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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 59343 ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: Cover art]
+
+
+
+
+[Frontispiece: The Glory glided into the Newfoundland fog.]
+
+
+
+
+  THE S.S. GLORY
+
+  BY
+
+  FREDERICK NIVEN
+
+  AUTHOR OF "JUSTICE OF THE PEACE"
+  "HANDS UP!" ETC.
+
+
+
+  ILLUSTRATED BY FRED HOLMES
+
+
+
+  LONDON
+  WILLIAM HEINEMANN
+
+
+
+
+London: William Heinemann, 1915
+
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+The "Glory" ... glided into the Newfoundland fog . . . Frontispiece
+
+The new comer approached more closely and looked at the crowd
+
+There!  They were apart
+
+Asked of the evil-smelling darkness below many insulting questions
+
+Flailed his way along the line
+
+It seemed to be rushing at them with all its great dark purple hollows,
+its purple hillsides, its snowy crests
+
+Again the other cattleship forged level
+
+The Manager says this is an American coin
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+Somebody was playing a mouth-organ in the midst of a group of "hard
+cases" that waited on a certain wharf at Montreal.  You who arrive
+there in spick and span passenger steamers can pick out the place from
+the promenade decks as you come alongside, for on the shed roofs is
+painted, with waterproof paint, "The Saint Lawrence Shipping and
+Transport Co., Ltd."
+
+At the gable of these sheds the Hard Cases waited, alert for anybody of
+importance coming from citywards.  But they did not forget that the
+important person might be already in the sheds.  Therefore, as they
+strolled a step or two forth and back, or double-shuffled in response
+to the mouth organ, they cast glances now and then into the shed,
+between the lattice-work of a barrier at its end, a barrier that
+continued the slope of the roof to the wharf-side and about a foot
+beyond.  A determined man could have clambered round it at the
+projecting part, or over it for that matter--although it looked fragile
+at the top as well as showing many prominent nails.  But no one did
+clamber over it, or round it even.  In America there is a sneaking
+regard for the man who climbs over, or crawls round, barricades; but it
+was hardly likely that any of the Hard Cases, who waited for a job
+outside the barrier, would have obtained that job at the end of such
+gymnastics.  These men were not hoboes, tramps, sundowners,
+beachcombers, though there was not a handkerchief-full of luggage in
+the crowd.  They were cattlemen, who lead a life more hard and
+uncertain than that of sparrows, crossing and recrossing the great,
+grey Atlantic, with Liverpool for their British port; and, for their
+American ports, Montreal, Halifax, Boston.
+
+"Well, what's this?" said one of them, Big Mike.
+
+The "Push" glanced at "this"--a lean man, brown as an Indian, wearing a
+broad-brimmed hat that set him apart from the "Push," which wore,
+chiefly, scooped sailor-caps, and, secondly, dilapidated Trilbys.
+True, the latter were of felt, but only in regard to material were they
+like this hat that hove in sight on the newcomer's head.
+
+[Illustration: The new comer approached more closely and looked at the
+crowd.]
+
+"What's he?" asked Jack, a slender and finely-built young man with a
+face handsome and devil-may-care and cunning, a face oddly aristocratic
+though leathery, and bearing signs that ablution was not a daily matter
+in his life any more than in the lives of the others.
+
+"It's one of them cow-boys," said Mike.  "One of them fellers that
+comes from beyant, in the cars with the cattle, and takes a thrip over
+sometimes to see what its loike in our counthry."
+
+"I suppose 'e'll go fer nuthin'," said Cockney.  "Do one of hus out of
+a job."
+
+"Well, ye needn't be supposing till ye hear," answered Mike.  "I never
+seen wan of them do that yet."
+
+The newcomer approached more closely and looked at the crowd, one of
+whose members, an inquisitive youth, caught his eye and daringly
+proffered assistance.
+
+"You goin' on this ship?" he asked.
+
+"I hope so.  I've just come down to see how the chances are."
+
+The "Push" that had been listening mostly in quarter and three-quarter
+face, wheeled about, and all their "dials," as they would have
+expressed it, confronted him.
+
+"'Ow much you goin' to hask?" said Cockney.
+
+"What do they usually give?"
+
+"Oh, I don't know," several replied.
+
+Jack extracted himself from the "Push" to spit over the wharf-side, and
+then turned back again.
+
+"Thirty shillings," he said.
+
+"Is that what you get?" asked the Inquisitive One.
+
+Canted back, hands in pockets, Jack leered at him.
+
+"You hask thirty shillings then," said Cockney.
+
+Big Mike pushed through.
+
+"What are ye all talking about?" he said.  "I tell ye what it is, now,"
+he went on, turning to the stranger.  "There's some of these fellers go
+over for tin shillin's; the most of them don't get more'n a pound, and
+when it's getting cold here you'll find 'em runnin' round and saying,
+'I'll go for fifteen shillin's, mister.'  But if ye came down from
+beyant in the cars yourself ye're all right.  You fellers that come
+down from The Great Plains goes on with your own cattle on the ships if
+ye want."
+
+Some of the lesser lights in the "Push" snarled.
+
+"Want more than ten shillings," said the subject of their discussion.
+"Ten shillings for across the Atlantic!  Good Lord!"
+
+"There now!  What was I tellin' ye?" asked Mike of Cockney.
+
+"What does he want comin' round?" said a man with eyes in which madness
+showed.
+
+"Did ye come down on the cars?" asked Mike again.
+
+"No--I didn't come down with cattle.  I can't tell them that so as to
+get on."
+
+"There you are then!" cried he of the mad eyes, and walked away.
+
+Mike looked frowningly at the young man.
+
+"Well, young feller," he said, "you've no cause for worry.  It doesn't
+matter whether ye came down in the cattle cars or not.  That hat of
+yours will get ye the first chance."
+
+Some of them laughed, and he turned and looked scathingly at them, but
+did not deign to explain that he was serious.  Cockney, who had
+understood the significance of Mike's words, if he did not now come
+over exactly as ally to the newcomer, at least withdrew from his
+position as a possible enemy.
+
+"That's right!" he declared.  "That's the kind of 'at the fellers wear
+up there w'ere the cattle comes from.  You hask thirty shillings.  You
+know about cattle any'ow wiv that 'at.  They'll bring yer down to a
+quid.  Well, that's all right, ain't it?  Good luck."
+
+The others seemed to see the justice of this.  Mike hitched his belt
+and regained his position as Bull of that herd by saying: "Pay no
+attintion to thim----"
+
+"To _me_?" yelled Cockney, breaking in.
+
+"That's all right, that's all right," said Mike soothingly to him.
+"You're all right.  See, young feller,"--to the man with the Stetson
+hat--"you come over here beside me and I'll tell you when there's a
+chance."
+
+The young fellow came toward him.
+
+"Good luck!" said Cockney.
+
+"What _I_ get," added Mike, "is none of their business."
+
+"Well," said the young fellow, "ten bob to 'tend cattle across the
+Atlantic seems pretty poor.  I'll ask thirty."
+
+"Well, ye can't do better than that, can ye?" answered Mike.  "Askin'
+it, I mane."
+
+Cockney whirled round upon someone who had muttered, and thrust forward
+his face at the end of an elastic neck.
+
+"No, he's not--'e's not goin' over fer nuthin'!  Didn't yer 'ear 'im
+say?  I bet yer 'e'll go over fer more'n you."
+
+A short broad man, somewhat like Mike in miniature, declaimed: "What's
+the use o' listening?  Can't believe anybody.  I hear a feller say: 'I
+wouldn't go over for ten shillings--wouldn't go over for less than two
+quid.'  Believe he goes over just to get across--for nothing."
+
+Several, at this, glanced grinning at the young man whom Mike had
+befriended.
+
+"No," said the miniature edition of Mike, "I don't mean him.  _He's_
+not a liar anyhow.  I can tell that.  I mean fellers that talks and
+talks about what they would do and what they wouldn't do."
+
+"Pay no attintion to thim fellers," said Mike, less talking to the
+newcomer in particular than generally, to those in the group who had
+ears to hear.  And then to his new friend: "You didn't come down in the
+cars then, young feller?"
+
+"I've come from the West," answered the young fellow.
+
+"That's good enough," said Mike, in the accents of one instilling hope.
+"There's no need to answer what they don't ask.  You look as if you
+came from beyant.  Let yer hat spake for ye.  Here he comes now."
+
+Hands behind back, walking slow, came a man of forty or so, lean,
+grizzled, projecting himself with easy swinging steps toward the
+"Push," looking at them, head bent, from under his brows, with eyes so
+calculating and keen that the glance might have been considered
+malevolent were it not for a faint smile, or suggestion of a smile,
+about his close-pressed lips.  There was a fresh agitation among the
+"Push," as of a pool when a stone is dropped therein.  Mike stood a
+little more erect and drew his chin back.  The aristocratic-looking
+Jack--in some queer way, despite his old, seedy, hand-me-down garments,
+he was almost dandyish--hands in pockets, jacket wrinkled up behind,
+body canted backwards, strolled out of the group a step or two with
+eyes on the man who advanced upon them, and strolled back again, as one
+who would draw attention to himself.
+
+"Is this one of the bosses?" inquired the young man who had come by
+kind request if not exactly under Mike's wing at least to his side.
+
+Mike gave a brief nod and closed one eye.
+
+"Candlass," he said; and Candlass coming now level with them, Mike
+leant towards him and made a grimace which evidently Candlass
+understood.  The others, at this, tried to crowd in between them.
+Candlass frowned grimly, opened a door in that latticed barricade
+between shed and wharf-side, and passed through.  The "Push"--one might
+now have a hint of the derivation of its name--flocked after him, but
+he stood in the narrow entrance way and considered it over his shoulder
+as a man looks at a bunch of doubtful dogs that snap at his heels.
+Mike commented, in the background: "What are yez all crowding for?
+He'll tell ye when he wants us."  Candlass closed the gate in the
+barricade, moved slowly away, but was still to be seen by those
+outside.  He walked along the wharf looking up at the iron wall of the
+_S.S. Glory_ that lay there, considered the high-sided cattle gangways
+that stretched up to the hull.  Then he turned away and disappeared in
+the rear of the nearest shed, to reappear anon with a stout, fatherly
+man whose clothes had the appearance of rather being made to measure
+than reached off a hook.  This man seemed to be trying to look grim,
+but when Candlass swung over to the barricade, whipped open the door,
+and wheeled back again as a sign to the "Push" to enter--and they did
+enter--any mere looker-on could have seen a quick droop of his eyelids,
+a momentary biting of his lip as of a man who is hurt in some way.
+There was a deal of the milk of human kindness about Mr. Smithers,
+wharf-manager of the St. Lawrence Shipping and Transport Co., and he
+never became used to the Hard Cases.  He often wanted to know all about
+them, where they were born, how they lived, what they thought of it
+all.  Some of the men, out of their breast-pockets, were tentatively
+withdrawing bundles of discharge papers lest John Candlass might care
+to see them.  Candlass looked over the crowd again as it thronged into
+the St. Lawrence shed.  He spoke now, for the first time, and his voice
+was amazingly quiet.
+
+"I don't want _you_," he said to one man, with a quick lift of his
+eyebrows; and the man went out backwards, and swiftly, suggesting in
+his manner that he was ready either to put up a fight if pursued, or to
+turn tail and run the moment he passed through the barrier again.  He
+backed away from the sultry and quiet Candlass much as a lion-tamer
+leaves a cage.  Another man prepared to follow him, yet not as if
+whole-hearted in his retreat.  Candlass had an eye on him.
+
+"Er----" he began, in the tone of one who considers to himself.  The
+retreating man heard this and paused like a weather-cock in a lull,
+looked at Candlass, and Candlass looked at him.  They studied each
+other thus in a way that made the others, brief though the time of
+study might be, realise that there had been some prior understanding or
+misunderstanding, between the two.
+
+"Well," said Candlass, still in that low voice, "if you think you can
+behave yourself."
+
+The man's expression changed.  A waggish look came on his face.
+
+"All right, Mr. Candlass."
+
+"All right then," said Candlass.  "You can wait around and I'll see--if
+I don't get plenty otherwise.  Leave it that way."
+
+Candlass looked over the group once more, then nodded to Mr. Smithers.
+
+"All right.  Come this way, boys," said Mr. Smithers.  But though he
+straightened his back and thrust his neck into his collar in the
+recognised attitude of people who are not to be trifled with, there was
+something paternal that he could not efface from himself as he walked
+over to a little office on wheels that stood in a backward corner of
+the shed.  In the wall of this box contrivance a small window opened on
+his arrival, and a clerk was beheld within.
+
+Candlass said: "Line up, boys; one at a time."
+
+Mike elbowed himself to leading position, looking round at his new
+friend.  "You come with me, lad."  And when some grumbled, "Well,
+well," he said.  "We all have a chance."
+
+The man to whom Candlass had decided to give another trial strolled
+backward and stood beyond the group so as to be last in the string.
+
+"Now then, come along," said Smithers, and tapped twice with the end of
+a fountain pen on the little ledge before the diminutive window.  The
+"Push," realising that all would have a chance, seeing how few there
+were, did not crowd now.  There was more of: "You go ahead"--"No,
+that's all right, you go!"--than of anxiety.  One by one they stepped
+up to the wicket, to one side of which Smithers leant, and in front of
+which Candlass had taken his stand.  Each in turn exchanged a few quiet
+words with these two; the clerk within, pen in hand, bent over his
+tome, giving ear at the window.  Once or twice Candlass looked round
+and beckoned to a man, when the group, milling instead of retaining the
+queue, was slow to decide who should go next.  He did this by raising a
+hand, thumb and forefinger in air, looking keen and cold in some man's
+eye, and then flicking down the forefinger and dropping his hand to his
+side again.  While this signing on was still in progress there entered
+the shed, slowly swinging his legs forward, clad in dirty khaki,
+large-hatted like the young man of whom we have already heard, a
+close-lipped, short-nosed youth.  Candlass remarked him as he came in
+and said: "All right, you.  Come ahead."
+
+"One of the fellows what come down in the cars," it was suggested, or
+explained.
+
+A little later there came a man in a long coat, tweed cap, heavy boots,
+leggings, wearing spectacles.
+
+"What's this blown in?" one asked.
+
+Smithers, by the side of the wicket, drew a deep breath.
+
+"All right.  Come ahead," called Candlass.
+
+"Did _that_ come down in the cars?" inquired a little pale-faced,
+thin-handed youngster.
+
+Mike, standing over to one side with those who had already signed on,
+offered explanation:
+
+"He's one of them young fellers from up behind somewheres.  Comes from
+feedin' pigs, and doin' the chores, and what they call learnin'
+farmin'."  He noticed that his newly adopted friend had allowed some
+others to precede him and had not yet signed on.  "Go on there forward,
+young feller," he admonished.  "Take your turn there after Four Eyes
+with the coat."
+
+"Go on, then, go on," chorussed several of the "Push," and he who,
+though he wore the Hat of the Great Plains, had not come down on the
+cars with cattle, as indeed had that other large-hatted recent arrival,
+stepped up to the wicket.  The onlookers noticed that with him, as with
+others, there was evidently a little bargaining being done.
+
+"No--'e's not goin' fer nuthin'; 'e's all right," said Cockney to Mike.
+
+Mike merely turned his head toward Cockney and then turned it away
+again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+When the young man to whom Mike had extended kindness passed from the
+wicket, having agreed to tend cattle across the Atlantic for the sum of
+fifteen shillings, he found that he had already been christened.
+Perhaps his lack of diffidence in signing his name in the book which
+was turned round to him by the clerk, after the quiet discussion of
+terms was over, had suggested the new name to Mike.
+
+"That's right, Scholar," he said.
+
+"How much are you going to get?" asked the Inquisitive One, jumping
+forward, left shoulder advanced, and thrusting his face close to
+Scholar.
+
+"He's after getting as much as you!" said Mike.  "Don't you be telling
+him, Scholar, or he'll be running back to the wicket and saying: 'I
+want as much as the other feller there.'"
+
+The Inquisitive One contented himself by looking at Mike's boots,
+trousers and belt, torn waistcoat, shirt, and black-and-white scarf,
+briefly at his face, and then, turning about, executed a heel and toe
+movement of right foot and left foot alternately, looking at the others
+and inclining his head towards Mike, in a kind of silent, noncommittal:
+"You observe?"  Mike, too, observed, as his slight drawing erect
+signified, the slight toss of his chin, a dismissing toss, somewhat
+leonine.  Then his eye rested on the youth in the long coat, and
+disapproval was in his eye.  He had no objection to cattlemen in big
+hats from "beyant," who had come down in the cars with cattle,
+continuing across the Atlantic.  He had no objection to other young men
+in big hats, who had not come down with cattle, but who wanted to cross
+the Atlantic.  But that heavy, stolid, long-coated, legginged,
+spectacled lout seemed to him an indignity thrust upon them.  He
+studied him a long while, with his weight now upon left foot, right
+advanced, toe tapping the cobbles, anon shifting weight to his right
+foot, leaning back, left foot advanced and left shoulder almost in a
+fighting attitude.  The man in the long coat did not seem to be one of
+them.  He might be going over this way simply to save money, not
+because he was hard up.  It was different with the short-nosed man in
+the old soiled khaki; he did not seem to be by any means on his uppers,
+but he looked as one to whom all this was part of the day's work.  His
+arrival had shown more clearly that Scholar might not be typical of men
+from "beyant," or "the Great Plains where the cattle comes from,"
+despite his hat, but Scholar still remained not anathema; he was brown
+with the sun and the open air, and he had that touch of vagabondage
+that made him welcome although an outsider.  He had come into their
+midst with an air of "If you don't mind, boys," but that long-coated,
+and leggined, and spectacled one didn't come in at all; he was just
+there.  Mike had to ask the opinions of the others at this stage.
+
+"What do you think of that?" he said quietly.  "Is that a Jonah?  Don't
+like the look of it.  Looks a Jonah."
+
+Long Jack's partner, whose name was Johnnie, and who had a way of
+varying the double-shuffling to the mouth-organ by striking belligerent
+attitudes at the others and making feints at them with a fist, paused
+in his mixture of double-shuffle and pugilistic rehearsal, to look at
+the subject of Mike's doubt.
+
+"_That!_" he said.  He peered at him, walked a little way toward him
+where he stood aloof, whirled on his heel, and coming back to the
+group, raised a fist as if to smite and announced: "He's one of them
+fellers that goes up on the Ontario farms, up in the bush--half silly,
+farmers get them for their board; learn to milk cows, shovel horse
+dung, and all that."
+
+"Yus," said Cockney.  "That's wot 'e is."
+
+Mike's expression was like that of a man disgusted.  Had he not already
+told them this?  Candlass put an end, for the time being, to farther
+speculation.
+
+"Get on to the main deck, you fellows," he ordered, "and you'll see
+some bales of hay there.  Cut them open and bed down."
+
+The "Push" began to swarm up one of the gangways, the one nearer to
+them, that led to the lower deck.  Mike looked at it; its condition
+showed that lower deck cattle were already on board.
+
+"Indade," he said, "there's no sense in dirtying your shoes before ye
+nade to," and he led the way to the second gangway, which was canted up
+to the main deck, and was clean.  The ascent was not much steeper, for
+the gangway was longer and led off from farther back on the wharf.
+
+"Oh, all right," said Candlass, as he saw his men going up in two
+portions.  "It's all the same."  But he called after those who were
+going up to the lower deck: "Don't you fellows hang about down there
+when you get aboard."
+
+They nodded, and some responded with an "Aye, aye, sir," and up they
+ran, talking and laughing among themselves in jeering fashion.
+Candlass stood on the dock and waited till they were on board, so that
+those that turned their heads, when they stepped on deck, to look down,
+met his eye.  The "Push" gathered on the main deck.  Those who had gone
+direct to it, looking down the hatches, could see, what those who had
+come up the other way already knew, that the lower deck cattle were
+already all on board.  The full complement was already there; and
+beyond the docks were now the cling-clang of an advancing bell, a
+locomotive bell, and more lowing of cattle.  Amidships many bales of
+hay had been tumbled.
+
+"Now we want an axe," said Mike.
+
+"There's a queer fellow below with an axe," volunteered one of those
+who had come up by the lower deck.  "Here he comes."
+
+He came.  He came as if to slaughter them all, a man of maybe fifty,
+shirt open, one brace sustaining his trousers, bald-headed, almost
+toothless, scarred upon the forehead.  He was neither fat nor lean,
+showing at once many protuberant bones, cheek and chin and breast
+bones, and rolls of fat under chin, and on abdomen, to which his shirt
+clung, damp from excessive labour in the stuffy ship.  He charged upon
+the bales of hay, smote furiously at the wires that bound them,
+heedless of the possible scratches when they sprung apart, and yelling,
+"Here you are!  Roll it away--roll that away now," rolled the bale over
+himself so that it fell apart as in compressed cakes or slices.  "Well,
+if you won't roll, carry away, carry away," he went on, hitting the
+next bale; and, dodging his axe, the "Push" gathered armfuls and
+hastened off to shake and to tease out these armfuls into the strong
+pens ranged all round the ship's sides and down the ship's centre,
+ranged so closely that if two men passed abreast they had need to be
+slender men.  Hardly had they finished coming and going on this
+employment than the ki-yi-ing of men's voices, and the lowing of beasts
+caused the bedders-down to pause and give ear.  The man who had broken
+open the bales suddenly appeared again, screaming oaths.  "Come along
+here, and tie up!"
+
+Blundering up the deck, up the gangway, came steer after steer.  When
+they found themselves aboard, with bars such as the corral bars that
+they knew of old before them, they wheeled sharply and away they went
+running, lowing, away forward, then across the ship and down the other
+side.  The man with the axe rushed across, and every here and there
+thrust a plank from front barrier to ship's side, turning the long
+corral that ran round the ship into many smaller pens.  Then came a
+cessation in the river of steers that ran aboard.
+
+"Come over here and I'll show you, Scholar," said Mike.  What Mike had
+to show to the tenderfoot cattleman was how to take the ropes that hung
+all along the pen fronts, throw them over the steers' necks, pull the
+slack end through a hole in the flat front board, knot it, and then let
+it go.  The hole in each case was only large enough to admit of the
+rope, consequently the knot upon the end was all that was necessary for
+making fast.  It was a duty not without some excitement, for the
+steers, arranged now in pens, thanks to the boards that the Mad Boss
+had thrust across (five, six, or seven to a pen), would persist in
+milling.  Round and round they moved, and before each pen a man, or two
+men, worked.  After a few minutes the steers in the pen before which
+Mike and Scholar laboured had each a rope tied round its neck.  That
+was the first duty done, not without scrimmage.  And now they went on
+to the second part of that work, the making fast.  As steer by steer
+was hauled up to the board, and the rope pulled through, there was
+trouble.
+
+"Watch your hands!" shouted Mike, hanging on to a halter while Scholar
+tried to affix the knot.  His shout was barely in time.  The steer
+flung backward, and smack went Scholar's hand against the board, for he
+still clung tenaciously to the rope's end.  "All right!" he replied,
+for he had succeeded in making the knot just in time, and when the
+steer strained back the knot also smacked on the board.  A tug of war
+began upon the next one.  Farther away a sudden shout arose, and they
+looked along the deck.  The Mad Boss, who had been armed with an axe a
+short time previously, was now blaspheming against the ship's side.  He
+had jumped into one of the pens, armed with a stick, in an endeavour to
+make the animals face the front board, and one of them now had propped
+itself against him.  There was an unholy glee on the faces of some of
+the men, those who looked upon the squeeze that he was getting as good
+punishment for his method of treating them.
+
+"You, you----" he half gurgled, half shouted a series of scathing names
+at them.  He caught Scholar's eye.  "Can't you lend a hand here?"
+
+Scholar could lend a hand.  He grabbed up a piece of stick and vaulted
+into the pen.  After all, he had signed on as a cattleman, and a long
+horn must not intimidate him.  He hoped that even if he had not signed
+on his pause before leaping to the rescue would have been of no longer
+duration.  The very close proximity of the steers among which he leapt
+was his salvation.  There was not room for them to run upon him, heads
+down.  He gave two twists to the tail of the steer that had pinned the
+mad foreman; it relaxed and swung round facing the tying board, where
+Mike adroitly grabbed the rope, hauled the loose end through, and
+knotted it--just in time.  Back went the animal's head, and smack came
+the knot against the board.
+
+"Now, you," said the mad-looking boss to Scholar.  "Take care of
+yourself.  I'm all right now--aisy there.  Slip over."
+
+Scholar watched for his chance; but he did not slip over.  The chance
+came to slip under, and he did so, coming on to the alley-way with a
+kind of side dive, while the man to whose rescue he had gone, seizing a
+favourable opportunity, dodged into the neighbouring pen and from
+thence gained the alley-way.
+
+"That's being a man!" he said, nodding to Scholar.  "Rafferty won't
+forget ye."
+
+"Who is he?" asked Scholar of Mike.
+
+"Him?  Oh, he's bossing the Lower Deck, but he's come up here till
+Candlass comes aboard, I suppose."
+
+Perhaps two hours later this instalment of steers was all tied up, and
+the remaining space of deck, awaiting the next batch, was almost all
+strewn with hay.  Many of the men seemed bored.  There was a constant
+hinting that an adjournment for liquor should be made.  Candlass had
+not yet appeared; Rafferty had disappeared; the "Push" was alone, and
+Mike seemed to be half in command.
+
+"I tell yez," he said, "there's nobody going ashore till the
+bedding-down's finished."
+
+"Candlass didn't tell you to----" began he who has been spoken of as a
+kind of diminutive Mike.
+
+"Never mind what Candlass told me.  I'm telling you that if Candlass
+comes aboard and finds that we haven't finished bedding-down entoirely
+it's me he'll jump on."
+
+"Well, good luck, here's beddin'-dahn," said Cockney.
+
+Mike drew erect, stretched, blew a great breath, and wiped his forehead
+with the back of his hand.
+
+"I could be doing with a drop meself," he said, "but duty's duty."
+
+There was a halt in the arrival of the hay.
+
+"Where's them lads bringing the hay?" he asked.
+
+"Perhaps there ain't no more bales," said Cockney.
+
+It might have been the Devil that prompted Scholar at that moment.
+Perhaps he was feeling a little gay after his bout with the steers;
+perhaps he thought how funny it would be if Mike led the way ashore for
+refreshment after having so recently proclaimed that no man would go
+ashore for that purpose until the bedding-down was over.  Perhaps he
+thought to make some sign to these men that he appreciated the fact
+that they had not all cold-shouldered him as an outsider, and could
+think of only one way to do it that would seem expressive to them.
+
+"Well," he said, "let me stand the treat anyhow."
+
+Mike turned upon him.
+
+"Do you mane it?" he asked.
+
+Scholar nodded.
+
+"Come along, boys," cried Mike.
+
+It now appeared that many of them had already vacated the deck.  Jack
+and Jack's partner and several others were gone.  The cowboy was
+nowhere to be seen; the man of the long coat and spectacles was all
+alone, making some knots more sure upon the ropes, tying fresh ones on
+those that had been knotted so near the end as to suggest to a watchful
+eye that a few vigorous pulls of a steer's head would make them give.
+
+"We'll lave him," said Mike, and those few who remained hurried to
+depart, clustering round Mike and Scholar.  A bo'sun at the gangway
+said: "There's some more cattle coming up, you fellows."
+
+"Let them come," replied Mike.  "Everything's ready for them."
+
+One of the "Push" told the bo'sun that there was a parson along there,
+with spectacles on, who would tie them up, and down the gangway went
+the crowd.  Scholar perhaps need not have been so greatly vexed
+afterwards for having carried these men away.  As they went down the
+gangway they woke to the fact that they were the only cattlemen left.
+The others, who had come aboard with them under Candlass's eye, had
+been more alert to note when the Mad Boss turned his back, and had
+already hastened off to amuse themselves before sailing.  Great
+sizzling lights were by now lit above the wharf.  Back in the shadows
+of the shed could be seen many tossing horns.  Neither Candlass nor the
+Mad Boss interrupted them.  Smithers was not about; perhaps he had gone
+home to supper.  Outside the lath partition was a little new mob of
+dead-beats, and some of those going out recognized friends there and
+hailed them.  There was a smell of docks, and of cattle, and of grain;
+there was much noise of iron gangways being run to and fro, cling-clang
+of locomotive bells, hiss of the new-lit lights.  Things were all in
+just uncertain enough light for a man here and there to stub a toe on a
+stretched hawser.  Overhead an exquisite pale blue, and fading pink,
+showed the aftermath of the day, high, far-off, serene.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+Lamplight and daylight blent in the waterfront streets, and as the
+little crowd of men left the more open wharf front, where there was
+also some reflected last daylight from the docks and the river, a
+looker-on might have been touched deeply, seeing the quick-going day,
+the gathering shadows in the gulches of the streets, the lighting up of
+the saloons, and that knot of men, more homeless than sparrows,
+drifting across the twilight.  And they were not of the bottom rung, at
+least not in their own estimation.  A man in the uniform of the
+Salvation Army passed by, and that member of the "Push" who looked like
+a squat Mike, and whose name, it transpired, was Michael, turned to
+Scholar and commented: "I suppose the Salvation Army does some good in
+its own way--among the lowest classes."  And again a few paces on, when
+one of the men in the rear broke out: "Here, where are you fellows
+going?  What's the matter with this?" Michael looked over his shoulder
+and shook his head in dissent; and a little further still, as the man
+behind was still wanting to know what was the matter with the saloon in
+question: "We don't want to go in there," Michael said.  "There ain't
+enough of us.  That's a bad, low-down joint."
+
+"Scared, are you?" jeered the other.
+
+"There's a bad push goes in there," said Michael, "and you don't stand
+a show if you're not in the swing."
+
+"Go on!  What could they do?"
+
+It would appear that Michael felt his powers of explaining inadequate.
+
+"Mike," he said, "here's a fellow wants to know what they would do with
+him back there."
+
+"What they would do to him, is it?" asked Mike.  "It all depinds
+whether he feels in his pockuts and fetches out the nate money as if it
+was his last nickel."
+
+The man behind seemed interested.
+
+"Supposing I put down fifty cents?" he said.
+
+Mike looked at him witheringly.
+
+"You'd have to spind the change on thim," he said.
+
+"Oh!"
+
+"But if ye want to see the whole thing for yoursilf, my device to you,
+me lad, is to plant down a dollar--if ye have it.  If ye hadn't plenty
+of fighting friends with ye, ye might just as well hand it to them.  If
+it's a rough house ye're wantin', we might all go in and oblige ye, but
+spakin' for mesilf, I'm wantin' a quiet drink."
+
+"That's right," Michael commented quietly, with a nod to Scholar, by
+whose side he marched.  "Partner of mine once went in there.  I think
+meself that some fellow slipt up and drugged his beer, for when he
+comes near the tail of the glass he feels kind of funny, ye know, and
+he came outside.  He was for walking out into the main streets, and
+then he thinks some bull would arrest him for drunk and incapable, for
+he could hardly stand; so he turns the other way and two fellows came
+up to him and began talking to him, and asks him what's the matter, and
+he tumbles to it and tries to walk back the other way again.  One of
+them fellows comes the one side of him and the other the other side,
+and they says: 'You come along with us, where the bulls won't get you.'
+And while he's puzzling out which is better, the bulls or them, ye
+see--well, he doesn't know any more, ye see.  And the next he does
+know, he's wondering where he is anyhow, for the things he's after
+seeing.  It's the backs of the wharfs all upside down, ye see.  He's
+lying there with nothing on him but his pants.  The hat on his head,
+his shirt and his coat, with his discharge papers in it, they've
+skinned off him; and his boots; and him after having a dollar stowed
+away in each boot."
+
+"Here you are, Scholar, then," said Mike, in advance, and swung into a
+saloon, a ramshackle sawdusted place, where, behind a short counter, a
+lean, sharp-faced man in shirt sleeves looked at them in a way
+reminiscent of a weasel.  All entered with a swagger, each man with
+whatever change of face was his change of face before possible trouble.
+Mike jerked up his right shoulder, jerked up his left, hitched his
+belt, seemed to heave his chest up, and broaden his whole torso.
+Cockney curved his back, curved also his arms, making the swing of
+them, instead of by his side, left and right, in front of him, and
+thrust his face forward, craning his neck.  Michael put one hand in his
+pocket, half-closed his eyes, and slowly, and without expression, his
+guarded gaze roved from occupant to occupant of the place.  The man
+with the dangerously mad eyes, who it appeared was called Harry, but
+was referred to simply as Queer, merely sneered slightly, an unpleasant
+sneer, a one-sided sneer that showed a tooth.  The Inquisitive One
+danced into the place; his name had not yet transpired, but it seemed
+to be "him," with an indicatory jerk of the thumb, at which he did not
+take open umbrage, only now and then giving his roving glance from foot
+to head of whoever thus referred to him.  But if he danced in gaily he
+was none the less alert.
+
+Somebody spoke, and Mike interrupted with: "Where's your manners?
+Can't you let the man that's going to stand treat ask you what you're
+going to be after having, without shouting your order like that?"  And
+they lined up against the bar, on which the barman put the palms of his
+hands, standing before them.
+
+"Well, what will you have, Mike?" asked Scholar.  It was the first time
+he had given him his name, and Mike acknowledged it with a nod.  He
+turned to the bar-keeper.
+
+"I'll have a schooner of beer," he said.
+
+Michael, catching Scholar's eye, nodded to him, and then to the
+bar-keeper.  "The same for me," he said.
+
+The barman looked along the row and received a series of nods.  He
+glanced at Scholar, elevating his brows, and Scholar inclined his head,
+and the monster nominal glasses, but really glass jugs with handles,
+came swift almost as conjuring, one after the other, on to the counter.
+
+"Well, here's looking at ye," said Mike, "and good luck."
+
+"Well, here's good luck," said Michael.
+
+The phrase passed along, and the great jugs were held up and the
+quaffing began.  Mike drank a quarter of his, and then turned his back
+to the bar, and surveyed the room.  Over in a corner a faint
+disturbance arose, sounds of altercation, somebody telling someone else
+that he would push his face in.  Mike looked into the corner,
+impassive.  He leant forward and dragged a high stool over to the
+counter.
+
+"Come and sit here beside me, Scholar," he said.
+
+The narrow swing doors opened; a slight draught of air, cooler than the
+air within, caused them to glance round.  A furtive and evil face
+showed for a moment in the middle of the strip of dark, blue night, and
+then was withdrawn.  Michael looked at Mike to see if he had noticed
+that observer who came and went.  Scholar sat up on the high stool.
+
+"I don't know if you're fond of entering into scraps," said Mike
+quietly.  "But don't you do it.  It's a way some of these fellows have.
+Hearken to 'em now!"
+
+This half-dozen or so of the "Push" of the _S.S. Glory_ applied itself
+to its beer, and to talk, two by two.  It had the air of partitioning
+itself off from the rest of the house; it was a private party.
+
+"Order!" cried the bar-keeper, shoving his chin at those in the noisy
+corner.  "Order, please!"
+
+A man danced from the corner, beseeching another to "stand out."
+Scholar glanced in the direction of the group from which he had come,
+and it struck him that one or two faces there were turned more toward
+the men of the _Glory_ than toward the combative person.  At one small
+table, that stood all by itself, there had been, so far, a newspaper
+and two red fists; the newspaper came down now a little way and a face
+looked over the top, a face as red as the fists that had shown on each
+side.  The bar-keeper's hands were flat on the counter again; he was
+looking (almost stupidly it seemed) at the man who desired trouble, but
+now his eye roved toward the face that appeared over the newspaper's
+top.
+
+"Order, sir!" he said again, looking once more at the man who had stood
+up and forth to demand war.
+
+Mike drained his glass; his eyes were very bright.  He turned, and
+leaning against the counter, looked at the belligerent one, met his
+eye, cleared his throat oddly, and heaved up his chest.  It struck
+Scholar that the beer acted quickly upon Mike.
+
+"Well, will _you_ fight me then?" said the man, catching Mike's eye.
+
+Mike took a fierce step forward--he who had but a moment ago advised
+Scholar to keep out of such trouble.  The eyes of the bar-keeper and of
+the man behind the newspaper again met.  Down went the newspaper, up
+came the man.  He walked over to the blusterer and addressed a knothole
+in the planks before his feet.
+
+"I'll have to ask you to get out," he said, speaking to the knot-hole,
+and then glanced at the man.
+
+"I don't have to!"
+
+The actions were then as quick as when two cats, the preamble over,
+decide to come to grips.  A whirl of arms and legs went down the middle
+of the saloon, the swing doors swept left and right and closed again,
+and the big man was alone now, his eye upon the doors as they wavered
+to a standstill.
+
+"There you are!" said Michael to Scholar.  "That's what I told
+you--this is a good class house."
+
+"Drink up!  Drink up!" ordered Mike, "and we'll have some more."
+
+But four rational glasses of beer in one seemed sufficient for Scholar.
+
+"We'd better get back I think," he said.  "The rest of the cattle will
+be coming on board."
+
+"Oh, but indade I must stand treat now!" answered Mike.
+
+"Can't you get a glass of beer here?" asked Scholar, accentuating the
+"glass."
+
+"Them is the glasses of beer here," said Mike.  "Come along boys, drink
+up!" he repeated; and he glanced at the door with a kind of hilarity in
+his eye.
+
+"When will she sail, do you think?" said the Inquisitive One.
+
+"She can't go out before four or five in the morning," said Mike.
+"Give us all the same again, Mr. Bar-keeper."
+
+Those who had not finished made haste to do so, and the glasses were
+replenished.  The man who had thrown out the belligerent one had not
+again taken his seat.  He was looking sadly, moodily, at the swing
+doors.  He might have been brooding over some domestic trouble by the
+look of him.  Then he turned about, still looking heavily at the floor,
+walked rearwards, hands behind back, and took up a position towards the
+end of the saloon, legs spraddled, swaying up on his toes and coming
+down on his heels again gently.
+
+"He's after freezing them out," said Michael, seeing Scholar glance at
+the man of moody weight.  The noisy group had probably a like opinion
+of his brooding proximity, drained its glasses, rose and passed to the
+door.  The heavy man walked slowly in the rear.  It was composed of
+some tough-looking units; but Scholar, who had come down from the
+lumber camps of Michigan, was not intimidated by their scowling faces.
+One of them jostled Cockney's elbow, and he turned round, lean and
+humped like a weasel; but the big man, following just a step behind,
+thrust his big hand between Cockney and the jostler, and admonished:
+"Now then, now then.  Move on, please!"
+
+Michael nodded his head again to Scholar, jogged him with an elbow.
+
+"See?" said he.  "See?  There's nothing on here between the people
+behind the bar and the people in front, same as in some of them."
+
+"I see," said Scholar.
+
+Hardly had the last of these ugly fellows departed than the Inquisitive
+One plucked his elbow and drew him aside, and Scholar was amazed to
+notice that his utterance was thick as he whispered, a blend of
+ingratiation and intimidation in his face: "How much are you getting
+for the trip over?"
+
+"Look here--none of that whispering!" said Mike, the heavy,
+ready-to-smite look, with which he had watched the departure of the
+dubious throng, still on his face.  "If you fellows have anything to
+say, say it.  Here's a schooner of beer untouched, too!"
+
+Scholar turned about.
+
+"My inside isn't big enough to take another glass of that size," he
+declared.
+
+"Here's looking at you, then!" said Michael, and, lifting the glass
+jug, he opened his throat, and holding it rigid as if it were a filler,
+poured the contents down.
+
+"There y'are!" said Mike.  "There y'are!  That's a gintleman!  That's a
+gintleman!"  And there was a faint thickness in his speech too, as
+though his tongue was spongy.  "I was niver mixed up with such a push
+in me life--what with whisperin' together and drinking another man's
+beer."
+
+Cockney broke out, in a jeering voice, eyeing the Inquisitive One and
+Scholar: "How much are you getting for the trip?  Tell me, and see if
+yer getting something mor'n me."
+
+"Oh, is that what he's after whispering?" said Mike.
+
+The stubby Michael caught Scholar by the elbow and drew him away from
+the inquisitor, who went back to his place at the bar to drain his
+glass in an offended manner.
+
+"You see, it's like this," began Michael, swaying ever so little
+towards Scholar.  "What these fellows do is this: one of them gets up a
+row with you, and one of the others comes in as if he was separatin'
+you.  'Pay no attention to him,' he says.  'Pay no attention to him.
+You come along of me.  You're a good man wantin' to fight when you're
+insulted, but he's drunk.  Pay no attention to him.  Come along of me.'
+And the other fellows say: 'Come along of us!'  But they're all of the
+one push, see?  And when you go off with them to talk about the things
+you would be doin' if they hadn't separated you, ye never know when
+it's goin' to end.  The way that them landsharks goes around looking
+for honest seamen----"
+
+A roaring bellow from Mike interrupted this.  Evidently he had spoken
+before.
+
+"I'm askin' ye--I'm askin' ye--I'm askin' yez--are ye goin' to have
+another drink?" he demanded.  "Whisperin' like a lot of girls!"
+
+While he was roaring thus, entered two men, blue-capped and shabbily
+attired, clean as to face and half the neck, but showing tide marks of
+scanty washings.
+
+"Hallo, Mike!" one of them said.
+
+"Well, bejabbers, and how's yourself?" answered Mike.  Here was clearly
+not a case of new and fraudulent friends, for Mike evidently knew them
+both; having shaken hands with the first he required no introduction to
+the second, extended his great hand, shook warmly, and cried: "How are
+you?  Have a drink with me!"
+
+"Have a drink with _me_," said the man who had first hailed Mike, and
+he ordered and paid for three glasses of beer.  Suddenly he glanced
+over his shoulder at the other men.
+
+"Are these fellows----" he began.
+
+"Oh, indade!" said Mike.  "Thim fellers is aither too short in the neck
+to take more, or they have saycrets to whisper."
+
+Some of the men near the door had gone out, and now the door swung open
+again, and one shouted: "Shake a leg, push of the _S.S. Glory_!  Crew
+of the _S.S. Glory_, shake a leg!"
+
+"What's the time?" said Scholar, astonished.  "It can't be late yet.
+This place is still open."
+
+"'E thinks 'e's in England," said Cockney, but joyful, not malevolent.
+"The first thing yer notice in this 'ere country is them bills--'Open
+day hand night'--and the next thing is the size of them glasses.  They
+look long at first, but you get used to everythink.  I could do wiv 'em
+longer."  He drained his glass.  "Longer fer me!  Longer fer me!" he
+began to sing, making for the door.  Evidently the strains of a
+Salvation Army song outside had come to his ears through the voices and
+clatter of the place, for as the doors swung now with the men tumbling
+out, Scholar heard the beat of a drum and voices singing: "That will be
+glory, glory for me!"  Cockney danced along the street, his wide
+trousers flapping about his lean shanks, laughing and singing: "Longer
+fer me!  Longer fer me!"
+
+"Come on, Mike!" shouted the last of them.
+
+"Tell them to cast off if I don't come!" he replied.  "I've met ould
+friends--and I'm drinkin'."
+
+"Come along, Mike," Michael hailed.
+
+"Come along, Mike," implored Scholar.  There was something like pity in
+his eye for the great empty-stomached man.  They were all
+empty-stomached--that is so far as to food; and that beer had drugged
+and stupefied them.
+
+"To hell wid yez all!" cried Mike; and then through the haze in his
+eyes he peered along the saloon at Scholar.  "Stay wid me, Scholar,
+stay wid me.  Let the other fellows go."
+
+"I want to cross over," said Scholar.
+
+"Well, well--God bless you then.  Don't let them fellers run it on ye,"
+and Mike waved his hand and turned his back.  Outside Michael held the
+door open with a foot, and when Scholar came out, Michael, withdrawing
+the foot, seemed to have some difficulty in balancing.  Scholar caught
+his arm.
+
+"What are you holdin' me for?" said Michael.  "There's nothing the
+matter with me!"
+
+He persisted with this remark all the way to the corner in the rear of
+the others, varying it now and then with: "I'm all right."  At the
+corner were two men that Scholar recognized; one of them was the man
+with whom Mike had had half a mind to grapple, the thrower-down of the
+gauntlet; the other one was of the ejected gang.  The former caught
+Scholar's eye in the lamplight.
+
+"Is the big fellow there still?" he asked.
+
+Cockney, looking over his shoulder a few paces ahead, turned about,
+pausing in his singing of "Longer fer me!" and came back, craning like
+a thin duck.
+
+"Wot does 'e say?  Wot does 'e say?"
+
+The two men eyed him coldly.
+
+"Wot does 'e say?" repeated Cockney.
+
+"He wants to know if Mike's in there still," said Michael.
+
+"Wot does 'e want Mike for?  Wot do you want Mike for?"
+
+"We were speaking to this gentleman," said one of the men, but not the
+one who had spoken to Scholar.
+
+"O, you were, were you.  Why can't yer speak for yerself?" and Cockney
+turned to the other, he who had tried to lure Mike into combat.  "Wot
+do you want him for?"
+
+"It's none of your business!" replied the man.
+
+"Yus it is!  We're shipmites!  I'll give yer a bash in the ear-'ole for
+tuppence!  I'll put yer nose up among yer 'air for ten cents!  Won't hi
+do instead?  We're shipmites, 'im and me."
+
+The man lunged at Cockney to deliver a blow; and Cockney, with a
+wriggle and a snarl, smashed a blow in his assailant's wind, and, next
+moment, when they grappled, set his teeth in the man's wrist.
+
+"Bull!" somebody shouted, so the farther combat of weasel and boar was
+not to be seen, for the call of "bull!" was genuine.  There he was,
+there was the policeman pacing slowly towards them like a fate, broad,
+determined, left hand at side nonchalant, right hand slightly raised,
+nonchalant too, twirling his club gently at the end of its short
+leather wristlet--like a stout Georgian dandy, swinging a cane.
+
+None of the "Push" of the _S.S. Glory_ had any desire to see the inside
+of a lock-up, and evidently the two men who had been curious regarding
+Mike's whereabouts, were not in league with the police.  By the time
+that his slow patrol brought him to the end of the block, that bull had
+the pavement to himself; the two "toughs" had disappeared in one of the
+narrow streets, in one of its narrow entrances; the "Push" was
+stumbling about over hawsers and round bales on the dark wharf-side.
+The policeman, turning gently about, gave ear.  He heard a thin sound
+of fiddles, a sound of clapping and table-thumping behind closed
+windows over at Dutch Ann's dance house; the quick, coughing sound of a
+donkey-engine somewhere along the docks, and a voice chanting: "Up
+again!"--pause--"All right!  Up again!"  Slow puffs of a locomotive
+drew near, sepulchral cling-clang of the bell; there came a shout of
+voices: "Yo-ho!  Let her go!" a rattle of iron, a rattle of wheels over
+cobbles; and all through this was a querulous lowing of cattle,
+puzzled, despondent, irritable, after their week's journey from the
+long green rolls of Alberta, from lush bottoms of the Milk River.
+
+The Salvation Army people had gone; but away along towards where the
+masts and the smoke-stack top of the _S.S. Glory_ showed over the
+wharf, Cockney's voice sang high and piping and exulting: "Longer fer
+me!  Longer fer me!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+Like unto a river in an arid land, like unto a river that dwindles
+instead of increases, was the "Push" that headed for the _Glory_.
+Smoke came, black and oily, into the electric-lighted night from her
+smoke-stack; the cattle were all on board, but the tugs were not yet
+alongside.  The absence of the tugs sent many of the men back again.
+Still, there was a sprinkling aboard.
+
+Scholar found his way to the cattlemen's quarters, a large safe of a
+place under the ringing iron poop, with bunks all round the walls and
+all over the floor space, the latter ones fixed between iron stanchions
+that ran from floor to ceiling.  The place smelt already of fresh
+cattle and of beer.  Coming down the companionway to it, it seemed that
+the few who were there were rather dropping an ordinary word into
+strings of swear-words, than dropping a swear-word into their speech.
+Men lay here and there, men sat here and there on bunks.  Some he
+recognized as having been at the signing-on; some faces were new to
+him.  Somebody asked him with many oaths who he was, what he wanted;
+somebody else informed that inquirer that he must be drunk not to
+recognize the man.  One man deplored that the money was all gone, and
+there could be no more drink; another voice announced that that didn't
+matter, and need not be brooded over, being beyond mending.  Scholar,
+looking round, noted that on various of the unoccupied bunks there lay
+some trivial article of apparel--on one a sock, on another a cap, and
+on another one half of a pair of braces!  Somebody fell down the stairs
+and yelled, and a voice said: "Take that, then!"  Men rose upon their
+elbows and blinked; some rolled to their feet, rolled to the door.
+There were sounds of wild scrimmage up and down the stairs.  Scholar
+noticed that many men seemed to take all this for granted; even men
+whom it would be more fair to call "oiled" than drunk merely gave ear
+and reclined again.  The sounds of fighting waxed and waned, ceased,
+dwindled out, abruptly began again, above--on the stairs.  Now and then
+the combat surged into the cabin, or a fringe of it, other men coming
+down the stairs evidently taking sides in the original fight.  One of
+them reeled in, holding his head, sat down on a bunk, looked at his
+knuckles, shook his hand, and blood dropped from it.  He had evidently
+given a blow, and had evidently received one, for his eye rapidly
+disappeared as the flesh around it puffed.
+
+Scholar felt a sense of relief when the great bulk of Mike appeared in
+the shadows outside; yet when Mike fairly entered, and was fully
+revealed in the hard glare of electric light that lit the place, he
+knew not whether to be relieved or otherwise.  Mike seemed to have
+grown another inch, to have swelled, broadened, two or three; his eyes
+seemed at once bleared and brightly dancing.
+
+"Hallo, Scholar!" he hailed.  "Have you claimed your bunk?"
+
+Scholar did not understand.
+
+"Put something on your bunk," said Mike.  "Something that 'tain't worth
+nobody's while to steal."
+
+"'Ere yer are--reserved seats!" shouted Cockney, who had been asleep,
+and now awoke.
+
+Mike looked at a top bunk near the door and climbed on to it.  Scholar
+sat down on a lower one in the middle of the deck.  Men came and went.
+Several ugly pickpocket-faced youths clattered into the cabin, wandered
+round looking at the bunks and the sleepers.
+
+"I'm sorry I signed on!" grumbled one.  "Didn't know it was quarters
+like this."
+
+He strolled round the cabin and went out.  Mike sat up.
+
+"Scholar, young feller," he said, "Scholar, young feller--listen to
+what I'd be tellin' ye.  When ye see fellers come in, and when ye hear
+them say they're sorry they signed on the ship watch your pockuts.
+They haven't signed on at all.  They've only come aboard to see what
+they can steal."
+
+"Is Montreal Mike--is Montreal Mike there?" called a voice from above.
+
+"It's me ould friend," said Mike, swung to the floor, swayed out.
+
+"Come and have some more, Mike," said the voice above.  "She won't sail
+till four."
+
+"Come ashore!" called Mike to Scholar.
+
+"No, thanks."
+
+"All right, then--watch your pockuts and keep an eye on my bunk.  I
+haven't reserved it.  Tell thim it's Montreal Mike's, and he'll burst
+any man he finds sitting on it."
+
+There was a hailing on deck, a phrase repeated; it drew nearer, came
+down the stairs, a chorus of: "Not sailing till four!" and a general
+exodus from the cabin.  Scholar stretched out upon his bunk--and
+repented him that he had invited Mike and the others ashore, starting
+them upon their jamboree.  Nor could he ease himself by thinking that
+if he had not done so someone else would; not even the thought that
+sooner or later they would have gone ashore of their own accord,
+finding that the others had left work, soothed him.  The place rang
+like the inside of a drum as the departing feet clattered over the
+deck.  The volume of sound died, the hammer of heels was intermittent.
+More men, or youths, such as Mike had warned him of, came down into the
+cabin and roved, searching, round it.  Suddenly a man in one of the
+mid-deck bunks--a top bunk--sat up and wailed: "Ma valise--gone--pooh!"
+The half-dozen remaining sleepers awoke, sat up and asked him what he
+was jabbering about.  He waved his arms in a forward gesture,
+signifying disappearance, flight.
+
+"Ma valise--gone!" he repeated.
+
+"He had a valise!  Gee!  Here's a feller had a valise!"
+
+"Well, didn't yer never see a feller with a valise before?"
+
+They rose and crowded round the bunk of the distracted Frenchman.
+
+"When did yer miss it, Pierre?" asked one.
+
+"Valise--gone!" said the Frenchman.
+
+"_When_ did you miss it?  Long ago?"
+
+"Valise--gone!  Pooh!"
+
+"'E can't talk English!  Let me try," said Cockney.  "Wen your valise
+gone, heh?  Long time--you sleep?  Wen you miss, heh?  Wen your valise
+pooh?" and Cockney very seriously imitated the gesture that signified
+disappearance.
+
+The Frenchman sat up and stared at him; the other well-meaning
+drunkards clustered round, waiting the reply to Cockney's question.
+
+"Gee!  Can't anybody talk his lingo?  Where's that feller Jack--Boston
+Jack?  He can talk it."
+
+"Liverpool Jack you mean--a long, thin feller.  Walks like this."  The
+speaker drew up his jacket behind so that it wrinkled round his waist,
+and canted back his shoulders.
+
+"That's 'im.  He can quelle-heure-est-il all right."
+
+It struck Scholar that the Frenchman's English might be none so bad.
+
+"Have you been asleep?" he asked.
+
+The Frenchman looked at him with something of astonishment.
+
+"Yes, I sleep," he replied.  "Some time, I know not how long."  He put
+his hand to his watch pocket, then sat bolt upright again.  "My watch!"
+he screamed.  "My watch gone!  Pooh!" and he waved his hands.
+
+Cockney was now hanging stupidly round one of the stanchions at the
+foot of the Frenchman's bunk, looking on as might a drunk doctor at a
+patient.
+
+"Your watch pooh?" he said.  "O, isn't that a 'ell of a shame!  I once
+'ad a watch meself."  He slipped down the stanchion as though it were a
+greasy pole, so far as the top bunk would allow him, and laying his
+forehead on the back of his hand made a sound as of anguish.  The
+Frenchman's eyes were upon him, staring; he looked at Scholar; he
+pointed a finger at Cockney's bowed head.
+
+"Dronk?  Eh?" he said.  But he was not really thinking about Cockney's
+state.  "What I do?" he asked of the rivet-studded ceiling, and
+answered himself: "Nozing!"
+
+"Was there anything important in your valise?" asked Scholar.
+
+"Important?  Suit of clothes, for go home."
+
+One of the men clapped his shoulder.
+
+"Never mind, Pierre," he said.  "Never mind.  You've a shoot of clothes
+on.  What's the matter with them?  They're all right!"
+
+Pierre just glanced at this man, and went on to Scholar:
+"Lettairs--from my vife."
+
+Cockney had recovered sufficiently by this to raise his head and
+explain to the others, as if translating: "That's his wife!  'E's got a
+wife!  Too bad."
+
+"Militar' papers," said the Frenchman.
+
+"You come ashore with me," advised Scholar.
+
+"Ashore?"
+
+"Yes, we'll go to the police office."
+
+"Police--eh?  Non, non!  Not leesten.  'Valise gone!' they say.  'You
+go with cattle?  No matter!'"
+
+It struck Scholar that there was much truth in this.  One of the men
+seemed to see it otherwise.
+
+"You go with this fellow, Pierre," he said.  "You go police with this
+fellow.  He talkee alla same upper ten.  You savvey?  You savvey toff
+in disguise?"
+
+"Toff?  Oh, me elbow!" shouted somebody, which seemed an insulting
+phrase in the society in which they moved.  There was an offer, on
+Scholar's behalf, to paste a face because of it, an acceptance, a
+scrimmage.  "Don't!  Don't!  Don't!" cried Scholar, and they stopped,
+drew apart.
+
+"We'll go ashore," he said again to the Frenchman.
+
+"No, no matter.  They say," and Pierre waved a hand at the recent
+fighters and the watchers of the fighters, "even if they leesten--'No
+good; bottom of the dock!'  Hay?  No matter!" and he lay back again.
+
+There was a slight movement of the ship that caused the "Push"--those
+that were left of it--to stagger.  Somebody outside said: "We're off!
+Is the push aboard?  Where's Jack?  Where's Johnnie?  Where's Mike?"
+
+"Mike, is it?" answered a voice.  "Here he is.  Who is the man that has
+a valise?" and he appeared in the doorway with a cut across his
+forehead from the hair to the temple.  He was carrying a small
+suit-case.
+
+"Glory!" shouted Cockney.  '"Ere's yer old valise, Pierre!"
+
+"Ma valise!"
+
+"Is it yours?  Well, if ye had been an Englishman, or a Scotsman, or an
+Irishman, or a Bostoner, I would have had to hit ye for havin' a
+valise, but seein' ye're a Frenchman and all alone like, here's your
+ruddy trunk!" and he laid it upon the bunk.
+
+"Your head's bleedin', Mike," said one of the men.
+
+"Is it me head?" asked Mike.  "So is me fist.  I met the spalpeen
+runnin' down the gangway when I'm runnin' up.  'Where ye goin' wid the
+trunk?' I says, and he swings it up and hits me over the head wid it,
+and I knocks his teeth out for him.  Whin ye see luggage goin' off a
+ship after the Blue Peter's up, its a good rule ivery toime to grapple
+wid the man that's carrying it."
+
+There was a rattle of heels again overhead, a fresh outcry; sounds of
+another scrimmage came down to them.  For a moment it seemed Mike heard
+a call to battle; then he remembered his dignity.
+
+"D'ye hear them?" he said.  "D'ye hear them?  A scrappin', disorderly
+crowd!"
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+Many of the men fell asleep, Scholar among them, exhausted by the
+strain of the day and evening.  He dreamt that he was back again in a
+bunkhouse of Michigan, and came half-awake, thinking that the forest
+was afire, then realised where he was, in this Bedlam, and was
+crucified upon regret.  If only he had not made that offer to stand
+treat!  He moaned; it was an anguish to him, for he had not lived even
+his brief years without knowing kindliness when he met it; and these
+fellows, whatever their vocabularies, their moral code, their falls
+from it, their capacity to live up to it, had treated him kindly.  He
+would like to begin all over again with them, to go back twelve hours
+in his life and theirs, and stroll towards them feeling the air again
+for the method of approach, outside the barrier at the end of The Saint
+Lawrence Shipping and Transport Company's shed.  Tortured, he fell
+asleep again, and the next he knew was the sound of voices.  Perhaps
+all had their dreams, or nightmares when that sound brought them from
+sleep proper into a state of half awake and half asleep.
+
+"Well, wot do yer want ter see 'im for, any'ow?"
+
+"He is here, is he?  I want to see him."
+
+"I say 'e's a-sleepin'!  Any man as wants to see Scholard 'as got ter
+tell me wot 'e wants ter see 'im for!"
+
+"It's none of your business--I want to see him.  Is he there?"
+
+"You tell me wot you want ter see 'im for, and I'll see if it's worth
+disturbin' 'im for.  I'm his bleedin' secretary, I am."
+
+Scholar came wide awake, and rose upon an elbow, to find a semi-circle
+of backs turned to him, Cockney's back among them; and Cockney's arm
+was reaching out and brushing those of his shipmates who stood near, or
+part brushing, part elbow-plucking, part signing to them in an
+endeavour to form them up between Scholar's bunk and a man in the
+doorway.  Up sat Scholar.  He had seen enough of ugly fighting during
+the last few hours to feel a yearning for a life, nay, an eternity, of
+peace; but he was in the pack, and he must not let Cockney take the
+chances of an encounter on his behalf.  As the man in the door--and he,
+too, had a backing of friends--advanced upon Cockney, Scholar sat up.
+He had the strong resolution to, as they say out West, "make good"
+here; and it was a resolution that advertised itself on his face as he
+rose and swung forward.
+
+"All right, Cockney!" he said.  "I'm awake."
+
+The forming segment of circle broke.  Cockney looked over his shoulder.
+
+"That's hall right.  You ain't one of hus.  I know 'ow ter deal wiv
+these fellers.  We're shipmites, ain't we?"
+
+"Do you want to speak to me?" said Scholar, looking keenly at the
+advancing tough.
+
+"Oh!  No!  They told me a man called Scollard was aboard.  I wanted to
+see a feller called Scollard!"  This in a grumbling voice.
+
+"O, yus!  This hain't the feller, eh?  No!  Am _hi_ any use?  Would you
+like to push _my_ face in, eh?"
+
+A voice above shouted: "Come on, mate, come on!  She's pushing off!"
+and the man who wanted to see Scollard hastened away, drawing off his
+forces in the doorway.
+
+"Thought we were off already!" said Cockney.
+
+"Thank you very much for that," said Scholar.  "Only a man must look
+after himself of course."
+
+"Yus, that's all right.  Good luck!  You ain't 'ust one of us; you
+don't know the ropes--not 'ere, any'ow.  Good luck, mate."
+
+He and those others who had power over their legs, climbed to the deck,
+Scholar accompanying them.  The former jogglings must have been merely
+due to the casting loose of one or two hawsers.  A ladder still
+stretched from ship to wharf.  "Come on, come on there.  Get ashore!"
+the bo'sun was shouting at its top.  "You fellers had no right aboard
+here anyhow."  The visitors hastened over the side and down the ladder,
+those of them who saw a policeman at the shed end (looking up with that
+frowning and sidewise consideration that suggests: "Now I don't know
+but what I should run you fellows in!  You look as if there might be a
+charge about you!") going down with anxious precipitancy.  The last
+reached the wharf.  Two men came up, climbed aboard--the pilot and a
+ship's officer.  The ladder was hauled away, the last hawser was cast
+loose, and with a tug ahead and a tug astern the _S.S.  Glory_ moved
+from the wharf sideways like a great iron wall drifting away from a
+great stone one.  The space of dirty water between, with pieces of
+straw, bits of wood, and such flotsam of the docks--a sodden apple or
+two, and a potato--rapidly widened.  The lights alongshore looked pale
+and insignificant as the dawn spread; those in the low-browed windows
+of the waterfront saloons that could be espied over the leaden-hued
+roofs had lost their glare.  Men below, those who could stand, feeling
+sure now that she was off, came on deck to double-shuffle and cluster
+on the poop, to cheer and scream, to wave their hands shorewards, as
+though they saw a multitude of friends there waving farewell, though
+really there were none.
+
+Before the cheering was over a little unpleasantness began between Mike
+and Michael.  In all societies, in all walks of life, there are certain
+statements that are considered insulting; but statements that in one
+stratum are considered insulting are, in another, looked upon as merely
+amusing; in yet another they are unheard, unknown, and so there is no
+opinion on them.  What should a passivist, in any walk of life, do when
+some neighbour of his paddock discharges at him the supreme term of
+contempt of that special paddock?  They who cheered the dock roofs
+turning grey in the morning, and the early stevedores, and the few late
+night-birds, had now something close at hand to attract their
+attention.  Michael and Mike, on the poop now, met for the first time
+since Mike, in the saloon ashore, had preferred the company of his two
+friends to that of the "Push."  And Michael, extremely fuddled, vaguely
+remembered that he had some grievance against Mike.  Mike leant against
+a rail that ran athwart the ship, dividing the stretch of upper deck
+from the stubby semi-circle of poop.  His hands were behind him,
+holding the rail as he leant against it.  He had had a short sleep
+since coming aboard, and his drunkenness was stale.  The ale within
+Michael, on the other hand, had not yet come to the height of its
+action.
+
+"What," he was asking Mike, "are you a-doing wearing a seaman's cap?"
+
+Mike turned his head from surveying the shed roofs, lightly glanced
+down at Michael, but did not fix him, turned his head the other way.
+
+"A seaman's cap, I say!" Michael repeated.
+
+Mike shook his head, as if a fly had landed on his face.
+
+"Eh?" said Michael.
+
+Mike looked down upon his stubby and sturdy compatriot as a Saint
+Bernard dog looks down on a snarling Pomeranian between its forepaws.
+
+"I _am_ a seaman," he replied at last.
+
+"You're a liar!" said Michael, which in that stratum of society is no
+more considered, even by those who are not passivists, as a call for
+the mailed fist than, in another, is "Pardon me--have you verified
+that?"
+
+"I'm tellin' ye," said Mike.
+
+"Let me see your discharges then," demanded Michael.
+
+Mike tossed his head with an air of "This man bores me," tossed it to
+right, and from left breast pocket drew forth a folded bundle of Board
+of Trade discharges, and held them up.
+
+"Huh!" grunted Michael.  "Cattleman."
+
+"Seaman I'm tellin' ye," Mike repeated.
+
+"What are you a-going over as a cattleman for, then?" asked Michael.
+
+"I'm tellin' ye I have some seaman discharges among theyse."
+
+"Well then, you're a cattleman!"
+
+"Yes, yes, quite so.  All right."
+
+"You're a cattleman."
+
+"Yes, yes.  Have it that way, thin."
+
+"You're a dam' cattleman."
+
+Mike stretched his head up as does one who wears a tall collar when the
+collar's edge annoys his neck.
+
+"Now, now," he said.  "Now, now!  You'll be after annoying me."
+
+"A dam' cattleman," reiterated Michael, "with one shirt!"
+
+"Quite so.  Have it your own way."
+
+"One shirt--a dirty shirt."
+
+Mike unloosened his right hand from the taffrail that it was again
+gripping, threw forward his left shoulder, and then, instead of
+hitting, he wrung his hands, held them high, rubbed the palms together
+in a kind of anguish, smashed the butt of his right hand into the palm
+of his left, and "Michael," he said, "you're drunk.  Ye'd better go
+below.  Have a sleep, have a sleep."
+
+"I'm not drunk!" cried Michael, and hit, smash upon Mike's breast.  And
+then out of the crowd leapt upon him--Cockney.
+
+"Is it a fight yer want?" asked Cockney.
+
+Neither was so drunk that he could not hit, feint, parry; the others
+circled.
+
+"Now, now," said Mike.  "See!  Pull them apart!"  But it was too late;
+they had grappled.
+
+Now people make laws, and they become the vogue; you are judged by
+them, willy-nilly.  If you cannot box, as boxing is taught in the
+gymnasium, and find yourself set upon by a boxer, you will be
+ostracised in some walks of life if you deliver him a kick in the
+shins; or, should he fall, if you knuckle his wind so that he may lie
+there long enough for you to beat your retreat from one skilled in the
+"science," you will be ostracised for that; you must box him according
+to the rules.  But in this walk of life, upon the poop of the _S.S.
+Glory_, it is a case of top dog anyhow.  Mr. Smithers, on the docks,
+newly arrived to see the ship clear, put teeth together, looking up,
+and made the hissing sound through his teeth that a stoic makes when
+operated on without an anaesthetic.  For as the two men reeled to the
+taffrail, and the onlookers there fell asunder to give them a full
+field, they were displayed to the one or two persons who looked up from
+the wharf front, displayed as on a high set stage, Michael with
+Cockney's head under his left arm, an attitude, by the way, permitted
+in some gymnasia, taboo in others--for there are "sets" there too.
+Michael was swinging a right in upon the top of Cockney's head, when
+suddenly he saw the taffrail and thought it would serve as well,
+shifted his hold, and with both hands drove Cockney's head, as if it
+were a turnip, against the middle rail.  It was this which caused the
+first hiss and spasm ashore.  It would have finished most men.  You
+could have laid a finger in the indentation that the rail made in
+Cockney's skull; but as he took the blow, refusing to be stunned, like
+a tough, wild beast, he screamed, and thrust a thumb upward into
+Michael's eye, even while Mike, Scholar, Pierre and the Inquisitive One
+were hauling them asunder.  Back went Cockney, flopped on the deck, and
+held head in hands.  There!  They were apart.  And suddenly, over the
+taffrail and down the curve of the ship to the tow rope that went to
+the tug astern, Michael made a kind of scramble and scuttle.
+
+[Illustration: There!  They were apart.]
+
+"Grab that man!" shouted Smithers from the dock.  "He'll fall on the
+screws!"
+
+Michael, upon all fours, had caught the tow rope and now swung himself
+down, shouting: "I've been shanghaied!  I won't sail on the _Glory_!"
+He spun slightly left and right, clutching the rope, so that those who
+craned under the bottom rail to try to grab him, and those who looked
+up from the wharf, had glimpse, time about, of his ghastly face, and
+the eyeball protruding like the yolk of an egg.  One man was now on his
+belly under the taffrail, stretching to grasp Michael, but he slithered
+slightly forward on the curve to the hull.
+
+"Somebody hold my legs!" he shouted.  It was Scholar.  The Inquisitive
+One promptly sat down upon his feet.  Mike had taken off his boots, and
+was saying, one leg swung over the rail: "Here, some of youse--hold my
+hand, will yez."
+
+"Look up!" came a voice.  It was the Man with the Hat.  He had made a
+slip-noose on the end of a rope.  It hissed down and up.  On shore
+Smithers was shouting to the people in the tug astern: "Keep that rope
+taut!" for the rope to which Michael hung was falling slack.  "He'll be
+down on the screws!"  But the noose was now round Michael's waist, and
+in their rejoicing the "Push" laid hold of the hither end of the rope
+that the Man with the Hat tossed amongst them, and with a "Yo-ho!" they
+put as much muscle into hauling the human being aboard as if he had
+been a stern anchor.
+
+"Easy, easy--for God's sake!" came a quiet voice to rear, a voice that
+compelled attention because of the very loudness of the others.  It was
+Candlass; and behind him was the captain's steward, who was a good deal
+more than a first aid man.  They secured Michael as he was dragged over
+the rail, and walked him forward along the narrow passage left between
+the sheep-pens that crowded the upper deck.
+
+"Bring that other man here," ordered Candlass over his shoulder.
+
+"I'm all right!" said Cockney, standing up.  He put up his hand to feel
+his head, and laid a finger into the impression of the taffrail.
+Everybody seemed a little more sober after that.  The docks receded.
+Montreal rose up behind them.  Sea gulls that had come into port with
+other ships cried one to another overhead, and came to their poising
+station above the stern of the _S.S. Glory_.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+Scholar need not indeed have worried, telling himself that he it was
+who started the pandemonium.  Those who had accompanied him were but a
+few, and sooner or later they would surely have marked the absence of
+the others and gone ashore to share their pleasures.  In the whole
+"Push" upon the _Glory_, as she churned slowly down the river, there
+was hardly a sober man.  And virulent, not ecstatic, are the nepenthes
+offered, to the men who go down to the sea in ships, along the
+waterfront by the people ashore.  Some were still in fighting key; many
+were in a condition that recalled to whosoever drew near them the adage
+to let sleeping dogs lie; many were in a kind of mad misery.  Perhaps a
+third showed wounds, as of battle, cuts and bruises.  The veering wind
+about the poop carried mostly swear-words, and these more obscene than
+blasphemous, to the captain and the pilot on the bridge.  The pilot
+paid no heed; the captain only looked now and then over his shoulder,
+like one thinking: "Yes, just as usual!" instead of: "That's rather
+bad."  He was held aloft upon the bridge as are spectators in the
+zoological gardens above the bear pits.
+
+The Man with the Hat, sober and solitary, reclined on a bale of hay to
+leeward of the smokestack on the upper deck--the sheep deck; its whole
+length was crowded with sheep in pens, only narrow passage-ways being
+left between the packed central pens and the narrow pens along the
+side--these latter being protected from overmuch wind by canvas
+dodgers.  Jack--he who spoke French--and Jack's partner sat laughing
+and talking alone, telling tales of adventurous lives one to the other,
+the glitter of those who look upon the wine while it is red still in
+their eyes, and as they sat nursing their knees, and colloguing, the
+wind plucked the frayed edges of their pants.  Jack pulled his hat down
+upon his head with a gesture in keeping with that manner of his as of a
+dandy in his sphere.  It is not to be imagined that he had "come down."
+Men do come down, of course.  He was just a hard case, not beyond
+helping himself to shoes from a shoe-shop door, not beyond looking upon
+a derelict suburbanite, crossing vacant lots to his home, with unsteady
+steps, late at night, as a fair prey, if Johnnie was with him.  In his
+walk of life such a way of replenishing the exchequer was considered no
+more inestimable that in another walk of life is a little sharp
+practice in business.  There they sat, laughing and chatting.
+
+Pierre had drawn apart, elbows on the rail, his shoulders suggesting
+that he would fain have them hide him from his fellows.  He looked at
+the shores spreading out, onward and onward, as the _Glory_ threshed
+along and the tugs left her--a shore that Nature, and the inhabitants,
+make to look much like certain parts of the real and original France.
+There were the poplar rows, the little belfrys, the little French
+villages.  If his knowledge of English prevented him from understanding
+all the obscene oaths behind him, so much the better for him and his
+dream of the Picardy home.
+
+As for the Inquisitive One--he was not, of course, only inquisitive,
+but was thus introduced to help to distinguish him from others in first
+telling of the "Push"--he shuffled round among the rest, hands in
+pockets, jerking left shoulder forward, jerking right shoulder forward,
+very young, very crass, trying to keep drunk by acting drunk.  If a
+policeman had stepped up to him he would have been sober on the
+instant.  He was always scared of policemen, unlike men like Jack, who
+were merely alert to them.  There were a great many others, many of
+whom need not be mentioned in detail, because as the voyage went on
+they were not considered so by Mike, and he was a man worth heeding in
+his own walk of life.  They were just "them" or "youse"; if referred to
+in the singular they were "him" or "you," with an indicative jerk of a
+thumb, or pointing of a finger.  They did not even rise to
+nicknames--shrimpy-looking lads who could pick pockets and knew the
+soup kitchens of all the Atlantic ports.
+
+The sounds of discord ebbed; and now more plaintive than irritable was
+the lowing of the cattle on the main and lower decks.  On the upper
+deck sheep gave voice here and yonder, though the majority were quiet.
+It was as if every now and again they thought it over and gave a little
+bleat of "Why?"  Scholar, stealing away from the diminishing group on
+the poop, easily, not to attract attention, went forward along the
+upper deck and looked at the faces of these woolly creatures with
+something like affection, as a man disgusted in the society in which he
+finds himself will welcome his dog, or a lonely woman the upturned face
+of a cat.
+
+The day wore on, the lowings increasing, the cursings decreasing.  The
+warm sun helped to stupefy farther the drink-stupefied.  They had now
+the appearance, most of them, that comes to those who have missed sleep
+through some long and harassing vigil.  Taunting smells of food wafted
+aft from the galley ventilator; but there was none for the cattlemen.
+They were left alone on the railed-off poop and in the cabin under it,
+as in a cage and a wild beast pit.  The Man with the Hat, lying on his
+chest, a straw in his mouth, near the smoke-stack, rolled over and
+pulled his belt up two holes and looked round casually, wondering when
+something was going to happen; and then there appeared, in the narrow
+path to starboard between the sheepcots, John Candlass, with his air of
+reserve; and behind him, lurching, Rafferty, axe in hand.
+
+There was a difference between these two cattle bosses; Candlass had
+come into the business--no one knows why but Candlass--and Rafferty had
+mounted in it, and, mounting, he had not discarded the ancient custom
+known as "tanking up" on the day that the ship clears the wharf.
+Nominally they were colleagues, but his clear eye and brain made
+Candlass actually the boss aboard and Rafferty, red-eyed and
+swollen-faced, was as lieutenant.  Smithers, of the Saint Lawrence
+Shipping and Transport Co., Ltd., wished they might meet more mysteries
+like Candlass, but such mysteries were scarce, or did not come their
+way.
+
+[Illustration: Asked of the evil smelling darkness below many insulting
+questions.]
+
+Candlass, coming to the poop, poked his head down the companion-way and
+said sharply: "All cattlemen on deck!"  Then he stood back.  He seemed
+to pay hardly any heed to whether they came promptly or leisurely.  To
+Rafferty's mind they did not come quickly enough, so he leapt to the
+companion-way and asked of the evil-smelling darkness below many
+insulting questions.  His vocabulary put to the blush the vocabularies
+of all the others.  Candlass glanced sideways at him, and, stepping a
+little more close, in a low voice, that caused Rafferty to come near to
+hear what was said, engaged him in conversation.  Rafferty, drunk or
+sober, was rather proud of his job; he had climbed to the top, as may
+the reporter to be editor, the bank clerk to be manager, the stable
+mucker to be ranch foreman.  But Candlass was a celebrated boss, and it
+was an honour for any other boss to chat with him, or to sail with him.
+Even Rafferty drunk did not forget that, and Rafferty only three sheets
+in the wind, as he was at present, was none averse to letting the men
+come up as they would, when all could see the terms he was on with
+Candlass.  Not that his ways were Candlass's ways; he esteemed
+Candlass's control, but would not imitate--indeed could not.  There was
+always some intimidating weapon in Rafferty's hand; but Candlass's
+hands generally lay negligently one within the other behind his back.
+One may suspect that he felt a slight pity for Rafferty rather than
+contempt, and would have been sorry to see him do a murder in his cups;
+looked upon him somewhat as Scholar, coming aft now from the
+sheep-cotes amidships, looked upon the large, dishevelled Mike who
+emerged on to the deck, scoop-cap awry on his ruffled hair, eyes
+puckered to the sunlight after the dusk of the cabin, licking dry lips,
+working dry tongue, disgustedly grunting "Ach!" over his condition and
+his stale feeling--referred to by callous topers as "the morning
+after."  Candlass produced a coin and handed it, perhaps by some
+convention of courtesy, to Rafferty; Rafferty rejected it with a "Go
+ahead!" and Candlass tossed.
+
+"Heads!" cried Rafferty.
+
+It came down tails.  Candlass pointed to Mike, and Mike made four steps
+of it, with a touch of swagger, to one side.  Rafferty pointed to
+Cockney, who staggered to the other side.  Candlass said, very quietly:
+"All right.  You can pick your own men now!" for these were "straw
+bosses"--Mike under Candlass, Cockney under Rafferty.  Neither Cockney
+nor Mike had a coin left, so Cockney stooped and picked up a splinter
+of wood, and, laying it between his two palms, held them forth.
+
+"Sharp--blunt!" said Mike, tapping first the fingers then the wrist of
+the covering hand, which Cockney then lifted.  The pointed end of the
+splinter was toward the fingers, the blunt toward the wrist.  Mike
+looked at Scholar, but at that moment there arrived, from his patching
+and his sleep amidships under the steward's care, Michael, one eye
+under a blind, the other riveting an imploring gaze upon Mike.
+
+"Come over, Michael," said Mike, in a tone of resignation.
+
+"I'll have----" snapped Cockney, and out shot his hand and he pointed
+to Scholar.
+
+"No, you won't!" roared Mike.
+
+"It's his pick!" shouted Rafferty
+
+"I don't give a curse," said Mike.  "I'll----"
+
+"You'll do _wot_?" Cockney interrupted.
+
+"Can't do it, Mike," said Candlass quietly, "it's his pick."
+
+"I'm after doin' this," persisted Mike doggedly, "for everybody's sake.
+I want Scholar meself, but I'm takin' Michael from him, for they've
+sane enough of each other.  He can pick somebody else for Michael, if
+he's half a man, and then I'll begin afresh with Scholar.  Come over
+here, me lad; ye're picked."
+
+"Oh, hall right!" said Cockney, "There's somethink in that."
+
+Rafferty, with an evil oath, demanded Scholar, and Cockney, for a
+moment, had the air of veering round again, then he grinned and was
+silent.  Candlass said something that nobody caught.
+
+"Oh, all right--go ahead!" growled Rafferty.  "Let Mike have him, and
+you take that fellow there with the hat--and that thin fellow with the
+impudent eyes."  This was Jack, who could quelle-heure-est-il.
+
+Mike then picked another; Cockney looked round, and Jack's partner, of
+his own accord, stepped over beside Jack.
+
+"What t'ell?  O, hall right!" said Cockney.
+
+Things went fairly smoothly thereafter, till it came to the last shamed
+few--at least most of them seemed shamed; only a small number appeared
+to look upon the lack of desire for them with unmixed levity.
+Apparently the sign-on had been an even one; two men were left.  It was
+Mike's choice.  Suddenly an odd cough drew everybody's attention; and
+there, foolish behind them, was the youth in the long coat, the
+spectacles, and the leggings.  Mike stared at him.
+
+"Oh, be jabbers!  Come here, me lad!" he said.  Some laughed; others
+said: "What the hell are you laughin' at the poor feller for?"  Mike
+stepped forward and put a hand on Four Eyes' shoulder, and an arm out
+behind the two remaining pick-pockets who stood together, and herded
+them, all three, like a man driving pigs, herded them across to
+Cockney's side.  Cockney's receding under jaw hung down, his eyes
+goggled under the bandage he had tied over his forehead, covering the
+mark of the taffrail.
+
+"I give ye a prisent of them," said Mike.  "The three of 'em."  Some of
+his underlings grumbled.  He looked slowly round at them.  "Whaat?" he
+asked.  "Would ye not prefer to be short-handed than disgraced?"
+
+"That's hall right!" cried Cockney.  "Any ole thing fer me!"
+
+So that was all quite satisfactory.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+The two bosses looked at their men, observing how some stood erect, if
+bleary, but how others swayed and propped themselves against taffrail
+or neighbour.
+
+"I think," said Candlass, "if you have the bigger bunch, Rafferty, that
+I've the pull on you for the sober ones."
+
+"Oh, indeed," answered Rafferty.  "They'll be sober and sorry before we
+strike Liverpool."  Some of the men flinched, and some showed their
+teeth in wry smiles; one or two, men of the order of Jack, stuck hand
+in jacket pocket easily, cast their heads back, and smiled secret
+smiles at the river.
+
+"Those of you that are sober," said Candlass to his gang, "come
+forward."  And he walked away.  He was taken at his word; not all
+followed.  Half-way along the deck he turned and glanced meditatively
+at those who elected to call themselves drunk, and as he glanced at
+that little party thus it became aware of him, and was troubled, and
+one or two more disentangled themselves and followed him.  There was a
+slight puckering upward of his under lip as he considered each of
+these, and to each he delivered a brief nod, and they knew they were
+marked men.  Rafferty had other ways of doing it.
+
+"Drunk and sober," he said, "get forward!" and shepherded them before
+him, along the passage-way between the sheep-pens on the other side.
+One man turned and looked at him insolently; and Rafferty, elbowing
+ahead, plucked his sleeve, and leaning forward, whispered in his ear,
+then thrust him along the deck violently.
+
+"What did he say to you?" asked another.
+
+"I'll tell you what I said to him," said Rafferty, "and to you," he
+added as if biting the words.  And stepping up close he muttered
+something with a virulent expression.  The men crowded forward,
+growling.
+
+"What did he say?" they asked.
+
+One of them--he who was the subject of Rafferty's second whispered
+advice--explained: "He said: 'I'll not give you a chanst to make any
+reports, if that's in your mind.  I'll get ye alone between decks, and
+you'll be having an accident.  Somebody will find ye had a severe
+fall.'"
+
+"Come hon!" cried Cockney, for the men delayed again.  "Come hon!"
+
+"Who do you think you are?" said the man whose eye Cockney caught as he
+spoke.
+
+Cockney, a mere "straw boss," had no scruples.  He leapt at the man,
+both hands at his neck tight, crashed him to the deck and knelt
+violently in his stomach.
+
+"Talkin' ter _me_!" he said, coming erect, and the gang moved forward,
+while he who had fallen sat up, gasping for breath.
+
+"Shake a leg!" ordered Rafferty, behind, and the last men, at sound of
+that voice, hastened forward, then delayed again, made a jam.  It was
+Jack and Jack's partner who were the cause of that; and it was
+intentional on their part.  Rafferty's eye sighted an end of wire rope.
+He lifted it and whirled it down upon the back of the last man.
+
+"He hit me!" yelled the man.
+
+"Get on!" said Rafferty.
+
+A man ahead pushed Jack's partner.
+
+"Gettin' me blimed fer this," he said.  "It's you."
+
+"Oh, you coward!" sneered Johnnie.
+
+"Me?"  And the man who had been called "coward" smashed his fist into
+Johnnie's face.  A fierce fight followed; they reeled to and fro,
+falling this way and that about the sheep-pens.  This was a different
+matter for Rafferty.  He charged upon both.
+
+"Come siperate!" he shouted, but they did not come separate.  With the
+wire rope he flailed them till one relaxed and fell over, moaning,
+among the sheep.  Johnnie turned, belligerent still, but crash on his
+knuckles came the wire rope, and he was disabled.  And on went all
+again, sullen, and some in pain.  Candlass's gang had already
+disappeared forward and gone down to the main deck.
+
+"Can you work a donkey-engine?" said Candlass to Scholar.
+
+"I might manage," answered Scholar.  "Looks fairly simple, if you show
+me how.  Hate machinery, all the same."  He smiled.
+
+The Man in the Hat looked at both so expressionless that Scholar took
+the lack of expression to signify contempt.
+
+"You?" asked Candlass, elevating his brows.
+
+"I guess," said the Man with the Hat, and strolled over to the engine.
+
+"All right, Mike.  Get busy there--get up that hay."
+
+Rafferty's yelling gang came down to the main deck, and passed on, with
+more friction on the way, to the lower deck.  Candlass watched it, head
+on side, watched it meditatively as it progressed a few yards at a
+time; had the faintest little snort and a pucker of the corner of his
+lips, as some particularly insolent one received the wire rope, for
+Rafferty had now cast aside all technical scruples.  Cockney was in his
+element.  Jack swung along, his handsome and evil face sneering--a
+sneer that Cockney averted his eyes from quickly each time that he
+encountered it as he played lieutenant to Rafferty.  They descended
+somehow or other into the hold, going down like frogs.  Some seemed to
+be kicked over.  Jack's partner, Johnnie, went down the ladder with one
+hand thrust in his jacket as in a sling.  He turned at the ladder and
+looked at Cockney, who stood there to see all below, went over very
+self-collectedly, raising his head at Cockney and then at Rafferty,
+something like a duck after spooning water.  Candlass's gang above,
+looking over, opined each to each that there was going to be a hot time
+in that half of the "Push."  They were already, though they knew it
+not, under the influence of their mysterious boss.  Even their voices
+were more subdued.
+
+"O!" said Cockney, suddenly.  This was to the man in the long coat.  He
+stood aside to let him go down with plenty of space to manage his
+coat-tails and the buckles of his leggings.  Even Rafferty slackened
+his grip on the wire rope, put a steadying hand on the top of the
+ladder, and watched the descent with an "Aisy, me lad!" as if me lad
+was a valuable cow.
+
+There was a hiss of steam, a rattle of cogged wheels; and two hooks at
+the end of a chain swung down.  "Out below!" went the cry above.
+Somebody below yelled up: "All right!  I'll paste you later when I see
+you!"--"Get on with your work!" roared Rafferty.  "I see you sitting
+there on them bales underneath.  Roll them out."  Up came the bales,
+and down anon swung the hooks; up again came the bales.  Once the hooks
+slipped, the bales fell, one nearly on a man.  At that Candlass
+disappeared from the main deck, reappeared presently on the lower deck,
+went over the hatch-side half-way down the ladder, and stood there
+looking at the gang below.  Rafferty made no objection.  "A dirty,
+drunken crowd," was all he volunteered.  "It would sober some of them
+to have a bale on their head."  Candlass climbed up again after
+exerting his influence by merely being there, and flicking his hands
+together as he came to the deck, remarked: "They'll all be sober before
+long, and no excuse."  This saying was passed round from one to
+another.  It suggested, as those who knew Candlass of yore agreed, that
+Candlass had his own point of view, and that only upon a man who had
+full use of his faculties would he be utterly severe in case of
+wrong-doing.  Those whom he had "marked down" felt troubled in their
+hearts, as do discovered truants whose names have been handed in to the
+Head.
+
+"Let me have an axe up," said Candlass presently, on the main deck
+again, looking down at Rafferty.  Rafferty glared round for his axe,
+forgetting where he had put it, found it, and Candlass, turning to his
+men, gave a jerk of his head to one of the marked youths, and pointed
+down at the axe.
+
+"Do you mean that I've got to go down for it?" asked the young man.
+
+Candlass's lips tightened for all reply, and he seemed to read the
+man's eye.  The man hastened away to the deck below, and when he
+returned with the axe Candlass looked at him again thoughtfully, then
+pointed to the bales strewn on the deck.
+
+"Do you mean----" began the man, and his face was insolent.
+
+Candlass pointed to the bales again, and the man walked over to them
+and began to smite upon the wires, which sprang apart.
+
+"Here, the rest of you," said Candlass sharply, "just hustle that hay
+all along the alleyways."
+
+"Is that enough hay on your deck, Candlass?" came Rafferty's voice.
+
+"That will do," Candlass replied, and then quietly, at least
+comparatively speaking, and certainly expeditiously, to and fro on the
+main deck went Candlass's men, carrying the hay.  They even began to be
+jolly at their work, throwing the fodder each to each, and the great
+horned beasts strained their necks and lowed, horns meeting horns
+across the alleyways.  The men had to arm themselves with sticks to
+beat back the heads, for the armfuls that were carried to the extreme
+ends were sorely diminished by snatchings on the way.  Candlass
+remained by the hatch, signing with a hand when to hoist, when to
+steady, when to let go, for the Man with the Hat worked on at the
+engine, bringing up bales to Rafferty's deck.
+
+There was a sense of famine in the crew by the time all this work was
+done.  The cattle were fed, but not they.  The drink was out of them
+and there was no food in them, and they went aft to their safe of a
+cabin and picked, snarlingly, the men who were to go for meat and bread
+to the galley and the baker.  They crowded, still snarling, round the
+tub containing the tin plates, forks and spoons, and when the food
+arrived they swooped round it, all talking and yelling.  Mike's voice
+boomed high.
+
+"Yis, youse all sober up for your chewings, but youse can't sober up
+fer work, some of yez."
+
+"That's so," came Cockney's chirruping shriek.  "Them that wasn't
+workin' jest now shouldn't git anythink ter eat."
+
+Obscene comments on the food were voiced.
+
+"Oh, kickin', kickin'!" said Mike.  "You deserve to be given just the
+Board of Trade Allowance, the way youse are kickin'!  Are youse aware
+that there's more rations there than the Board of Trade grants ye?"  He
+turned to explain to Michael, friendly: "Them fellers whose mothers was
+rakin' in the ash bucket for a crust would be kickin' if they sat down
+to ate this day with the captain."
+
+"_He_ gets enough," growled a flat-browed fellow.  Mike turned his head
+slowly and sized up that speaker.
+
+"Well," said he, "I suppose the captain didn't spind his life lying on
+his back in the parks!"  He paused, and nodded his head, to let that
+soak in, before he added: "So as to get his freezin' job up on the
+bridge.  Do ye begrudge him his pie, damn ye?"
+
+"Pie!  Oh pie!" cried one, and there began a great talk about
+"hand-outs," and "sit-downs," and "throwing the feet,"--slang of
+American trampdom.
+
+"Well!" said Mike, hearing all that jargon.  "I thought it was
+cattlemen we was.  We seem to be a bunch of hoboes, back-door
+beggars----"
+
+"Front-door!" shouted a sharp, pale-faced little youth.  "I always go
+to the front-door.  If it's an old woman what opens I always asks her
+if she would ask her mother to give something."
+
+Mike glanced at him with the appearance of one who is sick.  Michael,
+cheered up afresh by Mike's recent friendly acknowledgment of his
+presence, shouted to a man who had flung his empty plate at a rat that
+ran on one of the pipes: "What are you doing that for?  Let the rats
+alone."
+
+"What for?"
+
+The general conversation subsided so that they might listen to this one.
+
+"To keep them friendly.  You may throw your arm out of your bunk in
+your sleep, and if ye're always disturbing the rats they'll lay on to
+your hand then.  But if you pay no attention to them at any time
+they'll understand it was an accident."
+
+One or two laughed derisively, but they were quickly silenced by others
+who wagged knowing heads.  Michael, thus backed, proceeded to cite
+cases.
+
+"When I was on the steamship _A-Chiles_ the rats used to come up every
+meal time and form up behind us clean round the table."  There was a
+laugh.  "I'm tellin' ye!" said Michael.  "There's no use of me going
+further if ye don't believe the first of it."
+
+"What else, then?" asked the Inquisitive One.  But he was beneath
+Michael's notice, for Michael wore a blind on his eye and was proud of
+it by now.
+
+"What was the rest?" said Mike.
+
+"I was going to tell them," answered Michael, "but I suppose they won't
+believe me, that the table was short for the number of rats, and they
+formed up behind us----" he waved a hand behind him as if there were
+rats there now--"four deep."
+
+There was another laugh, but Mike did not join in.  He was staring into
+a corner, for something there had arrested his gaze.  He turned to
+those near him.  He thought he had got used to the freaks on board, but
+evidently not.
+
+"Can any of youse tell me," he asked quietly, "what's the German
+Emperor doing on board?"
+
+They looked round.  Over in the corner, with a heaped plate and two
+biscuits, gorging, was a man whose attire would have ousted him from
+any hotel in Regent Street or Broadway, but who was here a disgrace the
+other way round--shamelessly well done; a fat, cunning-looking man with
+lecherous eyes.  It was probably his moustache that deluded Mike, for
+it was a little bit reminiscent, perhaps, of that other celebrated one,
+so handy for caricaturists.
+
+"It's the night watchman--the night watchman," explained the
+Inquisitive One, who perhaps had seen him before and instituted
+inquiries.
+
+"Bejabbers," said Mike, and putting down his empty cup and empty plate,
+he led an adjournment on deck.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+There was a tensity in the "Push" that night, a sense of expectancy and
+foreboding, according to how they were constituted who felt it.  There
+were minor squabbles.  The lower deck gang had several to settle, and
+they never seemed to be settled.  There was some slight friction in
+Candlass's gang also over the fact that, thanks to the whim of their
+straw-boss, they numbered three men less than the lower deck gang.  Two
+of these three that had been made a gift of to Cockney were present
+when the subject was discussed, and the rising storm over that matter
+made several wonder where the third was--the youth in the long coat.
+
+"Where's Four Eyes?" someone asked.
+
+"Oh, to hell!" said several, which being interpreted means that they
+thought he was not worth worrying over.
+
+Mike put his head on one side wondering, trying to remember if Four
+Eyes had been present in the crowd wrangling for food, but he could not
+remember, so he dismissed the subject.  He was glad the fellow was out
+of his sight anyhow, and not in his gang.  And as for defending himself
+in his action, which they now discussed, though he opened his mouth
+once or twice to do so, he desisted on each occasion.  "Let them
+wrangle," his expression seemed to say.  Charles, to give the
+Inquisitive One his name, was agitated; he had set this discussion
+agoing, and Mike's silence he began to feel as ominous.  Mike was well
+aware that he had started the "grouse" about being three men short, and
+in an attempt to allay his forebodings, Charles now drew forth his
+mouth organ, and began to play.  Some of the younger fry danced.  One
+or two, who were mouth-organ experts, cocked their ears.  They thought
+they could play every whit as well as the Inquisitive One.  His
+rapid-fire eyes perceived this, and when he finished one tune, and
+these young men made a grab for the instrument, he leapt back snarling.
+There were shrieks of "Damn your eyes!" and "Half a mo'!" and "Give me
+a chance!" and "To hell with you!"
+
+"Give us a lend of it then!"
+
+"Half a mo'!" shrieked Charles, and broke into another tune, holding
+the mouth organ between the flattened palms of his hands, and putting a
+tremolo into the music by the adroit movement of them.  The other
+would-be players drew back, sat down on their bunks.  One of them, when
+the dancers added shouts to their dancing, growled: "A little less
+yelling like that.  Let us hear the music."
+
+"Who are you talking to?" said another, who had interspersed his dance
+with many whoops.  It was a mistake, for the man who had ordered
+silence was that devilish, depravedly handsome, dandiacal person called
+Jack.  He rubbed his nose with the back of his hand and rose.  There
+was an expression at his mouth as of boredom.  The youth who had
+"lipped" him dived out of the cabin.  Jack strolled after him.  One or
+two gave ear, listening for what sounds from outside might come through
+the music within.  They made up their minds that nothing had happened,
+when suddenly there came throttling cries, and they listened anew,
+listened briefly, and then said: "Oh, to hell!"  Jack strolled back
+again and looked at the two young men who had shown themselves as
+especial friends of the man he had been chastising out there in his own
+way.  It was a brief but meaningful glance he gave to them; neither had
+any response.  The music went on, with a few interludes after that
+fashion.
+
+"Yes, very nice," said Mike eventually, gloomily.  "Now we're going to
+sleep.  There's a few of youse fellows is going to have a happy day
+to-morrow."
+
+Some fell silent; others said: "Oh, we'll let them see!"  It was
+growing cold on deck, and one by one the men who had been above came
+down into the stuffy cabin.  The fellow who had "lipped" Jack crept in
+and retired to his bunk.  Mike, backed by Michael and others,
+belligerently ordered the crew to strip.  Several had already done so.
+They were not too cold; the place was reekingly hot, and for all the
+tendency of their oaths to be based upon naked matters, nakedness
+brought forth no giggling comments.  The stripped men reclined in all
+manners of attitudes, carrying on conversations, rising on an elbow to
+gesticulate, hanging a leg over a bunkside in excitement--but there was
+none of that, no giggling at each other's nakedness.  Now and then
+Scholar was inclined to smile, but it was a wholly humorous smile; he
+was thinking of what the people in the walk of life he came from would
+think if they were present.  He was picturing his father reclining on
+the ottoman at home, rising up on an elbow as he discussed politics or
+taxation with other friends similarly at ease.  Several grimly refused
+to strip.
+
+"Oh, very well," said Mike.  "Only I'm telling ye ye'll be lousy before
+we reach Liverpool, wearing yer pants day and night."
+
+Jack and Johnnie whispered together, and then went up on deck with the
+air of young men going out on a "tear" for the evening.  They were off
+to see if they could amuse themselves by discovering the lairs among
+the hay of one or two who had not come down to the cabin, to tickle the
+ears of these men with blades of hay, or to pelt them with sheep dung,
+or to interview their pockets, according to what seemed feasible.  One
+or two others slipped away anon, but did not go on deck, and presently
+they returned tittering, vaulted into their bunks, and stretched out.
+There was quiet for a little while, save for the lowing of the cattle
+and the everlasting churn and beat of the propeller pulsing underfoot.
+Then came Rafferty's voice from the distance asking somebody, in the
+name of Saints and Devils, if he could not tie them up himself.  The
+answer was inaudible, even to those who were wide awake, but Rafferty's
+voice came again:
+
+"All of them?  A lot of them!  I'll come and see."
+
+A titter again exploded from a bunk, a whispered "Shut up!" came from
+another.  In plunged Rafferty, wire rope in hand, and roaring: "Tumble
+up, the lower deck"!  Some of the men woke, thinking it was morning.
+
+"Come on, you fellows!" Rafferty said, and they followed him.  Mike
+wakened.
+
+"I just tell you fellows right now," he said, "you can confine your
+letting loose of the steers in the darkness of the night to your own
+deck, or there'll be some slaughtering done.  Mind!  Now when I say a
+thing I mane it!"
+
+The pacific men of the main deck thought to themselves: "Oh, Lord!
+There'll be a free fight with all that lower deck crowd."  The men who
+had sleepily and subconsciously followed Rafferty came back presently;
+two divisions of the steers, they reported, had been loosened and were
+milling.
+
+"Huh!" said Mike.  "A nice night watchman that!" and rolled over.
+
+Jack and Johnnie, after the others were asleep, stole back again,
+muttering something about "divvy in the morning."  The morning came
+with awful celerity.  "Tumble up, you sons of----!" and there was
+Rafferty in the doorway, wire rope in hand, going from bunk to bunk
+roaring, and coming down whack on the sleepers.  One man sat up and
+pointed at him before he drew near.
+
+"Now look out, Rafferty!" he warned.  "I'm not on your deck.  If you
+touch me I'll have it into you one way or another."
+
+Rafferty glared at him, realised that the man was not on his deck, and
+passed on.  But all were awake now.  Scholar, hauling on his clothes,
+thought to himself: "Now we are going to have an exhibition of
+discipline at sea!"  Then suddenly, in a top bunk amidships, up sat one
+of the pickpocket-faced youngsters, one of those referred to, in a
+bunch, as "youse" by Mike.  And he piped up: "Call me in another hour,
+Rafferty, and fetch me me shavin' water."
+
+Rafferty rushed at him, but the skimpy youth slipped to the deck on the
+far side.  The boss pursued, and amid cheers and whoops they ran, like
+boys at tag, round and round the bunks.  They grew winded.  The
+pickpocket-faced kid paused, made feints of coming this way that way,
+and Rafferty, suddenly, abruptly, fled from the cabin.
+
+"Better get out now, you," somebody said to the youngster, but he
+delayed, uncertain; and as he delayed there, gaining his breath,
+Rafferty returned with a pitchfork and charged upon him.  A man in a
+lower bunk thrust out his leg, and Rafferty cannoned over it, dropping
+the pitchfork; but the wire rope was to hand.  It fell from his pocket
+where he had thrust it on arming himself with the sharper weapon, and
+he grabbed it and scrambling up whirled back to the bunk of the man who
+had tripped him, and down came the wire rope again and again.
+
+"Eh?" came a sharp voice, exploding in the doorway, and there was
+Candlass, white and very grim.  "Main deck men, tumble up!" he ordered.
+Behind him was a middle-sized, square man with a pepsin jaw, slightly
+bent forward, left foot a little in advance of the right, clenched
+fists almost touching over his midriff.  Candlass became aware of him.
+"That's all right," he said over his shoulder, in an easy tone, and the
+pugilistic person, who bunked in Candlass's cabin, and who was on board
+to bring over a dozen stallions penned amidships near the galley,
+turned away.  The main deck crowd filed out, Mike delaying to watch
+them go, like a sergeant in command.
+
+"You go ahead then," said Candlass to him.  "I'll be after you
+presently."
+
+Rafferty had his man down still, out of the bunk, on the floor--not the
+kid who had set the trouble going, but the man who had tripped the Mad
+Boss up.  They were fighting for possession of the wire rope, grappling
+each other's throats, and it; but at last Rafferty gave up his hold
+upon the rope.  Candlass, motionless, kept an eye upon those who seemed
+to be drawing on their boots with purpose.  Several of the lower deck
+men thought it safer to go forward than to wait and see the finish
+here.  They began to file out, past Candlass, who let them go, eyeing
+each carefully, and then glancing back at the bout in progress on the
+floor.  Suddenly his hand shot out and he grabbed the throat of one
+passing him, instinct telling him that this thin and evil-faced young
+man was in too great haste.  Rafferty rose then, commented: "That will
+keep you thoughtful for a day or two!" and spun round looking for the
+originator of this trouble.
+
+"Where's that----" he began.  "Oh, that's all right, Candlass; I want
+to see him.  Get out, the rest of ye."
+
+"Don't go!" shrieked the youth.
+
+"Get a move on, you fellows," said Candlass.  "Shake a leg lively out
+of that door."
+
+Johnnie looked at Jack; Jack went white.  He arranged his scarf.
+
+"Don't go, you fellers!" screamed the youngster that Candlass had now
+relaxed grip upon; he tried to plunge out of the door, but the boss of
+the main deck had planted himself in the entrance, hands on hips, and
+an elbow touched either side.
+
+"What are you going to do with him?" said Jack, and there was a slight
+thickness in his voice, and he canted back his head a little more than
+usual.  His shorter partner struck an attitude much like that adopted
+by William a few minutes ago, he who had charge of the stallions, when
+he thought Candlass might require assistance.
+
+"Eh?" snapped Rafferty.  He made a movement like one in a weird dance,
+whirling on his heel, advancing to the door, and he sent the youth who
+wanted his shaving water off his feet like a skittle well hit, sent him
+flying the breadth of the cabin, rushed after him, and as he was
+clutching a bunk stanchion to save a fall, flung his arms round him,
+bear-hugged him, flung him again, as Jack and Johnnie ran forward, not
+wholly certain what to do--flung him clear through the door, by the
+side of which Candlass stood.  There was a sound that indicated that
+the insolent youth's head had hit something hard out there.
+
+"Guess that will do," said Candlass.
+
+Jack and Johnnie, and the dazed man who had tripped Rafferty up, and
+one or two others who had not yet left, moved toward the door.  Those
+in the lead showed an impulse to pass the Mad Boss with a slight parody
+of a seaman's roll that might have been taken for insolence.  But
+before they came to where Candlass stood they changed their gait, all
+save Jack--but his gait was generally swaggering, and even he looked
+strained as he went out.  They passed through the door with a lowering
+of their heads, somewhat as many people go into church.  In the passage
+outside the perky one, blubbering, rose and shuffled forward with them.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+Next morning Scholar was wakened by someone shaking his arm.  It seemed
+that he had fallen asleep, worn out, in the midst of a babel, a mere
+second before the shake was given, and with a sense of distress he
+opened his eyes.  Candlass bent over him, and in a voice so kindly that
+there came a lump in the throat of the new-awakened Scholar, he said:
+"Tumble up, young fellow.  Four o'clock."
+
+"Thank you," said Scholar, and was aware of the note in his own voice,
+a note as of gratitude.
+
+Candlass, moving on, glanced back at him abruptly, and then went on
+again looking in bunk after bunk, top bunk, lower bunk, and wherever he
+saw, inert and blank, one of the men of the main deck squad he shook an
+elbow of the sleeper.  Hauling on his boots, sitting on the edge of his
+bunk, Scholar looked after him, arrested.  There could be no mistaking
+the expression of Candlass's face; it was with pity that he looked into
+these bunks.  He shook gently, and there were grunts.  He shook again,
+and there came a sigh, or an "Oh, hell!" and the eyes opened, and then
+Candlass, head bent, said: "Tumble up, Jack.  Four o'clock!" or "Tumble
+up, Liverpool!" or Sam, or Dublin, or whatever the name might be.  They
+woke in all sorts of ways.  Some woke abruptly, and clenched a hand,
+prepared for attack; some quailed back and put up a hand to parry;
+some--great hulking fellows with the faces that we are accustomed to
+call brutal--looked as if they felt as did Scholar.  Candlass, his task
+over, strolled quietly to the doorway, and his men did not keep him
+waiting long; they filed out and followed him in the dark tween-decks,
+where the lamps that hung here and there were beginning to swing, a
+slight roll being on the ship as she surged out of river into estuary.
+
+The everlasting hum and whirr of the shaft went on below.  Now and
+again one had to shorten a leg abruptly as she gave a roll.  There was
+a new freshness in the draughts of air that scurried between the decks,
+and many little sounds suggested the open sea--little creakings and
+chirpings of wood and steel; and outside, in the dark round her, there
+rose faintly and fell away, a sound as of blown tissue paper.  It was
+black above through the hatches, not yet blue.  No stars showed.  The
+atmosphere was fresh and full of little pin points of moisture.  A bell
+struck above, and a bell responded, beat for beat, forward, and from
+beyond again a high piping voice was heard to declaim (it came with a
+slightly blown sound): "All's well!"  She was forging out to sea.  Away
+aft there was a whoop and shriek of: "Tumble up you sons of----!"
+There followed yells, cat-calls, loud voices.  That incorrigible weasel
+was at it again.  He sat up in his bunk, when the lower deck boss
+arrived, and--"Call me in another hour, Rafferty," he said, "and bring
+me me shaving water."  He was less a cattleman than what is known in
+the begging fraternity of the States as a "gunsel."  Half-a-dozen of
+his kidney together will set upon a grown man in a dark lane.  Dislike
+of hitting a kid too hard clings to the man even in the midst of the
+tussle; but the kids have no qualms.  They hang on like rats.  It is
+almost impossible to tell their age.  They may be anything from the mid
+teens to twenty-five, and they remain for many years looking simply
+neither boy nor man--peek-faced, cunning, slippery.
+
+Rafferty slightly changed his tactics this morning.  He stood and
+looked at the youth.  He wagged his head at him.
+
+"My lad," he said, "what I'll do with you is to take you into my berth,
+over my knee."
+
+"No, you won't!" shouted the youth, and one or two others of the same
+breed added their voices to his, making a chorus.
+
+"Tumble up, tumble up, damn ye; it's four o'clock!" said Rafferty, and
+then to the gunsels in general: "If you was a full-sized man and gave
+me that lip I would paste your face!" and he glared round at the
+full-sized men.
+
+"Come on, come on!" said Cockney.
+
+"Yah!" jeered the first gunsel.
+
+Cockney gave that horrible jump that made his wide pants flap round his
+thin shanks.  He had always to take people by surprise, so as to have
+any chance at all.  Now he bowled the boy over with a flat blow on the
+cheek; and, not long since a gunsel himself, and very little patient
+with them, he leapt at the other two who were standing together waiting
+to see the fun, and crashed their foreheads together.  There seemed
+less sympathy with them this morning.  Harry, the crazy fellow, sat up
+with tousled hair and gibbered profanity at Rafferty, but Rafferty was
+nearly as crazy as he.
+
+"Well, you're a grown man!" said he.  "Take that!" and with a mighty
+quick action he flung his hand outside the cabin door, grabbed thence a
+pitchfork that he had left there on entering, and thrust at Harry with
+it.  Harry put up his hand to protect himself, and the prong jabbed.
+He rolled over to get out of his bunk upon the other side, being in one
+of those amidships.  The prong jabbed again--with a certain care this
+time, so that it was possibly not much worse than a pin-prick.  He
+jumped in the way that some pedestrians jump from mad motorists,
+catching himself behind, and the men gave little laughing grunts.
+
+"Come on, come on!" several growled, and the lower deck squad filed
+out, Cockney pushing his face close to the faces, one after the other,
+of the three weasely ones, who might be anything from sixteen to
+twenty-five.  They seemed to understand that, and went quietly forward.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+Mike had long since sobered, and was now getting better of the
+dry-mouth and dry-tongue feeling that had followed his drunkenness.  He
+leant with folded arms upon the poop rail and observed how, in the
+estuary, where the shores rapidly receded one from the other, the
+lightships were all booming.  A ball of steam rose from each, and anon
+came the shriek.  There was something unreal about the whole view.
+Kind sunlight was upon the deck of the _Glory_.  The precipitous bank,
+the higher south bank, could be seen clearly, rolling up shining,
+dew-wet, a glistening green; and yet the sirens kept calling.  Suddenly
+there showed up, some distance off, two pieces of stick, erect, a short
+and a long one, and then a low mist rolled aside, and the two pieces of
+stick were disclosed as the mast tops of a schooner.  Mike looked at
+the last lightship, and noticed how only its top was visible.  The mist
+lay low, and in banks.  Not for great steamers, like the _Glory_,
+standing high, did the sirens roar, but for the little sailing vessels
+and coasters under the haze.  And now, day advancing, that haze began
+to disappear.  Looking over the side he saw the green water quite
+clear, and something was swimming in it.  Elbows on the taffrail, he
+glanced over his shoulder to see if there was anybody near him who
+would be interested, but there were only some of the "youse" about, who
+might reply, if he pointed out to them this otter, that so pleased him:
+"Well, what about it?"
+
+The "youse" behind him broke out suddenly with: "Got any tobacco,
+Frenchy?"
+
+"Feenish!" came Frenchy's voice, and Pierre strolled past.  He too
+looked over the side, and Mike glanced at him.
+
+"Otter, Pierre," he said.  "You savvy otter?"
+
+"Ah yes, so!  What you call?  Otter?"
+
+"Yes, what they call an otter.  Very good swim?"
+
+"Yes, swim all right," and Pierre pensively watched the otter swimming
+away sternwards.
+
+"How you getting on down at the galley?" asked Mike, for Pierre had
+been told off to sit at the galley door peeling potatoes, washing up,
+and so forth, on behalf of the upper deck.  Pierre shrugged his
+shoulders.
+
+"Not ver' good," he said.
+
+"Who's helping you for the lower deck?  Somebody helping you for the
+lower deck?" asked Mike.
+
+"Two!" replied Pierre, and held up two fingers.
+
+"Two!" said Mike, frowning, as though something was wrong.
+
+"Not together.  One man was come down with me--you know, man with
+hat----" and he held his hands up some distance out from his head on
+either side.  Mike nodded.  "He came down with me first day.  Candlass
+tell me go down.  Rafferty tell him.  The cook talk rough.  He say
+nozing--he just look.  The cook say: 'What the hell you look at me?'
+and he say to cook--something I don't know.  The cook run and get----"
+Pierre made a motion as of one who chops beef with a cleaver.
+
+"A mate cl'aver!" said Mike, to the manner born.
+
+"I don't know what you call.  For chop--for cut meat."
+
+"Yes, that's right.  And what was the feller with the hat after doing?"
+
+The interesting conversation had a pause of puzzlement.
+
+"I beg your pardon," said Pierre.
+
+Mike, too, was worried for a moment, in his anxiety to hear the tale.
+
+"Yes, yes.  What?" he said.
+
+"Ze cook run out at zees man, but he did not jump.  He stand and look.
+Ze cook drop his hand and put the knife with handle down."
+
+"The cl'aver," said Mike.
+
+"What you say?  Oh, yes, clever--ver' clever, not afraid.  There is
+nozing more for a little while, then the cook come to the door and he
+say: 'I have white vife in Liverpool,' and this man----" and again the
+gesture on either side of the head--"say: 'Come outside.'"
+
+"He is a nigger, is he--a black fellow?"
+
+"Black, yes.  He say: 'What you mean?'  This fellow only say once more:
+'Come outside.'  The cook stand inside door and say: 'Yah!  You
+someting cattleman!' and zees man heet him."
+
+"Eh?"
+
+"Heet."
+
+"Oh yes, quite."
+
+Pierre showed where, jabbing his own fist under his chin.
+
+"He go down bang!  And he get up and reach for----" and again he
+indicated the cleaver.  "But zees man with big hat have valise like me.
+He give it to the baker to keep for him for a shilling----"
+
+"A valise!" said Mike.  "Go on."
+
+"He jump inside baker's cabin, and he say: 'Partner, you give me my
+valise dam' quick!'  He grab it from inside and bring out one revolver.
+Ze cook run past me and say: 'Where he go?'  I say nozing--I am too
+excite.  And zees man----" again he showed the breadth of hat--"there
+he is, throw down valise, and he say to the cook: 'You drop that,' he
+say.  'You get in galley.'  And he follow the cook, and baker follow
+him.  Ze baker do not like ze cook.  All day ze cook shout at him:
+'Baker, damn you, ze oven is hot.  Baker, damn you, what about your
+bread?  Baker, damn you, I'll put dis dough overboard if you do not
+come!'  And zees man say to cook: 'You dance,' he say.  'You dance, you
+God-damn nigger!  You tell your white vife you menshion about just now,
+you tell her I make you dance when you go home,' and ze baker
+laugh--and zen jump back where ze cook not see him laugh, for he is a
+small man with a cough, and ze cook is very large and ugly."
+
+"And did he dance?" asked Mike.
+
+"He try to dance!"  Pierre shook his head.  "No, not good.  He kneel
+down, and ze man go away.  By and by he look out and he say to me--he
+shake his fist at me--he say: 'By God, I report that man to Captain!'
+he say.  'You understand?'  I say: 'Yes.'  He shake his two fist at me
+and say again: 'By God, I report that man to Captain!'  I say: 'Yes!'"
+
+"You stay down?" asked Mike.
+
+Pierre shrugged his shoulders.
+
+"Oh, not nice."  He waved a hand in one direction.  "But up here," he
+waved a hand in the other direction, "not nice."  It was Scylla and
+Charybdis for Pierre all right.
+
+"Ye're doing all the paylings yerself then now?" asked Mike.
+
+"I beg your par_don_?"
+
+"All alone down there now--you?"
+
+"No.  Anozer man come down.  Ze cook say to Meestair Rafferty, when he
+come past: 'I want anozer man.  I give zat ozer man ze sack.  He no
+good.'----"
+
+"The hell he did!"
+
+"Yes, he do.  And Rafferty bring down anozer man."
+
+"Has he got a gun too, do you think?" asked Mike.
+
+"What you say?  No, no.  Coat and spectacles."
+
+"Do ye mane to tell me," said Mike, disgusted, "that ye would sit on
+the one side of a galley door payling spuds, and that sitting forninst
+ye on the other?"
+
+This was beyond Pierre, but a sudden stampede behind announced that
+grub was being brought aft.
+
+"So long just now," said Mike, and plunged down after the crowd; and
+Pierre, who in a menial capacity had helped to prepare this meal, went
+down again to the galley door from his airing, to take what food the
+cook would have ready for him.  He gathered that Mike had some contempt
+for his occupation down there, but in so far as the society went, it
+was--as he had phrased it--not nice there, not nice here.  But the
+quality, as well as the quantity, of the food doled out to him in
+return for his services at the galley door, was greatly different from
+that which was scrimmaged for in the cattlemen's cabin, gristly hash
+and a biscuit, and a tin-cupful of soup.  Pierre, down there forward,
+ate as well as the captain--had mashed potatoes, a little piece of
+fish, well cooked Irish stew, a hunk of pie; and, if they had paid no
+heed to the fierce expletives volleyed upon them, the two galley slaves
+received a cup of coffee later, with: "Here--here's a cup of coffee for
+you, you poor devils."  Pierre and Four Eyes are not the only people
+who have chosen the fleshpots of Egypt on such terms.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+An air of belligerence still hung about the boat, thick as the smell of
+the cattle.  The twelve stallions, ranged amidships, bickered like the
+men.  The alleyway before them was narrow; they could stretch their
+necks all the way across it, and they were everlastingly doing so--not
+in the friendly way of the long-horned steers that stretched out merely
+to draw attention to themselves lest somebody might have food for them,
+but stretched out crankily, even at their mildest, and at their worst,
+devilishly.  When one did so thrust out its head the ears were always
+laid back, the teeth showing, the eyes rolled white, glinting round to
+see what the neighbour was up to.  Out would come that neighbour's head
+like a darting snake, and snap would go the teeth left and right.  Out
+came the next head, and so on along the line--till every horse was
+snapping left and right save the end ones, that had only to keep alert
+inwards.  Thus were they with each other, and when human beings came
+along each tried to take a piece out of the passer by; and when he
+succeeded in running the gauntlet, tried to take a piece out of its
+neighbour for having wished to share the human being's head.
+
+Most of the men attempted the "Whoa now!  Steady boy!" method, not only
+for their own sakes, but for those who were to handle the horses later.
+The night watchman used to go past them on hands and knees.  Scholar
+saw him do so once, and immediately gave up his practice of going on to
+the upper deck, and passing over them so, and descending again; gave up
+even descending to the lower deck and running the gauntlet of the men
+there (which was not quite as bad as that of the stallions, for not all
+were unfriendly) when coming and going.  Now, when he had occasion to
+go forward alone, he always did so by way of the horses, the direct
+way, and passed them slowly.  Each one of them seemed to be possessed
+of a devil.  Cockney had an ear torn off--and the temper of the
+stallions was not improved thereby.  That fellow was a marvel.  He got
+the bandage off the dent of the taffrail on the third day, and that
+afternoon he had his head bound up afresh because of his torn ear.  He
+expressed no opinion about these stallions, he voiced no threat, not
+even to the steward who bandaged him, fresh from the accident; but
+after the steward had done with him, and he had brought the odour of
+iodoform into our midst and been decently sympathised with, he stole
+away armed with a cudgel.  Those who saw him slip it up under his
+jacket said nothing.  He swung with flapping trousers, a vigorous bag
+of bones, along the alley where the stallions challenged all comers.
+Out came the head of stallion one at his approach, and crash went the
+cudgel on its nose.  That brought out the head and neck of the second,
+brought out the craning necks of all of them; and Cockney flailed his
+way along the line, flailed up and down, and flailed his way back
+again, and returned to the cattlemen's den and sat down upon the bunk's
+edge, with the spreading stain of a fresh hemorrhage upon the bandage.
+Men looked at the head between those thin hands.
+
+[Illustration: Flailed his way along the line.]
+
+"Your ear's a-bleedin' again," said one.
+
+"Never mind me hear," he answered.  "I give them socks."
+
+But another man eventually advised him to go back to the steward and
+have his ear re-dressed.  The stallions were not improved by this
+treatment.  It was impossible now to "stay with" any one of them,
+hanging on to its upper lip and stroking the forehead, whether it would
+or not, and crooning: "Whoa there!  Steady boy!"  They raised their
+heads high, and launched downwards.  Later on, Cockney, back again from
+the doctoring, put his hand to his head and said: "I tell you this
+'urts, it does!" suddenly rose and went out again; and once more some
+men guessed what manner of errand he went upon, but said nothing.
+William saw him at his flailing this time.
+
+"What are you doing?" he said, charging upon him.  "I'd give you the
+same if you hadn't got enough already."
+
+"Wot for?" asked Cockney, and as he thrust forward his face his eyes
+danced and blazed feverishly, like the eyes of one at bay, under the
+white bandage.
+
+"For hitting them," replied William.
+
+"Bit off my hear, didn't they?" said Cockney.
+
+"You leave them alone," William advised.
+
+"You keep 'em from bitin' off people's 'eads, then.  They're your
+stallions, ain't they?"
+
+"You leave them alone."
+
+Cockney fired one word at William, his eyes as if a lamp was reflected
+in them.  William wrestled inwardly, clenched his hands at his side,
+and Cockney moved on.  William turned back from him, letting the matter
+rest there in consideration of Cockney's state; but he did not look
+where he was going, still had a lingering inclination to punch Cockney
+anyhow, and had his head turned so that Cockney could see that thought
+in his eye.  The end stallion flung its head up and down, with a
+sidewise swing, loose necked, and William got the blow full on the side
+of his face and head, and went down.
+
+"Yah!" jeered Cockney, as William dragged himself up on one palm,
+clapping the flat of his other hand to his temple, and he returned by
+way of the upper deck (for he was at the far end of the stallion row)
+with a dancing step, to narrate to those in the cattlemen's quarters
+what had befallen.  And they were quietly satisfied, for William was no
+favourite.  They all remembered how he had come to their door one
+morning, and stood behind Candlass in the attitude of a prize-fighter
+being photographed for the posters.
+
+The steers were not like that.  Many of the men had pets among them.
+There was a big fellow on the main deck that won almost all the men
+over, all those that could be won over by anything.  He began his
+engaging ways about the third day, and kept them up thereafter.  As
+soon as he saw anything on two legs advancing he thrust his head across
+the alley, holding it a little tilted like a cat that asks to have its
+neck scratched.  After the feeding and watering was over knots would
+linger there, beside that wise long-horn.  The hand was not enough; he
+preferred the edge of a piece of board rubbed up and down.  Seeing how
+he enjoyed a scratch, various men offered themselves as scratchers to
+other beasts.  You could see the men all along the alley, each with a
+piece of board, arms going up and down automaton-like, the steers with
+their heads slowly turning, gratified.  And as the men like clock-work
+figures scratched the beasts' necks, they carried on shouting
+discussions each to each.  But this big fellow who inaugurated the
+scratching was especially charming.  When one side was scratched
+sufficiently for the time being, he would raise his head up and over,
+carefully, so that his long horns might not smite his human friend, and
+then present the other side of the neck for treatment.  If the movement
+was not observed he would turn his head slowly to the side,
+pushing--none of your swinging blows from him, no suggestion ever of
+drawing back his head and launching it forward with sharp horn
+projecting.
+
+The bulls, too, that had been unruly the first day, were now all
+friendly.  If a man happened to lean against their pen, he would be
+reminded of where he was, not by a prod of a horn, but by a ringed nose
+nuzzling into the hands held behind.
+
+After the glorious scent of balsam, blown out to us from the south
+shore, became so thin it was scarcely perceptible amid the smell of
+beasts, the whoop of the siren, thrilling the decks, on and on, was
+added to the lowing of the steers and the bleating of sheep.  The
+_Glory_ slowed down slightly and glided into the Newfoundland fog.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+Fog reeked and rolled round the ship, and there was a swell on the sea.
+Under the fog it moved, with knolls and valleys, high and low, regular
+and apparently everlasting as those rolls and dips of green grazing
+land from Rocky Mountain House down to the Little Missouri--that
+country "beyant," whence came the cattle.  Ever and again one could see
+across and along, under the fog, as a man on hands and knees might,
+lifting a carpet's edge, look along the floor.  But even that was a
+doubtful kind of vision, with shifting and obliterating coils of
+vapour, so that even if the fog lifted for a yard or two it seemed as
+if the sea steamed below the lifted fog.  The sea's surface seemed
+covered by a film, and the swell moved under it, a film that the
+_Glory_ broke as she loomed along, sliding her nose up and down, many
+feet to the rise, many feet to the drop, advancing all the while.  It
+was before the day of wireless.  No messages were coming and going;
+only her siren complained into the wilderness of fog and water.
+Forward, the first officer and a couple of seamen took soundings.  The
+ship stopped in a great stillness.  Sheep sneezed and coughed; the
+cattle lowed.  Deep down there was a sound of shovelling of coal; then
+a bell cling-clanged, and once again there broke out a sound as of a
+"hush," and the whirl and whirl of the shaft with its old refrain.
+
+Feeding and watering being over for the afternoon, the cattlemen
+clustered in their hot den, that little bit of an iron safe of a place,
+going up in the air, swinging left and right, full of such sounds as a
+cane chair makes.  Michael, squat and broad, patch on his eye, was
+telling some experience of his life to somebody; another man drew near
+to listen and remained; still more clustered round.  Twosomes, talking
+in corners, desisted to listen also.
+
+"Michael!" one of them called.  "Wasn't there something about you and
+stowing away?"
+
+"Oh, that's an old story," answered Michael.
+
+"What's that about?" asked several of the younger men, who wanted to
+gather as much data as possible on this subject.  "Tell us about it,
+Michael," they besought him.
+
+"Well," said Michael, "it was when I came over on the _A-Chiles_."
+
+"Was Johnson boss then?"
+
+"Oh, before Johnson's time.  I've been over with Johnson, too," said
+Michael.
+
+"Shut up!" several admonished.  "Let him tell the story."
+
+"I was on the rocks," said Michael.  "You see I got down to the docks
+too late to get the _A-Chiles_ back."
+
+There was a movement of interest, a drawing closer.  This was a
+predicament they understood.  There are always cattle to bring eastward
+from Canadian and U.S. ports to Liverpool or London, and the cattleman
+may return with his boss on the same ship; but if he loses it there are
+not cattle-boats plying west across the Atlantic to give him a job
+again.  There is stoking to be done, of course, east and west, but
+there is some kind of stokers' union; and the cattleman does not know
+whether he would be welcomed among the stokers.  There are always ways
+of getting across, but the cattleman, or at any rate the young
+cattleman, needs to be posted up on them.
+
+"Where did you stow away?" asked one of the wizened partners of that
+youth who morning by morning demanded his shaving water from Rafferty.
+Michael had already begun his story, and this question, and others
+discharged from the rear of those clustered near him, slightly offended
+him.
+
+"As I was saying," said he, "I goes on board, and some of the fellows
+had left one of the boats afore fixing the tarpaulin down.  I gets
+inside there, and I hears somebody say: 'I see you!  I'll get the
+police to you!'"
+
+The Inquisitive One unconsciously ducked his head into his shoulders,
+and the edges of his eyes narrowed.  The word "police" always affected
+him like that.  Jack took on the expression of someone who does what is
+called "looking the other way."  He became blank.
+
+"But I thought I knew the voice," continued Michael.  "I says: 'Is that
+you, Jim Larson?'"
+
+"It was a friend, was it?" a tense listener exploded.
+
+Michael looked with his one eye at the interrupter.
+
+"So he fastens up the tarpaulin," said he, "and there I stays till we
+drops Ireland, and I tell ye I was wantin' something to eat.  So I puts
+my hand over the gunwale, and loosens them ropes, and----"
+
+One of the men at this came a little closer, cunning and critical.
+
+"--I comes on deck, and oh there was a----"
+
+Michael's vocabulary broke down at this, and with a lot of by-thises
+and by-thats, he gave it to be understood that a bo'sun and a third
+officer told him that they would clap him in irons, that the skipper
+ordered him to be swung over the side in a cradle and start in
+chipping, and that he said he wouldn't go.  At this point Michael
+looked up at the insidious critic.
+
+"Oh, well, indeed," he hurriedly went on, "I did a bit of painting for
+them, and my friend on board gives me a chance to slip the coppers at
+Montreal."
+
+"Yes," said somebody, "but wasn't there something about you having a
+fight with the bo'sun when he took you forward?"
+
+"There was indeed, there was some kind of scrimmage."  Michael looked
+up with his one eye at the man whose expression in listening was
+different from that of all the other listeners.  "You been over with me
+before, haven't ye?" he asked him.
+
+"Tell us about the scrap you had with the bo'sun going forward!"
+shouted another.
+
+"No, indeed," Michael declared.  "I'll drop that bit out.  I've told
+the story so often that I don't know myself now which is the right way
+of it and which is the wrong way."
+
+There was a laugh at this, and Michael smiled.
+
+"Oh, indeed, there was a fight all right," he assured them.  "But I've
+told about it different ways.  I sometimes wonder myself now if I came
+off best."
+
+There were sympathetic murmurs.
+
+"Indade, of course, of course," Mike spoke, lying stretched upon his
+top bunk, near the door, head on hand, lenient and understanding.  "You
+got over anyhow, and you didn't get put in the clink, and there's much
+to be thankful for."
+
+"Oh, we're only cattlemen," said a voice.
+
+"Lend us your mouth organ!" cried a youth.
+
+The Inquisitive One looked for a moment as if he would protect his
+breast pocket; but fighting was getting stale, and so he handed over
+the instrument, the man who took it wiping it on a dirty sleeve before
+he plunged into the strains of "Rule Britannia!"  As he played there
+was a movement among those near the door.  Candlass was there, but he
+lingered outside until the air was finished and then--"Feed and water,
+boys," he said, looking in, and as his men defiled into the passage
+Rafferty arrived.
+
+"Come on wid youse, lower deck!" he bawled.  His men filed out fairly
+orderly.  It was only at the morning call that they were still inclined
+to be cross-grained.
+
+Affairs were settling down into the routine of the trip.  There was,
+indeed, a spirit of friendliness growing among the "Push."  Free of
+liquor, and of the after effects of liquor, the largeness of heart of
+many was evident, though perhaps there was something morbid, as well as
+of kindly interest, in their sympathy that they lavished on little
+Michael.  He had his head turned over it, spent most of his spare time
+sitting on the edge of his bunk, holding up his head to let them look
+at his eye under the shade.  Cockney and he, if they had not yet made
+friends exactly, had allowed the matter of their fight on the poop to
+be as an ancient matter now forgotten.  The bad eye might have been the
+result of an accident for all that was said about Cockney by those who
+looked at it; indeed Cockney was the only one who seemed to recall the
+origin of it.  He sat apart, looking a little ashamed during these
+examinations of the injured member; but his shame soon began to give
+way to jealousy, for had he not a bandage on his head--had he not an
+interesting ear that might be pried at?  Yet, take it by and large, as
+seamen say, a feeling of amicability came to the ship--that is to say
+by comparison with the spirit that had inhabited it so far.  Had any
+quietist been spirited aboard upon an Arabian carpet he might well have
+been excused for stepping hastily on to it again, and most hastily
+murmuring the incantations that would speed his departure; but for
+those who had seen the "Push" with the drink in it, or the drink waning
+in it, the _S.S. Glory_ was now almost on the way to being sacred!
+
+The night-watchman, who slept away most of the day in Rafferty's cabin,
+was the most objectionable sight on deck.  He always appeared at meal
+times, scooped up more than his share, then strolled about for a little
+while for a constitutional, but was never spoken to.  As the days wore
+on, however, he spoke to others in a manner horribly blending
+intimidation and fawning, his great moustache waving.  He would plant
+himself in front of some member of the "Push" and explain that he had
+come down in the world, that he had a son in the Household Cavalry, six
+foot three, with a fist that would fell an ox.  "If my son was on
+board," he would say, and glare, and if the glare was returned: "Oh,
+not that I mean anything," he would add.  The cattlemen gossiped
+infinitely less than do people aboard a passenger ship, but it was
+inevitable that the watchman should be observed, and to some extent
+discussed.
+
+"What was he saying to you?" asked Jack of a young man before whom the
+night-watchman had been peering and glaring and fawning.
+
+"Oh, I don't know--about a son in the army, six foot three, knock the
+stuffing out of anybody.  Says he's been divorced."
+
+Mike, hanging over the rail, turned around.
+
+"He's a lazy good-for-nothing, that night-watchman," he said.  "It's a
+wonder to me youse fellows on the lower deck don't fix him.  These last
+nights now we haven't had a dacent sleep for him waking Rafferty."  He
+laughed.  "I hear Rafferty says to him: 'Don't you waken me,' he says,
+'if there are only one or two loose.  Waken me if there's more than
+half-a-dozen.'"  Mike paused, and then added: "But there always is
+half-a-dozen."
+
+Some of the lower deck men within hearing grinned.
+
+"Oh, I know what it is," said Mike.  "Some of youse slips out at night
+and loosens them, so as to get back on Rafferty for treating you the
+way he does.  It's cutting off your nose to spite your face, bringing
+Rafferty in at twilve, at wan, at two, and at three, roaring like hill
+for you to tumble up, and wakenin' us all.  What was he after saying
+now, shoving his face at you, me lad, and waving his tusks at you in
+the wind?  Was it about his tall son that has the strong arm?"
+
+"He says he was divorced," said the young man.
+
+"Divorced, is it?" answered Mike.  "He must have been married then, so
+there wouldn't be any truth in what I would be calling his lad to him
+if he comes along to me talking about him and his strong arm, and
+hinting what he would be after doing, and him thousands of miles away."
+His voice growled on.  "Did he tell ye what he was divorced for?"
+
+"No."
+
+Mike's voice almost suggested that he knew himself.
+
+"Indade, he was divorced for laziness," he said.
+
+Jack swaggered away smiling, and the night-watchman, arriving then on
+the poop, came up to him, seeing he was alone.
+
+"Are these men talking about me?" he said.
+
+He was evidently a poor judge of character.  Jack strolled slowly past
+and over his shoulder--"Ask them," he said.
+
+The night watchman glared and bellowed, in the roaring voice of a
+bar-room bully: "I'm only asking you a simple question."
+
+Jack stopped in his stride, looked again over his shoulder, and smiled
+queerly.  The night-watchman thought it was a pacific smile, and
+stepped closer.
+
+"I won't have it!" he roared, and thrust his tusked face forward
+presumably to let Jack see the determination in it.
+
+Jack merely canted himself backwards, hands in pockets, and--"Take your
+face off me," he said quietly, "or I'll spit in your eye."
+
+The night-watchman was shocked.
+
+"That's a nice thing for a lad to say to an elderly man," he commented.
+
+"Oh, shut up!" said Jack quietly.
+
+"If my son was here----"
+
+"If your son was here," said Jack mockingly.  "I know all about
+him--he's six foot three, isn't he?--I'd pound the stuffing out of him.
+One of the family is enough to be going on with.  If you come chumming
+round the decks after me any more, I'll come along and stick you in the
+ribs to-night, when you're down there supposed to be watching.  I will.
+I don't want you to come talking to me.  You'll waken up with a knife
+in you.  Now, that'll do!" and he strolled on, leaving the
+night-watchman with a face of terror, but drawing himself erect, and
+twisting his moustache.
+
+Jack walked the length of the deck and turned, but stepping a foot to
+one side so that he walked back, in his slow march, direct upon the
+night-watchman.  As he walked he took his right hand from his pocket,
+clenched, and walked swinging it.  "Get out of the way!" he said.
+"Shift!"  The watchman moved on one side.  Jack walked on, wheeled,
+marked where the night-watchman stood now, and, both hands in pockets
+again, he trod the deck back like a panther, straight toward him.
+
+"You're doing this on purpose!" boomed the night-watchman, squaring
+himself again.
+
+Jack raised his handsome and evil face.
+
+"You come around talking to me," he said, "you say any more to me and
+I'll fix you all right."  The night-watchman stepped aside, and when
+Jack turned at the end of that walk the watchman was scuttling down the
+companion way like a rabbit into a burrow.
+
+Nobody congratulated Jack in words.  He was a dark horse.  He was one
+of themselves, but except with Johnnie he was not a clubable young man.
+Men like Cockney, men like Mike, never spoke to him, nor he to them.
+Sometimes, in the morning, after the watering was over, if he met
+Scholar's eye, he would give his head a little jerk to left and say:
+"Hallo!"  He was of those who, when others talked, could move away and
+not come back again, and yet be called to account by no one for such
+contempt.  He was of those who, if spoken to, could lean up against the
+rail, cross-legged, turn and look gently up and down the frame of the
+questioner, then move away, dumb.  Perhaps it was Jack, and his partner
+Johnnie with his feverish devilry, who were at the bottom of an opinion
+that began to be current on the lower deck.  The lower deck men, it
+appeared, thought that the main deck men were somewhat lacking in
+spirit.  They managed to pass on their devilish restlessness to one or
+two on the deck in question, and these, thus affected, had the air of
+looking for trouble.  A handy theme offered, and they fell to grumbling
+over the fact that they were three men short.
+
+"_Men_ short, did you say?" inquired Mike.
+
+"_Things_ short.  Do you call them three things _men_?"
+
+The complaining voices subsided, but there were glances cast at Mike by
+one or two that were intended to be read as: "Who do you think you are?"
+
+"I've had enough short-handed," broke out one of the less easily
+extinguished.
+
+But here the routine interfered.  A hail came from forward, and the men
+on the poop, and the men in the cabin below, had to file away to the
+afternoon feeding.  When the main deck bunch spread out with hay and
+buckets, Candlass appeared, coming down the narrow alley to see that
+the men did not overdo the belabouring of those steers near the end
+where the hay was, great beasts whose main thought was to make a meal
+off the armfuls of hay that went past them while the steers at the far
+end looked down the alley and lowed vehemently; to see, also, that the
+mood of laziness in the men did not triumph over the mood of
+determination and prevent the steers at the far end from having a fair
+feed; to see also that all hands had tumbled out.  So far he had had no
+skulkers in his crowd, but he was an experienced cattle boss.  He moved
+along slowly, edging sideways past each hay-laden man.  All were busy;
+he had merely to look on.  Then he spoke.
+
+"Isn't there a man short?" he asked.
+
+Nobody answered.
+
+"Tom," he addressed one, "do you know where that fellow with the mouth
+organ is?"
+
+"Isn't he here, boss?" and the man that Candlass had spoken to looked
+along the decks as if he expected to see the Inquisitive One somewhere
+at work.  Candlass went slowly up the alleyway.  Scholar did not
+observe his approach until the boss's hand was on his shoulder, and he
+pushed his armful of hay aside to let Candlass go past, a steer on the
+side toward which he moved immediately tearing at the bundle.
+
+"There's a man short, isn't there, Scholar?" asked Candlass.
+
+"Don't know," answered Scholar, and was aware that Candlass peered
+sharply at him before hailing Mike.
+
+"What's the matter with that man, Mike, the man that has the mouth
+organ?"
+
+There was distress on Mike's forehead as he answered: "I don't know."
+
+"You _should_ know," said Candlass.  "You're the straw boss."
+
+"Yes, yes, I'm the straw boss maybe, but I'd rather work meself
+than----" and he said no more.  Only Scholar, near Candlass, caught the
+response of: "Oh yes, quite so."
+
+Then the boss went aft; and all the men along the alley, for some
+reason, turned and looked at his back.  Even after he had disappeared
+they continued to pass the hay without a word, then they looked along
+the alley again, and coming forward was the Inquisitive One.  The
+mouths of several of the men opened, an upright furrow showed between
+their brows.  What they saw seemed inconceivable, for the Inquisitive
+One appeared to have shrunk, was deathly white, did not look the same
+man.  Behind him Candlass walked, shoulders a little bent, as one under
+a burden, lips puckered, and eyes on the deck; and the Inquisitive One
+fell to work, making a whimpering sound ever and again.  He was
+changed, as a cat that has been dipped in a tub of water, but he never
+told any of the men what Candlass had done to him.  Some asked, who had
+his gift, or failing, of inquisitiveness; others left it to him to tell
+if he cared to; but none heard.  Probably it was a bear-hug that the
+Inquisitive One had received, alone in the cattlemen's cabin where he
+sulked over Mike's contempt for those who objected to working with
+three men short--for Candlass had arms like steel.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+The crew sober was very different indeed from the crew drunk.  Their
+likes and their dislikes were more explicable now.  There were one or
+two who spoke to nobody and were left alone, such as the Man with the
+Hat.  He had made a nest of hay for himself on the upper deck; nobody
+knew, nobody cared, what he did when it rained; nobody was curious
+enough to go along to see how he weathered it when they passed through
+lashing rain.  He had one manner for all men--one attitude--the
+attitude of a bulkhead.  A friendly approach was met by him exactly in
+the same fashion as an inquisitive approach.  As for openly
+antagonistic approach--none made it.  He did not seem to want to know
+anything about the cattlemen.  Even when at work with his half of the
+gang he was never known to say a word, except once when a man pushed
+him, and he whirled round upon him and said, low and vindictive, the
+one word "Quit!"  And the man quit.  The night-watchman halted beside
+him once and said "Good evening," but received no reply.  He did not
+take the snub, stood beside the nest of the Man with the Hat, looking
+up at the voluminous and oily-looking smoke that rushed away from the
+top of the smoke stack and stretched out like a fallen pillar,
+diminishing across the sea.
+
+"Well," said the night-watchman, still looking overhead, "it looks as
+if we might have a dirty night."
+
+Still there was no reply, and the night-watchman, thrusting his hands
+deep in his coat pockets, fumbling for pipe and matches, looked round
+at the Man with the Hat, and peered at him from under his
+cream-coloured eyebrows--then moved on with a little more haste than he
+usually exhibited, recovered a few paces away, and made pretence that
+he had only moved off to light his pipe in the lee of one of the
+sheep-pens.  He bent down there in the attitude of a boy at leapfrog,
+and as he lit his pipe, expending many matches, could only think to
+himself: "That is a dangerous young man."
+
+Scholar, who had no distaste for the appearance of the Man with the
+Hat, marching to and fro on the swinging deck later on, enjoying the
+pillar of smoke rolling out in the deepening purple night, enjoying the
+wind, enjoying the sweep of the masts that gave the stars, as they came
+out, an appearance as of rushing up and down the sky, commented, in
+passing the Man with the Hat: "Bit of wind."  No reply!  He thought
+that the wind carried his words away.
+
+"Bit of wind, I say," he repeated.  No reply.  He thought the man must
+be deaf, so passed on and took his stand near the stern that tossed
+high and slid down, every slide being a forward slide, the screws
+whirling.  He was enjoying the motion and the spindrift on his
+shoulders--for he was only in undervest and trousers--when up came two
+men of the lower deck squad, and one said to him: "Rough night."  He
+did not feel inclined to talk with them, but, a little sore from what
+might have been a snub forward (for the Man with the Hat might not be
+deaf), he put a certain warmth into his nod and smile in response.  The
+two came closer at that.  He wondered why it was that so many of these
+men could not chat without having the appearance of being ready at any
+moment to lift a hand and smite their interlocutor.  They came close
+and plied him with questions--one a Welshman, the other from the
+Kingdom of Fife.  Somewhat thus went the conversation:
+
+"Whit deck are you on?"
+
+"The main deck."
+
+"I wondered.  I never seen you on the lower deck.  Where have you been?"
+
+"What do you mean?" asked Scholar.
+
+"Have you been in Canada?"
+
+"Yes--part of it."
+
+"What part?" asked the Welshman.
+
+"Oh, I came up through Lower Ontario."
+
+"Then you wasn't stopping there?" this from the Fifer, with a
+villainous scowl, as if Scholar had been trying to deceive.  "You was
+in the States?"
+
+Instead of giving them County and State as reply, he answered now with
+the bald: "Yes."
+
+"What states?" asked the Welshman.
+
+"Michigan."
+
+"Whit was ye daeing in Michigan?" asked the Fifeman.
+
+There came into Scholar's mind a brief conversation he had overheard
+earlier in the day.  One man had told a story of something he had seen
+"when I was in Florida."--"What were you doing in Florida?" the
+Inquisitive One had asked after the story was told.--"Eh?" had said the
+man who had been in Florida, with a note of warning.--"I asked you what
+you were doing in Florida?" the Inquisitive One had returned, with a
+showing of the teeth.--"Ask my elbow!" had been all the answer to that,
+spoken as if each word was a knife-thrust.  Scholar felt himself out of
+his sphere.  He had no practice in saying: "Ask my elbow!" in that
+tone, or in any tone; and it seemed to him the requisite reply now.  As
+he paused, wondering how to fob off these two catechists, the Fifer
+said, with a curl of his lip: "You're getting it now, then."
+
+"Getting what?  I don't understand you."
+
+"Oh, you understand all right."
+
+Scholar's eyelids came slightly together.  He wished he knew how to act
+in this society, found himself squaring his chest a little, found that
+his jaw was tightening.  At this juncture Mike appeared on deck,
+hitched his belt, came rolling along towards them, drew up alongside
+and yawned loudly, stretching himself, raising his elbows in the air,
+and clasping his hands behind his head.  Then, leaning forward between
+the two catechists, he spat out into the flying scud, turned his big
+back on them, hitched his belt again, and said to Scholar: "Bejabbers,
+it's cold!  Let's have a quarter-deck walk, Scholar."
+
+Scholar fell in step with him.  At the end of their walk, when they
+turned, he was aware, without looking too keenly, that the two men of
+inquisitorial mind were feeling highly vindictive; but the end of their
+return walk bringing them again close to these two, Mike took a brief
+farther step to the taffrail, swinging back largely.
+
+"What was them two saying to you?" he asked, as they walked forward
+once more.
+
+"Oh, just asking questions about where I had been, and all that sort of
+thing."
+
+Mike gave a "Huh!" of disgust.  They wheeled, and began the return
+balancing walk to the poop just in time to see "them two" going down
+the companion-way.  Mike brought up against the taffrail at the end of
+their march this time, and leaning back on it, said he: "I tell you
+what it is, Scholar.  Them fellers think they're better than us
+cattlemen.  They're tradesmen.  I've seen enough--I don't need to
+listen to all they're saying, after what you tell me.  They're
+tradesmen; indade, I expect they're ruddy plumbers.  They've spotted
+you, you see.  They're thinking to themselves: 'Here's a fellow on
+board here, and in the Ould Counthry we'd be putting gas pipes in his
+father's house, and he's down now, and we'll kick him.'  Just the same
+way they would try to kick us too, if they didn't think we was down
+already, beyant the likes of them to kick," he added in a grim tone,
+"if they didn't know that we knew how to fix them.  If they come prying
+at ye again, Scholar--listen now to what I'm tellin' ye: Turn yourself
+around sideways to them, and says you to them, says you: 'Ask me
+elbow!' says you.  And if they shoves their face up against you, says
+you: 'I'll spit in your eye if you shove your face at me like that!'
+And hit, Scholar, hit!  It's different with the likes of us.  You came
+in among us like a man; anybody could see you wasn't accustomed to us.
+Now you know what I mean--you understand?" said Mike, for he felt there
+was more in his mind than he could express.  "I would rather go on a
+boat with you, Scholar, than with thim, if it was a case of taking to
+the boats; and if it was a row on the waterfronts I'd rather have you
+with your back to the wall with me than them plumbers.  You was born
+different, and you don't understand thim--ye see what I mane," and he
+waved his hand.  "But you would niver roll a shipmate; and if it came
+to the bit, I can see it in your eye, Scholar, you'd hang on like a
+bulldog."
+
+Scholar felt a great friendliness in his heart to this man, though he
+feared he could not quickly learn the lesson, and would have to think
+out some method of his own.  The "spit in your eye" method of address
+was foreign to him as yet.  Mike had been shouting towards the end, for
+the wind was rising; but now he paused a spell, and his gaze roved
+round the night and its stars.  He drew a deep breath and returned to
+matters mundane.
+
+"That watchman will have to keep his eyes open to-night," he said.
+"He's another of them."  He frowned, looking along the decks forward.
+"I wonder if that feller wi' the big hat is along there yet--like a
+dead burrd in a nest.  He's blamed unsociable, that feller in the big
+hat," he commented.  And then: "Oh, I don't blame him if he wants to be
+that way."
+
+"Perhaps he's afraid of being asked questions," suggested Scholar,
+laughing.
+
+"Him!  No, it's different with him.  I said: 'Good evening mate,' to
+him the other night there, and he pays no attintion.  And I looks at
+him, and he gives me the look--you know what I mane; so I says to him,
+says I: 'All right, shipmate,' I says.  'All right, if that's the way
+of it.  I know now, anyhow,' says I to him, says I.  He's a great lad,
+ye know.  I was hearing about a bit of a spar him and the cook had."
+He considered the darkened deck.  "Yes, he could fix them two plumbers
+all right that was asking you questions."
+
+Scholar had a certain depression in his heart.  Mike was perhaps aware
+of it.
+
+"Oh, I'd rather have you than him any day, all the same," said Mike, as
+if in response to a spoken regret at inability to learn the ways of the
+society on board.  "I think I'll turn in now.  Remember what I was
+telling ye about them gas-fitters."
+
+Mike rattled down the companion-way, but Scholar remained on deck.  A
+faint sound of voices came from below, now and then a laugh.  The decks
+throbbed with the everlasting engine; a hissing and a scudding went
+along the weather side; a sheep snuffled and bleated; a little while
+ago fresh lashings had been put round their pens, tarpaulin dodgers
+protecting the tops.  There seemed to be nobody about; here and there a
+lozenge of golden light, of deck lights, showed.  The night was fallen
+almost as dark as the smoke from the smoke-stack.  The _Glory_ tossed
+and slid, tossed and slid onward; spray rattled with a sound like
+handfuls of shot on the tops of the sheep-protecting tarpaulins.  From
+forward the sea's assaults began to sound more loudly, with many a
+resonant clap, and then the rattling as of grape shot followed.
+Scholar thought he would go below, among his fellows.  Friendliness was
+very dear to him.  It was only prying and worming into him that ever
+caused his jaw to tighten, his eyes to narrow, as he wondered what the
+stage directions might be.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+When Scholar descended out of the tearing night he choked like an
+asthmatical man.  It was not now a smell as of fresh cattle that filled
+the cattlemen's safe, called cabin; it was a suffocating smell as of
+ammonia.  Somebody was singing in the cabin that rose and fell with
+steely and wooden screams, and with whispers of the sea running round
+it, the tremendous sea that swirled and broke and sprayed on the other
+side of the thin iron plates.  The tobacco smoke was perhaps not quite
+so thick to-night, for tobacco was growing scarce; but there were still
+plenty of pipes a-going for blue clouds to temper the callous glare of
+the electric light.
+
+Scholar slipped into the cabin, feeling for a moment almost shy.  He
+had learned how to come into the cabin when it was a kind of bedlam;
+but to come into it now, and find it a kind of temperance sing-song
+hall for poor seamen, with several of the poor seamen glancing at him
+in a way that suggested their thought was: "Ah! we'll ask him to sing
+next!" was a little upsetting.  He tried to efface himself in his bunk.
+The applause following a heartrending solo about "For the flag he gave
+his young life!" had just ended.
+
+"Charles will give us a solo upon the mouth organ," said someone.
+
+Charles looked bashful; it was one thing to play the mouth organ on the
+dock front while the others double-shuffled (or, for that matter, to
+play it on an ordinary evening when the ordinary life was going on,
+some listening, others talking, voices roaring: "You're a liar!" others
+bellowing: "Shut up!") but quite another to have everybody quiet even
+before he began to play.  Charles screamed that he was "fed up with the
+thing!" and very likely felt a qualm in his heart so soon as the words
+left his lips, for he was not at all "fed up" with his mouth organ; he
+was very keen on it.
+
+Many coaxed him, and one-eyed Michael said: "Well, never mind if you
+don't want to play.  Don't worry the young fellow if he doesn't feel
+inclined.  Jimmy there will play."
+
+Jimmy had been shouting: "Go on, Charlie!"  For a moment he was like a
+sailing ship taken aback, but he plucked up courage, and accepting the
+instrument that Charles handed to him, wiped it with his sleeve and
+began to play.  Some rose and tried to dance, but did not find dancing
+easy, for the gale was rising, and the stern rose and swung and fell
+and leapt up.  They danced, collided, and fell, danced again, and the
+onlookers whooped with amusement, or smiled with mild disdain and pity;
+and the mouth organ warbled, while the sea echoed and whispered round.
+Candlass, appearing unexpectedly with a lamp, brought the man with the
+mouth organ to a stop, and the dancers reeled to their bunks, where
+they sat down laughing.
+
+"Mike!" said Candlass.  "Oh, you're there, Mike.  Bring two or three of
+the men forward with you."
+
+Mike slipped over his bunk side; three or four others rolled out of
+their own accord, the Inquisitive One among them, for though it must be
+a call to work of some kind, and he was not eager for extra work, he
+simply must know what was afoot.
+
+"That will do," said Candlass.  "I just want you to come along here and
+see to some of these ropes before you turn in."
+
+Away they went along the reeking decks.  The cattle were not in a bad
+plight at all; they had their four legs to stand upon, and propped each
+other as well.  It was those upon the lee side that gave most concern
+to Candlass now.  He carried the lamp high, casting weird shadows, and
+directing the men in the slacking of a rope here, the hauling up of one
+yonder.  There was no doubt that the gale was rising; sailors were
+battening down a hatch overhead, and their voices, as they hailed each
+other before they got the whole hatch covered, shutting out the night,
+came down broken and blown.  Seas came over the decks, smacking like
+the flat of a great hand, and rushed past.  Now that the hatches were
+battened down there was a kind of confined feeling--the long deck
+above, and the steer-packed deck below, converged in the perspective,
+and gave a feeling as of being buried alive in a monstrous box full of
+a dance of weird lights and shadows.
+
+Their work over, Candlass said: "That'll do, men.  I'd better have a
+man or two up to-night, along with the watchman."
+
+"All right," answered Mike, looking forward to the variety.
+
+"No, no--not you," said Candlass.  "You fellows can go back."
+
+Away they went along the choking decks, one or another pausing now and
+then to scratch, with closed fists--fingers being useless to the big
+beasts--some head that thrust forward inviting.  Others, when a head
+leant out determinedly, smote at it to make way--but most, by this
+time, had desisted from such methods, and were more inclined to make
+friends with the steers.  They met Rafferty as they were on their way
+back.
+
+"Where's Candlass?" he asked them.
+
+"He's behind."
+
+"Oh, he's behind, is he?  Are you fellows going to have another man or
+two up with the watchman?"
+
+"I was just talking about it," came Candlass's voice, he walking aft in
+the rear; "but I guess I'll stop up myself."
+
+"All right," said Rafferty.  "I'll relieve you then, if you tell me
+when."
+
+They passed on to the cabin, Candlass following to thrust his head in
+and look sharply till silence fell.
+
+"You fellows," he said, "if I come and call on you to-night, turn out
+lively."
+
+"All right, boss," several shouted, but Candlass had already turned
+away.
+
+All were soon asleep; but, as it happened, there was no night call.  On
+a night like this, even if the bosses had not been about on the decks,
+the little trick of loosening some steers in distaste for the
+night-watchman or for Rafferty would have been allowed to lapse.  All
+slept, or at least all were silent; for perhaps here and there, in a
+bunk, someone lay staring at the electric lights that were never put
+out, and could not be put out, there being no switch in the cabin, lay
+staring and wondering at the whole business, the deep breathing, the
+occasional sighs, the place ringing to the blows of the sea, and
+echoing, as though someone whispered to the sweep of the spray without;
+the whirl of the driving propeller going on and on, as if for ever,
+under foot.
+
+They thought at first, when they were called, that it was a night call,
+woke gasping in the reek of ammonia, to find Candlass going his rounds
+along a sloping deck, the _Glory_ now having a tremendous list on,
+never swinging up to a level, but rolling all the time from the degrees
+of that list to a slope comparable with that of a church steeple, an
+almost anxious slope, then back up again, and pitching, too.  The men
+who were already wakened began to shout: "Tumble up!  Tumble up!" even
+before Rafferty appeared; and there was little need for him to raise
+his cry, for almost all were awake and rolling from their bunks as he
+lurched in at the door and glared round.  The wind shrieked outside,
+the cabin echoed more than ever like a steel drum, the screams and
+groanings were infinitely louder.  Candlass looked at his men to see
+what fettle they were in, but he had already arrived at an opinion and
+a computation regarding what men could be relied on in the event of
+emergency.
+
+"Come on!" said Mike, and led the way.
+
+Scholar followed, Michael came next.  It was very dark.  They went
+along on the windward side.  All the cattle there had their broad
+fronts against the making-fast board, their heads over it.  The men
+moved along, propped against the hoardings to leeward.  The cattle on
+that side were standing well back, leaning against each other, tails
+against the backboards.  As they manoeuvred forward a faint glow showed
+to starboard, which had nothing to do with the scattered lamps that,
+from the beams above, swung round and round in circles.  One hatch (and
+only one) was still uncovered, and down that the shrieking and roaring
+song of the gale came.  Mike poised along ahead like one walking on a
+steep roof.  Up soared the _Glory_, and down she plunged, and over she
+rolled--farther over, trembling down.  The cattle staggered; there was
+a sound of clicking horns, there were sounds of things going slide and
+crash all over, and still she rolled.  She had a list on her beyond
+anything that Mike had ever known.  He hung on with his right hand; he
+was under the hatch now, Scholar a pace or two behind, and both could
+look up at the dark sky overhead showing purple before the beginning of
+another day.  It was then four o'clock.  And as she hung over thus they
+watched the stars rush wildly up the sky like soaring rockets, up and
+over, and then up came the sea, following the soaring stars.  It gave
+them pause.  So far over did she hang that, from where they held tight
+upon the windward side, they could see clean through the hatch above,
+and over its lee edge, right out to the junction of sky and sea (a
+strip of awesome whiteness, or less whiteness than the colourless look
+of a glass of water) beyond an unforgettable tremendous tossing waste
+of a deep and velvety purple.  And still she hung over, so that they
+saw more and more of the sea.  It seemed to be rushing at them with all
+its great dark purple hollows, its purple hillsides, its snowy crests.
+And in that moment Scholar averted his eyes from it and looked toward
+Mike, and found Mike--hanging on--looking over his shoulder rearward.
+Their eyes met.  And Scholar believed that perhaps Mike was right in
+his view of him that he had voiced the day before when the gale was
+rising--believed that when it came to the "bit" he would not be found
+wanting.
+
+[Illustration: It seemed to be rushing at them with all its dark purple
+hollows, its purple hillsides, its snowy crests.]
+
+Then the stars that had rushed up came rushing down again, bringing the
+sky with them, and it fitted over in place.  The _Glory_ rolled and
+pitched onward, still with something of a list, but no following roll
+sent her so far over, and from no succeeding roll was she so slow to
+rise again.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+A few of the pickpocket-faced ones hung back during the gale that
+morning, crawled into corners, effacing themselves, like sick cats.  At
+the afternoon feeding and watering (despite the words of contempt,
+glances of contempt, and, worst of all, silences of contempt, bestowed
+upon them when they showed face at their own feeding-time) several did
+not turn out, pretended to do so--perhaps tried to do so--but slunk
+back to the cabin.  When Rafferty, missing them, came aft to hunt them
+forth, they showed their peeked faces to him, worn and scared; and he
+despised them and left them, turned back to his working majority again
+and shouted through the shouting of the storm overhead, and the rushing
+of the draught along his deck: "There's some chickens, some chickens!"
+His men knew to whom he referred, looked at him--and sneered, and
+laughed, and tossed their heads in agreement; Jack even, whose attitude
+to Rafferty so far had been one of watchfulness, gave a kind of loud
+mutter of: "We don't want them with us, messing about here."  Cockney
+too, energetic straw-boss, looked on them as did Rafferty.
+
+"Let 'em lie there and shiver, then," he said.
+
+Only two of the main deck men were perturbed beyond labour by the
+steadily increasing violence of the gale, scared by the consideration
+that it had begun to blow last night, and had been getting worse and
+worse ever since.
+
+"Two men short!" commented Candlass in the afternoon, and went aft to
+the cabin to look for them, found one on the way, behind a bale of hay,
+peered at him as if wondering what he was doing there, balancing
+carefully with loose knees, taking hand from pocket only to grab and
+hang on by a protruding end of barricade.  He eyed him as a man may eye
+a newly-bought puppy that has gone in between the sofa's end and the
+wall.  The youth got up, scrambled out as best he could, hauled himself
+to his feet.  Candlass spoke never a word, but bowed to him in the
+attitude of one listening for a whisper, mock-commiserating, and the
+youth dragged himself forward to find that his fellows did not want
+him, had fallen to work passing the hay themselves, and were inclined
+to treat him as if he was in the way.  He had the air as of pleading to
+be allowed to do something.  Candlass, meanwhile, walked on into the
+cabin, zig-zagged across, looking for his other missing man.
+
+There were two of the lower deck hobbledehoys there.  He waggled a
+thumb at the door, and they got up and crawled out, but he did not
+follow them; he went up on deck instead, to hunt out the man who was
+missing from his own deck in particular.  The sheep sniffled and
+bleated occasionally under securely-lashed dodgers that now covered the
+tops of all the pens.  They saw his feet and thrust out their black
+faces, wrinkled their noses, shivered and withdrew.  It was near their
+feed time.  (Mike and Cockney, with two or three others, saw to them
+daily on their way back, after having tended the cattle.)  Candlass
+tilted his body along, looking left and right to see where his man
+might be hiding, the ship ever and again pausing in the midst of a
+rise, pausing much as men on deck did at a more violent and unexpected
+roll and kick.  Some greater wave, at such times, had caught her fair,
+and smashing upon her hull as on a cliff, raced whirling along the
+length of her, shot up her side, soared thinly there beyond the
+bulwark, to be immediately blown wide, as is the top of a fountain in
+the wind, scudding and rattling along the decks.  Tarpaulins had been
+rigged entirely across her, below the bridge, to protect the sheep on
+the after deck; and as far as to that barrier did Candlass now strut,
+tilting and balancing.  And there, in a space between two sheep-pens,
+beside a ventilator, he saw a pair of boot-soles, bent down and grabbed
+at the legs beyond them, and the face of the missing man looked up at
+him--green.  It was sea-sickness.  Candlass stooped low.
+
+"Sick?" he said.
+
+The man's eyes rolled.  He clung desperately to the ventilator.
+
+"Don't fall overboard, don't want to lose a man.  Savvey?"
+
+The man tried to nod; his whole body sagged forward in that effort.
+
+"You lie on your back when you ain't actually being sick," Candlass
+roared into his ear.  "Savvey?"
+
+Again the man tried to nod and at least succeeded in making his head go
+up and down instead of being powerless to keep it from doing aught but
+rolling left and right.
+
+"Don't fall overboard," Candlass counselled again, and lurched away,
+muttering to himself: "Sick all right."
+
+But most of the men enjoyed the gale.  It was something doing.  And
+when, next morning, the pickpocket-faced youth sat up ready to give his
+shout of: "Call me in another hour, Rafferty, and bring me me shaving
+water," his voice failed.  He looked round the cabin; he had been one
+of the shirkers yesterday.
+
+"That's right," said one of the men.  "You keep your mouth shut this
+morning!"  And the gunsel and his special cronies kept quiet, for it
+was unfitting that those who skulked in a corner during a gale should
+cheek Rafferty the morning after merely because they found that the
+swing and sweep of the tossing stern were back a little more to the
+normal.  The gale had indeed blown itself out, or nearly so.  It was a
+tremendous morning in the North Atlantic.  A fountain of gold,
+preceding sunrise, shot up eastwards.  A sound of hissing and of
+breaking foam was round the ship, and echoed in every corner.  The
+waves soared, great and curving, blue and purple, veined like marble in
+their forward curves with the foam of other broken waves, soared
+higher, curled their tops, broke, and as they broke the wind took the
+foam and whirled it broadcast.  There was a wonderful purple and blue
+and windy hilarity over that great expanse, so high a sea running that
+even the horizon line was ragged.
+
+The grub that day seemed painfully scanty.  The uneaten shares of the
+one or two seasick men made no difference, so great were the appetites
+of the fit.  Cockney admitted, after the meal was over, that he
+sympathised with those persons who chummed with, or intimidated, Pierre
+and Four Eyes, for the sake of what food they might smuggle away from
+the galley--though his phrasing of this comprehension was of course all
+his own.
+
+"Are they cadgin' off Frenchy and that object in the coat?" asked Mike.
+
+"'Aven't you seen 'em?" said Cockney.  "'O, Frenchy, bring hus along
+some pie!'" he cried out in a fleering voice.
+
+"I quite belave it," said Mike.  "I see some of 'em cadgin' tobacco.
+There's men aboard this ship I know I wouldn't prisint me plug of
+tobacco to.  If they took a bite out of it you'd be thinkin' the plug
+was in their mouth, and the chaw they axed for was the piece they gave
+back to ye."  There was an attempt at a laugh, an obvious attempt, for
+the shot had gone home.  "'Have ye got a piece of chewing on ye?'"
+mocked Mike.  "'Me pipe's empty, have you a fill about ye?'--'Have ye a
+ceegareet about ye?'"  He paused.  "'After you wid the ceegareet!'" he
+mocked.
+
+And he lived up to his opinion.  There are people who arrange their
+moral code according to what they can do and cannot do.  There are
+people to whom a fall from fealty to their code is occasion for
+renouncing and deriding that code.  Mike was not of these.  He disliked
+cadging, but had his love of a smoke or a chew driven him to cadge he
+would not have relinquished his opinion; he would have smoked and
+chewed as a defeated man.
+
+All day now there was sign of better weather.  Even the wind aided to
+calm the seas, swinging round a point or two and besoming the
+wave-tops, flattening them.  There was hash and pea-soup that day--the
+pea-soup drunk in the tin mugs, of course, along with, or after, the
+hash--and the "Push" were glad of it.  It was a great tonic day.  By
+night all the clouds seemed to have been blown away; stars by the
+billion filled the vault; the Milky Way was like a whirl of triumph,
+like a gesture of joy across the heavens.  The wake of the tiny little
+_Glory_ (she seemed tiny now) was as an imitation of that Milky Way,
+full of balls, large and small, and smaller, down to the size of sparks
+even, of phosphorus--dancing and bursting and thinning out.  Mike,
+coming on deck a trifle disgusted by a surfeit of what he called
+"soup-kitchen palaver" that was in progress amid a group of "youse,"
+looked down at that wake, moody, and furrowed, that kind of half-broken
+look upon his face, like a wondering beast, a puzzled beast.  He stood
+there at the stern, lifted high and brought low, till his back went
+cold.
+
+"Bejabbers, it's all very strange," he said to himself; and being cold
+he looked round for shelter.  Some wisps of hay, blown from windward,
+had been brought up against the lee rail, and he gathered them
+together.  The sheep bleated.
+
+"I'm using this for me own comfort," he said, addressing the sheep in
+the end cote; "go to sleep!"  And he squatted down with his back
+against the cotes, and stretched out his legs--sat there a long time
+while the ship pulsed and pulsed on, tossing her stern and the engines
+racing and steadied, racing and steadied, as she slid through the sea,
+churning the water into foam, in which whirls of gold began like
+nebulas of stars, whirled into complete little globes, danced away as
+entrancing as opals, and then suddenly went out.
+
+Now it happened that, below, Scholar felt he might almost suffocate,
+and remembering that he had been some time out of the weather, for
+which he had always a great friendliness, never liking to be too long
+out of touch with it--blow high, blow low, rain, mist or sunshine--he
+too came on deck.  The poop companion-way had been closed these last
+few days, and that made the cabin all the more asphyxiating.  He came
+up that narrow staircase, feet clattering on the worn brass edges,
+turned the handle; eddies of wind did the rest.  He wrestled a spell
+with the door, then came on deck, closed the door, and looked up in awe
+at all these stars--stood there balancing, now drawn away from them
+down and down, next moment soaring and swinging up with a sensation as
+if he might be swung on and come up through that golden dust and see
+some explanation.  Then down he was borne again, or felt as though his
+body was borne down and his spirit left up there.  Explanation, or no
+explanation, it was good--all good, the crying of the sea, the whistle
+and shriek of the wind in the cordage, the feel of the wind, the scud
+of the spray--good!
+
+He turned and looked forward.  There seemed to be not a soul on deck.
+It was as if he had dropped from a star, forgetting all about it on the
+way, and had alighted gently upon this thing that, reeking
+volcano-like, tossed and swung, but always forward through the night.
+He had almost to take it on faith that there was a man in that
+hardly-discernible little barrel on the foremast, the summit of which
+raked from left to right.  He peered up at the bridge.  Yes, something
+moved there from port to starboard and back again, like a mouse running
+to and fro on a shelf.  Below his feet the ceaseless whirl and whirl
+went on.  A man suddenly appeared, jumping up on top of the sheep pens,
+tapping with his toe before him, then stepping, to be sure he stood on
+firm board top and not on tarpaulin cover, turned the top of a
+ventilator, disappeared, bobbed up again, revealed against the starry
+sky, or at any rate revealed from his head down to about his knees, the
+wind pluck-pluck-plucking at his short jacket.  He disappeared again,
+jumping down and was gone.  Scholar moved to one side, kicked something
+soft, looked down and said: "Oh, I beg your pardon!" and a coarse Irish
+voice answered: "All right, Scholar."
+
+There was fresh movement at Scholar's feet.
+
+"I seen ye against the stars, but ye couldn't see me.  Bring yourself
+to an anchor here beside me--I have some straw here--and give us your
+crack."
+
+Scholar, peering down, was now able to make out where Mike reclined,
+and sat down beside him, back against the end of the last sheep-pen.
+But they did not speak at once.  Scholar felt in his pocket for pipe
+and tobacco, and held the tobacco-bag to Mike.
+
+"Have a fill?" he said.
+
+Mike put forth a hand, and drew it back.
+
+"No," he growled.
+
+"I've a plug of chewing-tobacco somewhere," said Scholar.  "Yes--here
+it is."
+
+Out went Mike's hand, then abruptly back again; and this time he thrust
+both hands deep in pockets.
+
+"No, thank you, Scholar."
+
+Scholar wondered if he had given some offence.  Ignorant of how to
+repel in this society in which he found himself, he might also, even in
+sitting down in response to Mike's invitation, ignorantly have
+transgressed some usage of courtesy in this sphere.  Next moment Mike
+explained.
+
+"When I see the way the fellers on this ship go cadgin' for tobacco it
+gives me a pain."  He shifted his position slightly, as if he really
+felt a physical pain.  "I would think shame to keep on axing a man day
+after day--_many_ times a day--'Have you got any chewing?  Have you got
+any smoking?'"
+
+"That's all right," said Scholar.  "You didn't ask me--I offered to
+you."
+
+"Yes, yes, I know; but I said to meself: 'Thim fellers has no daycency.
+I'll do without chewings and smokings until I get to Liverpool.'  No,
+Scholar, thank you kindly--I'll go wanting it.  It has too much hold
+upon me as it is."
+
+Scholar did not press.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+Now there began to be signs of how the cattlemen would wander off
+together when they came to land again.  Understandings seemed to be
+arrived at between threes and fours and half-dozens.  It was not
+exactly cliquishness--it was more a case of "birds of a feather"--No,
+that simile is bad, as are most ready-made proverbs.  Not their outward
+parts, their mere feathers, but their inner parts arranged the
+groupings.  The snarling was all over; drink, and the effects of drink,
+were old stories.  One or two men, of course, were still left alone by
+all, men so different as the Man with the Hat and the Man with the
+Specs.  Frenchy, or Pierre, his tobacco nearly done, and his
+complaisance in giving it away in a like state, was now discarded by
+some of the former spongers, but not by all.  Probably those who had
+been interested in him, as well as sponging upon him, were the ones who
+now besought him to sing a French song, or to tell them what France
+looked like.
+
+The feeding and watering were by this time matters of routine, wakening
+at four a habit.  The cabin was almost tenantless, only the
+cold-blooded, or those children of the slums who felt out of their
+element unless they slept in rancid air, turned in there.  Among the
+diminishing hay near the hatches--all open again--or on the upper deck,
+around the smoke-stack, and between the sheep-pens, most of the men
+slept, snatching a nap during the day when the cattle did not call
+them, sleeping there at night until only the extreme cold drove them
+down, with short gasps, from the windy deck to the asthmatical cabin.
+It was, indeed, easier to tolerate the cabin by day than by late night,
+for by day, and early in the morning, there was some tobacco smoke--not
+much now, to be sure--and the companion was open.  At night the tobacco
+smoke soon ceased to combat with the ammonia fumes as the men slept,
+and some of the cold-blooded were sure to mount up and shut the
+companion-door before turning in, making the cabin's atmosphere more
+stifling still.
+
+They began to talk of reaching Liverpool, of what they would do there,
+to ask each other: "You coming back on her?"  Cockney and Michael
+exchanged friendly speech again.  It is doubtful which started, but
+they were again conversing.  The Inquisitive One begged Frenchy to
+"come with us," indicating the group round him; but Pierre explained
+that he was going home.  One told another about the loss of Frenchy's
+valise, and Mike's recovery of it, as he might tell of the incident on
+another ship one day if Frenchmen, or valises, were mentioned.  Many of
+the men fell to rubbing their chins, and announcing that they would be
+the better of a shave.  They asked each other: "Have you a razor?"
+Frenchy taking warning by the cadging of tobacco that left him
+smokeless now, pretended that he didn't know what "razor" meant, was
+unusually dense to signs, could not be got to understand of what they
+talked.  Somebody commented that he _must_ have a shave, that they all
+should shave, looked too tough, that the day after to-morrow, perhaps,
+they would be in Liverpool, and if they went ashore like this they'd be
+taken for cadgers by everybody.
+
+Scholar took pity on them.  He had managed to shave twice already,
+despite the sea running.  Now he offered the loan of his razor to one
+man; and many others asked to be next.  Some of them sneered, both at
+the razor and at those who wished to use it.  At any rate Scholar,
+carefully propped, had his shave; and others--each using his razor,
+each handing the razor back to him when finished.  Thus, at least, they
+acted to begin with.
+
+"I wonder," said Mike, approaching him, "if ye would lend me the loan
+of your razor, Scholar, if it's not too much to be asking ye."
+
+"Certainly," answered Scholar, and Mike had his shave, then gave the
+razor back.  Another man had it, and thereafter there was no more talk
+of the razor for an hour or two, when suddenly several were asking
+where it was, and it was impossible to tell who had it.  Mike was
+greatly upset.
+
+"I don't like it at all," he said, "not at all.  Here's Scholar being
+kind to youse, and there's some of you fellers can't see anything
+without putting it in your pockut."
+
+He looked round the crowd.  Harry of the mad eyes sat humped, nursing
+his knees, and smiling in front of him.  Jack was smiling too, a
+cynical smile it might be, however.  Johnnie, over his shoulder, asked
+them to shut up about that razor.  Mike's eye rested with suspicion on
+Mad Harry, but he was unshaven; still, that didn't signify.  Cockney,
+with a clean bandage on his head, tried to thrash out the question of
+who had used the razor last.  It was a task more thorny than
+discovering who turned out the gas for fun at the Philanthropists'
+Teetotal Hand Out.  Little Michael, beginning to peer under his
+eye-patch now--with an eye and a half, as it were--grumbled a great
+deal about the disappearance.  It would give a man who didn't know them
+such a poor opinion of cattlemen!  Mike turned his troubled face to
+Michael, puzzling over him; with no vocabulary to express his feelings
+he wondered dumbly if Michael really had so high an opinion of a
+"Push."  The Inquisitive One drew Scholar aside anxiously, and with
+intense eagerness asked him: "You don't think I got it, do you?"
+
+"No, no," said Scholar.  "That's all right--don't worry about it."
+
+"No, but I wouldn't like you to think I had it--straight I wouldn't."
+
+Mike was gloomy all that day.  At night there was again a sing-song,
+but it was not a very great success.  One man, called upon for a song,
+said he couldn't sing; another said: "Get on your feet and sing.  What
+the hell's the matter with you?  Are you sitting on the razor?"
+Another, who had danced a breakdown without being asked, was told that
+he was no dancer, and that if that there razor could only be found he'd
+have his throat cut.
+
+Mike watched to see which men found these recurrent references merely
+amusing, which looked disgusted, which appeared guilty; but it was
+impossible even to begin the winnowing in that way.  A flutter of more
+pleasant talk ricocheted about, Molls and Biddies, and what not--names
+of streets, descriptions of where they lay.  One man stood up and sang
+the praises of a certain lady friend.  Mike's eyes opened wide and he
+stared; his face gloomed.  He shot out a hand, pointing at the man.
+
+"Do you know what I'm going to tell you about her?" he said.  Faces
+turned to see what Mike had to say, and he said.  The man looked
+belligerent for a moment.
+
+"No, no!" cried Mike to those who laughed.  "No, no!  I'm not talking
+fanciful.  I know the woman."
+
+That settled it.  Those who had listened believed that she was beneath
+contempt, for there was verity in Mike's gesture.  One of those from
+the lower deck, who had been in the razor queue, and was grateful,
+called to Scholar: "If you don't know Liverpool, Michigan," evidently
+he had heard whence Scholar had come, "you come with me.  There's a
+moll I know--you'll like her."
+
+"Pay no attintion to them," broke in Mike.  "Them fellers sees a crimp
+in a petticoat and they starts singing about her."
+
+"That's right," agreed another.  "Don't you go with him.  You come
+along of me."  He looked Scholar up and down.  He would be rather proud
+to introduce Scholar, as a shipmate, to the lady in question.
+
+Mike growled: "Scholar's coming with me," and turning to Scholar, very
+friendly, his manner reminiscent in a far-off way of a kindly host:
+"You come with me, Scholar," he said.  "There's a fine motherly woman I
+know----" and he nodded.  "I'll put you on to her."
+
+Scholar wondered if he should say: "Thank you very much."  Instead he
+drew at his empty pipe and looked at nothingness before him; and the
+propeller whirled, and the screws beat on.
+
+"What a queer homecoming these fellows know," he thought.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+The feeding of cattle and of men was over for the afternoon.  Scholar
+was the first up on the poop.  He leant over the rail, looking away out
+and forward.  The south end of Ireland was off there somewhere, out of
+sight, northwards.  The _Glory_ surged on, in a pother of spray, a mile
+of smoke trailing from her smoke-stack a point or two off the bows,
+southward.  There was a touch of humidity in the air that was not the
+humidity of the sea.  It could not be said that Scholar had enjoyed the
+trip any more than any of them, but nearing home the call of home
+seemed to be an open question.  In this riff-raff below him he had
+found something likeable, something good amid all the evil.  The people
+at home, where he was going, he knew, could not appreciate one word
+that he might have to tell of the voyage or the men.  No, if they
+pitied, it would be a very patronising pity, and even that annulled by
+censure.  His womenfolk would find only one more opportunity to say:
+"What awful creatures men are!"  Last night he had pitied these men
+that they had no homes to go to.  To-day, alert for Ireland, near home,
+the sentimental glow was fading from the vision of his own.  He felt
+himself homeless as they.  And then ahead there, northwards in the sea,
+he beheld something advancing rapidly.
+
+Some of the other men came on deck, among them Mike, who drew near and
+looked in the direction of Scholar's gaze; and just then Scholar saw
+what it was that came like a low cloud through the many foam-topped,
+spray-topped waves--a blue-grey warship, lying low, with four short
+funnels, a very short mast; and he experienced a thrill.  He had met
+Englishmen who were less moved than Frenchmen by such lines as those
+that tell of how "the coastwise lights of England watch the ships of
+England go."  If they had objected to the same poet's: "Lord of our
+far-flung battle line," to the Hebraic self-righteousness in that, he
+could have been at one with them; that was a different matter.  He
+appreciated Kipling's song of the "coastwise lights of England."  He
+also appreciated Arnold's reminder to Victorian Englishmen that England
+could be improved; but he loved the England that Arnold, in his love,
+made to bloom and flower in such poems as his "Scholar Gipsy," that
+England that coloured the same poet's "Resignation."  It struck him
+that the Englishman who could not tolerate a song simply because the
+name of England was in it would be highly repulsive and irksome even to
+Arnold, who so often lectured Englishmen upon their self-satisfaction.
+They could not understand, these people; the moment they were left
+alone they strayed.  The road was pointed out to them time and again,
+and off they went, but the moment they were alone they deviated into
+paths that led otherwise, without knowing.
+
+Scholar felt a thrill at sight of this long, low vessel that came with
+tremendous speed, wasp-like, sweeping out from the haze beyond which
+lay home.  It might be a slightly tarnished home, the house not all in
+order, but, by God, it was home, and worth loving and setting in order.
+He had a feeling as of: "How they do watch!"  There was nobody on her
+decks.  She was a thing of beauty, although of steel.  She was nearly
+abreast now, but far off.  Then suddenly, hammering along between the
+sheep-pens (the tarpaulins off them now) came a man in haste the
+bo'sun--and as he ran this way sternwards upon the deck of the _Glory_,
+there appeared, as out of a hole in the deck of that long, low wasp of
+a thing, a small black spot that ran sternwards upon it.  The bo'sun
+was already at the flagpole, loosening the flag halyard, the flag was
+dipping, and a little square of cloth, away off there on that other
+ship, was dipping too, down and up.  She slid past, rushing through the
+sea; the spot went forward on her and disappeared again; she was hidden
+in the smoke reeking from her four short stacks.
+
+Mike, behind Scholar, expelled a gust of air from his nostrils and drew
+erect.
+
+"Bedad!" he said.  "I guess she can smell us that far."
+
+It had not occurred to Scholar before; and thereafter, when more ships
+began to appear, where the sea-trails of the world converged, he
+imagined the people on their decks all holding their noses.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+A callous-looking grey morning was breaking in the Mersey.  Now and
+then, when a bell-buoy heaved, the bell tolled.  It was just like
+that--tolling, tolling them home.  Another steamer, swathed in mist,
+surged along, behind and a little to the side, but rapidly drawing
+level.  Captain Williamson, coming to the bridge and gazing astern at
+that steamer that was but half vapour, turned away with some agility
+after his scrutiny, for she was another cattleboat, and he wanted to be
+berthed first.  Those members of the "Push," the morning's feeding
+being over, who strolled as far forward as to the bridge, heard him
+speaking down the tube to the engine room.  Sounds of energetic
+shovelling came up from the stoke-hole; the _Glory_ put on the pace a
+little more as the other ship came level.  The _Glory_ led again.
+Captain Williamson, pacing the bridge, stirring up the morning haze,
+looked pleased.  Again the other ship forged level, and he was heard
+chanting: "Shake her up!  Shake her up!"  The cattlemen took up the
+refrain, and addressed the deck on which they walked and
+double-shuffled, with "Shake her up!  Shake her up!"
+
+[Illustration: "Again the cattleships forged level."]
+
+"Oho!" shouted Cockney.  "'Ere we are!  Two stinks comin' 'ome!"
+
+Michael leant on the rail and gazed at the rival ship with one eye,
+raised the shade slightly from the other and looked, to see if it
+improved.
+
+"Iberian!" he said.  "Iberian!" reading her name upon the bows.
+
+"Hiberian," said Cockney.
+
+"No, you're thinking of the Hibernian," replied Michael, still holding
+the shade up and peering, like a man testing new eye-glasses.
+
+Cockney humped his shoulders and shot his face forward, then noticed
+Michael lifting that lid over his eye, and his mouth gave a twist of
+something like shame, and he turned away.
+
+"It's the S dropped off," said the Inquisitive One.  "I came over on
+her once--Siberian."
+
+"Nothing of the kind!" said somebody else.
+
+"Oh, gee!" said Mike.  "You fellers are always scrapping."
+
+"Well, what is it, then?" they asked him "What is her name?"
+
+"Can't you rade?" asked Mike.
+
+"Yes.  But what _is_ her name?"
+
+"It's the S dropped off," Charlie repeated.
+
+Mike shook his shoulders and that baffled look was on his forehead as
+he turned from them.
+
+"Oh, indade," he said.  "Nobody knows anything about it; and
+everybody's talking.  You think you know all about it; maybe I think I
+know a hell of a lot; but we all know damn-all.  If you want to know,
+keep your mouth shut till we get ashore.  They'll be paid off along of
+us likely, and you'll hear what the man at the Board of Trade Office
+calls them.  She's another ould ship the same as us, and that's enough
+to be goin' on with."
+
+"Well, we're forgin a'ead, any'ow," said Cockney.
+
+Suddenly their feet tingled and the sound of the siren came.  They
+looked round and up.  The haze had not thickened again-it was not for
+that she whistled.
+
+"She's whistling for the cattle-sheds," somebody said.  One of the
+others explained that in a race like this the steamer that passed a
+certain point first was the first to be unloaded, and the _Glory_ was
+whistling to let them know ashore that she had done it.  Some of the
+youngsters asked the older men if this was so, but they shook their
+heads; they did not know.  They had often made the trip, but rules
+change.  "Wait and see," was all that anybody could say.
+
+A radiance began to come down into the haze, and the particles of
+moisture sparkled.  A glory, a splendour, but ever so tenuous, ever so
+frail, was on the river-mist, a mist that waned fainter and fainter.
+The men lay along the rail and looked into the mist as though they
+sought to make sure of that evanescent radiance in it, to make sure
+that it was there, was not a trick of their eyes.  The other steamer
+had now the air of giving up, fell behind, foot by foot, content to be
+second.  One of the young men plucked Mike's elbow; he had been in a
+knot looking the other way.
+
+"Is that right, Mike?" he asked, pointing to the long melancholy
+promenade that showed up ashore.  "Is that where the toffs go to pick
+up the flash molls?"
+
+"Oh, indade, I don't know," said Mike.
+
+The Inquisitive One fell to chatting with Scholar, but asking questions
+in a way wholly different from that of the two catechists whom Scholar
+had desired to keep at arm's length--the Cardiff man, and the man from
+Fife in Scotland.
+
+"Mike!" he said, suddenly.  "Mike, Scholar has a mother!"
+
+"Well, what about it?" asked Mike.  "I expect ye had wan yersilf."
+
+The Inquisitive One looked far off briefly, then a new thought came
+again to him.
+
+"Got a father?" he asked, turning back to Scholar.
+
+There was a look in Scholar's eyes that seemed somehow akin with that
+baffled look that showed in Mike's.  He nodded.  The Inquisitive One
+stood back, hands in pockets, and examined him with great interest.
+
+"You're going _home_?" he said, accentuating the word.  "You have a
+home?"
+
+Mike turned away slightly.  The Inquisitive One waggled his head
+sidewise as a sign that he wanted to draw Scholar aside again.  Nobody
+who heard had jeered; some had pretended not to hear; only the chumming
+Welshman and the man from Dysart in Fife, standing together and apart,
+looked scorn, hate, contempt at these other two.  Scholar was amazed to
+see that there were tears in the eyes of the Inquisitive One as he said:
+
+"I often wonder what it's like going home.  I've never had a father,
+and I've never had a mother.  Straight!  Will you be coming back on the
+ship?"--this suddenly, eagerly.
+
+"I don't know.  I think so."
+
+"Tell me all about it when you come back, will yer?  I would like to
+know."
+
+But they were now being warped into the land, through channels between
+dock walls into docks, round the dock walls, sailors coming running
+along to hang over rope-fenders.  The cattlemen kept quiet.  There
+seemed to be no end to it.  Men on shore caught ropes and ran,
+clattering and yelling.  It was as if they were dragging for a corpse.
+Scholar felt a horror of the land, even as he had felt a horror of
+putting out to sea in that safe full of madmen, madmen that he felt now
+he would like to know more of--not probing like the Welshman, or the
+man from Fife, not even perhaps questioning personally like the
+Inquisitive One, but just sailing the seas with them after they had got
+over their cups.  Suddenly they found that the ship was still.  There
+was a rope ladder hanging over the other side.  A broad-beamed little
+steamer lay there.  The unruly members of the "Push," the shirk-works,
+were piling over the side and down the rope ladder.
+
+"Come on, Mike!" someone called.  "Ashore!"
+
+"They're going to lave us to run the cattle ashore!" said Mike,
+disgusted, and he swung his legs over.  Over they all went, one after
+the other, down the rope ladder, and jumped thence on to the bluff
+little steamer, where a man in a jersey stood looking at them
+curiously, staring; and another, a custom-house man, sat on the further
+bulwark watching the descent on the grin.  The Man with the Hat came
+down, his wrist through the handles of his valise.
+
+"Carry your bag?" jeered the younger men among the cattlemen below.
+"Carry your bag, mister?"
+
+But cause for greater amusement was beheld higher up.  There was Four
+Eyes, wrestling with a small trunk, round which he had made a rope
+fast, trying to lower it over the side.  They whooped and cheered, they
+rocked with delight.  "Lower away there!" they shouted.  "All clear
+below!  Drop it in the dock!"  They advised him to make fast to the
+capstan.  As he struggled with the box they suggested that he should
+"hail them two fellers on the bridge," and ask them to give him a
+hand--namely the pilot and the skipper.  The face of Rafferty appeared
+over the rail; he gnashed his teeth, he yelped at them.
+
+"It ain't our place to run the cattle ashore," they called back.
+Others looked a little forward, turning their heads, for a sharp
+whistle had sounded thence.  Candlass, standing on the top of a
+sheep-pen, raised thumb and forefinger, and beckoned gently with the
+finger--then, with his head, gave an inclination inboard.
+
+"Come on youse, then," said Mike.  "I knew youse was wrong."
+
+The man in the jersey, who had been standing like a squat effigy, moved
+to a rope by which this little craft was moored alongside, pressed feet
+to the bulwark, hung on to the rope so that the great hull of the
+_Glory_ (she looked a massive thing again) loomed close and they could
+stretch out to the rope ladder.  Rafferty above hauled in Four Eyes'
+trunk with great vehemence, that "poor feller" standing by like a great
+child watching the rough-handling of a toy.  They swarmed on deck
+again.  Candlass came aft and stood beside them.
+
+"Stand by, men," he said.  "Just wait till we get alongside here."
+
+The ship began to move on again, towards a sound of lowing of cattle
+and shouting of men, and Candlass walked forward, left them, and stood
+chatting amidships with Rafferty.  There appeared suddenly, running
+into their midst, swarming on deck like rats, several grimy stokers,
+looking for friends, it would appear, among the cattlemen.  Mike eyed
+the little knots that drew aside.
+
+"If you want your razor, Scholar," he said quietly, "keep your eye on
+these fellows.  Whoever's got it up here will very likely slip it to
+one of his friends in the black hole, for fear of you putting a copper
+on them."
+
+The Inquisitive One, standing by, heard the word "copper" and flinched.
+
+"What you say about a copper?" he asked anxiously.
+
+"Now then, some of you fellows," cried Candlass.
+
+"Come on, you fellows," shouted Rafferty.
+
+The willing ones followed them; the shirkers remained, and were not
+worried.  Indeed all were not required--they would be in each other's
+way.  They only went below now to knock out the divisions between the
+pens with a crow-bar or two, or the back of an axe, or whatever
+implement came handy; and as they were so employed the shore-push
+thrust in their gangways and swarmed up them.
+
+A couple of men that Mike called "them toffs" were speaking to Candlass
+at the top of the gangway that stretched to the main deck.  They paid
+no heed to the men who had brought the cattle across, or at least
+little heed.  One of them, once, while talking, roved his eyes from
+Candlass along the deck, looked at this cattleman, looked at that, half
+absently; saw Scholar, seemed for a moment to be more interested in him
+than in the threesome chat; looked then at Mike, up and down, appeared
+to measure him as if he thought: "Jove!  There's a big fellow!" nodded
+"Yes, yes," to Candlass, looked at Mike's face again with an expression
+faintly reminiscent of that which had showed on Smithers' face now and
+then when he stood beside the wicket of the little movable office in
+the back of the shed at Montreal as the Hard Cases trooped up to sign
+on.  Mike bent down, lifted a board, and stepped forward to a great
+steer that thrust its head, and its great long horns, over the front
+barricade.  The "toff" looked at him, alert, frowning; but all the
+movements of these Hard Cases seemed belligerent to strangers, and Mike
+might not be going to rough-handle the brute.  So he merely watched,
+intent.  Mike took the end of the board and scrubbed the steer under
+its chin as it raised its great head, like a cat wanting to be
+scratched; it turned its head round and over slowly, to have the office
+well done all round.
+
+"Well, bejabbers, this is your last scratch!  You're a fine looking
+baste.  You might have had a worse trip!" Mike addressed the steer,
+that baffled look on his face, and his eyes kindly.
+
+
+When they did find themselves, anon, rightly upon the shore, they
+clustered there, masterless men.  Jack asked: "What are we waiting here
+for?"  His partner said: "I don't know," and swore.  Somebody moved
+away, saying: "Come on, come on--what are we waiting here for?" and a
+few followed him.
+
+"Where are you going?" he was asked.
+
+He admitted that he did not know.  A long, thin, grey-faced man drew
+nigh and stood beside the knot.  Somebody took him into the
+conversation, half turning to him, but not looking at him, unaware that
+a stranger had joined them, and he answered, but not eagerly, quite
+casually.  Thus he dropped into the talk: what kind of a trip had they
+had? what were they hanging around for?  They didn't know.  One of them
+asked if he was So-and-So, of Such-and-Such a boarding house?  He
+admitted he was.  Was he there still?  He merely nodded--it was all
+very casual, but it seemed settled soon, seemed to be in the air
+somehow that they had arranged that they might as well bunk at his
+boarding house as anywhere else.
+
+Then Candlass appeared on the wharf, wearing a white collar instead of
+the blue-and-white striped rubber one of the trip.  Some of the men
+approached him, and he turned in his walk as a housemaster, one
+somewhat feared as a rule but respected, turns to hear what some boys
+would say to him, who have the air of wondering if they should approach
+at all on the day before breakup.  He answered gently, easily, seemed
+to suggest by his manner that he would see them through as well as
+possible, but that even he was in the clutch of circumstance.  It was
+with the hint of a shrug and with a little toss of the head and a half
+smile that he left them.  The crowd formed afresh around those who had
+spoken to him.
+
+"What does he say?  What does he say?"
+
+"Well," said Mike, sticking a hand under his belt, "we may as well
+drift up that way, then."  "That way" was the Board of Trade Office.
+
+"See you later on," said the boarding house man.
+
+"Are you going away?" asked somebody, who perhaps felt homeless.
+
+"Oh, I'll be back--I'll meet you up there."
+
+"What does he say?  What does he say?"  He had drifted away.
+
+"Who the hell is he?" asked one with a mania for trying to make others
+quarrelsome, and then backing out.  The older hands filed off; the
+others followed.  The Inquisitive One saw their resemblance to a
+procession as they drew aside to let a traction engine go past, a
+rattling, smoking, devil-waggon, pulling a string of lorries laden with
+swaying beer kegs.  He took out his mouth organ.  Rattling and
+deafening the engine and drays quivered by, the men shouting: "Oh,
+beer!" or: "How would you like to get all them inside you?"  The
+procession went on, the irresponsible tail-end of it cake-walking, and
+the mouth organ, with full tremolo, in full blast, made music for it
+with the air of a bottle-song of the halls.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+The "Push" came to a halt before the Board of Trade building.  The less
+juvenile, and the elders, looked broodingly at it.  The younger fry
+sparred, and danced, and fought for possession of the mouth organ.  Now
+and then a man who leant against a wall of the neighbourhood would
+catch the eye of one of the youths in the crowd and nod amiably, and
+the man nodded at would either look away quickly, or would tauten his
+legs and chuck his chest a little, look up the wall behind the man who
+had pretended to be an acquaintance, slow, casual, and so extricate
+himself.  Now and then somebody who really knew one of the group would
+approach, and all would look at him shrewdly to see what his intentions
+might be.
+
+A voice came: "You're there, are you?"  It was Rafferty.  Cheerily he
+was asked when the pay-off would be.  "Oh, not for some time yet," he
+said.  One man announced a wish that they could get something to eat;
+and that set them all a-going with their wishes.  A few had a coin or
+two left.  It was for something to eat that the Inquisitive One raised
+his plaintive voice.
+
+"I have half-a-crown or so," said Scholar.  "Come and let us have
+breakfast.  Come and have some breakfast, Mike," he added, turning.
+Two others ran close, approaching him in a kind of cake-walk, inviting
+themselves.  "I don't think I've enough money," said Scholar.
+
+"We'll stop here," said Mike, wheeling round again.
+
+"Come on," answered Scholar.
+
+"No!"
+
+"I _am_ hungry," said the Inquisitive One.
+
+Scholar and he headed for a cheap restaurant, but Mike refused to
+accompany them and jeered at those who showed signs of intending to
+follow, so that they subsided.  The man behind the counter nodded
+pleasantly to them and wished them good morning, and the early waitress
+rustled after them to a marble-topped table.  The Inquisitive One felt
+nervous, but Scholar's suggestion of ham and eggs made his eyes bulge.
+Large cups of coffee were brought, rolls of butter, and the ham and
+eggs.
+
+"I can do with this," murmured Charles.
+
+The girl waited.  Scholar wondered why; then, even as it struck him
+that perhaps he was expected to pay before eating, she turned away.
+
+"Ain't yer goin' to give her the money?" asked Charlie in a worried
+voice.
+
+"Oh!" said Scholar.  "Oh, of course, that's what she was waiting for."
+
+Charlie looked at him a trifle suspiciously.  Was it possible that this
+man was one of those swell crooks in embarrassed circumstances?  Was he
+beginning his daring fancy tricks and games of bluff the moment he got
+ashore?  Here was out of such company for him!  The girl was walking
+over to the man behind the counter, he looking up expectant, for she
+had evidently something to say.
+
+"I'd better pay you," called Scholar, and she came back smiling.
+
+"It's the rule," she said.  "I was just going to ask the boss, seeing
+you--thank you," for he put the coin in her hand.
+
+They took up knife and fork, and as they did so the girl returned to
+say, quite sweetly: "Didn't notice.  The manager says this is an
+American coin."
+
+[Illustration: "The manager says this is an American coin."]
+
+Charlie sat back and went limp; he looked from one to the other, mouth
+open.
+
+"So it is," said Scholar easily.  "I wasn't thinking.  I haven't got
+anything else, either--I have only American money.  Still, that's the
+same as two shillings; that will be all right, won't it?"
+
+Charlie pushed his plate forward on the table, pushed his coffee cup
+forward.  The girl departed, and the manager called: "I'm not supposed
+to take foreign money, but that's all right.  Have your breakfasts.
+The money-changing places aren't open yet."
+
+"By gee, you'll get run in!" whispered the Inquisitive One.  "Get run
+in!"  He pushed the dishes still farther from him.
+
+"Thank you very much," answered Scholar, looking to the manager.
+"Perhaps you could send somebody out to get the money changed."  He
+smiled cheerfully.  "You don't know us, and we might run off."
+
+"Oh, that's all right--there's a place just across the street," said
+the man behind the counter.  (The girl put down the fifty-cent piece
+beside him.)  "Just arrived?" he asked affably.
+
+Charlie kept gibbering: "Can't eat!  Can't eat!  My appetite's gone!  I
+feel stalled before I start.  Couldn't touch it.  Might have got run
+in.  Might have got me run in!" and he flared up angry for a moment.
+"That's what you might have done to me."
+
+The girl looked at him, pensive, having caught part of this.  She moved
+nearer to the manager, and they whispered; Charlie eyed them.
+
+"I'm going to slide," he murmured, and half rose off his chair.
+
+The girl and the manager drew apart, and the latter took up the thread
+again.
+
+"Just come off a ship?" he enquired.
+
+"Yes, a cattle boat," replied Scholar.
+
+"Don't tell him which one," whispered the Inquisitive One.  And then,
+next moment: "No, tell him, tell him, because he'll find out, and it'll
+make it worse."
+
+Scholar, applying himself to his breakfast, said: "We've just come off
+the _Glory_."
+
+"The _Glory_?  Oh, that's one of the Saint Lawrence Transport, isn't
+it?"
+
+Charlie rose from his chair, and then sat down again.  The manager
+suddenly dived from behind his counter and ran outside.  The
+Inquisitive One eyed the door.  He wondered if it might not be better
+to rush now; but the manager's voice could be heard outside, and then
+he dived in again.
+
+"Where's that--oh, yes, here!" and he lifted the fifty-cent piece from
+the counter and handed it to a red-faced man who followed him.
+
+"Perhaps it's bad!" moaned Charlie, and again he looked suspiciously at
+Scholar.
+
+Relief showed in Charlie's eyes as the red-faced man put the coin in
+his pocket, handing the manager some other money in its place.
+
+"Now you can eat your breakfast," said Scholar to Charlie.
+
+"Me?  No, can't touch it.  Can't eat to-day."  The relief was no better
+for him than the ordeal, so far as raising an appetite went.
+
+"Your com-ish?" said the manager, smiling to the red-faced man.
+
+"That's all right.  You can give me another lump in my tea when I send
+over.  Good morning."
+
+"Good morning."
+
+The manager came over to give the change himself, to chat about the
+weather, and the Atlantic, to ask if there had been any cattle lost
+coming over, how many head they had, so on, making pleasant
+conversation.
+
+"You don't have an appetite," he said to the Inquisitive One.
+
+"No," Charlie gurgled.  And for all the friendly "good morning" of the
+manager when they did rise to go, and the friendly nod of the waitress,
+great was his relief to be out in the street again.  He gave Scholar to
+understand that they could congratulate themselves on getting off like
+that, that it couldn't happen twice, and as Scholar continued to talk
+soothingly, the Inquisitive One became declamatory, and anon
+vituperative.
+
+Those of the "Push" that still hung around the Board of Trade doors
+saw, on the return of these two, that there had been some friction.
+But again the crowd there began to gather and increase, and everybody
+had something to say.  They hung about for hours; now and then somebody
+passed by and cried "Ahoy!" to some member and carried him off for a
+drink.  At last one of them caught sight of Captain Williamson, with
+cheery red face and rolling gait, entering the Board of Trade offices.
+Another group of men formed--such another as this from the
+_Glory_--"cattle-stiffs."  Some sailors hove in sight, in stiff hats
+and stiff, and strangely creased, new-brushed shore-going clothes, and
+smoked their little short pipes, coming to an anchor near by, and
+standing in a circle to talk quietly.  But at last Candlass appeared,
+hand up and beckoning, and the "Push," subduing its voices, came up to
+the swinging glass doors, passed through, some manfully, others with a
+look left and right as though on guard lest the place might prove to be
+a trap.  The big floor space seemed to worry them; it made their foot
+steps sound so loud and echoing.  The long counter, broad and shiny,
+seemed rather magnificent; the windows suggested a church, the wire
+netting a cage.
+
+"There's the skipper," said one to another, and they looked through to
+where Captain Williamson sat.  They were pleased with him for having
+won the race with the _Iberian_, _Siberian_, or whatever it might be
+called--the rival.  They spoke in low voices.  Candlass shepherded
+them, one at a time, to get their money and sign off.  When the Man
+with the Hat, who had waited about alone who knows where, appeared
+there were glances of hard interest.  Safely off the ship somebody had
+let out that he had hazed the cook, though everybody thought that the
+part of the rumour relating to a revolver was by way of superfluous
+frilling to the story.  They looked at him with interest, somewhat as
+they would look at a boxer if the news passed down the street that he
+was coming along, or as they would stand outside the prison where a
+murderer awaited execution till the flag went up.  One by one they
+stepped forward, and Candlass gave them "the wink."  They felt
+themselves in his hands, as schoolboys with an under-master, when there
+has to be an interview with the Head.  Soon, however, they got into the
+swing and Candlass stood aside.  Michael, retiring from the counter
+with his hand full of shillings, stepped up to him.
+
+"Will you do something for me, Mr. Candlass?" he said.  "Will you keep
+half of this for me until we get back to Montreal?"  He divided off the
+half, but it seemed too much.  Present needs were surely greater than
+future.  "Well, I don't know--perhaps ye might take for me----" he went
+on slowly.
+
+"Better let me keep the half, Michael," said Candlass.  "You'll only
+drink it."
+
+"Indeed you're right," replied Michael.  "I'll only drink it."
+
+Cockney stepped up.
+
+"It's a good idear," he said.  "Will yer do the sime fer me, please?"
+
+"I will," replied Candlass.  "And look here--I want you two to promise
+me something."  They looked at him.  "I want you to promise me that
+there'll be no more fighting ashore between you.  Let bygones be
+bygones."
+
+Cockney made a motion of spitting on his hand and held it out to
+Michael, who took it, and looking at Candlass said: "That's a promise,
+Mr. Candlass."
+
+"How's the eye?" asked Candlass, and looked, putting a hand on little
+Michael's head and raising the blind with a thumb.  "It might have been
+worse," he said.  "It might have been very bad."
+
+"Perhaps we both 'ad a drop," said Cockney.
+
+"Quite so, quite so," agreed Candlass sadly, yet severely.
+
+The youth who had asked for his shaving water for three mornings in
+succession got the length of the door, which an official held open;
+then he turned round.
+
+"Rafferty!" he called.
+
+Rafferty came back from looking into nothingness with his queer red
+eyes, standing apart; and the youth, putting his lips together, made a
+sound of contempt with them, and then dived from the place.  Rafferty
+looked away again; one or two of the men grinned sympathetically; one
+or two gave a "Huh!" as who should say: "He _had_ to do something like
+that!"
+
+Mike, scratching the side of his head and pushing up his cap, had a
+troubled look in his eyes, glanced at the door, said something about
+impudence, and then turned to Scholar, who had now taken his money and
+received his discharge.
+
+"You're going home then, Scholar?" he said, heavily.  "Do you go far?"
+
+"Newcastle."
+
+"Well, well, you'd better not stop here to-night.  You'll be coming
+back?"
+
+"I'm not sure."
+
+Troubled, Mike looked at him.
+
+"If ye do, Mike can teach ye the ropes.  Don't forget.  Will ye have a
+drink before----"
+
+Scholar looked at the floor, then up at Mike's face.
+
+"It wouldn't just be one, Mike," he said.
+
+The baffled look showed again.
+
+"You're right--another on the top of it, and so on.  Men that's friends
+will start quarrelling in liquor."  Mike looked as if he had much to
+say as they drifted towards the door.  The tall shepherd from the
+boarding house was outside waiting for them.  Somebody said: "We're
+going to see Frenchy off in the train."  Another announced: "Scholar's
+taking a train, too."  Mike blew a deep breath.  He turned round and
+looked at them as though they worried him, shaking his head upwards,
+and they fell back.
+
+"I'll not be after coming with you," he said.  "Them fellers will be
+cheerin' and screamin.'  We _may_ meet again, or we may _not_.  It's
+all bloody strange," and he held out his hand.  They did not
+pump-handle; they grasped hands warmly.  Each felt that the other had
+much in common with him, but they had need of an interpreter.
+
+"Well, so long, Scholar.  Luck with ye, and God bless ye."
+
+"So long, Mike."
+
+THE END
+
+
+
+
+WOODS & SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, LONDON, N.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The S.S. Glory, by Frederick Niven
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 59343 ***