uld
not strike this fractured splinter of a man. I swear that Mr. Pike
actually struggled with himself to strike. I saw it. But he could not.

"Go on to your work," he ordered. "The voyage is young yet, Mulligan.
I'll have you eatin' outa my hand before it's over."

And Mulligan Jacobs's face thrust another inch closer on its twisted
neck, while all his concentrated rage seemed on the verge of bursting
into incandescence. So immense and tremendous was the bitterness that
consumed him that he could find no words to clothe it. All he could do
was to hawk and guttural deep in his throat until I should not have been
surprised had he spat poison in the mate's face.

And Mr. Pike turned on his heel and left the room, beaten, absolutely
beaten.

* * * * *

I can't get it out of my mind. The picture of the mate and the cripple
facing each other keeps leaping up under my eyelids. This is different
from the books and from what I know of existence. It is revelation. Life
is a profoundly amazing thing. What is this bitter flame that informs
Mulligan Jacobs? How dare he--with no hope of any profit, not a hero,
not a leader of a forlorn hope nor a martyr to God, but a mere filthy,
malignant rat--how dare he, I ask myself, be so defiant, so
death-inviting? The spectacle of him makes me doubt all the schools of
the metaphysicians and the realists. No philosophy has a leg to stand on
that does not account for Mulligan Jacobs. And all the midnight oil of
philosophy I have burned does not enable me to account for Mulligan
Jacobs . . . unless he be insane. And then I don't know.

Was there ever such a freight of human souls on the sea as these humans
with whom I am herded on the _Elsinore_?

* * * * *

And now, working in my rooms, white-leading and turpentining, is another
one of them. I have learned his name. It is Arthur Deacon. He is the
pallid, furtive-eyed man whom I observed the first day when the men were
routed out of the forecastle to man the windlass--the man I so instantly
adjudged a drug-fiend. He certainly looks it.

I asked Mr. Pike his estimate of the man.

"White slaver," was his answer. "Had to skin outa New York to save his
skin. He'll be consorting with those other three larrakins I gave a
piece of my mind to."

"And what do you make of them?" I asked.

"A month's wages to a pound of tobacco that a district attorney, or a
committee of some sort investigating the New York police is lo