"I do!" shouted the clock-setter, from the recesses of the bunk. "Because they can do just what they like with 'em, and they don't know their rights. If they were to ship a whole crew of old hands that knew their rights and stood up for them, they'd get brought up with a round-turn."
"R-r-r-ights!" muttered Manoel the Portuguese. "What that you talk 'bout r-r-rights? What for you begin gr-r-owl now, no got ship out sea yet? Time enough gr-r-owl, s'pose old man no do r-r-right by-'m-by."
"But it's always well enough to have these things understood in the beginning," insisted Burley. "I want a man to use me _like_ a man, and I mean he _shall_, too. I don't know what you Dagos mean to do, but _I'll_ have my rights."
"R-r-rights!" echoed Manoel, with infinite contempt. "All 'e time r-r-rights!"
"I tink s'pose have row 'board dis ship--you no do more's 'nother mans," said the little Portuguese, Antone, with that quick perception of character, which, in many of his class, seems to supply the place of both theoretical knowledge and worldly experience.
"Well, you'll see," returned the sea-lawyer. "Time will show. I sha'n't ask any Dago to tell me what to do."
"Dago no tell you, s'pose you ask," answered the quiet little Portuguese, sarcastically.
He had already conceived a disgust for one, at least, of his shipmates. Though having no desire, at present, to quarrel with him, he took in good part the epithet of "Dago," which Burley had always at his tongue's end.
"Well," said I, "I shall not believe that the captain--"
"Who's the captain?" interrupted Old Jeff.
"O! the old man you mean. If you was talking about the skipper of another ship, it might do to say the cap'n, but _ours_ is always the old man--mind that."
"Very well--the old man, then," I resumed. "I shall not believe that he will misuse or ill-use a man for not knowing what he can't be expected to know without some practice and experience. It's an old saying that the devil is not so black as he is painted; and the only way for us new hands is to go to work cheerfully, and try to learn our duty. I'm sure I am willing to learn, and would be obliged to any one who would teach or help me."
This view of the matter, and my expression of it, at once found an echo from all the other youngsters, while, at the same time, it secured for me the better opinion of Old Jeff himself; who, though a notorious growler, was not a bad-hearted man in the main. In deed, this negro was a specimen of a class which every seaman will recognize at once, who growl rather from confirmed habit than from any evil motive; and nothing could be further from his mind than to be the intentional cause of trouble on board any ship in which he served. Not so with Burley, whom I set down at once as a man to be instinctively avoided and distrusted. Growling, with Old Jeff, was a weakness, and, from long indulgence in the practice had become, as it were, an essential part of his existence; but the sea-lawyer was a deliberate mischief-maker. In one respect, as I afterwards discovered, they were much on a par, being both arrant cowards when put to the test.