comes pecause of der American ship!"

"But you call me 'Chris'!" the boy expostulated, reproachfully.

"But you vas a boy."

"Who does a man's work," Chris retorted. "And because I do a man's work
I have as much right to call you by your first name as you me. We are
all equals in this fo'castle, and you know it. When we signed for the
voyage in San Francisco, we signed as sailors on the _Sophie Sutherland_
and there was no difference made with any of us. Haven't I always done
my work? Did I ever shirk? Did you or any other man ever have to take a
wheel for me? Or a lookout? Or go aloft?"

"Chris is right," interrupted a young English sailor. "No man has had to
do a tap of his work yet. He signed as good as any of us and he's shown
himself as good--"

"Better!" broke in a Novia Scotia man. "Better than some of us! When we
struck the sealing-grounds he turned out to be next to the best
boat-steerer aboard. Only French Louis, who'd been at it for years,
could beat him. I'm only a boat-puller, and you're only a boat-puller,
too, Emil Johansen, for all your twenty-two years at sea. Why don't you
become a boat-steerer?"

"Too clumsy," laughed the Englishman, "and too slow."

"Little that counts, one way or the other," joined in Dane Jurgensen,
coming to the aid of his Scandinavian brother. "Emil is a man grown and
an able seaman; the boy is neither."

And so the argument raged back and forth, the Swedes, Norwegians and
Danes, because of race kinship, taking the part of Johansen, and the
English, Canadians and Americans taking the part of Chris. From an
unprejudiced point of view, the right was on the side of Chris. As he
had truly said, he did a man's work, and the same work that any of them
did. But they were prejudiced, and badly so, and out of the words which
passed rose a standing quarrel which divided the forecastle into two
parties.

* * * * *

The _Sophie Sutherland_ was a seal-hunter, registered out of San
Francisco, and engaged in hunting the furry sea-animals along the
Japanese coast north to Bering Sea. The other vessels were two-masted
schooners, but she was a three-master and the largest in the fleet. In
fact, she was a full-rigged, three-topmast schooner, newly built.

Although Chris Farrington knew that justice was with him, and that he
performed all his work faithfully and well, many a time, in secret
thought, he longed for some pressing emergency to arise whereby h