"Because if you do it again we'll toss you overboard with twenty pound of kentledge to your feet," I told him, and it was the only reason he could get through his bullet head. It didn't scare him at all. He only looked upon the matter as closed, for he would not mutiny. He was too good a sailor for any foolishness.
"Rags is rags," he would repeat as we chopped the blackened wreck away the day after, when all hands had been near the port of missing ships and were tired and nervous, having been on duty for fifty hours without a break. "Rags is rags, an' some son of a sea-cook set fire to 'em—no rags I ever seen ever took fire of themselves. Does a ship run herself, hey? Answer me that! Does a ship run her own engines, steer her own course, what? Some one of you sons of Ham did that dirty trick and I'll get you for it yet!"
"But rags do fire themselves, even if a ship don't," said the old man, "and you are the leading bonehead not to know it. You don't rate a brass boy in anything but a coal barge, and if you don't look out I'll have to train you some."
"Rags is——"
Only the size and look of the bos'n's hands prevented the old man from committing murder right there. But the bos'n took it out on the men. What he didn't do to them that voyage was never logged.
Miss Docking stood the test well. She stayed on deck and watched the fracas and never turned a hair, so to speak, waiting for the word to take to the boats with as cool a nerve as anything I ever saw. She was billeted for my boat, Number One, and I confess I was somewhat disappointed when the blamed deck house burned to the steel and the danger of leaving the ship was past.
Boldwin was always taking it easy, and he never even took that real hard, although it would cost him something to explain how he did the damage when the underwriters asked him.
"Don't do it again," was all he said to me.
"No, not until we get another deck house at least," I said. "Maybe I can see that they don't set fire to the anchor or burn up the windlass, or eat the coir hawser, or——"
"Well, see that you don't. That's your business—you're mate," he snapped back, and started for the chart house.