“Here,” he said; “cover your legs wi’ that, and say a prayer if ye’ know wan.  The Captain’s a verra hard man wi’ stowaways.”

The Captain, however, who was a gentleman and a navigator and had a sense of humour also, was not hard with the Red Un.  It being impracticable to take the boy to him, the great man made a special visit to the boy.  The Red Un, in the Chief’s bathrobe, sat on a chair, with his feet about four inches from the floor, and returned the Captain’s glare with wide blue eyes.

“Is there any reason, young man, why I shouldn’t order you to the lockup for the balance of this voyage?” the Captain demanded, extra grim, and trying not to smile.

“Well,” said the Red Un, wiggling his legs nervously, “you’d have to feed me, wouldn’t you?  And I might as well work for my keep.”

This being a fundamental truth on which most economics and all governments are founded, and the Captain having a boy of his own at home, he gave a grudging consent, for the sake of discipline, to the Red Un’s working for his keep as the Chief’s boy, and left.  Outside the door he paused.

“The little devil’s starved,” he said.  “Put some meat on those ribs, Chief, and—­be a bit easy with him!”

This last was facetious, the Chief being known to have the heart of a child.

So the Red Un went on the payroll of the line, and requisition was made on the storekeeper for the short-tailed coat and the long trousers, and on the barber for a hair-cut.  And in some curious way the Red Un and the Chief hit it off.  It might have been a matter of red blood or of indomitable spirit.

Spirit enough and to spare had the Red Un.  On the trip out he had licked the Captain’s boy and the Purser’s boy; on the incoming trip he had lashed the Doctor’s boy to his triumphant mast, and only three days before he had settled a row in the stokehole by putting hot ashes down the back of a drunken trimmer, and changing his attitude from menace with a steel shovel to supplication and prayer.

He had no business in the stokehole, but by that time he knew every corner of the ship—­called the engines by name and the men by epithets; had named one of the pumps Marguerite, after the Junior Second’s best girl; and had taken violent partisanship in the eternal rivalry of the liner between the engine room and the bridge.

“Aw, gwan!” he said to the Captain’s boy.  “Where’d you and your Old Man be but for us?  In a blasted steel tank, floating about on the bloomin’ sea!  What’s a ship without insides?”

The Captain’s boy, who was fourteen, and kept his bath sponge in a rubber bag, and shaved now and then with the Captain’s razor, retorted in kind.

“You fellows below think you’re the whole bally ship!” he said loftily.  “Insides is all right—­we need ’em in our business.  But what’d your steel tank do, with the engines goin’, if she wasn’t bein’ navigated?  Steamin’ in circles, like a tinklin’ merry-go-round!”