I was a new boy from that day.

It never pays to be a slave. It never benefits a man or a people to
submit to tyranny. A slave is a man forgotten of God. That fight against
slavery was a beautiful, a joyful thing to me, with all its penalties of
compassion and guilty feeling afterward. I think the best thing a man or
boy can do is to find out how far and to whom he is a slave, and fight
that servitude tooth and nail as I fought Ace. It would make this a
different world.

CHAPTER III

I SEE THE WORLD, AND SUFFER A GREAT LOSS

The strange thing to me about my fight with Ace was that nobody thought
of such a thing as punishing me for it. I was free to fight or not as I
pleased. I needed to be free more than anything else, and I wanted
plenty of good food and fresh air. All these I got, for Captain Sproule,
while stern and strict with us, enforced only those rules which were for
the good of the boat, and these seemed like perfect liberty to me--after
I whipped Ace. As for my old tyrant, he recovered his spirits very soon,
and took the place of an underling quite contentedly. I suppose he had
been used to it. I ruled in a manner much milder than his. I had never
learned to swear--or to use harder words than gosh, and blast, and dang
where the others swore the most fearful oaths as a matter of ordinary
talk. I made a rule that Ace must quit swearing; and slapped him up to a
peak a few times for not obeying--which was really a hard thing for him
to do while driving; and when he was in a quarrel I always overlooked
his cursing, because he could not fight successfully unless he had the
right to work himself up into a passion by calling names and swearing.

As for myself I walked and rode erect and felt my limbs as light as
feathers, as compared with their leaden weight when I lived at Tempe and
worked in the factory. Soon I took on my share of the fighting as a
matter of course. I did it as a rule without anger and found that beyond
a bloody nose or a scratched face, these fights did not amount to much.
I was small for my age, and like most runts I was stronger than I
looked, and gave many a driver boy a bad surprise. I never was whipped,
though I was pummeled severely at times. When the fight grew warm enough
I began to see red, and to cry like a baby, boring in and clinching in a
mad sort of way; and these young roughs knew that a boy who fought and
cried at the same time had to be killed before he would say enough. S