"You talk big," said the Finn. "Look my hands." He showed palms calloused, split, swollen lumps of chilblained flesh worn down and stiffened. "I bin seaman, not goddam navvy."
Lund turned to the hunters.
"You in on this?" he asked. Deming and Beale moved off. Two of the others joined them. "Neutral?" sneered Lund. "I'll remember that." Hansen and the two remaining came over beside Lund and Rainey.
"Five of us," said Lund. "Five men against twelve fo'c'sle rats. I'll give you two minnits to start work."
"You talk big with yore gun in pocket," said the Finn. "Me good man as you enny day."
Lund's face turned dark with a burst of rage that exploded in voice and action.
"You think I need my gun, do ye, you pack of rats? Then try it on without it."
His hand slid to his holster inside his heavy coat. His arm swung, there was a streak of gleaming metal in the lifting sun-rays, flying over the heads of the seamen. It plunked in the free water beyond the ice.
"Come on," roared Lund, "or I'll rush you to the first bath you've had in five years." The Finn lowered his head, and charged; the rest followed their leader. The hot food had steadied their motive control to a certain extent, they were firmer on their feet, less vague of eye, but the crude alcohol still fumed in their brains. Without it they would never have answered the Finn's call to rebellion.
He had promised, and their drunken minds believed, that refusing in a mass to work would automatically halt things until they got their "rights." They had not expected an open fight. The spur of alcohol had thrust them over the edge, given them a swifter flow of their impoverished blood, a temporary confidence in their own prowess, a mock valor that answered Lund's contemptuous challenge.