, who pulled his fingers when he was
excited, cracked three knuckles.

"It would be good deescipline," continued the Chief, "to stand the
four o' them in ship's belt at the gangway, say for an hour, morning
and evening--clad, ye ken, as they were during the said
infreengements."

"You're a great man, Chief!" said the Captain. "You hear that,
lads'?"

"With--with no trousers'?" gasped the Doctor's boy.

"If you wore trousers last night. If not----"

* * * * *

The thing was done that morning. Four small boys, clad only in
ship's belts, above which rose four sheepish heads and freckled
faces, below which shifted and wriggled eight bare legs, stood in
line at the gangway and suffered agonies of humiliation at the hands
of crew and dockmen, grinning customs inspectors, coalpassers, and a
newspaper photographer hunting a human-interest bit for a Sunday
paper. The cooks came up from below and peeped out at them; the
ship's cat took up a position in line and came out in the Sunday
edition as "a fellow conspirator."

The Red Un, owing to an early training that had considered clothing
desirable rather than essential, was not vitally concerned. The
Quartermaster had charge of the line; he had drawn a mark with chalk
along the deck, and he kept their toes to it by marching up and down
in front of them with a broomhandle over his shoulder.

"Toe up, you little varmints!" he would snap. "God knows I'd be glad
to get a rap at you--keeping an old man down in the water half the
night! Toe up!"

Whereupon, aiming an unlucky blow at the Purser's boy, he hit the
Captain's cat. The line snickered.

It was just after that the Red Un, surmising a snap by the
photographer on the dock and thwarting it by putting his thumb to
his nose, received the shock of his small life. The little girl from
Coney Island, followed by her mother, was on the pier--was showing
every evidence of coming up the gangway to where he stood. Was
coming! Panic seized the Red Un--panic winged with flight. He
turned--to face the Chief. Appeal sprang to the Red Un's lips.

"Please!" he gasped. "I'm sick, sick as h--, sick as a dog, Chief.
I've got a pain in my chest--I----"

Curiously enough, the Chief did not answer or even hear. He, too,
was looking at the girl on the gangway and at her mother. The next
moment the Chief was in full flight, ignominious flight, his face,
bleached with the heat of the engine room and the stoke