r-cut. And in some curious way
the Red Un and the Chief hit it off. It might have been a matter of
red blood or of indomitable spirit.

Spirit enough and to spare had the Red Un. On the trip out he had
licked the Captain's boy and the Purser's boy; on the incoming trip
he had lashed the Doctor's boy to his triumphant mast, and only
three days before he had settled a row in the stokehole by putting
hot ashes down the back of a drunken trimmer, and changing his
attitude from menace with a steel shovel to supplication and prayer.

He had no business in the stokehole, but by that time he knew every
corner of the ship--called the engines by name and the men by
epithets; had named one of the pumps Marguerite, after the Junior
Second's best girl; and had taken violent partisanship in the
eternal rivalry of the liner between the engine room and the bridge.

"Aw, gwan!" he said to the Captain's boy. "Where'd you and your Old
Man be but for us? In a blasted steel tank, floating about on the
bloomin' sea! What's a ship without insides?"

The Captain's boy, who was fourteen, and kept his bath sponge in a
rubber bag, and shaved now and then with the Captain's razor,
retorted in kind.

"You fellows below think you're the whole bally ship!" he said
loftily. "Insides is all right--we need 'em in our business. But
what'd your steel tank do, with the engines goin', if she
wasn't bein' navigated? Steamin' in circles, like a tinklin'
merry-go-round!"

It was some seconds after this that the Purser, a well-intentioned
but interfering gentleman with a beard, received the kick that put
him in dry dock for two days.

II

They were three days out of New York on the Red Un's second round
trip when the Second, still playing the game and almost despairing,
made a strategic move. The Red Un was laying out the Chief's
luncheon on his desk--a clean napkin for a cloth; a glass; silver; a
plate; and the menu from the first-cabin dining saloon. The menu was
propped against a framed verse:

_But I ha' lived and I ha' worked!
All thanks to Thee, Most High._

And as he placed the menu, the Red Un repeated the words from
McAndrew's hymn. It had rather got him at first; it was a new
philosophy of life. To give thanks for life was understandable, even
if unnecessary. But thanks for work! There was another framed card
above the desk, more within the Red Un's ken: "Cable crossing! Do
not anchor here!"

The card worked wel