ay.

Larry went aboard his ship, and, going to the forecastle, peered into an
upper bunk.

"Your baby's not to home, Mouse," a voice jeered. "I saw him over to
Flanagan's awhile ago."

A hopeless look crossed Larry's face.

"Give me a hand up the side, like a good lad, Jim, when I come aboard
again."

A few minutes later the little man was making his way back to the
steamer, every step of his journey harassed by derisive shouts as he
dodged between the lines of belated trucks that jammed West Street from
curb to string-piece. He pushed a wheelbarrow before him, his knees
bending under the load it held. Across the barrow, legs and head
dangling over the sides, lay an unconscious heap that when sober
answered to the name of Dan Sullivan.

* * *

Larry Walsh, stoker on the coastwise freighter _San Gardo_, was the butt
of the ship; every man of the crew imposed on his good nature. He was
one of those persons "just fool enough to do what he's told to do." For
thirty of his fifty years he had been a seaman, and the marks of a
sailor's life were stamped hard on his face. His weathered cheeks were
plowed by wrinkles that stretched, deep furrowed, from his red-gray hair
to the corners of his mouth. From under scant brows he peered out on the
world with near-sighted eyes; but whenever a smile broadened his wide
mouth, his eyes would shine with a kindly light.

Larry's defective sight had led to his banishment as a sailor from the
decks. During a storm off Hatteras a stoker had fallen and died on the
boiler-room plates.

"It don't take no eyes at all to see clean to the back of a Scotch
boiler," the boatswain had told the chief engineer. "I can give you that
little squint-eyed feller." So, at the age of forty or thereabouts,
Larry left the cool, wind-swept deck to take up work new to him in the
superheated, gas-stifling air of the fire-room. Though entered on the
ship's papers as a sailor, he had gone without complaint down the
straight ladders to the very bottom of the hull. Bidden to take the dead
stoker's place, "he was just fool enough to do what he was told to do."

Larry was made the coal-passer of that watch, and began at once the
back-breaking task of shoveling fuel from the bunkers to the floor
outside, ready for the stokers to heave into the boilers. He had been
passing less than an hour during his first watch when the coal ran
short in the lower bunker. He speared with a slice-bar in the bunker
above. The