suffered from a constitutional plethora of speech. "But wait till
they get to cutting up iv jinks and rowin' 'round. He's the boy'll
fix 'em. 'Tis him that'll put the fear of God in their rotten
black hearts. Look at that hunter iv mine, Horner. 'Jock' Horner
they call him, so quiet-like an' easy-goin', soft-spoken as a girl,
till ye'd think butter wouldn't melt in the mouth iv him. Didn't
he kill his boat-steerer last year? 'Twas called a sad accident,
but I met the boat-puller in Yokohama an' the straight iv it was
given me. An' there's Smoke, the black little devil--didn't the
Roosians have him for three years in the salt mines of Siberia, for
poachin' on Copper Island, which is a Roosian preserve? Shackled
he was, hand an' foot, with his mate. An' didn't they have words
or a ruction of some kind?--for 'twas the other fellow Smoke sent
up in the buckets to the top of the mine; an' a piece at a time he
went up, a leg to-day, an' to-morrow an arm, the next day the head,
an' so on."

"But you can't mean it!" I cried out, overcome with the horror of
it.

"Mean what!" he demanded, quick as a flash. "'Tis nothin' I've
said. Deef I am, and dumb, as ye should be for the sake iv your
mother; an' never once have I opened me lips but to say fine things
iv them an' him, God curse his soul, an' may he rot in purgatory
ten thousand years, and then go down to the last an' deepest hell
iv all!"

Johnson, the man who had chafed me raw when I first came aboard,
seemed the least equivocal of the men forward or aft. In fact,
there was nothing equivocal about him. One was struck at once by