e I'll have to take my pick of yer."

They knew he had proposed the matter to them only in mockery of their
helplessness; they were at his mercy, and those he selected would
have to go. He would secure an advance of three months of their wages
as payment for their week or so of board; and they would desert
penniless in New York to escape the return voyage. There was no
remedy; it was almost a commonplace risk of their weary lives so
commonplace a risk that of all those men, accustomed to peril and
violence, there was none to rise and drive a fist into his sleek
face. But, from the back of the room, one, nursing a crossed knee,
with his pipe in his mouth, spoke with assurance.

"I'm not goin' aboard of her," he said.

Tom Mowbray's heavy brows lowered a little; he surveyed the speaker.
It was a young man, sitting remote from the windows, whose face, in
the shadows of the big, bare room, showed yet a briskness of
coloring. His name Tom remembered it with an effort was Goodwin,
Daniel Goodwin; he had been paid off from a "limejuicer" little more
than a week before.

"Oh, you're not goin' aboard of her?" he queried slowly.

"No," answered the young man calmly. "I'm not."

It was defiance, it was insult; but Tom Mowbray could stand that. He
smoothed out his countenance, watching while the young man's neighbor
on the bench nudged him warningly.

"Well, I gotta find a crowd for her," he said in tones of
resignation. "I dunno how I'm goin' to do it, though."

He sighed, the burlesque sigh of a fat man pitying himself, and
passed through the room to the door at the far end. Not till it had
closed behind him did talk resume. A man who had been three weeks
ashore leant back against the wall and let his breath escape in a
sigh, which was not burlesque. For him there was no hope; he was as
much doomed as if a judge had pronounced sentence on him.

"Oh, hell!" he said. "Wonder if he'll let me have a dollar to get a
drink 'fore I go aboard of her?"

The others turned their eyes on him curiously; whatever happened to
them, he was a man who would sail in the Etna; already he was
isolated and tragic.

The neighbor who had nudged young Goodwin nudged him again.

"Come out," he breathed into the ear that the young man bent towards
him. "Come out; I want to speak t' ye."

In the street, the mean cobbled street of the Barbary Coast, the man
who nudged took Goodwin by the arm and spoke urgently.

"Say, ain't ye got no sense?