t the impression that those washed
pale eyes were filmed with dreams, and that the intelligence, the
_thing_, that dwelt within the skull, fluttered and beat against the
dream-films and no farther.

"How much would you expect?" the captain was asking,--a most unsealike
captain, in Daughtry's opinion; rather, a spick-and-span, brisk little
business-man or floor-walker just out of a bandbox.

"He shall not share," spoke up another of the four, huge, raw-boned,
middle-aged, whom Daughtry identified by his ham-like hands as the
California wheat-farmer described by the departed steward.

"Plenty for all," the Ancient Mariner startled Daughtry by cackling
shrilly. "Oodles and oodles of it, my gentlemen, in cask and chest, in
cask and chest, a fathom under the sand."

"Share--_what_, sir?" Daughtry queried, though well he knew, the other
steward having cursed to him the day he sailed from San Francisco on a
blind lay instead of straight wages. "Not that it matters, sir," he
hastened to add. "I spent a whalin' voyage once, three years of it, an'
paid off with a dollar. Wages for mine, an' sixty gold a month, seein'
there's only four of you."

"And a mate," the captain added.

"And a mate," Daughtry repeated. "Very good, sir. An' no share."

"But yourself?" spoke up the fourth man, a huge-bulking, colossal-bodied,
greasy-seeming grossness of flesh--the Armenian Jew and San Francisco
pawnbroker the previous steward had warned Daughtry about. "Have you
papers--letters of recommendation, the documents you receive when you are
paid off before the shipping commissioners?"

"I might ask, sir," Dag Daughtry brazened it, "for your own papers. This
ain't no regular cargo-carrier or passenger-carrier, no more than you
gentlemen are a regular company of ship-owners, with regular offices,
doin' business in a regular way. How do I know if you own the ship even,
or that the charter ain't busted long ago, or that you're being libelled
ashore right now, or that you won't dump me on any old beach anywheres
without a soo-markee of what's comin' to me? Howsoever"--he anticipated
by a bluff of his own the show of wrath from the Jew that he knew would
be wind and bluff--"howsoever, here's my papers . . . "

With a swift dip of his hand into his inside coat-pocket he scattered out
in a wealth of profusion on the cabin table all the papers, sealed and
stamped, that he had collected in forty-five years of voyaging, the
latest date o