One night, after an easy watch, as they lay talking and smoking in their bunks in the dark, Klondyke remarked:
"Sailor, there's a lot o' guts in you."
Henry Harper, who was very far off that particular discovery, didn't know what Klondyke was getting at.
"You've taken quite a lot of gruel this week. And you've stood up to it well. Mind, I don't think you'll ever make a bruiser, not if you practice until the cows come home. It simply isn't there, old friend. It's almost like hitting a woman, hitting you. It is not your line of country, and it gets me what you are doing aboard this blue-nose outfit. How do you stick it? It must be hell all the time."
Henry Harper made no reply. He was rather out of his depth just now, but he guessed that most of this was true.
"I don't mind taking chances, but it's all the other way with you. Every time you go aloft, you turn white as chalk, and that shows what grit you've got. But your mother ought never to have let you come to sea, my boy."
"Never had no mother," said Sailor.
"No"—Klondyke felt he ought to have known that. "Well, it would have saved mine a deal of disappointment," he said cheerfully, "if she had never had such a son. I'm her great sorrow. But if you had had a mother it would have been another story. You'd have been a regular mother's boy."
Sailor wasn't sure.