hat sodden,
sea-ignorant lump. It was like condemning men to penal servitude. No
wonder they swore. And swear they did, with mouth-filling, curdling
oaths, as though in vain hope their flaming words would quite consume
that evilly known vessel.

In the midst of that bedlam I stood thinking strange thoughts. It is
hardly credible, but I was considering if I should tell the Swede I
would ship in the _Golden Bough_. And I had heard all about the ship,
too, for if the Knitting Swede was the hero of half the dog-watch
yarns, the _Golden Bough_ was the heroine of the other half. I knew of
the ship, the most notorious blood-ship afloat, and the queen of all
the speedy clippers. I knew of her captain, the black-hearted,
silky-voiced Yankee Swope, who boasted he never had to pay off a crew;
I knew of her two mates, Fitzgibbon and Lynch, who each boasted he
could polish off a watch single-handed, and lived up to his boast. I
knew of the famous, blood-specked passages the ship had made; of the
cruel, bruising life the foremast hands led in her. And I stood before
the Swede's bar and considered shipping. Oh, Youth!

For my thoughts were fathered by the vaulting conceit of my nineteen
years. Consider . . . a few days before I had for the first time
assumed a man's estate in sailordom. Already I was a marked man. Had
I not stopped at the Knitting Swede's, and ruffled on equality with the
hard cases? Had I not whipped the bully of the beach? Had I not been
offered a fighting man's billet by the Swede, himself? Was not that
glory?

Then how much greater the glory if I spoke up with a devil-may-care
lilt in my voice, and shipped in the hottest packet afloat!
Glory!--why, I would be the unquestioned cock of any foc'sle I
afterward happened into. You know, in those days the ambitious young
lads regularly shipped in the hot clippers; it was a postgraduate
course in seamanship, and accomplishment of such a voyage gave one a
standing with his fellows. I had intended going in one--in the
_Enterprise_, or the _Glory of the Seas_, both loading in port. But
the _Golden Bough_! No man shipped in her, sober, and unafraid. If I
shipped, I should be famous the world around as the fellow who feared
neither God, nor Devil, nor Yankee Swope and his bucko mates!

So I stood there, half wishful, half afraid, deaf to all save my own
swirling thoughts. And there happened that which gave me my decision.

It was the man with the s