this moment
Latimer called down the scuttles:

"Hump! The old man wants you!"

"He ain't down here!" Parsons called back.

"Yes, he is," I said, sliding out of the bunk and striving my hardest to
keep my voice steady and bold.

The sailors looked at me in consternation. Fear was strong in their
faces, and the devilishness which comes of fear.

"I'm coming!" I shouted up to Latimer.

"No you don't!" Kelly cried, stepping between me and the ladder, his
right hand shaped into a veritable strangler's clutch. "You damn little
sneak! I'll shut yer mouth!"

"Let him go," Leach commanded.

"Not on yer life," was the angry retort.

Leach never changed his position on the edge of the bunk. "Let him go, I
say," he repeated; but this time his voice was gritty and metallic.

The Irishman wavered. I made to step by him, and he stood aside. When I
had gained the ladder, I turned to the circle of brutal and malignant
faces peering at me through the semi-darkness. A sudden and deep
sympathy welled up in me. I remembered the Cockney's way of putting it.
How God must have hated them that they should be tortured so!

"I have seen and heard nothing, believe me," I said quietly.

"I tell yer, he's all right," I could hear Leach saying as I went up the
ladder. "He don't like the old man no more nor you or me."

I found Wolf Larsen in the cabin, stripped and bloody, waiting for me.
He greeted me with one of his whimsical smiles.

"Come, get to work, Doctor. The signs are favourable for an extensive
practice this voyage. I don't know what the _Ghost_ would have been
without you, and if I could only cherish such noble sentiments I would
tell you her master is deeply grateful."

I knew the run of the simple medicine-chest the _Ghost_ carried, and
while I was heating water on the cabin stove and getting the things ready
for dressing his wounds, he moved about, laughing and chatting, and
examining his hurts with a calculating eye. I had never before seen him
stripped, and the sight of his body quite took my breath away. It has
never been my weakness to exalt the flesh--far from it; but there is
enough of the artist in me to appreciate its wonder.

I must say that I was fascinated by the perfect lines of Wolf Larsen's
figure, and by what I may term the terrible beauty of it. I had noted
the men in the forecastle. Powerfully muscled though some of them were,
there had been something wrong with all of them, an insuf