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A leap, a pass, and his fist smashed into the lowering face. Over keeled the carpenter, a tall man, like a falling spar. "Put that man in irons!" Noyes jumped at the voice. The captain was leaning over the rail beside him. "Irons?" The pump-man's head went into the air. For a moment he stood poised on the hatch like a statue. "Irons?"
There was that in the pump-man's eyes the carpenter stepped to the big man's shoulder. "Listen to me. This man's no innercent. I've seen his picter somewheres." "An' he'll see something of me in a minute, an' more than a picksher. Go away!" The boson shoved the carpenter aside.
Lively, indeed, he was for his immense bulk, although, compared to the pump-man in that, he was like a moose beside a panther. "It ain't goin' to be so one-sided after all," whispered some one loudly, and recalled the pump-man's leaping across the hatch that very morning.
Noyes noted that the crew laughed more loudly at the bosun's rough jeers than at the more sharply pointed comment of the pump-man. But looking them over, he began to understand; these men were nearer to the bosun's type than the pump-man's. And also, no crew could long remain ignorant of which it was the captain favored. Yet there were those who favored the game-looking pump-man.
The pump-man's smile died away. "Maybe I'm thanking God," he said softly, "for more than that." Illustrated. $1.20 net. Postpaid $1.30 A collection of new stories of the same type breezy, fresh, vigorous as those in his earlier books.
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