was a wild-cat and that I would
just as willingly fight again. My intention was to demonstrate that I
would tolerate no imposition. I proved that the man who imposed on me
must have a fight on his hands. And doing my work well, the innate
justice of the men, assisted by their wholesome dislike for a clawing and
rending wild-cat ruction, soon led them to give over their hectoring.
After a bit of strife, my attitude was accepted, and it was my pride that
I was taken in as an equal in spirit as well as in fact. From then on,
everything was beautiful, and the voyage promised to be a happy one.

But there was one other man in the forecastle. Counting the
Scandinavians as ten, and myself as the eleventh, this man was the
twelfth and last. We never knew his name, contenting ourselves with
calling him the "Bricklayer." He was from Missouri--at least he so
informed us in the one meagre confidence he was guilty of in the early
days of the voyage. Also, at that time, we learned several other things.
He was a bricklayer by trade. He had never even seen salt water until
the week before he joined us, at which time he had arrived in San
Francisco and looked upon San Francisco Bay. Why he, of all men, at
forty years of age, should have felt the prod to go to sea, was beyond
all of us; for it was our unanimous conviction that no man less fitted
for the sea had ever embarked on it. But to sea he had come. After a
week's stay in a sailors' boarding-house, he had been shoved aboard of us
as an able seaman.

All hands had to do his work for him. Not only did he know nothing, but
he proved himself unable to learn anything. Try as they would, they
could never teach him to steer. To him the compass must have been a
profound and awful whirligig. He never mastered its cardinal points,
much less the checking and steadying of the ship on her course. He never
did come to know whether ropes should be coiled from left to right or
from right to left. It was mentally impossible for him to learn the easy
muscular trick of throwing his weight on a rope in pulling and hauling.
The simplest knots and turns were beyond his comprehension, while he was
mortally afraid of going aloft. Bullied by captain and mate, he was one
day forced aloft. He managed to get underneath the crosstrees, and there
he froze to the ratlines. Two sailors had to go after him to help him
down.

All of which was bad enough had there been no worse. But he was v