okin' for
'em right now. I'd like to have the cash somebody's put up in New York
to send them on this get-away. Oh, I know the breed."

"Gangsters?" I queried.

"That's what. But I'll trim their dirty hides. I'll trim 'em. Mr.
Pathurst, this voyage ain't started yet, and this old stiff's a long way
from his last legs. I'll give them a run for their money. Why, I've
buried better men than the best of them aboard this craft. And I'll bury
some of them that think me an old stiff."

He paused and looked at me solemnly for a full half minute.

"Mr. Pathurst, I've heard you're a writing man. And when they told me at
the agents' you were going along passenger, I made a point of going to
see your play. Now I'm not saying anything about that play, one way or
the other. But I just want to tell you, that as a writing man you'll get
stuff in plenty to write about on this voyage. Hell's going to pop,
believe me, and right here before you is the stiff that'll do a lot of
the poppin'. Some several and plenty's going to learn who's an old
stiff."

CHAPTER XV

How I have been sleeping! This relief of renewed normality is
delicious--thanks to Miss West. Now why did not Captain West, or Mr.
Pike, both experienced men, diagnose my trouble for me? And then there
was Wada. But no; it required Miss West. Again I contemplate the
problem of woman. It is just such an incident among a million others
that keeps the thinker's gaze fixed on woman. They truly are the mothers
and the conservers of the race.

Rail as I will at Miss West's red-blood complacency of life, yet I must
bow my head to her life-giving to me. Practical, sensible, hard-headed,
a comfort-maker and a nest-builder, possessing all the distressing
attributes of the blind-instinctive race-mother, nevertheless I must
confess I am most grateful that she is along. Had she not been on the
_Elsinore_, by this time I should have been so overwrought from lack of
sleep that I would be biting my veins and howling--as mad a hatter as any
of our cargo of mad hatters. And so we come to it--the everlasting
mystery of woman. One may not be able to get along with her; yet is it
patent, as of old time, that one cannot get along without her. But,
regarding Miss West, I do entertain one fervent hope, namely, that she is
not a suffragette. That would be too much.

Captain West may be a Samurai, but he is also human. He was really a bit
fluttery this morning,