The sailors eyed him warily. From the end of the room a white-haired
American looked up wryly.
"What's her name?" he asked.
"Name?" Tom Mowbray kept his countenance, though the name was the cream of the joke. He paused, watching the faces of those who had been ashore a week and were due to ship again when he should give the word. "Oh, you don't want to be scared of her name; her name's all right. She's the Etna."
Somebody laughed, and Tom Mowbray gave him an approving glance; the others interchanged looks. The Etna had a reputation familiar to seamen and a nickname too; they called her the "Hell-packet." Of all the tall and beautiful ships which maintained their smartness and their beauty upon the agony of wronged and driven seamen, the Etna was the most terrible, a blue-water penitentiary, a floating place of torment. To enhance the strange terror of her, the bitter devil who was her captain carried his wife on board; the daily brutalities that made her infamous went on under the eyes and within the hearing of a woman; it added a touch of the grotesque to what was otherwise fearful enough.
Tom Mowbray stood enjoying the dumb consternation of his victims.
"Well, who's for it?" he inquired. "Ain't there none of you that wants a good ship like that Noo York an' back here, an' eighteen dollars a month? Well, I s'pose I'll have to take my pick of yer."
They knew he had proposed the matter to them only in mockery of their helplessness; they were at his mercy, and those he selected would have to go. He would secure an advance of three months of their wages as payment for their week or so of board; and they would desert penniless in New York to escape the return voyage. There was no remedy; it was almost a commonplace risk of their weary lives so commonplace a risk that of all those men, accustomed to peril and violence, there was none to rise and drive a fist into his sleek face. But, from the back of the room, one, nursing a crossed knee, with his pipe in his mouth, spoke with assurance.
"I'm not goin' aboard of her," he said.
Tom Mowbray's heavy brows lowered a little; he surveyed the speaker. It was a young man, sitting remote from the windows, whose face, in the shadows of the big, bare room, showed yet a briskness of coloring. His name Tom remembered it with an effort was Goodwin, Daniel Goodwin; he had been paid off from a "limejuicer" little more than a week before.
"Oh, you're not goin' aboard of her?" he queried slowly.