d he, "for if my name's Tom Hall,
You must set a thief to catch a thief--and a thief has caught us all!
By every butt in Oregon and every spar in Maine,
The hand that spilled the wind from her sail was the hand of Reuben
Paine!
He has rigged and trigged her with paint and spar, and, faith, he
has faked her well--
But I'd know the Stralsund's deckhouse yet from here to the booms o'
Hell.
Oh, once we ha' met at Baltimore, and twice on Boston pier,
But the sickest day for you, Reuben Paine, was the day that you came
here--
The day that you came here, my lad, to scare us from our seal
With your funnel made o' your painted cloth, and your guns o' rotten
deal!
Ring and blow for the Baltic now, and head her back to the bay,
For we'll come into the game again with a double deck to play!"

They rang and blew the sealers' call--the poaching cry o' the sea--
And they raised the Baltic out of the mist, and an angry ship was she:
And blind they groped through the whirling white, and blind to the
bay again,
Till they heard the creak of the Stralsund's boom and the clank of
her mooring-chain.
They laid them down by bitt and boat, their pistols in their belts,
And: "Will you fight for it, Reuben Paine, or will you share the
pelts?"

A dog-toothed laugh laughed Reuben Paine, and bared his flenching
knife.
"Yea, skin for skin, and all that he hath a man will give for his life;
But I've six thousand skins below, and Yeddo Port to see,
And there's never a law of God or man runs north of Fifty-Three.
So go in peace to the naked seas with empty holds to fill,
And I'll be good to your seal this catch, as many as I shall kill."

Answered the snap of a closing lock and the jar of a gun-butt slid,
But the tender fog shut fold on fold to hide the wrong they did.
The weeping fog rolled fold on fold the wrath of man to cloak,
And the flame-spurts pale ran down the rail as the sealing-rifles
spoke.
The bullets bit on bend and butt, the splinter slivered free,
(Little they trust to sparrow-dust that stop the seal in his sea!)
The thick smoke hung and would not shift, leaden it lay and blue,
But three were down on the Baltic's deck and two of the Stralsund's
crew.
A