several quite fairly large men I
marked were vacant-faced. One man, however, large and unmistakably
Irish, was also unmistakably mad. He was talking and muttering to
himself as he came out. A little, curved, lop-sided man, with his head
on one side and with the shrewdest and wickedest of faces and pale blue
eyes, addressed an obscene remark to the mad Irishman, calling him
O'Sullivan. But O'Sullivan took no notice and muttered on. On the heels
of the little lop-sided man appeared an overgrown dolt of a fat youth,
followed by another youth so tall and emaciated of body that it seemed a
marvel his flesh could hold his frame together.

Next, after this perambulating skeleton, came the weirdest creature I
have ever beheld. He was a twisted oaf of a man. Face and body were
twisted as with the pain of a thousand years of torture. His was the
face of an ill-treated and feeble-minded faun. His large black eyes were
bright, eager, and filled with pain; and they flashed questioningly from
face to face and to everything about. They were so pitifully alert,
those eyes, as if for ever astrain to catch the clue to some perplexing
and threatening enigma. Not until afterwards did I learn the cause of
this. He was stone deaf, having had his ear-drums destroyed in the
boiler explosion which had wrecked the rest of him.

I noticed the steward, standing at the galley door and watching the men
from a distance. His keen, Asiatic face, quick with intelligence, was a
relief to the eye, as was the vivid face of Shorty, who came out of the
forecastle with a leap and a gurgle of laughter. But there was something
wrong with him, too. He was a dwarf, and, as I was to come to know, his
high spirits and low mentality united to make him a clown.

Mr. Pike stopped beside me a moment and while he watched the men I
watched him. The expression on his face was that of a cattle-buyer, and
it was plain that he was disgusted with the quality of cattle delivered.

"Something the matter with the last mother's son of them," he growled.

And still they came: one, pallid, furtive-eyed, that I instantly adjudged
a drug fiend; another, a tiny, wizened old man, pinch-faced and wrinkled,
with beady, malevolent blue eyes; a third, a small, well-fleshed man, who
seemed to my eye the most normal and least unintelligent specimen that
had yet appeared. But Mr. Pike's eye was better trained than mine.

"What's the matter with _you_?" he snarled at the m