city
that moved them like physical nausea.

He had left his coat on the wheel-box to go to his work, and was
manifestly unarmed. The belief which had currency in the forecastle,
that he came on watch with a revolver in his coat-pocket, did not
apply to him now; they could have seized him, smitten him on his
blaspheming mouth, and hove him over the side without peril. It is a
thing that has happened to a hated officer more than once or ten
times, and a lie, solemnly sworn to by every man of the watch on
deck, has been entered in the log, and closed the matter for all
hands. He was barer of defense than they, for they had their sheath-
knives; and he stood by the weather-braces, arrogant, tyrannical,
overbearing, and commanded them. He seemed invulnerable, a thing too
great to strike or defy, like the white squalls that swooped from the
horizon and made of the vast Villingen a victim and a plaything. His
full, boastful eye traveled over them absently, and they cringed like
slaves.

"Belay, dere!" came his orders, overloud and galling to men surging
with cowardly and insufferable haste. "Lower tobsail--haul! Belay!
Ubber tobsail--haul, you sons of dogs! Haul, dere, blast you! You
vant me to come over and show you?"

Servilely, desperately, they obeyed him, spending their utmost
strength to placate him, while the naked spirit of murder moved in
every heart among them. At the tail of the brace, Conroy, with his
cuts stanched, pulled with them. His abject eyes, showing the white
in sidelong glances, watched the great, squat figure of the mate with
a fearful fascination.

Eight bells came at last, signaling the release of the port watch
from the deck and the tension of the officer's presence. The
forecastle received them, the stronghold of their brief and limited
leisure. The unkempt, weather-stained men, to whom the shifting seas
were the sole arena of their lives, sat about on chests and on the
edges of the lower bunks, at their breakfast, while the pale sunlight
traveled to and fro on the deck as the Villingen lurched in her gait.
Conroy, haggard and drawn, let the coffee slop over the brim of his
hook-pot as he found himself a seat.

"Well, an' what did he punch ye for this time?"

It was old Slade who put the question, seated on a chest with his
back against the bulkhead. His pot was balanced on his knee, and his
venerable, sardonic face, with the scanty white hair clinging about
the temples, addressed Conroy wit