“Look here, mate,” he said, “you go and get forward on deck where the wind blows, and have a quiet pipe. You’re out of sorts.”
If he had spoken sharply to me, I should have given him back as good as he gave, but this disarmed me.
“Yes, I am out of sorts,” I said. “Thank ye, I will the moment I’m off duty. Nothing like a pipe!”
You see it was like this. I was at the Foreland, and doing pretty well, when, more for the sake of the change than anything, I volunteered for Australia, so as to see a little of the world for one thing, but more especially because I’d had a sort of a quarrel with my young lady.
It was a bit of jealousy, and we parted, when a word of explanation would have set all right; but that word wasn’t spoken, till the day before we were to sail with a heavy batch of convicts. Then it was spoken when it was too late, and I couldn’t back out. However, we made it up, swore we’d be true, and broke a ring and then said good-bye.
This didn’t improve my temper, which never was one of the best, and when I tell you that we had too deal with one of the most troublesome, savage lot of scoundrels ever shipped off, rough weather, a deal of illness, and my liver—the doctor said it was going all wrong—you will not be surprised at my temper getting a bit worse.
I never was a favorite with convicts at the Foreland. I was not harsh or brutal to them, but there were certain rules, laid down by the authorities, for the men to follow out, and I never would let them scamp anything.
Then, I never made friends with any of them. If they were obedient and did their work, and kept themselves and their cells clean, they never had a word from me; and I’ll swear, that, whenever a man was really out of sorts and not bad enough to go into the infirmary, I always made it easy for him. But I was too strict an officer for the convicts to like.
Of course I pretty well knew everyone’s history, and, as I’ve told you, I took quite a dislike to young Nick.
Prejudice? Well, of course it was. “Young Nick,” I said to myself, “nice son of his father, Old Nick; and if the law hadn’t nicked him, he’d have run his course as a pickpocket, and grown into a perfect specimen of the swell-mobsman.”