That day the wind rose to a gale and the sea went wild. It kept
Monson on deck night and day for four days. It kept us in a boiling
pot, and on the fifth we entered the mouth of the Mississippi. Then
Monson went down to sleep, and he hadn't waked when we anchored off
the levee at New Orleans, which was six o'clock in the evening. By
eight I was on a train going north, with a new trunk in the baggage
car.
I've never happened to see Monson since. I guess he was contented.
When I opened the bags, one of them was mainly full of eighth-inch
sections of lead pipe.
Maybe he'd heard me go down to the hold in the first place, but
probably he found first his lead pipe at the time he left me on the
deck, and then he'd changed things a bit more to his ideas of what
was right, bearing in mind the natural wickedness of the negroes. He
didn't appear to have noticed that some of the stuff was stowed in my
leather satchel, but he got nearly a third of Clyde's savings.
I came to New York and I walked along South Street, thinking of the
day, twenty years back, when I first walked along South Street, cocky
and green. Then I came toward the slip where the _Hebe Maitland_
had lain that day, and where I'd looked at her and said, "Now,
there's a ship.
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