efusing to wear the badge of that
profession?"

"Call it what you want to. I'm not going to have any heathen rites
performed over me, or my skin pricked full of holes."

"Then, shipmate, you'll have to take your medicine. Jump on him, boys!"

Black and White, the two Hawaiians who had been standing by grinning,
made a concerted rush for Hickey. He wheeled just as they threw
themselves upon him. But the Pacific Islanders were reckoning without
the cost.

"So that's the game, is it?" gritted Sam.

Grabbing Black by the collar and one leg, he pitched the fellow half
way across the deck, standing the Hawaiian on his head. White
followed. He, too, was sailing through the air before Black struck.
Both landed on the same spot, and instantly were fighting each other in
their efforts to get clear.

But the admiring jackies had no time to spare. They would have liked
nothing better than to have let that affair go on to a finish.
Instead, the whole crowd, fifteen or twenty of them, fell upon the
red-haired boy, hand and foot. Sam went down in a heap. He was not
angry, but he was giving these fellows all they wanted in their
attempts to hold him down.

"Grab the foot!" shouted one.

The jackie did so, but was promptly knocked over by a kick on the nose,
causing that member to bleed freely.

This time two sailors grasped the Battleship Boy's naked foot and
straightened it out.

"Get your tools out, Needle. Here's your foot."

Despite their efforts, the foot was working back and forth so fast that
Johnson was unable to do anything with it.

"Pass a rope around it. That's the way we used to rope cattle out
west. That's the idea."

A line was passed about Hickey's ankle and made fast to a stanchion.

"All right, Needle, drive the color in deep, so it won't wash out."

"Give him two pig's feet," suggested another. "He'll have better luck
if you do."

"I'll trim the whole bunch of you for this," growled a voice from the
bottom of the pile.

The jackies laughed loudly.

"Me fix him, me fix him," snarled Black, at that instant jumping into
the pile, his face contorted with rage.

"You get out and mind your own business," advised one of the men. "You
got yours; now run along and be good. Take your white friend along
with you, while you are about it, or we'll paint both of you."

While this conversation was going on Johnson was plying his needle
industriously, and under his hand Sam Hickey's foot was