THE MUTINY OF THE ELSINORE

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.