said Harrigan, “I got an idea I’ll have to break you.”
He raised his hands, which trembled with the restrained power of his arms, and moved them as though slowly breaking a stick of wood.
“I’ve broken men—like that,” he finished.
“When I’m through with you, Harrigan, you’ll take water from a Chinaman. You’re the first man I’ve ever seen who could make me stop and look twice. I need a fellow like you, but first I’ve got to make you my man. The best colt in the world is no good until he learns to take the whip without bucking. I’m going to get you used to the whip. This is frank talk, eh? Well, I’m a frank man. You’re in the harness now, Harrigan; make up your mind: Will you pull or will you balk? Answer me!”
“I’ll see you damned!”
“Good. You’ve started to balk, so now you’ll have to feel the whip.”
He pulled a cord, and while they waited, the relentless duel of the eyes continued. A flash of instinct like a woman’s intuition told Harrigan what impulse was moving McTee. He knew it was the same thing which makes the small schoolboy fight with the stranger; the same curiosity as to the unknown power, the same relentless will to be master, but now intensified a thousandfold in McTee, who looked for the first time, perhaps, on a man who might be his master. Harrigan knew, and smiled. He was confident. He half rejoiced in looking forward to the long struggle.
A knock came and the door opened.
“Masters,” said McTee to the boatswain, “we’re three hands short.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Here are the three hands. Take them forward.”
CHAPTER 3
Masters looked at Harrigan, started to laugh, looked again, and then silently held the door open. Harrigan stepped through it and followed to the forecastle, a dingy retreat in the high bow of the ship. He had to bend low to pass through the door, and inside he found that he could not stand erect. It was his first experience of working aboard a ship, and he expected to find a scrupulous neatness, and hammocks in place of beds. Instead he looked on a double row of bunks heaped with swarthy quilts, and the boatswain with a silent gesture indicated that one of these belonged to Harrigan. He went to it without a word and sat down cross-legged to survey his new quarters. It was more like the bunkhouse of a western ranch than anything else he had been in, but all reduced to a miniature, cramped and confined.
Now his eyes grew accustomed to the dim, unpleasant light which came from a single lantern hanging on the central post, and he began to make out the faces of the sailors. An oily-skinned Greek squatted on the bunk to his left. To his right was a Chinaman, marvelously emaciated; his lips pulled back in a continual smile, meaningless, like the grin of a corpse.
Opposite was the inevitable Englishman, slender, good-looking, with pale hair and bright, active eyes. Harrigan had traveled over half the world and never failed to find at least one subject of John Bull in any considerable group of men. This young fellow was talking with a giant Negro, his neighbor. The black man chattered with enthusiasm while the Englishman listened, nodding, intent.
One thing at least was certain about this crew: the Negro, the Chinaman, the Greek, even the Englishman, despite his slender build, they were all hard, strong men.
The cook brought out supper in buckets—stews, chunks of stale bread, tea. As they ate, the sailors grew talkative.
“Slide the slum this way,” said the Englishman.
The Negro pushed the bucket across the deck with his foot.
“A hard trip,” went on the first speaker.
“All trips on the Mary Rogers is hard,” rumbled a voice.
“Aye, but Black McTee is blacker’n ever today.”
“He belted the bos’n with a rope end,” commented the Negro.
“He ain’t human. This is my last trip with him. How about you, John? You got a lump on your jaw yet where he cracked you for breakin’ that truck.”
This was to the Chinaman, who answered in a soft guttural as if there were bubbling oil in his throat: “Me sail two year Black McTee, an’—”
To finish his speech he passed a tentative hand across his swollen jaw.
“And you’ll sail with him till you die, John,” said the Englishman. “When a man has had Black McTee for a boss, he’ll want no other. He’s to other captains what whisky is to beer.”
The white teeth of the Negro showed. “Maybe Black McTee won’t live long,” he suggested.
There was a long silence. It lasted until the supper was finished. It lasted until the men slid into their bunks. And Harrigan knew that every man was repeating slowly to himself: “Maybe Black McTee won’t live long.”
“Not if this gang goes after him,” muttered Harrigan, “and yet—”
He remembered the fight in Ivilei and the heaving shoulders which showed above the heads of the swarming soldiers. With that picture in his mind he went to sleep.
They were far out of sight of land in the morning and loafing south before the trade wind, with a heavy ground swell kicking them along from behind. Harrigan saw the Mary Rogers plainly for the first time. She was small, not more than fifteen hundred or two thousand tons, and the dingiest, sootiest of all tramp freighters. He had little time to make observations.
In the first place all hands washed down the decks, some of the men in rubber boots, the others barefooted, with their trousers rolled up above the knees. Harrigan was one of this number. The cool water from the hose swished pleasantly about his toes. He began to think better of life at sea as the wind blew from his nostrils the musty odors of the forecastle. Then the bos’n, with the suggestion of a grin in his eyes, ordered him up to scrub the bridge. He climbed the steps with a bucket in one hand and a brush in the other. There stood McTee leaning against the wheelhouse and staring straight ahead across the bows. He seemed quite oblivious of his presence until, having finished his job, Harrigan started back down the steps.
“D’you call this clean?” rumbled McTee. “All over again!”
And Harrigan dropped to his knees without protest and commenced scrubbing again. As he worked, he hummed a tune and saw the narrow jaw of McTee jut out. Harrigan smiled.
He had scarcely finished stowing his bucket and brush away when the bos’n brought him word that he was wanted in the fireroom. Masters’s face was serious.
“What’s the main idea?” asked Harrigan.
The bos’n cast a worried eye fore and aft.
“Black McTee’s breakin’ you,” he said; “you’re getting the whip.”
“Well?”
“God help you, that’s all. Now get below.”
There was a certain fervency about this speech which impressed even Harrigan. He brooded over it on his way to the fireroom. There he was set to work passing coal. He had to stand in a narrow passage scarcely wide enough for him to
