"That's all right, Standish," was the reply. "He's your boat-
puller when you've got him in the boat; but he's my sailor when I
have him aboard, and I'll do what I damn well please with him."

"But that's no reason--" Standish began in a torrent of speech.

"That'll do, easy as she goes," Wolf Larsen counselled back. "I've
told you what's what, and let it stop at that. The man's mine, and
I'll make soup of him and eat it if I want to."

There was an angry gleam in the hunter's eye, but he turned on his
heel and entered the steerage companion-way, where he remained,
looking upward. All hands were on deck now, and all eyes were
aloft, where a human life was at grapples with death. The
callousness of these men, to whom industrial organization gave
control of the lives of other men, was appalling. I, who had lived
out of the whirl of the world, had never dreamed that its work was
carried on in such fashion. Life had always seemed a peculiarly
sacred thing, but here it counted for nothing, was a cipher in the
arithmetic of commerce. I must say, however, that the sailors
themselves were sympathetic, as instance the case of Johnson; but
the masters (the hunters and the captain) were heartlessly
indifferent. Even the protest of Standish arose out of the fact
that he did not wish to lose his boat-puller. Had it been some
other hunter's boat-puller, he, like them, would have been no more
than amused.

But to return to Harrison. It took Johansen, insulting and
reviling the poor wretch, fully ten minutes to get him started
again. A little later he made the end of the gaff, where, astride