ow," I urged, meeting him in his mood. "It will be easier for
your back."

"To hell with you," was his answer. "Go ahead an' smash the boats. You
can hang some of them. But you can't touch me with the law. 'Tis me
that's a crippled creature of circumstance, too weak to raise a hand
against any man--a feather blown about by the windy contention of men
strong in their back an' brainless in their heads."

"As you please," I said.

"As I can't help pleasin'," he retorted, "bein' what I am an' so made for
the little flash between the darknesses which men call life. Now why
couldn't I a-ben a butterfly, or a fat pig in a full trough, or a mere
mortal man with a straight back an' women to love me? Go on an' smash
the boats. Play hell to the top of your bent. Like me, you'll end in
the darkness. And your darkness'll be--as dark as mine."

"A full belly puts the spunk back into you," I sneered.

"'Tis on an empty belly that the juice of my dislike turns to acid. Go
on an' smash the boats."

"Whose idea was the sulphur?" I asked.

"I'm not tellin' you the man, but I envied him until it showed failure.
An' whose idea was it--to douse the sulphuric into Rhine's face? He'll
lose that same face, from the way it's shedding."

"Nor will I tell you," I said. "Though I will tell you that I am glad
the idea was not mine."

"Oh, well," he muttered cryptically, "different customs on different
ships, as the cook said when he went for'ard to cast off the spanker
sheet."

Not until the job was done and I was back on the poop did I have time to
work out the drift of that last figure in its terms of the sea. Mulligan
Jacobs might have been an artist, a philosophic poet, had he not been
born crooked with a crooked back.

And we smashed the boats. With axes and sledges it was an easier task
than I had imagined. On top of both houses we left the boats masses of
splintered wreckage, the topaz-eyed ones working most energetically; and
we regained the poop without a shot being fired. The forecastle turned
out, of course, at our noise, but made no attempt to interfere with us.

And right here I register another complaint against the sea-novelists. A
score of men for'ard, desperate all, with desperate deeds behind them,
and jail and the gallows facing them not many days away, should have only
begun to fight. And yet this score of men did nothing while we destroyed
their last chance for escape.

"But where did they get