[Illustration:  OUT OF THE MIDDLE OF THESE SPECTATORS JUMPED THE MILD, DELICATE HAMILTON.]

But one of the mates, who had followed his captain down on to the lighter to bear a hand, took a quick method of stopping the scuffle.  He picked up a cargo-sling, slipped it round Cranze’s waist, hooked on the winch chain, and passed the word to the deck above.  Somebody alive to the jest turned on steam, and of a sudden Cranze was plucked aloft, and hung there under the derrick-sheave, struggling impotently, like some insane jumping-jack.

Amid the yells of laughter which followed, Hamilton laughed also, but rather hysterically.  Kettle put a hand kindly on his wet shoulder.  “Come on board again,” he said.  “If you lie down in your room for an hour or so, you’ll be all right again then.  You’re a bit over-done.  I shouldn’t like you to make a fool of yourself.”

“Make a fool of myself,” was the bitter reply.  “I’ve made a bigger fool of myself in the last three minutes than any other man could manage in a lifetime.”

“I’ll get you the Royal Humane Society’s medal for that bit of a job, anyway.”

“Give me a nice rope to hang myself with,” said Hamilton ungraciously, “that would be more to the point.  Here, for the Lord’s sake let me be, or I shall go mad.”  He brushed aside all help, clambered up the steamer’s high black side again, and went down to his room.

“That’s the worst of these poetic natures,” Kettle mused as he, too, got out of the lighter; “they’re so highly strung.”

Cranze, on being lowered down to deck again, and finding his tormentors too many to be retaliated upon, went below and changed, and then came up again and found solace in more king’s pegs.  He was not specially thankful to Hamilton for saving his life; said, in fact, that it was his plain duty to render such trifling assistance; and further stated that if Hamilton found his way over the side, he, Cranze, would not stir a finger to pull him back again.

He was very much annoyed at what he termed Hamilton’s “unwarrantable attack,” and still further annoyed at his journey up to the derrick’s sheave in the cargo-sling, which he also laid to Hamilton’s door.  When any of the ship’s company had a minute or so to spare, they came and gave Cranze good advice and spoke to him of his own unlovableness, and Cranze hurled brimstone back at them unceasingly, for king’s peg in quantity always helped his vocabulary of swear-words.

Meanwhile the Flamingo steamed up and dropped cargo wherever it was consigned, and she abased herself to gather fresh cargo wherever any cargo offered.  It was Captain Kettle who did the abasing, and he did not like the job at all; but he remembered that Birds paid him specifically for this among other things; and also that if he did not secure the cargo, some one else would steam along, and eat dirt, and snap it up; and so he pocketed his pride (and his commission) and did his duty.  He called to mind that he was not the only man in the world who earned a living out of uncongenial employment.  The creed of the South Shields chapel made a point of this:  it preached that to every man, according to his strength, is the cross dealt out which he has to bear.  And Captain Owen Kettle could not help being conscious of his own vast lustiness.