p to the mark, and not getting it they grow soft--their bodies and
their souls become flabby. Engineer officers nowadays have the work cut
out for them and they are doing good work, but the bridge officers are
no longer men of the sea--they're clerks, agents in floating hotels. And
the crew take their tone from the officers. When the commander's weak,
your whole outfit is apt to weaken, especially under a strain."

They resumed their pacing, Kieran with head high in the air, inhaling
deep breaths of the fresh salt air.

The passenger came out of a deep meditation. "Kieran, you can do a good
work for us. Is there any berth with this line you'd like to have? If
there is, say so. You can have it. You can have that head clerk's job if
you want it. And I think that after a while I could get you mine, for
I'm only there to fill a gap."

Kieran shook his head. "It wouldn't do."

"Why not? You're the man for the job."

"No, I'm not the man. You haven't got me quite right. I can point out
errors, but I'm not the man to correct them. I'm not a good executive."

"You certainly were the good executive in the bosun's case."

"N-no, no. You mustn't count him. If he was a John L. Sullivan, say, in
his good days, it would prove something. Besides, I don't care for
fighting--for beating people up. I do hate though to see a bully or a
faker getting the best of it, and maybe having had time to knock around
and study people, I can pick out a bully or a faker quicker than most
people, and seeing somebody getting too much the best of it, why,
sometimes I can't help butting in."

"And because of that faculty of seeing things, once you made up your
mind to settle down to it, you'd make good on this job I'm offering
you."

"No, you've got me wrong again. I'm not a reformer, and never will be,
I hope. Reformers, or most that ever I met, are only men who first tried
to play politics and got licked at it. I'm only an observer."

"But you like a fight?"

"M-m-m-n not me. And I never did. Any man, of course, likes the
excitement once he's into it, but what man enjoys smashing another man
in the face? What fights I've been into I couldn't side-step--not
without crawling, I mean. No, no, I wouldn't make good on your job. I'd
go along all right in your office back in New York for awhile,--for a
month, two months, six months,--who knows, maybe a year, and then one
day I'd look out the window, take a look down on the Battery, say at the
elev