d towards the doctor and Agatha guessed that he had
overheard part of the conversation. "Don't you think you had better
go--at once?" suggested the skipper.

The doctor evidently did, for he disappeared; and Wyllard, who entered
the saloon with the skipper, sat down at Agatha's side.

"How do you do it?" she asked.

"What?" returned Wyllard, beginning his dinner.

"We'll say persuade other folks to see things as you do."

"You evidently mean the skipper, and I suppose you heard something of
what was going on. In this case, I'm indebted to his prejudices. He's
one of the old type--a seaman first of all--and what we call bluff, and
you call bounce, has only one effect upon men of his kind. It gets their
backs up."

Agatha thought that he did not like it, either, but she changed the
subject.

"There really was a row forward," she said. "What was the trouble over?
You were, no doubt, somewhere near the scene of it."

Wyllard laughed. "I sat upon the steerage ladder, and am afraid I
cheered the combatants on. It was really a glorious row. They hammered
each other with tin plates, and some of them tried to use hoop-iron
knives, which fortunately doubled up. They broke quite a few of the
benches, and wrecked the mess table, but so far as I noticed the only
one seriously hurt was a little chap who was quietly looking on."

"And you encouraged them?"

"I certainly did. It was a protest against dirt, disorder, and the
slothfulness that's a plague to the community. Isn't physical force
warranted when there's no other remedy?"

A gray-haired Canadian looked up. "Yes," he agreed, "I guess it is. The
first man who pulled his gun in British Columbia was hanged right away,
and they've scarcely had to make an example of another since then,
though it was quite a while ago."

He paused, and smiled approvingly. "A mess of any kind worries us, and
we don't take long to straighten it out. Same feeling's in the Germans
and Scandinavians. I'll say that for them, any way. Your friends swept
up the steerage?"

"They took the Slavs and Jews, and pitched them down the second hatch on
to the orlop deck. Things will go smoothly now our crowd is on top."

"Your crowd?" said Agatha.

The Canadian nodded. "That's what he meant," he said. "There are two
kinds of folks you and the rest of them are dumping into Canada. One's
the kind that will get up and hustle, break land, and build new
homes--log at first, frame and stone afterwards.