“Subordinate positions, sir!”

“Exactly.  And Mr. Grump?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Why is it that good men don’t seem to stay long on some of our ships, especially on the Rapidan?”

“I couldn’t say, sir.”

“No?  Too bad you didn’t take the trouble to find out during all the years you’ve been here.  Possibly I can find out.  I’ll take passage on the Rapidan this trip.  But say nothing about it to anybody, mind.  If the captain wishes to know something more of his passenger, say that it is a friend of the third or fourth vice-president, or of one of the directors, or of the office boy’s, or the stenographer’s, or anybody at all, taking a little sea trip for his health.  And his name—­” He picked up the telephone directory, inserted the blade of the paper knife, opened the book, and laid the knife across the page.  “Noyes.  Noyes sounds all right.  Tell him the passenger’s name is Noyes.  And that’s all for now, except that you sign that man.”

“Yes, sir.”  The reorganized head clerk clicked his heels, wheeled, marched to his desk, and without delay signed John Kieran as pump-man for the Gulf voyage of the oil ship Rapidan.

II

It lacked two minutes to sailing time, and the passenger was in the cabin mess-room, when he heard the exclamation.  “Here he comes now.”

He looked through the air-port.  Out on the deck was a huge fellow gazing up the dock.  The passenger, who knew the big man for the boson, gazed up the dock also and saw that it was the pump-man coming; and he was singing cheerily as he came: 

  “Our ship she was alaborin’ in the Gulf o’ Mexico,
  The skipper on the quarter—­”

Usually it is only the drunks who come over the side of an oil-tanker singing, but this was no drunk.  Drunks generally make use of all the aids to navigation when they board a ship.  Above all, they do not ignore the gang-plank.  But this lad wasn’t going a hundred feet out of his way for any gang-plank.  He hove his suit-case aboard, made a one-handed vault from dock to deck (and from stringpiece to rail was high as his shoulder), and when he landed on deck it was like a cat on his toes; and like a cat he was off and away, suit-case in hand, while those of the crew who had only seen him land were still wondering where he dropped from.

The big man plainly did not like the style of him at all.  “Here you!” he bellowed, “who the hell are you?”

And the new-comer ripped out, “And who the hell are you that wants to know?”

“Who’m I?  Who’m I?  I’ll show yer bloody well soon who I am.”

“Well, show me.”

“Show yer?”

“Yes, you big sausage, show me.”

“Show yer?  Show yer?” The big man peered around the ship.  Surely it was a mirage.