ate inspiration had to take the
form of a yelping, yapping two months' old puppy. And with the advent of
the terrier the trouble had begun. The hotel clerk judged me a criminal
before the act I had not even had time to meditate. And then Wada, on
his own initiative and out of his own foolish stupidity, had attempted to
smuggle the puppy into his room and been caught by a house detective.
Promptly Wada had forgotten all his English and lapsed into hysterical
Japanese, and the house detective remembered only his Irish; while the
hotel clerk had given me to understand in no uncertain terms that it was
only what he had expected of me.

Damn the dog, anyway! And damn Galbraith too! And as I froze on in the
cab on that bleak pier-end, I damned myself as well, and the mad freak
that had started me voyaging on a sailing-ship around the Horn.

By ten o'clock a nondescript youth arrived on foot, carrying a suit-case,
which was turned over to me a few minutes later by the wharfinger. It
belonged to the pilot, he said, and gave instructions to the chauffeur
how to find some other pier from which, at some indeterminate time, I
should be taken aboard the _Elsinore_ by some other tug. This served to
increase my irritation. Why should I not have been informed as well as
the pilot?

An hour later, still in my cab and stationed at the shore end of the new
pier, the pilot arrived. Anything more unlike a pilot I could not have
imagined. Here was no blue-jacketed, weather-beaten son of the sea, but
a soft-spoken gentleman, for all the world the type of successful
business man one meets in all the clubs. He introduced himself
immediately, and I invited him to share my freezing cab with Possum and
the baggage. That some change had been made in the arrangements by
Captain West was all he knew, though he fancied the tug would come along
any time.

And it did, at one in the afternoon, after I had been compelled to wait
and freeze for four mortal hours. During this time I fully made up my
mind that I was not going to like this Captain West. Although I had
never met him, his treatment of me from the outset had been, to say the
least, cavalier. When the _Elsinore_ lay in Erie Basin, just arrived
from California with a cargo of barley, I had crossed over from New York
to inspect what was to be my home for many months. I had been delighted
with the ship and the cabin accommodation. Even the stateroom selected
for me was satisfact