my
knee the very chance it needed. It felt much better, the swelling had
materially decreased, and the cap seemed descending into its proper
place. Also, the three days' rest brought the trouble I had foreseen.
It was plainly Thomas Mugridge's intention to make me pay for those three
days. He treated me vilely, cursed me continually, and heaped his own
work upon me. He even ventured to raise his fist to me, but I was
becoming animal-like myself, and I snarled in his face so terribly that
it must have frightened him back. It is no pleasant picture I can
conjure up of myself, Humphrey Van Weyden, in that noisome ship's galley,
crouched in a corner over my task, my face raised to the face of the
creature about to strike me, my lips lifted and snarling like a dog's, my
eyes gleaming with fear and helplessness and the courage that comes of
fear and helplessness. I do not like the picture. It reminds me too
strongly of a rat in a trap. I do not care to think of it; but it was
elective, for the threatened blow did not descend.

Thomas Mugridge backed away, glaring as hatefully and viciously as I
glared. A pair of beasts is what we were, penned together and showing
our teeth. He was a coward, afraid to strike me because I had not
quailed sufficiently in advance; so he chose a new way to intimidate me.
There was only one galley knife that, as a knife, amounted to anything.
This, through many years of service and wear, had acquired a long, lean
blade. It was unusually cruel-looking, and at first I had shuddered
every time I used it. The cook borrowed a stone from Johansen and
proceeded to sharpen the knife. He did it with great ostentation,
glancing significantly at me the while. He whetted it up and down all
day long. Every odd moment he could find he had the knife and stone out
and was whetting away. The steel acquired a razor edge. He tried it
with the ball of his thumb or across the nail. He shaved hairs from the
back of his hand, glanced along the edge with microscopic acuteness, and
found, or feigned that he found, always, a slight inequality in its edge
somewhere. Then he would put it on the stone again and whet, whet, whet,
till I could have laughed aloud, it was so very ludicrous.

It was also serious, for I learned that he was capable of using it, that
under all his cowardice there was a courage of cowardice, like mine, that
would impel him to do the very thing his whole nature protested against
doin