“‘Not a bit of it,’ said Deshay, ‘but there’s a big difference between a man’s giving up drinking and a man’s never taking a drink. If you only drink at my suggestion you’ll never come to any harm. Will you join us, Leyden?’
“‘No, thanks,’ I answered.
“‘Oh, yes, you will,’ said Deshay, in his large way.
“I shrugged my shoulders and, turning on my heel, walked aft. To tell the truth, Doctor, although I am a mild-mannered man who will make a very great detour to avoid a quarrel, I think that just at that moment——”
Eight bells were struck forward, and Leyden paused to hold the stump of his cigar to the dial of the taffrail-log.
“A little more than ten,” he muttered; “that schooner did better for days on end!” He drummed softly with his fingers until I grew irritated at his abstraction, which emotion he perceived, for he flicked the stump of his cigar into the wake and resumed.
“Doctor, have you ever witnessed the spectacle of a strong will and high courage becoming completely and utterly dominated, less through lack of strength than excess of imagination, by a creature of far inferior qualities, but overwhelming impudence? These are the conditions which often give the bully his amazing autocracy; his victims are auto-hypnotized by the sheer impudence of his assertions, until some day the bubble is pricked by an individual more practical and less imaginative and the reign of terror is at an end. In a week’s time Deshay had Claud, and Dixie, too, for that matter, as entirely cowed and subjugated as if he had broken their spirits with a cat-o’-nine-tails, and the harrowing part of it was that, in spite of their high degree of sensitiveness, neither the dog nor the master were weak. I had studied Claud and felt his underlying force; he was of that high-bred, nervous type, vacillating in little things, but, deeper, of the resistance of chilled steel; like the bulkheads in the ward-room of a battle-ship, white and gold on the surface, but able to stand the pressure of hundreds of tons. If the petty aggressions of Deshay had all been combined into a solid weight, requiring a forceful resistance, he could no more have held Claud than he could have held a handful of guncotton detonated in his clenched fist; that is, he could not have done so at first, and his animal cunning told him this, so that he began by accustoming his victim to yield in minor matters until he had given him the yielding habit; but as I watched the whole thing I was convinced that Deshay was too crude a production and too lacking in finesse to continue his course successfully, and I awaited the denouement with interest. Deshay had already shown his lack of cleverness by not taking the trouble to conceal the aversion that he had come to feel for Dixie, and the silent hate of the dog for him was a thing as extraordinary to contemplate as the animal’s marvellous dignity and self-control. Deshay had come to openly maltreat him, but not as yet in Claud’s presence; he maltreated him once in mine, and only once, for I said a few words to him, at which he stared into my eyes and first blustered and then laughed and then went out with a sizzle—and we understood one another perfectly. On this occasion he had kicked the dog across the deck because the poor brute had placed both paws on the polished teak rail in a longing effort to discover land, and the dog had neither yelped nor growled nor become abject; he had simply walked away, albeit with a slight limp, but without the drooping tail and other signs of canine dejection. Perhaps you have seen a gentleman, Doctor, a fearless man, avoid a quarrel thrust upon him by a low fellow, and avoid it quietly and without loss of dignity. This was Dixie’s behavior.
“We were not a pleasant party on that schooner. I had come to detest Deshay, and he knew it; Lentz would no longer speak to him; the old fellow simply grunted when Deshay addressed him, as if he considered the captain a swine and able to understand the language. Claud did not hate him; he simply loathed him, and yet was dominated by him, and the same was true of Dixie. The air was heavily pregnant with possibilities, and, Doctor, when the denouement finally arrived it was as funny as the grin on the face of a corpse. Who do you suppose it was that pulled out the boat-plug? Why, none other than that black-browed humorist of a mate, who was, it seems, a murderer escaped from the Santa Clara county jail, and who had paid Deshay a good price for his billet.
“We were down in the neighborhood of Christmas Island, when we cut in close to some other little island; to this day I don’t know what it was. Our course would trim it close, so at Deshay’s suggestion we hove to and he and Lentz and Claud, Dixie and myself went in with two sailors to pull the boat. Possibly it was his plan to get Lentz and me ashore and leave us there, but he never had the chance, for no sooner had we struck the beach than Mister Mate up with his headsails, up stick and away!
“I must have a bizarre sense of humor, for I will confess that I dropped in a heap on the sand and laughed until the tears came. It was such a tremendous joke on the lot of us—especially upon Deshay.