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Updated: June 16, 2025
To McGarver he had been "Bill Wrenn" since the fifth day, when he had kept a hay-bale from slipping back into the hold on the boss's head. Satan and Pete still called him "Wrennie," but he was not thinking about them just now with Tim listening admiringly to his observations on socialism. Tim fell asleep. Bill Wrenn lay quiet and let memory color the sky above him.
Wrennie called down, sternly, "I ain't no theological student, Pete, and I don't mind profanity, but I wish you wouldn't talk like a garbage-scow." "Hey, Poicy, did yuh bring your dictionary?" Pete bellowed to Tim, two feet distant from him. To Wrennie, "Say, Gladys, ain't you afraid one of them long woids like, t'eological, will turn around and bite you right on the wrist?"
McGarver held him, kicking and yammering, his mild mustache bristling like a battling cat's, till the next round, when Pete was knocked out by a clumsy whirlwind of fists. He lay on the deck, with Bill standing over him and demanding, "What's my name, heh?" "I t'ink it's Bill now, all right, Wrennie, old hoss Bill, old hoss," groaned Pete. He was permitted to sneak off into oblivion.
It was so warm that they did not need to sleep below, and half a dozen of the cattlemen had brought their mattresses up on deck. Beside Bill Wrenn lay the man who had given him that name Tim, the hatter, who had become weakly alarmed and admiring as Wrennie learned to rise feeling like a boy in early vacation-time, and to find shouting exhilaration in sending a forkful of hay fifteen good feet.
But just the same, would he really ever get to England alive? And if he did, would he have to go on holding his breath in terror for nine more days? Would the fo'c'sle always keep heaving up up up, like this, then down down down, as though it were going to sink? "How do yuh like de fog-horn, Wrennie?" Pete, the tough, spit the question up at him from a corner of his mouth.
Tim pictured the result when, after the capsizing of the steamer which would undoubtedly occur if this long sickening motion kept up, Wrennie had to take to a boat with Satan. The fingers of Wrennie curled into shape for strangling some one. When Pete was asleep he worried off into thin slumber.
For Satan, the gaunt-jawed hook-nosed rail-faced head foreman, diabolically smiling when angry, sardonically sneering when calm, was a lean human whip-lash. Pete sniggered. He dilated upon Satan's wrath at Wrennie for not "coming across" with ten dollars for a bribe as he, Pete, had done. And his words have not been given literally.
"Oh, shut up," snapped Wrennie's friend Morton. But Morton was seasick; and Pete, not heeding him, outlined other dangers which he was happily sure were threatening them. Wrennie shivered to hear that the "grub 'd git worse."
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