong Yet, and I learned to love him as a greaser does a hot tamale. He wasn’t bogus as far as I could see in anything, and he had my affections and confidences double cinched and diamond hitched. He had nerve, was a natural boss and had more details inside than a clock has.

“A few years ago, when all this I’m elucidatin’ happened, Nang-po was an independent city and had a local import on opium, so all the dream boys had to divorce themselves from coin to get the dope. It’s on the Yangtse River, and the custom house was on an island. Me being assiduous, finally got to be night inspector, and then Wong’s and my scheme came in like the poor stranger in a fake foot race.

“And you can bet our system was a winner. We would buy opium up above, where it was as cheap as water is in Oregon, bring it down at night, and land it while I was on watch. Then good old Wong would have his Chinks lined up, they would scuttle over the bridge in a hurry, grab off a load of the stuff and disappear into the city. Next day we would meet, cut up the coin and no one the wiser. Wasn’t very big profits, but sales were quick.

“Oh, yes—I could see my way to returning home and being elected constable, or something of that sort, but I wanted to get enough to own a newspaper and go to congress. Took me about two months to stow away sixteen thousand in my room.

“Funny how a feller never gets satisfied. Here I was with a good homestake, but just bubbling over with yearnings to start a mint. Forgot all about the needle and the camel’s-eye business Mother used to tell about. Clean gold dreamed of gold, tried to eat it, sweat gold from every pore.

“Finally I goes to work on old Wong and loads him up with the idea to make a big clean-up. Regular wholesale round-up. Ship in a whole junk-load from up the river on the first rainy night, and get away with a wad of the yellow all at once.

“Honest, it was so easy I have to grin aloud when I think of it. The junk just floated down nice and smooth until she hove to alongside the custom house, which was noisy with stillness, me having the sabe to give all the sub-inspectors a night off. Sounded like a herd of rats pattering off the wharf and bridge as Wong’s men—a regular army of ’em—snaked that stuff ashore. Took them less time than it would me to borrow a dollar. Then that innocently empty raft goes lazily off out into the stream and the job is off.

“Well, when it comes time for me to jog up the trail home, you can reckon I was mighty juberous. Figured out I only needed a few more like that to start a bank. I gets part-way to my wickeyup when I’m flagged by my old pal Wong, who seems in somewhat of a hustle.

“‘Smatter?’ says I.

“‘Alle up,’ says he, both talking English for fear some one would hear us, although we was speaking like them whispering pines you read about.

“‘Pleece bymeby catchee you pletty dam quick,’ he remarks next, and about that time I was giving him most judicious attention.

“Then he unlimbers a yarn at a two-ten gait that sets my scalp lock to elevating my cap. Says the officers become intelligent somehow and were even then camping in my rooms like a lot of yellow hammers, cheerfully waiting for me to romp home. But Wong had beat ’em to me. He had a scent for a soldier like a rumdum has for beer. Guess he ought to have, too, because when they lariat you for smuggling dope over there it’s you to the greensward where a big husky chucks you on your knees and amputates your upper story. Might be some hope for a native almond-eye, but I knew mighty well if they got me the next census would show one foreign population shy.

“Wong says some one must have hollered after the dream medicine was landed. My only chance is to relieve that range of my presence at once. Wong had clamped onto a little handbag I had in my room, with about eight thousand in it, and being the right sort had dragged that with him to meet me. He hands me the bag and tells me to hike for the water front, get out to a rice sampan I’ll see there, give the fellow at the oar the high sign, and mosey out of the country about as fast as the great Buddha will let me.

“Gratitude? Say, I set the bag down, fell on that Chink’s neck, and wet the front of his blouse with great rivers of it for all he’d done for me; particularly for bringing the safety deposit.

“I left him standing there when I humped for the river front. Didn’t lose no time—got the record for that course yet. Couldn’t find a boat anywhere, but being a good swimmer, took a chance. No joke to swim with thirty or forty pounds dead weight. Ever try it? If I hadn’t had bellows like an alligator I think I would have swum to the bottom before I reached the boat, clean gone in and limber as a link of bologna.

“Sure enough a fellow there sees me, dislocates his map with a smile, says, ‘You all light,’ and then buries me about three feet deep in rice in the corner of his scow. Regular tomb of rice and I almost smothers to death.

“Reckoned I wasn’t any too soon either, when I heard a boat jam her nose against the sampan’s stern and then a gang of dong beaters diluting the silence with a regular poultry-show noise and hullabaloo of questions. My Chink, though, is Doctor Loquacious and Professor Diplomat all rolled into one pill; only I wasn’t sleeping while he worked. Says there hasn’t been a foreign devil aboard his liner for a month.

“But these yellow boys with embroidered mother hubbards gets industrious and prods through that loose rice with all sorts of antique weapons. The way they jabbed their snickerkersnees into that food, amiably trying to pink me like a wild boar, set my blood to circulating till it dried my clothes. One fellow comes mighty near getting me several times with a javelin, but he didn’t have any handicap on Saul as a marksman.

“I was shriveling up smaller all the time, until I reckoned if I ever got out I’d be a dwarf for the balance of my life. Kind of filing on the nerves to lie there half smothered and laying odds with myself as to how long it would be before some one made a bull’s-eye and fished me out like a hooked grubworm. Lasted so long it got to be an even booking with me as to whether I’d rather be vitally punctured, or hang on a few days to be beheaded.

“While I was pulling my muscles together for one grand final mix-up, they stopped and I saw I had hope for a new deal. ‘Time!’ says I, sparring for wind. They pulled off from the boat and my man grunts like a donkey engine and hoists up a few hundredweight of rock he used for an anchor and we gets under way.

“Along after daylight we makes the river’s mouth and I begins to shed rice. The locks on my satchel had got jambed in some way so I couldn’t open it, but the boat boy was all right and lent me several taels to buy a ticket on a tramp steamer bound Bombay way.

“If ever a feller saw a gang of pirates loose, that floating junk shop had ’em. Old Admiral Kidd never drew such a full hand. They all looked suspicious-like at me from the first. I couldn’t figure it out unless ’twas they saw my bag was dead heavy, and I was some plastered with rice in my crevices. Maybe, though, it was because they weren’t used to having passengers come so unexpectedly.

“They watched me every minute I was on that dirty, ill-smelling, eight-knot smoke-scow. Watched me until I got as suspicious and bug-eyed as a Texas longhorn, and used to camp round my bunk all day and fairly feed and sleep with that bag within reach. Purser suggested I ought to put it in his safe, but I didn’t like his game any better than I did his looks. Captain thought it would be safer in his cabin than anywhere, and even the blooming mate volunteered to care for it. That band of sheep-herders had more solicitude for the welfare of my little bag than for the whole blamed steamer.

“But when one morning the steward carelessly starts to lug it off as if it was a maverick he wanted to drop his brand on, and without remarking ‘By your leave, pardner,’ which is polite English, I protested.

“‘Whoopee-ee-ee!’ says I—just like that—‘I’m old Bill Slocum frem the Panamint. I’m a orphan but don’t need no gyardian.’ By punctuatin’ my speech with a handy belayin’ pin, I gently argued with ’em until all of ’em that could was either aloft or on the captain’s bridge. I’m a mild man at my worst, and ‘meek of spirit,’ as Mother used to preach, but I sure didn’t feel much sad when I heard the mate complaining next day that it was a tough job to work ship short-handed. After that everything was peaceful-like and I was let alone.

“The anchor chain hadn’t quit gritting its teeth off Bombay when out comes a redcoated inspector, one of them stuffy, swelled-up little Britishers with more importance than a walking delegate for a cooks’ and waiters’ union. In about five minutes I was under arrest. Couldn’t tell what for, but they handcuffed me, and nothing saved me from shackles but that I had to use my legs some to get anywhere.

“‘What’s it for?’ says I to the little man.

“‘Oh—you know well enough,’ he chops back, biting his words off as if he was afraid they’d stick in his insides.

“‘But I don’t,’ I jaws back.

“Then I thinks I'll take a bite at his leg, when he says, ‘Naow, me good, kind man, daoun’t you cut up nawsty, or I’ll crack yer block,’ and I, being discretionary, subsides. I took some hope, though, by remembering what Mother used to say—‘Every cloud has a silver lining’—and changing it a little for this festival, thought the gold lining in my Saratoga would see me through the deal unless the house ran a brace.

“Bime-by we gets ashore, and they snipes me through the streets with them ornaments on my wrists for the hilarious edyfication of the unwashed but appreciative populace, and brings me to attention in some kind of a one-horse justice factory. Bringing up the rear of this Durbar parade was a swatty, wheezing like a calliope, sweating, staggering and shifting hands under the weight of my bag of gold.

“‘Charge—suspicious character and quarrelsome. Corroboration—general appearance. Crime—came aboard without passports, bought ticket irregular with general hang-dog air, attempted wholesale murder while aboard ship.’

“Naturally I didn’t have passports, because, you see, when I left, my time was rather limited. I tried to bluff, but it was no go. My explanations was earnest enough, but elocutionary stunts didn’t satisfy the magistrate.

“Pretty soon appears the captain of the smoke-boat and enters formal charges. He was there strong with the jawbone, and I was the real long-haired ass to be slain. Swears he’s been looking for me since the last dry season, and that the bag I had was filled with gold stolen from a friend of his—another captain. Think of that, will you! His friend! All he wants is to get me where I couldn’t rob any more poor, trusting, British seamen, and then his friend would call and identify the wad of gold.

“I lets out a roar like a gold-bricked farmer, or a snake-bit Comanche.

“‘Shut up!’ says the little man.

“‘I’m an American citizen,’ says I, ignoring the little microbe, ‘and demands my unalienable rights.’

“‘You’re getting of ’em,’ splutters his Worship, and before I could continue my remarks his Johnnies closed in and squoze me down into my chair mostly by sitting on my head. Then I recollected Mother used to say ‘Silence is golden.’

“Either because he thought it would make me feel better, or because he wanted to show his real A-1 brand of indignities, the captain stands by while this round-up is on, looking horrified and muttering, ‘The wretch!’ or ‘Lord save us, he’s afraid of real British justice.’

“The judge either stood in with the play, or was an unsympathetic little cuss; but to make his bluff at investigation good, after he quit shuddering at the terrible ruction he had just witnessed, orders me to open the bag.

“‘Can’t,’ says I, ‘got no key.’

“‘Ah-ha,’ antes the captain, ‘what did I tell you?’ and then falls to wagging his whiskers at the court. All this time I was ebbulutin’ disturbances, so I fell over the top of that little picketed pasture and tangled with the captain.

“The nearest Johnnies grabs me back into the corral, but not before I had chewed off a chunk of the captain’s wind breaks and become so affectionately attached to the judge’s stand that it takes the persuasions of four men with clubs to separate me.

“‘Five bob fine,’ says his Honor, as I felt the place where my face ought to be.

“‘I’ll give five more for another bite of him,’ I ejaculates, spitting loose bristles out of my mouth.

“‘Order!’ yells the court louder than ever. ‘Officer, cut open that bag.’

“A big walloper pulls his knife and cuts her open, while I feels that all hope is loping off like a stampeded cayuse. But what do you think he found? Nothing but a few nice, big, fat, dirty chunks of common lead! Do you get me lucid?

“That yellow pup Wong, that I loved like a brother, had stood in with the gang, four-flushed me out of China with a marked deck, and confisticated not only my share of the big deal, but all I had earned in two years’ hard work. He had old Mister Machiavelli looking like a side show in a ragged tepee.

“Well, they threw me in the jail-house and when the American consul asked me what he could do for me, I says, disconsolate-like, ‘Nothin’—only for Gawd’s sake get me back to a cow country where even the steers and rattlers is honorable sized up alongside the folks I’ve been herding with; because I’ve been rangin’ in China, and the Chinese ain’t honest.’”