第5章
"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 with the rough but sensible advice of his messmates.
The mate, for his part, gave no indication of harboring the assault that Billy had made upon him other than to assign the most dangerous or disagreeable duties of the ship to the mucker whenever it was possible to do so; but the result of this was to hasten Billy's nautical education, and keep him in excellent physical trim.
All traces of alcohol had long since vanished from the young man's system.His face showed the effects of his enforced abstemiousness in a marked degree.The red, puffy, blotchy complexion had given way to a clear, tanned skin;bright eyes supplanted the bleary, bloodshot things that had given the bestial expression to his face in the past.His features, always regular and strong, had taken on a peculiarly refined dignity from the salt air, the clean life, and the dangerous occupation of the deep-sea sailor, that would have put Kelly's gang to a pinch to have recognized their erstwhile crony had he suddenly appeared in their midst in the alley back of the feed-store on Grand Avenue.