This last was facetious, the Chief being known to have the heart of a child.
So the Red Un went on the payroll of the line, and requisition was made on the storekeeper for the short-tailed coat and the long trousers, and on the barber for a hair-cut. And in some curious way the Red Un and the Chief hit it off. It might have been a matter of red blood or of indomitable spirit.
Spirit enough and to spare had the Red Un. On the trip out he had licked the Captain's boy and the Purser's boy; on the incoming trip he had lashed the Doctor's boy to his triumphant mast, and only three days before he had settled a row in the stokehole by putting hot ashes down the back of a drunken trimmer, and changing his attitude from menace with a steel shovel to supplication and prayer.
He had no business in the stokehole, but by that time he knew every corner of the ship—called the engines by name and the men by epithets; had named one of the pumps Marguerite, after the Junior Second's best girl; and had taken violent partisanship in the eternal rivalry of the liner between the engine room and the bridge.
"Aw, gwan!" he said to the Captain's boy. "Where'd you and your Old Man be but for us? In a blasted steel tank, floating about on the bloomin' sea! What's a ship without insides?"
The Captain's boy, who was fourteen, and kept his bath sponge in a rubber bag, and shaved now and then with the Captain's razor, retorted in kind.
"You fellows below think you're the whole bally ship!" he said loftily. "Insides is all right—we need 'em in our business. But what'd your steel tank do, with the engines goin', if she wasn't bein' navigated? Steamin' in circles, like a tinklin' merry-go-round!"
It was some seconds after this that the Purser, a well-intentioned but interfering gentleman with a beard, received the kick that put him in dry dock for two days.
II
They were three days out of New York on the Red Un's second round trip when the Second, still playing the game and almost despairing, made a strategic move. The Red Un was laying out the Chief's luncheon on his desk—a clean napkin for a cloth; a glass; silver; a plate; and the menu from the first-cabin dining saloon. The menu was propped against a framed verse: