"Why should I bear you a grudge?" he said. "You licked me, and licked me good. You left no argument as to who won that fight. If I ever bear you any grudge, it will be for the drinking and brawling record you're making, with never a thought of the manhood you're wasting."
"It's easy for you to talk so—you that won what I'd die ten times over to get."
"Die? You die? Give up your life? Why, you haven't even the courage to give up your consuming pride!"
He looked at me and I at him. I was all but leaping for him. "Go ahead," he says, "beat me up again!"
"You're my officer," I said.
"Cut the officer stuff!" He threw his cap on the deck. He took off his coat and threw that on the deck. "Now I bear no mark of the officer—come on now and beat me up! And you'll have to beat me till I can't speak or see again—and then you can leave me here, and I'm telling you now no one will ever know who did it. You're many pounds heavier and half as strong again as when you licked me before, but go ahead and turn yourself loose at me. There's no alibi left you now—go ahead, turn yourself loose at me!"
I was all that he said—a brute that felt equal to ripping the three-inch planking off the quarterdeck, and he wasn't himself near the man he had been when I fought him before—he had never got well over the burning in the handling-room fire; but he stood there telling me what some one should have told me long before.
"Jack Meagher," I said, "Mary Riley made no mistake—you're a better man than I am." And I left him and ran up the ladder—up to where winds were blowing and seas singing and the stars rolling their eternal circles. All night long I walked the deck.
It did me good—what he had said to me. But a man doesn't change his ways overnight. I stopped maybe to have a backward look more often than I used to, and friendly deck officers maybe didn't have so often to look hard at the liberty lists; but being in the same ship with Meagher did me good.
I used to take to watching him, to studying his ways—the ways of the man Mary Riley had married.