Adventure Magazine, Mid-September 1917 — page 83: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

Deferred though. Corbet’s too intelligent, far dif- ferent from the run of deep-water seamen. Anyway, keep your eyes open. “I don’t want a repetition of the outward passage; and I’ll see that I don’t ship an- other broken-down liner-skipper in my ship again. Who could have ever known that that big husky, shipped spifflicated drunk by a shipping-master, could be the Big Jim Chivers who lost the Ultonia? Gosh!” A repetition of the outward passage was desired by nobody. Chivers was a man of forty-five, with an ingrained wickedness that must have run back centuries. What- ever the cause that led to his initial tumble, his incumbency of the boatswain’s berth in the old Foochow was a thing to remember. Aside from his five-feet-eleven of height, and two hundred pounds’ weight of sheer brawn and springy sinew, the fellow har- bored a sort of inner-man that was four parts devil and one part devil’s twin. As a seaman he bowed to no man, and with good reason. He had not risen to command in big liners without full qualifi- cations. He was better than an extra mate in the ship; if there was any part of a ship not at his finger-ends, it was some new- fangled patent, such as automatic brace- winches, that he had not yet seen. Even such things were an open book to Chivers after one comprehensive examination. But in every deep-water ship there is at least one man forward who thinks himself as good as the next man, and this fact had some bearing on Big Jim Chivers’s inabil- ity to stay longer than one voyage in any ship and claw his way back to the top again. It was not that the bo’sun ever met his match; it was the other way about; for no skipper cares to carry a bo’sun whose sole notion of conquering an assertive able sea- man is to'kill him outright. Such killings might be in outwardly fair fight: they always were. But there were many of them against Chivers’s record, and various yarns concerning him all agreed on one point. Let the man who opposed him be as big and able as he might; let him pos- sess the fighting quality of a whole watch of game-cocks; he must either knuckle under to the bo’sun’s mallet fists early in the voyage, or his strength and spirit would surely be sapped and broken by subtly contrived accidents until he became as putty in Big Jim’s hands. : Then the climax usually came in a cun- SI ningly picked rough and tumble. The early days of the Foochow’s outward passage had witnessed such a case, which, however, stopped short of a man-killing simply be- cause the huskiest seaman speedily conceded the bo’sun’s superiority. | There was no other man in the forecastle capable of giving the hard case an argument, and Captain Raikes, who had looked glum on learning just who his bo’sun was, sighed his relief at the prospect of a quiet voyage. (aS Ben Corbet, a youth of twenty, - little more than half the bo’sun’s weight, and outwardly at least unused to hardship or hard work, had joined the ship at the dock just before she pulled out, and after the boarding master had delivered the balance of the crew. Obviously of a different class from the other forecastle denizens, precise and cultured of speech, pink of face and hands, and scru- pulously neat in dress, Corbet was shunned at first by his fellows who regarded him as an interloper. He, however, knew his work and they left him alone because of it. THEN had come the great surprise. - During the taming of the single refrac- tory seaman, the youth had looked on with a curious expression of countenance, and an utter absence of fear or awe for the ter- rible Chivers, that soon brought upon him- self unpleasant notice. His watch mates warned him in whispers that he’d better look subdued when the bo’sun spoke to him; but the warning served only to bring a queer smile to his lips, and a glinting light to his eyes. The inevitable result was swift to arrive, Chivers pounced upon him joyfully and from then onward Corbet’s life was a night- mare. Yet he refused to take warning. It seemed as if he deliberately sought conflict with the bo’sun, and thrived on his cruel batterings. As the weeks drew out into months, and the ship dragged out her wearisome passage, the slight frame filled out visibly, the pink skin took on a healthy tan, and Corbet’s encounters with the roaring, snorting Chiv- ers began to assume an appearance of ad- vancing equality. And with the physical improvement came a change of expression— in Chivers as well as his young tormentor. The glint in Ben’s eyes took on a steely, yet contemptuous quality, the smile on his lips became a sarcastic grin that the severest COmicloo (©