By Right of Conquest A Novel

Excerpt

CHAPTER I.

In a dark, dirty, foul-smelling room back of a small ship-chandler's store on West Street, four sailormen were seated at a table, drinking, quarreling, cursing. The bottle from which they had imbibed too freely contained a villainous compound that ensured their host a handsome profit, set their brains afire, and degraded them to the level of the beast. Not that their condition in life was much better than that of the dumb brute. Animals often enjoy more creature comforts, are better housed and more kindly treated.

They were not really sailors, for in their long experience on the high seas they had never reefed a sail or hauled on a rope. Only too often they never got so much as a glimpse of God's blue sky or the immense stretches of tumbling, foaming ocean. They were the galley-slaves of modern seagoing—the stokers, the men with oily skin and heat-bleared eyes, who toil naked in the bowels of the giant steamship, each crew doing its "watch" of four hours in a dark pit at the bottom of the huge vessel, deprived of air and sunlight, firemen and trimmers working feverishly in a maddening temperature of 140 degrees and over, thrusting and pulling with rod and rake in the insatiable maw of the raging furnace. The hot blasts scorch the men's faces and blister their skins, yet they are compelled to keep up the furious pace. They must never slacken, for on their muscles and their nerves depend the speed of the ship and the prestige of the line. So they shovel faster and faster, tirelessly, endlessly, the flying coal-dust settling on their sweating faces and bare bodies until they lose semblance to anything human and recall those lurid pictures of the Inferno in which Satan's imps, armed with pitch-forks, thrust back shrieking sinners, condemned to everlasting torment, who are struggling to escape from the bottomless pit. That the luxurious liner may break a record and retain the patronage of the millionaire passengers reclining indolently on the promenade-decks above, the unknown, unseen slaves in the hellish regions below must shovel, shovel, shovel, always faster, faster until at last nature gives way. Exhausted by fatigue, overcome by the killing heat, the man falls headlong. They pick him up and carry him on deck, where the pure air may or may not revive him. Perhaps he is already dead. His filthy, almost unearthly appearance chills the sympathies of the fastidious cabin passengers. Who is he? What's happened? "Only a stoker!" yawns some one, and all go unconcernedly down to dinner.

The time passed and the men still loafed in the chandler's shop, drinking and arguing. The day was already advanced, the active, busy world without summoned them urgently to duty, at noon their ship would cast off her moorings and steam majestically out to sea, and yet the four firemen sat idly in the evil-smelling den, noisy in drunken argument—all but one man, a big, athletic-looking fellow, who drank in sullen silence. Occasionally one of them would stop and glance furtively in the direction of the street, as if apprehensive that an unwelcome visitor might suddenly put in an appearance.

But no one disturbed them, not even Schmalz, the proprietor of the place, a fat, tousled-headed German, who found his customers too profitable to quarrel with. As fast as bottles were emptied, he replaced them, and that he sold liquor without going through the formalities of procuring a license was evident from his catlike movements, the absence of any outward signs of the clandestine traffic, and his extreme care to keep the inner room and its occupants well secluded from observation.

The outer shop was typical of the many nautical stores of its kind scattered along New York's waterfront. It contained everything a sailor needs, from yellow oilskins, thick woolen socks, and blue jerseys to fried herrings, pickles, and mustard plasters....