“Pshaw!” he said to himself, fidgeting in his chair, “what’s the use of that, Penfield? If a man’s rough enough to need that, you can’t hope to make anything of him; and if he isn’t, it hurts. A man’s got some feeling, whatever shape he’s in,” and a vision of a crooked little form, fleeing away like the wind, rose up before him, as it always had, from that miserable time at the professor’s to this very day, whenever he heard any one use taunting or cutting words.
He went on with his writing, but the second mate’s words seemed to echo in his ears.
“I wish Penfield wouldn’t be such a bear,” he said again as he put aside his book to turn in at last for a nap before his watch was called; “it don’t do to show a soft side with a man, to be sure, and I know he’s got some rough fellows in his watch; but he’s got two or three that started as fair as most men, and he’ll make beasts of them all if he goes on this way. I haven’t heard him speak to a man of them since he came aboard but as if hanging was too good for him.”
Carter’s nap was sound enough to make up for its shortness, and he paced the quarter-deck all right and fresh for the four hours before him as the second mate went below.
“’Tisn’t a bad idea that every wave we cut brings us so much nearer home,” he said as he watched the foam flying back over the bow. “‘A life on the ocean wave!’ that’s the only thing, to be sure; but, after all, it’s always certain the roughest hand aboard is counting how many days we’ve made on the home-run. Well, I’ll be glad to see it, for one.”
His thoughts made the trip before the sentence was finished, and brought up where they were very apt to do, in a place he always started for before he had been half a day ashore—Halliday’s.
“What a number-one fellow that Aleck is,” he went on, “and I owe him for some things I never should have seen if he hadn’t showed them to me,” and for the thousandth time some of Aleck’s words came up to his mind.
“The only way is to remember how the Lord has treated us, and the way he has taught us, to love our neighbor as ourselves.
“And that’s something I wish we officers remembered a little oftener; to be sure they say you can’t treat a sailor like a man, and keep him where he ought to be. But Penfield is too much of a Tartar, and he’s got one fellow there that it don’t do any good to, and he don’t see the difference. Some of them will take anything; but this Jake, though he seemed fair enough when he shipped, is getting blacker every day, and the ship that takes him next voyage will find him more so, I’m afraid. I wonder what those fellows are talking about, forward there; they ought to be below, but I’ll manage not to see them, if they don’t stay too long.”
They glided down, one after the other, as he spoke, and a moment after Jake was at Ratlins’ bunk and rousing him cautiously from a rather sonorous dream. “Hush!” he said, “there’s no need of saying anything just yet;” and leaning closer to him, he whispered the substance of what had been said at the foremast in his ear.