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Updated: June 10, 2025
The squareheads of our watch were already there, sitting gloomily about, or clumsily attempting to make the injured youth more comfortable. He looked bad, no mistake. Newman shook his head, gravely, as we turned away. "It is a task for her," he said to me. "She has the healing gift. The boy is badly hurt." A growled curse took my answer from me.
"There was danger of trouble, even before the boy went out," he went on. "Morton stood by the door and heard it all." This Morton was the sailmaker in the starboard watch. "The big Cockney in the port watch was all for trouble, a rush aft of all hands; he said he had the backing of my watch. The squareheads were willing; they want revenge.
He cuffed a knowledge of English into the squareheads. But he kept his hands off Newman and me, not because he was afraid of us I don't think Lynch feared anything but because we knew our work and did it. Oh, I got mine, and with interest, in the Golden Bough, but not from Lynch. The mate was a different type. He was all brute, was Fitzgibbon, and sailors and stiffs alike caught it from him.
He was calling upon Holy Joe, the parson, to come out of it blasted quick and be skinned alive, b'Gawd! Broken bones were being promised to poor Holy Joe. That was why the squareheads were showing fight not to protect their own skins, but to save the parson from the mate's wrath. For their little Nils was dying, and Holy Joe was by his side, praying for his passing soul.
"Why, I've crossed it when it was howlin' an' when the scow schooner sailors said I lied an' that I didn't. Huh! They were only squareheads. Why, we licked their kind thousands of years ago. We lick everything we go up against. We've wandered all over the world, licking the world. On the sea, on the land, it's all the same.
As for pessimistic Nigger, so strictly did he mind his own business these quiet days he was like a dumb man, a silent brown shadow. But he went on sharpening his knife. To heighten the squareheads' foreboding, and to scare the wits half out of us all, Nils' ghost visited the ship.
As I watched Captain Swope out of the corners of my eyes, God's truth, I was afraid to my marrow. Presently the second mate returned aft. "You may have your trouble now, Captain, if you wish," he said in the same clear, carrying voice he had before used, as he approached the skipper. "The squareheads won't give up the body. They'll fight if we take it.
It came from one of the squareheads, from Lindquist, a sober, bearded, middle-aged man, the one man among them who could manage a few words of English conversation. "Koom vrom mine town," he said, indicating the tossing form in the bunk. His blue eyes had a worried, puzzled expression, and his voice bespoke puzzled wrath.
He is nursing the scum, because this time he will strike through them, instead of through the squareheads." By "scum," Newman meant our unsavory mob of stiffs. And indeed they were being "nursed," and without even suspecting it. Inevitably, the unwonted gentleness of the men aft was interpreted as weakness and fear, and of course their stiffs' courage mounted and slopped over.
Constantine objects to my hospitality, and treats all strangers alike, fearing they may be Company men. When you didn't arrive at dark, I thought perhaps he was right this time, and that you had been taken in by one of the watchmen." "We throwed a Swede out on his neck," declared Fraser, swelling with conscious importance, "and I guess he's 'crabbed' us with the other squareheads." "Oh, no!
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