ment
and murder would have been complete.

"Avast there!" cried the captain, and as though to punctuate his remark
he swung the heavy stick he usually carried full upon the back of
Billy's head. It was that blow that saved the mate's life, for when
Billy came to he found himself in a dark and smelly hole, chained and
padlocked to a heavy stanchion.

They kept Billy there for a week; but every day the captain visited him
in an attempt to show him the error of his way. The medium used by the
skipper for impressing his ideas of discipline upon Billy was a large,
hard stick. At the end of the week it was necessary to carry Billy above
to keep the rats from devouring him, for the continued beatings and
starvation had reduced him to little more than an unconscious mass of
raw and bleeding meat.

"There," remarked the skipper, as he viewed his work by the light of
day, "I guess that fellow'll know his place next time an officer an' a
gentleman speaks to him."

That Billy survived is one of the hitherto unrecorded miracles of the
power of matter over mind. A man of intellect, of imagination, a being
of nerves, would have succumbed to the shock alone; but Billy was not as
these. He simply lay still and thoughtless, except for half-formed ideas
of revenge, until Nature, unaided, built up what the captain had so
ruthlessly torn down.

Ten days after they brought him up from the hold Billy was limping
about the deck of the Halfmoon doing light manual labor. From the other
sailors aboard he learned that he was not the only member of the crew
who had been shanghaied. Aside from a half-dozen reckless men from the
criminal classes who had signed voluntarily, either because they could
not get a berth upon a decent ship, or desired to flit as quietly from
the law zone of the United States as possible, not a man was there who
had been signed regularly.

They were as tough and vicious a lot as Fate ever had foregathered in
one forecastle, and with them Billy Byrne felt perfectly at home. His
early threats of awful vengeance to be wreaked upon the mate and skipper
had subsided with the rough but sensible advice of his messmates. The
mate, for his part, gave no indication of harboring the assault that
Billy had made upon him other than to assign the most dangerous or
disagreeable duties of the ship to the mucker whenever it was possible
to do so; but the result of this was to hasten Billy's nautical
education, and keep him in excelle