"I done my best," he said suddenly. "I carn't help it if the swine is made of injy-rubber. I pretty near skinned my knuckles on him yesterday, and he's as fresh as paint to-day. Try him yourself, sir."
"I hired you," retorted Noyes; "but if I do get at him you'll see something fly."
They were well to the nor'ard and eastward of the Horn before Noyes happened to try, and it was blowing a snorter from the south-west. As the men came down on the poop after stowing the lower mizzen-topsail, Hans, having gum-boots on, slipped and fell against the skipper. The next moment Hans was on his back and Noyes had his knuckles to his own mouth.
"Great Scott!" said Noyes, with a face like a comic door-knocker or a Japanese grotesque, and he turned about and went below.
"It serves him right," said Hans. "Oh, no, I ain't hurt. It is nuttin'."
And though he showed nothing, not even a slight puffiness on his high cheek-bone, the skipper wore a mitten on his right hand for days. Noyes even conceived a certain respect for the Finn.
"I thought I'd hit a bollard," he said. "I ought to have hit him on the jaw, or where he keeps his wind."
By dint of these object-lessons Hans gradually got an easier time. If Bragg ever went for him he kicked him, and the marks he made, if he made any, did not show, for Hans came on board clothed, and never undressed till they reached the Line in the Atlantic. There he took a bath. As he said, he always made a point of having some buckets of water thrown over him every time he crossed the equator homeward bound; perhaps he thought it kept him fresh. But by then Bragg was even tired of kicking him. Nothing made him go slower or faster. He went at the pace he had been born to, and he never learnt anything more than he had known at seventeen. If there is any truth in the transmigration of souls, Hans must have been a tortoise and was destined to "jump up" again as a sloth. But once, after a long slow month of provocation, he hit the real Dutchman from Amsterdam, and that native of Holland "went to sleep" for two hours.
"He's the on'y Dutchman I ever had any real respect for," said the crowd each for himself. But of course he was a Finn, and, as every one knows, a Finn triumphs over his disabilities as a Dutchman by virtue of strange gifts.
"No, I don't believe none of that jaw about Finns and witchcraft," said old Mackenzie, "but I own there's always somethin' strange about a Finn. Now, all Hans's nature seems to 'ave run to 'ardness. What a saddle 'is skin would make!" For Mac had spent two years in the Australian bush, and was never tired of relating his strange experiences on horseback.