I held out my hand, for there was really little use keeping up a bad feeling aboard. I might as well see the joke and bear a hand with the rest. I held out a greasy paw to signify all was well.
The next instant his long fingers, which I had at first noticed on the pier, closed upon mine like a steel vice, and I involuntarily cried out with the pain. Such a grip! There was nothing human about it, and I felt my bones cracking.
“Let go!” I roared, and Bill sprang upon him at the same instant.
But Henry grabbed his arm before he could strike, and there we stood like two boys for an instant, unable to move, with the keen-faced rascal between us. Before either could strike with the disengaged hand, Henry cast us loose with a laugh.
“Don’t you try it,” he grinned, as he passed forward.
CHAPTER VIII.
OUR BOS’N
The bos’n of an English ship usually has eight hours or more below, and the best part of four watches on deck. This enables him to walk around after the men and take charge during the time they are at work and the navigator is unable to leave the poop or quarter-deck. Yankee bos’ns, or fourth mates, as we used to call them, were distinguished by a rough, strong voice made raucous by hard usage. Yelling and swearing at delinquent mariners, as the shore folk put it, was supposed to be their principal occupation, and to a certain extent the shore folk were right. But Richards was not noisy. Neither did he have the rough voice of the man-o’-war bos’n. He was as gentle as any shore-bred person, and even while he had served as second mate under me, he had never been anything but “Old” Richards,--old because he was so quiet.
When he took in hand the crew of that ship, it made me smile to think of him tackling men like Bill, Jones, or myself. Yet there he was over us, and it soon began to look like Hawkson knew what he was about when he put him in charge.
In the first place he had been used to discipline. He had served on a war-ship for so long that he seemed to know just what to do to get men to work without getting afoul of them.
There is an art in this. It is born in some, cultivated in others, but absolutely impossible to define in a way that might be useful to the great majority, for it is a mixture of so many qualities, so many different freaks and phases of temperament, and generally so dependent upon chance for its establishment, that it must be dealt with only as a peculiarity happening in human beings at remote intervals.