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 a low fissure in the glittering sphere of
which the earth is the kernel.

"Whatever there might be about," said Jukes, "we are steaming straight
into it."