“What does the devil look like, my man?” Captain West asked.
“Answer the captain!” Mr. Pike snarled at him.
Oh, it was murder, sheer murder, that leapt into the gangster’s eyes for the instant, in acknowledgment of the snarl. Then he replied to Captain West:
“I didn’t wait to see, sir. But it’s one whale of a devil.”
“He’s as big as a elephant, sir,” volunteered Bill Quigley. “I seen’m face to face, sir. He almost got me when I run out of the fo’c’s’le.”
“Oh, Lord, sir!” Larry moaned. “The way he hit the house, sir. It was the call to Judgment.”
“Your theology is mixed, my man,” Captain West smiled quietly, though I could not help seeing how tired was his face and how tired were his wonderful Samurai eyes.
“Mr. Pike, will you please go for’ard and interview this devil? Fasten him up and tie him down and I’ll take a look at him in the morning.”
“Yes, sir,” said Mr. Pike; and Kipling’s line came to me:
“Woman, Man, or God or Devil, was there anything we feared?”
And as I went for’ard through the wall of darkness after Mr. Pike and Mr. Mellaire along the freezing, slender, sea-swept bridge—not a sailor dared to accompany us—other lines of “The Galley Slave” drifted through my brain, such as:
“Our bulkheads bulged with cotton and our masts were stepped in gold— We ran a mighty merchandise of niggers in the hold. . . ”
“By the brand upon my shoulder, by the gall of clinging steel, By the welts the whips have left me, by the scars that never heal . . . ”
“Battered chain-gangs of the orlop, grizzled draughts of years gone by . . . ”
And I caught my great, radiant vision of Mr. Pike, galley slave of the race, and a driver of men under men greater than he; the faithful henchman, the able sailorman, battered and grizzled, branded and galled, the servant of the sweep-head that made mastery of the sea. I know him now. He can never again offend me. I forgive him everything—the whiskey raw on his breath the day I came aboard at Baltimore, his moroseness when sea and wind do not favour, his savagery to the men, his snarl and his sneer.
On top the ’midship-house we got a ducking that makes me shiver to recall. I had dressed too hastily properly to fasten my oilskin about my neck, so that I was wet to the skin. We crossed the next span of bridge through driving spray, and were well upon the top of the for’ard-house when something adrift on the deck hit the for’ard wall a terrific smash.