Some days afterwards the second mate sent for me to his cabin. He had been on the sick list, and he was lying in his bunk, stripped to the waist, one arm and one leg touching the floor. He raised himself slowly when I came in, and spat. He had in a pronounced degree the Nova Scotian peculiarities and accent, and after he had shaved, his face shone like polished leather.
“Hallo!” he said. “See heeyur, young Kemp, does your neck just itch to be stretched?”
I looked at him with mouth and eyes agape.
He spat again, and waved a claw towards the forward bulkhead.
“They’ll do it for yeh,” he said. “You’re such a green goose, it makes me sick a bit. You hevn’t reckoned out the chances, not quite. It’s a kind of dead reckoning yeh hevn’t had call to make. Eh?”
“What do you mean?” I asked, bewildered.
He looked at me, grinning, half naked, with amused contempt, for quite a long time, and at last offered sardonically to open my eyes for me.
I said nothing.
“Do you know what will happen to you,” he asked, “ef yeh don’t get quit of that Carlos of yours?”
I was surprised into muttering that I didn’t know.