“‘Yes, I do,’ says I; ‘but how much have any of you chaps stuck to me, or backed me up? You’ve been as thick as thieves together,’ I says; ‘but—because, I s’pose, I haven’t been to the gold-fields—you’ve made me feel like a houtsider, from the very commencement of the v’yage,’ I says.
“‘Well, if we did,’ says he, ‘it was because we didn’t know you so well as we do now.’
“After that he stood pullin’ away at his pipe, and cogitatin’ like, for a minute or two; and then he looks up in my face, and says—
“‘Look here, Joe Martin, you’ve been on the growl for more’n a week now; but I s’pose if I was to give you the chance to get back into the skipper’s favour by tellin’ him somethin’ he’d very much like to know, you wouldn’t be above doin’ it, would you?’
“‘I don’t want no chance to get back into the skipper’s favour,’ I says. ‘If you knows anything that he’d like to know, go and tell him yourself,’ says I.
“‘Why, Joe,’ he says, laughin’, ‘you’ve regular got your knife into the old man,’—beggin’ your pardon, Cap’n Saint Leger, but them was his words, sir.”
“All right, Joe,” I whispered, anxiously; “what happened next?”
“I says, ‘I haven’t got my knife into him any more’n he’s got his into me, I suppose. But if a man does me a hinjury, I ain’t goin’ to rest until I’ve got even with him.’
“Then says Bill, ‘Now, I wonder what you’d say if anybody was to offer you a chance to get even with the skipper, and do a good thing for yourself at the same time?’
“‘You wouldn’t have to wonder very long,’ says I, ‘if so be as anybody aboard this ship had such a chance to offer me. But them sort of chances don’t come to a man away out here in mid-ocean.’