e," he said. "It's lucky for them
the old girl has the easiest roll of any ship I've ever been in. There
now! This one wasn't so bad."

"You wait," snarled the second mate.

With his sharp nose, red at the tip, and his thin pinched lips, he
always looked as though he were raging inwardly; and he was concise in
his speech to the point of rudeness. All his time off duty he spent
in his cabin with the door shut, keeping so still in there that he was
supposed to fall asleep as soon as he had disappeared; but the man who
came in to wake him for his watch on deck would invariably find him with
his eyes wide open, flat on his back in the bunk, and glaring irritably
from a soiled pillow. He never wrote any letters, did not seem to hope
for news from anywhere; and though he had been heard once to mention
West Hartlepool, it was with extreme bitterness, and only in connection
with the extortionate charges of a boarding-house. He was one of those
men who are picked up at need in the ports of the world. They are
competent enough, appear hopelessly hard up, show no evidence of any
sort of vice, and carry about them all the signs of manifest failure.
They come aboard on an emergency, care for no ship afloat, live in their
own atmosphere of casual connection amongst their shipmates who know
nothing of them, and make up their minds to leave at inconvenient times.
They clear out with no words of leavetaking in some God-forsaken port
other men would fear to be stranded in, and go ashore in company of a
shabby sea-chest, corded like a treasure-box, and with an air of shaking
the ship's dust off their feet.

"You wait," he repeated, balanced in great swings with his back to
Jukes, motionless and implacable.

"Do you mean to say we are going to catch it hot?" asked Jukes with
boyish interest.

"Say? . . . I say nothing. You don't catch me," snapped the little
second mate, with a mixture of pride, scorn, and cunning, as if Jukes'
question had been a trap cleverly detected. "Oh, no! None of you here
shall make a fool of me if I know it," he mumbled to himself.

Jukes reflected rapidly that this second mate was a mean little beast,
and in his heart he wished poor Jack Allen had never smashed himself up
in the coal-lighter. The far-off blackness ahead of the ship was like
another night seen through the starry night of the earth--the starless
night of the immensities beyond the created universe, revealed in its
appalling stillness through