an--no; he did not say it. He spat it out like so much
venom.

"Get off of here, or I'll throw you off, you and your tobacco," raged the
mate.

Mulligan Jacobs lurched closer to Mr. Pike, and in the gloom and with the
roll of the ship swayed in the other's face.

"By God, Jacobs!" was all the mate could say.

"You old stiff," was all the terrible little cripple could retort.

Mr. Pike gripped him by the collar and swung him in the air.

"Are you goin' down?--or am I goin' to throw you down?" the mate
demanded.

I cannot describe their manner of utterance. It was that of wild beasts.

"I ain't ate outa your hand yet, have I?" was the reply.

Mr. Pike tried to say something, still holding the cripple suspended, but
he could do no more than strangle in his impotence of rage.

"You're an old stiff, an old stiff, an old stiff," Mulligan Jacobs
chanted, equally incoherent and unimaginative with brutish fury.

"Say it again and over you go," the mate managed to enunciate thickly.

"You're an old stiff," gasped Mulligan Jacobs. He was flung. He soared
through the air with the might of the fling, and even as he soared and
fell through the darkness he reiterated:

"Old stiff! Old stiff!"

He fell among the men on Number Two hatch, and there were confusion and
movement below, and groans.

Mr. Pike paced up and down the narrow house and gritted his teeth. Then
he paused. He leaned his arms on the bridge-rail, rested his head on his
arms for a full minute, then groaned:

"Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear, oh dear." That was all. Then he went aft,
slowly, dragging his feet along the bridge.

CHAPTER XXXIII

The days grow gray. The sun has lost its warmth, and each noon, at
meridian, it is lower in the northern sky. All the old stars have long
since gone, and it would seem the sun is following them. The world--the
only world I know--has been left behind far there to the north, and the
hill of the earth is between it and us. This sad and solitary ocean,
gray and cold, is the end of all things, the falling-off place where all
things cease. Only it grows colder, and grayer, and penguins cry in the
night, and huge amphibians moan and slubber, and great albatrosses, gray
with storm-battling of the Horn, wheel and veer.

* * * * *

"Land ho!" was the cry yesterday morning. I shivered as I gazed at this,
the first land since Baltimore a few centuries ago. There was no sun,
and the morning was damp an