ves tenanted by uneasy corpses. Here and there a curtain of gaudy
chintz, half drawn, marked the resting-place of a sybarite. A leg hung
over the edge very white and lifeless. An arm stuck straight out with
a dark palm turned up, and thick fingers half closed. Two light snores,
that did not synchronise, quarrelled in funny dialogue. Singleton
stripped again--the old man suffered much from prickly heat--stood cooling
his back in the doorway, with his arms crossed on his bare and adorned
chest. His head touched the beam of the deck above. The nigger, half
undressed, was busy casting adrift the lashing of his box, and spreading
his bedding in an upper berth. He moved about in his socks, tall and
noiseless, with a pair of braces beating about his calves. Amongst
the shadows of stanchions and bowsprit, Donkin munched a piece of hard
ship's bread, sitting on the deck with upturned feet and restless eyes;
he held the biscuit up before his mouth in the whole fist and snapped
his jaws at it with a raging face. Crumbs fell between his outspread
legs. Then he got up.

"Where's our water-cask?" he asked in a contained voice.

Singleton, without a word, pointed with a big hand that held a short
smouldering pipe. Donkin bent over the cask, drank out of the tin,
splashing the water, turned round and noticed the nigger looking at him
over the shoulder with calm loftiness. He moved up sideways.

"There's a blooming supper for a man," he whispered bitterly. "My dorg
at 'ome wouldn't 'ave it. It's fit enouf for you an' me. 'Ere's a big
ship's fo'c'sle!... Not a blooming scrap of meat in the kids. I've
looked in all the lockers...."

The nigger stared like a man addressed unexpectedly in a foreign
language. Donkin changed his tone:--"Giv' us a bit of 'baccy, mate," he
breathed out confidentially, "I 'aven't 'ad smoke or chew for the last
month. I am rampin' mad for it. Come on, old man!"

"Don't be familiar," said the nigger. Donkin started and sat down on a
chest near by, out of sheer surprise. "We haven't kept pigs together,"
continued James Wait in a deep undertone. "Here's your tobacco." Then,
after a pause, he inquired:--"What ship?"--"Golden State," muttered Donkin
indistinctly, biting the tobacco. The nigger whistled low.--"Ran?" he
said curtly. Donkin nodded: one of his cheeks bulged out. "In course
I ran," he mumbled. "They booted the life hout of one Dago chap on the
passage 'ere, then started on me. I cleared hout 'ere.--" "