e Coast on one of the Pacific mail steamers. She was
behind time, an' around the Puget Sound ports we worked like niggers,
storing cargo-mixed freight, if you know what that means. That's how the
skin got knocked off."

"Oh, it wasn't that," she hastened to explain, in turn. "Your hands
seemed too small for your body."

His cheeks were hot. He took it as an exposure of another of his
deficiencies.

"Yes," he said depreciatingly. "They ain't big enough to stand the
strain. I can hit like a mule with my arms and shoulders. They are too
strong, an' when I smash a man on the jaw the hands get smashed, too."

He was not happy at what he had said. He was filled with disgust at
himself. He had loosed the guard upon his tongue and talked about things
that were not nice.

"It was brave of you to help Arthur the way you did--and you a stranger,"
she said tactfully, aware of his discomfiture though not of the reason
for it.

He, in turn, realized what she had done, and in the consequent warm surge
of gratefulness that overwhelmed him forgot his loose-worded tongue.

"It wasn't nothin' at all," he said. "Any guy 'ud do it for another.
That bunch of hoodlums was lookin' for trouble, an' Arthur wasn't
botherin' 'em none. They butted in on 'm, an' then I butted in on them
an' poked a few. That's where some of the skin off my hands went, along
with some of the teeth of the gang. I wouldn't 'a' missed it for
anything. When I seen--"

He paused, open-mouthed, on the verge of the pit of his own depravity and
utter worthlessness to breathe the same air she did. And while Arthur
took up the tale, for the twentieth time, of his adventure with the
drunken hoodlums on the ferry-boat and of how Martin Eden had rushed in
and rescued him, that individual, with frowning brows, meditated upon the
fool he had made of himself, and wrestled more determinedly with the
problem of how he should conduct himself toward these people. He
certainly had not succeeded so far. He wasn't of their tribe, and he
couldn't talk their lingo, was the way he put it to himself. He couldn't
fake being their kind. The masquerade would fail, and besides,
masquerade was foreign to his nature. There was no room in him for sham
or artifice. Whatever happened, he must be real. He couldn't talk their
talk just yet, though in time he would. Upon that he was resolved. But
in the meantime, talk he must, and it must be his own talk, toned down,
of c