f girls and women.
He was a bar-room brawler, and a saloon-corner loafer. He was all that
was dirty, and mean, and contemptible, and cowardly in the eyes of a
brave man, and yet, notwithstanding all this, Billy Byrne was no coward.
He was what he was because of training and environment. He knew no other
methods; no other code. Whatever the meager ethics of his kind he would
have lived up to them to the death. He never had squealed on a pal,
and he never had left a wounded friend to fall into the hands of the
enemy--the police.

Nor had he ever let a man speak to him, as the mate had spoken, and get
away with it, and so, while he did not act as quickly as would have been
his wont had his brain been clear, he did act; but the interval of time
had led the mate into an erroneous conception of its cause, and into
a further rash show of authority, and had thrown him off his guard as
well.

"What you need," said the mate, advancing toward Billy, "is a bash on
the beezer. It'll help you remember that you ain't nothin' but a dirty
damn landlubber, an' when your betters come around you'll--"

But what Billy would have done in the presence of his betters remained
stillborn in the mate's imagination in the face of what Billy really
did do to his better as that worthy swung a sudden, vicious blow at the
mucker's face.

Billy Byrne had not been scrapping with third- and fourth-rate heavies,
and sparring with real, live ones for nothing. The mate's fist whistled
through empty air; the blear-eyed hunk of clay that had seemed such
easy prey to him was metamorphosed on the instant into an alert, catlike
bundle of steel sinews, and Billy Byrne swung that awful right with the
pile-driver weight, that even The Big Smoke himself had acknowledged
respect for, straight to the short ribs of his antagonist.

With a screech of surprise and pain the mate crumpled in the far corner
of the forecastle, rammed halfway beneath a bunk by the force of the
terrific blow. Like a tiger Billy Byrne was after him, and dragging the
man out into the center of the floor space he beat and mauled him until
his victim's blood-curdling shrieks echoed through the ship from stem to
stern.

When the captain, followed by a half-dozen seamen rushed down the
companionway, he found Billy sitting astride the prostrate form of the
mate. His great fingers circled the man's throat, and with mighty blows
he was dashing the fellow's head against the hard floor. Another mo