The Mucker | Page 8

eyes of a brave man, and yet, notwithstanding all this,
Billy Byrne was no coward. He was what he was because of training

and environment. He knew no other methods; no other code. Whatever
the meager ethics of his kind he would have lived up to them to the
death. He never had squealed on a pal, and he never had left a wounded
friend to fall into the hands of the enemy--the police.
Nor had he ever let a man speak to him, as the mate had spoken, and
get away with it, and so, while he did not act as quickly as would have
been his wont had his brain been clear, he did act; but the interval of
time had led the mate into an erroneous conception of its cause, and
into a further rash show of authority, and had thrown him off his guard
as well.
"What you need," said the mate, advancing toward Billy, "is a bash on
the beezer. It'll help you remember that you ain't nothin' but a dirty
damn landlubber, an' when your betters come around you'll--"
But what Billy would have done in the presence of his betters remained
stillborn in the mate's imagination in the face of what Billy really did
do to his better as that worthy swung a sudden, vicious blow at the
mucker's face.
Billy Byrne had not been scrapping with third- and fourth- rate heavies,
and sparring with real, live ones for nothing. The mate's fist whistled
through empty air; the blear-eyed hunk of clay that had seemed such
easy prey to him was metamorphosed on the instant into an alert,
catlike bundle of steel sinews, and Billy Byrne swung that awful right
with the pile-driver weight, that even The Big Smoke himself had
acknowledged respect for, straight to the short ribs of his antagonist.
With a screech of surprise and pain the mate crumpled in the far corner
of the forecastle, rammed halfway beneath a bunk by the force of the
terrific blow. Like a tiger Billy Byrne was after him, and dragging the
man out into the center of the floor space he beat and mauled him until
his victim's blood-curdling shrieks echoed through the ship from stem
to stern.
When the captain, followed by a half-dozen seamen rushed down the
companionway, he found Billy sitting astride the prostrate form of the

mate. His great fingers circled the man's throat, and with mighty blows
he was dashing the fellow's head against the hard floor. Another
moment and murder would have been complete.
"Avast there!" cried the captain, and as though to punctuate his remark
he swung the heavy stick he usually carried full upon the back of
Billy's head. It was that blow that saved the mate's life, for when Billy
came to he found himself in a dark and smelly hole, chained and
padlocked to a heavy stanchion.
They kept Billy there for a week; but every day the captain visited him
in an attempt to show him the error of his way. The medium used by
the skipper for impressing his ideas of discipline upon Billy was a large,
hard stick. At the end of the week it was necessary to carry Billy above
to keep the rats from devouring him, for the continued beatings and
starvation had reduced him to little more than an unconscious mass of
raw and bleeding meat.
"There," remarked the skipper, as he viewed his work by the light of
day, "I guess that fellow'll know his place next time an officer an' a
gentleman speaks to him."
That Billy survived is one of the hitherto unrecorded miracles of the
power of matter over mind. A man of intellect, of imagination, a being
of nerves, would have succumbed to the shock alone; but Billy was not
as these. He simply lay still and thoughtless, except for half-formed
ideas of revenge, until Nature, unaided, built up what the captain had so
ruthlessly torn down.
Ten days after they brought him up from the hold Billy was limping
about the deck of the Halfmoon doing light manual labor. From the
other sailors aboard he learned that he was not the only member of the
crew who had been shanghaied. Aside from a half-dozen reckless men
from the criminal classes who had signed voluntarily, either because
they could not get a berth upon a decent ship, or desired to flit as
quietly from the law zone of the United States as possible, not a man
was there who had been signed regularly.

They were as tough and vicious a lot as Fate ever had foregathered in
one forecastle, and with them Billy Byrne felt perfectly at home. His
early threats of awful vengeance to be wreaked upon the mate and
skipper had subsided