"No," answered the young man calmly. "I'm not."
It was defiance, it was insult; but Tom Mowbray could stand that. He smoothed out his countenance, watching while the young man's neighbor on the bench nudged him warningly.
"Well, I gotta find a crowd for her," he said in tones of resignation. "I dunno how I'm goin' to do it, though."
He sighed, the burlesque sigh of a fat man pitying himself, and passed through the room to the door at the far end. Not till it had closed behind him did talk resume. A man who had been three weeks ashore leant back against the wall and let his breath escape in a sigh, which was not burlesque. For him there was no hope; he was as much doomed as if a judge had pronounced sentence on him.
"Oh, hell!" he said. "Wonder if he'll let me have a dollar to get a drink 'fore I go aboard of her?"
The others turned their eyes on him curiously; whatever happened to them, he was a man who would sail in the Etna; already he was isolated and tragic.
The neighbor who had nudged young Goodwin nudged him again.
"Come out," he breathed into the ear that the young man bent towards him. "Come out; I want to speak t' ye."
In the street, the mean cobbled street of the Barbary Coast, the man who nudged took Goodwin by the arm and spoke urgently.
"Say, ain't ye got no sense?" he demanded. "Talkin' like that to Tom Mowbray! Don't ye know that's the way to fix him to ship ye aboard the 'Hell-packet?'"