with
her lines. And indeed to a seafaring man the _Kalkis_ was a problem. She
resembled nothing so much as the broken-down blood animal whom one
discovers hauling a cab. Mr. Spokesly could see she had been a yacht.
Her once tall masts were cut to stumps and a smooth-rivetted funnel at
the same graceful rake was full of degrading dinges. A singularly
shapely hull carried amidships a grotesque abortion in the form of a
super-imposed upper bridge, and the teak deck forward was broken by a
square hatchway. All the scuttles along her sides, once gleaming brass
and crystal, were blind with dead-lights and painted over. Another hatch
had been made where the owner's skylight had been and a friction-winch
screamed and scuttered on the once spotless poop. As Mr. Spokesly once
phrased it later, it was like meeting some girl, whose family you knew,
on the streets. A lighter lay alongside loaded with sacks and cases, and
the friction-winch shrieked and jerked the sling into the air as a gang
of frowzy Greeks hooked them on.

They came round her bows to reach the gangway and Mr. Spokesly gave way
to a feeling of bitterness for a moment as he looked up at the gracile
sprit stem from which some utilitarian had sawed the bowsprit and
carefully tacked over the stump a battered piece of sheet-copper. It
affected him like the mutilation of a beautiful human body. What tales
she could tell! Now he saw the mark of her original name showing up in
rows of puttied screw-holes on the flare of the bow. _Carmencita._ She
must have been a saucy little craft, her snowy gangway picked out with
white ropes and polished brass stanchions. And now only a dirty ladder
hung there.

Leaving the little Jew to get up as best he could, Mr. Spokesly climbed
on deck and strode forward. He was curious to see what sort of mate it
could be who came into port with a ship like this. His professional
pride was nauseated. He kicked a bucket half full of potato peelings out
of the doorway and entered the deck-house.

Garlic, stale wine, and cold suet were combined with a more sinister
perfume that Mr. Spokesly knew was rats. He looked around upon a scene
which made him wonder. It made him think of some forecastles he had
lived in when he was a seaman, forecastles on Sunday morning after a
Saturday night ashore on the Barbary Coast or in Newcastle, New South
Wales. It was the saloon, apparently, and the breakfast had not been
cleared away. A large yellow cat was gnaw