from the last soaking or from the prolonged soaking
from the foundering of the _Martinez_. Under ordinary circumstances,
after all that I had undergone, I should have been fit for bed and a
trained nurse.

But my knee was bothering me terribly. As well as I could make out, the
kneecap seemed turned up on edge in the midst of the swelling. As I sat
in my bunk examining it (the six hunters were all in the steerage,
smoking and talking in loud voices), Henderson took a passing glance at
it.

"Looks nasty," he commented. "Tie a rag around it, and it'll be all
right."

That was all; and on the land I would have been lying on the broad of my
back, with a surgeon attending on me, and with strict injunctions to do
nothing but rest. But I must do these men justice. Callous as they were
to my suffering, they were equally callous to their own when anything
befell them. And this was due, I believe, first, to habit; and second,
to the fact that they were less sensitively organized. I really believe
that a finely-organized, high-strung man would suffer twice and thrice as
much as they from a like injury.

Tired as I was,--exhausted, in fact,--I was prevented from sleeping by
the pain in my knee. It was all I could do to keep from groaning aloud.
At home I should undoubtedly have given vent to my anguish; but this new
and elemental environment seemed to call for a savage repression. Like
the savage, the attitude of these men was stoical in great things,
childish in little things. I remember, later in the voyage, seeing
Kerfoot, another of the hunters, lose a finger by having it smashed to a
jelly; and he did not even murmur or change the expression on his face.
Yet I have seen the same man, time and again, fly into the most
outrageous passion over a trifle.

He was doing it now, vociferating, bellowing, waving his arms, and
cursing like a fiend, and all because of a disagreement with another
hunter as to whether a seal pup knew instinctively how to swim. He held
that it did, that it could swim the moment it was born. The other
hunter, Latimer, a lean, Yankee-looking fellow with shrewd,
narrow-slitted eyes, held otherwise, held that the seal pup was born on
the land for no other reason than that it could not swim, that its mother
was compelled to teach it to swim as birds were compelled to teach their
nestlings how to fly.

For the most part, the remaining four hunters leaned on the table or lay
in their bunks and