him.

And while he talked he hated me. He seemed to hate the things he talked
about and espoused. I judged him to be of Irish descent, and it was
patent that he was self-educated. When I asked him how it was he had
come to sea, he replied that the hooks in his brain were as hot one place
as another. He unbent enough to tell me that he had been an athlete,
when he was a young man, a professional foot-racer in Eastern Canada. And
then his disease had come upon him, and for a quarter of a century he had
been a common tramp and vagabond, and he bragged of a personal
acquaintance with more city prisons and county jails than any man that
ever existed.

It was at this stage in our talk that Mr. Pike thrust his head into the
doorway. He did not address me, but he favoured me with a most sour look
of disapprobation. Mr. Pike's countenance is almost petrified. Any
expression seems to crack it--with the exception of sourness. But when
Mr. Pike wants to look sour he has no difficulty at all. His
hard-skinned, hard-muscled face just flows to sourness. Evidently he
condemned my consuming Mulligan Jacobs's time. To Mulligan Jacobs he
said in his customary snarl:

"Go on an' get to your work. Chew the rag in your watch below."

And then I got a sample of Mulligan Jacobs. The venom of hatred I had
already seen in his face was as nothing compared with what now was
manifested. I had a feeling that, like stroking a cat in cold weather,
did I touch his face it would crackle electric sparks.

"Aw, go to hell, you old stiff," said Mulligan Jacobs.

If ever I had seen murder in a man's eyes, I saw it then in the mate's.
He lunged into the room, his arm tensed to strike, the hand not open but
clenched. One stroke of that bear's paw and Mulligan Jacobs and all the
poisonous flame of him would have been quenched in the everlasting
darkness. But he was unafraid. Like a cornered rat, like a rattlesnake
on the trail, unflinching, sneering, snarling, he faced the irate giant.
More than that. He even thrust his face forward on its twisted neck to
meet the blow.

It was too much for Mr. Pike; it was too impossible to strike that frail,
crippled, repulsive thing.

"It's me that can call you the stiff," said Mulligan Jacobs. "I ain't no
Larry. G'wan an' hit me. Why don't you hit me?"

And Mr. Pike was too appalled to strike the creature. He, whose whole
career on the sea had been that of a bucko driver in a shambles, co