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He was still a sick man, and I more than once observed him creeping painfully aloft to a topsail, or drooping wearily as he stood at the wheel. But, still worse, it seemed that his spirit was broken. He was abject before Wolf Larsen and almost grovelled to Johansen. Not so was the conduct of Leach. He went about the deck like a tiger cub, glaring his hatred openly at Wolf Larsen and Johansen.
Everyone had his regular work. Prestrud, with the assistance of Johansen, looked after the astronomical observations and the pendulum observations. Hassel was set in authority over coal, wood, and paraffin; he was responsible for the supply lasting out.
"Little that counts, one way or the other," joined in Dane Jurgensen, coming to the aid of his Scandinavian brother. "Emil is a man grown and an able seaman; the boy is neither." And so the argument raged back and forth, the Swedes, Norwegians and Danes, because of race kinship, taking the part of Johansen, and the English, Canadians and Americans taking the part of Chris.
I had never seen fear so strongly stamped upon a human face. Johansen called vainly for him to come down. At any moment he was liable to be snapped off the gaff, but he was helpless with fright. Wolf Larsen, walking up and down with Smoke and in conversation, took no more notice of him, though he cried sharply, once, to the man at the wheel: "You're off your course, my man!
Johansen called out to Harrison to go out the halyards. It was patent to everybody that the boy was afraid. And well he might be, eighty feet above the deck, to trust himself on those thin and jerking ropes.
The captain of the Sophie Sutherland had a story to tell, also, and he told it well so well, in fact, that when all hands were gathered together on deck during the dog-watch, Emil Johansen strode over to Chris and gripped him by the hand. "Chris," he said, so loudly that all could hear, "Chris, I gif in.
He was a slender though strongly built young fellow of seventeen, with Yankee ancestry writ large all over him. "Dere you go vonce again!" the Swedish sailor exploded. "My name is Mister Johansen, und a kid of a boy like you call me 'Emil! It vas insulting, und comes pecause of der American ship!" "But you call me 'Chris!" the boy expostulated, reproachfully. "But you vas a boy."
Then we pulled the cut pieces with the fish on them into our boat, intending to give them to their owners not a difficult task, as the marks of ownership were on the tackles and if they belonged to another settlement the fish would be sold and the money given them. Captain Johansen and the crew thought the cod would remain two days more.
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