The Project Gutenberg eBook, The Mutiny of the Elsinore, by Jack London

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Title: The Mutiny of the Elsinore

Author: Jack London

Release Date: July 10, 2007 [eBook #2415]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)

***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE MUTINY OF THE ELSINORE***

Transcribed from the 1915 Mills and Boon edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org; proofed by Rab Hughes.

THE MUTINY OF THE ELSINORE

BY
JACK LONDON

MILLS & BOON, LIMITED
49 RUPERT STREET
LONDON, W.

_Published 1915_

_Copyright in the United States of America by_ JACK LONDON

CHAPTER I

From the first the voyage was going wrong. Routed out of my hotel on a
bitter March morning, I had crossed Baltimore and reached the pier-end
precisely on time. At nine o'clock the tug was to have taken me down the
bay and put me on board the _Elsinore_, and with growing irritation I sat
frozen inside my taxicab and waited. On the seat, outside, the driver
and Wada sat hunched in a temperature perhaps half a degree colder than
mine. And there was no tug.

Possum, the fox-terrier puppy Galbraith had so inconsiderately foisted
upon me, whimpered and shivered on my lap inside my greatcoat and under
the fur robe. But he would not settle down. Continually he whimpered
and clawed and struggled to get out. And, once out and bitten by the
cold, with equal insistence he whimpered and clawed to get back.

His unceasing plaint and movement was anything but sedative to my jangled
nerves. In the first place I was uninterested in the brute. He meant
nothing to me. I did not know him. Time and again, as I drearily
waited, I was on the verge of giving him to the driver. Once, when two
little girls--evidently the wharfinger's daughters--went by, my hand
reached out to the door to open it so that I might call to them and
present them with the puling little wretch.

A farewell surprise package from Galbraith, he had arrived at the hotel
the night before, by express from New York. It was Galbraith's way. Yet
he might so easily have been decently like other folk and sent fruit . . .
or flowers, even. But no; his affection