Mr. Thompson did not answer. He stood glowering at a number of the hands who had gathered round.
"Don't none o' you gennelmen touch that bye," he said with a slow snarl, and he pointed to the heap on the deck.
They took Mr. Thompson's advice. Most people did aboard the Margaret Carey. Even the Old Man respected it in the last resort, that was if he was sober enough to respect anything. But with him it was the seamanship rather than the personal force of his chief officer that turned the scale. It was the man himself to whom less exalted people bowed the knee.
It took the boy the best part of two days to recover the use of his wits. And even then he was not quite as he had been. Something seemed to have happened to him; a very subtle, almost imperceptible change had taken place. He had touched bottom. In a dim way he seemed to realize that he had been made free of some high and awful mystery.
The knowledge was reflected in the thin brown face, haunted now with all manner of unimaginable things. But the feeling of defeat and hopelessness had passed; a new Henry Harper had come out of the sea; never again was he quite so feckless after that experience.
For one thing, he was no longer afraid to go aloft. During the warm calm delightful days in the Indian Ocean when things went well with the ship, and there happened to be nothing doing in the cabin, Sailor began to make himself familiar with the yards. All through the good weather he practiced climbing assiduously, so that one day the Old Man remarked upon it to the mate, demanding of that gentleman, "What has happened to Sailor? He goes aloft like a monkey and sleeps in the cross-trees."
Mr. Thompson made no reply, but a look came into his grim face which might be said to express approval.
The Old Man and the mate were the first to recognize that a change had taken place in Sailor, but the knowledge was not confined exclusively to them. It was soon shared by others. One evening, as Sailor sat sunning himself with the ship's cat on his knee, gazing with intensity now at the sky, now at the sea, one of the hands, a rough nigger named Brutus, threw a boot at him in order to amuse the company. There was a roar of laughter when it was seen that the aim was so true that the boy had been hit in the face.
Sailor laid the cat on the deck, got up quietly, and with the blood running down his cheek came over to Brutus.
"Was that you, you ——?" To the astonishment of all he addressed in terms of the sea the biggest bully aboard the ship.