So I came into the fifty-dollar-a-day class of workers, to the grim content of my mentor.
I have just remarked that the snarl of Anson C. Doughty sent me in earnest to my first job. Also, just as suddenly, that snarl pried me loose from my job.
I wish I did not have to confess what I have to say now. I come to jounce number two!
I have spoken a ways back of mile-stones in my life and suggested that Anson C. Doughty was connected with one.
I wish I could give a real, compelling, manly reason why I tossed my hopes and my prospects so wildly into the air all of a sudden. I have spoken of my ready temper—but that’s no reason.
In fifteen seconds I shifted the life I was living as completely as a derailing-switch shoots a runaway engine off the main line.
The borers of that mysterious hatred for Anson C. Doughty must have been burrowing in me all the time, even as those little teredinoid bivalves we call ship-worms gnaw into submerged piles with the edges of their shells. I was full of burrows and went to pieces all of a sudden.
For I came up one day out of thirty fathoms—and that’s man’s work—and Doughty was giving me green help out of his general meanness—and my head was far from steady; in addition he gave me his snarl for the last time, instead of snarling at his infernal dubs who were risking my life.
I stepped on his foot with a shoe that was loaded with twenty pounds of lead—and that’s some anchor!—I walloped him into insensibility with the end of a rubber hose. Then I resigned informally, while he lay on the deck of the lighter, grunting back to life again.
Nobody stopped me when I said I was going and announced that it would be dangerous to get in my way.