Her dark face grew turgid with impotent anger. As I
stood there she was like to have killed me. Then like a flash her
expression changed. With a dirty bejewelled hand she smoothed her
tousled hair. Her coarse white teeth gleamed in a gold-capped smile.
There was honey in her tone.

"Why, no! my niece in here's got a toothache, but I guess we can fix it
between us. We don't need no help, thanks, young feller."

"Oh, that's all right," I said. "If you should, you know, I'll be
nearby."

Then I moved away, conscious that her eyes followed me malevolently.

The business worried me sorely. The poor girl was being woefully abused,
that was plain. I felt indignant, angry and, last of all, anxious.
Mingled with my feelings was a sense of irritation that I should have
been elected to overhear the affair. I had no desire just then to
champion distressed damsels, least of all to get mixed up in the family
brawls of unknown Jewesses. Confound her, anyway! I almost hated her.
Yet I felt constrained to watch and wait, and even at the cost of my own
ease and comfort to prevent further violence.

For that matter there were all kinds of strange doings on board,
drinking, gambling, nightly orgies and hourly brawls. It seemed as if we
had shipped all the human dregs of the San Francisco deadline. Never, I
believe, in those times when almost daily the Argonaut-laden boats were
sailing for the Golden North, was there one in which the sporting
element was so dominant. The social hall reeked with patchouli and stale
whiskey. From the staterooms came shrill outbursts of popular melody,
punctuated with the popping of champagne corks. Dance-hall girls,
babbling incoherently, reeled in the passageways, danced on the cabin
table, and were only held back from licentiousness by the restraint of
their bullies. The day was one long round of revelry, and the night was
pregnant with sinister sound.

Already among the better element a moral secession was apparent.
Convention they had left behind with their boiled shirts and their
store clothes, and crazed with the idea of speedy fortune, they were
even now straining at the leash of decency. It was a howling mob,
elately riotous, and already infected by the virus of the goldophobia.

Oh, it was good to get on deck of a night, away from this saturnalia, to
watch the beacon stars strewn vastly in the skyey uplift, to listen to
the ancient threnody of the outcast sea. Blue and silver the nights
were