ecks, of drunken and deserting trimmers, of
creaking gear and grime of coal-dust. The cabin which held the Red
Un and the Purser's boy was breathless. On Sunday the four ship's
boys went to Coney Island and lay in the surf half the afternoon.
The bliss of the water on their thin young legs and scrawny bodies
was Heaven. They did not swim; they lay inert, letting the waves
move them about, and out of the depths of a deep content making
caustic comments about the human form as revealed by the relentless
sea.

"That's a pippin!" they would say; or, "My aunt! looks at his legs!"
They voiced their opinions audibly and were ready to back them up
with flight or fight.

It was there that the Red Un saw the little girl. She had come from
a machine, and her mother stood near. She was not a Coney Islander.
She was first-cabin certainly--silk stockings on her thin ankles,
sheer white frock; no jewelry. She took a snapshot of the four
boys--to their discomfiture--and walked away while they were still
writhing.

"That for mine!" said the Red Un in one of his rare enthusiasms.

They had supper--a sandwich and a glass of beer; they would have
preferred pop, but what deep-water man on shore drinks pop?--and
made their way back to the ship by moonlight. The Red Un was terse
in his speech on the car: mostly he ate peanuts abstractedly. If he
evolved any clear idea out of the chaos of his mind it was to wish
she had snapped him in his uniform with the brass buttons.

The heat continued; the men in the stokehole, keeping up only enough
steam for the dynamos and donkey engines, took turns under the
ventilators or crawled up to the boatdeck at dusk, too exhausted to
dress and go ashore. The swimmers were overboard in the cool river
with the first shadows of night; the Quartermaster, so old that he
dyed his hair for fear he'd be superannuated, lowered his lean body
hand over hand down a rope and sat by the hour on a stringpiece of
the dock, with the water laving his hairy and tattooed old breast.

The Red Un was forbidden the river. To be honest, he was rather
relieved--not twice does a man dare the river god, having once been
crowned with his slime and water-weed. When the boy grew very hot
he slipped into a second-cabin shower, and stood for luxurious
minutes with streams running off his nose and the ends of his
fingers and splashing about his bony ankles.

Then, one night, some of the men took as many passengers' lifebelts
and wen