“Jones!”
“Here, sir!” came from one of the crew.
“Stand to one side after you answer your names!” ordered the officer.
“Barclay!” The black chantey-man answered and joined Jones, and the mate mustered representatives of four continents as he drawled, “Valdez!”—“Si, senor!”
“Hansen!”—“Yaw, sir!”
“McLean!”—“Aye, mister!”
“Yedon—what th’ hell is this? Yedon—”
A man answered, “Yedonowskivitch, sir!”
“’Struth,” growled the officer, “yer blasted name is as long as a flyin’ jib’alliard! Yed is your name from now on!” The Russian grunted and joined the men who had been checked off.
Englishman, Irishman, Scotchman, Welshman, Japanese, Swede, Dane, German, Norwegian, Russian, Canadian, American, West Indian, Spaniard and South African represented the Kelvinhaugh’s laborers, and as Donald viewed them, he wondered how it was possible for such a cosmopolitan and ill-favored gang to be gathered together. Dressed in various garbs, scarcely one looked to be a sailor, but the keen-eyed mates knew that clothes and general appearance do not mark the man who is rated “Able Bodied” and who can “hand, reef and steer.” When the watch picking began, the first man Mr. Nickerson picked was the cropped head McLean, whose face still carried the marks of the clawing he had received on the Glasgow dock, yet Donald would have sworn that this fellow was a steamship fireman or a ship-yard laborer. But they were a small, weak-looking crowd after all, and when the boy scanned the little group and allowed his eyes to wander over the barque’s great hull and the mighty fabric towering aloft—ponderous and unwieldy in the gloom—he realized something of Thompson’s forebodings and compared the little company of ill-assorted humans, who were to work the ship to her destination, to a squad of pigmies doomed to undertake the tasks of giants.