“Salve.”

“Salve,” repeated the captain, with an English pronunciation of the name; “and Norwegian?”

“He looks too respectable for the pack he’ll have to herd with,” he muttered to the boatswain.

“Able seaman?”

“Yes.”

“You have had three guineas on account?” he went on, after a couple of puffs to keep his pipe alight, as he looked into his ledger; “a month’s wages.”

“No, sir,” said Salve, firmly, “I have had nothing on account,”—­and he proceeded then to relate the circumstances under which the supposed payment had been made.  “I have not been regularly engaged till this moment, if I am so now; but up to this I have been treated like a dog, and worse.”

The captain took no notice of his last observation, and merely said shortly and sternly—­

“The three guineas are owing to him, boatswain Jenkins.  His place will be in the foretop.  A steady hand will be wanted among all that rabble there.”

“Another time you’ll perhaps play on your own account, and not on the sailors’,” he observed, turning to the boatswain; but Salve caught the remark.

With this the conference came to an end, the boatswain’s expression prophesying that when the opportunity offered Salve should pay for his triumph.  He went about nursing his prominent chin, and twisting his yellow whiskers, and found a victim for the present in a wretched Mulatto, who was scouring for the cook.  After first correcting him sharply for nothing, he coolly felled him to the deck with a handspike, and left him lying there unable to move.

Salve’s blood boiled at the sight; but his indignation gave way presently to astonishment when he saw the poor fellow get up and go on indefatigably with his work, after first quietly wiping his own blood off the saucepan.  There was a limit to brutality, he thought, and in his disgust he almost envied him the blow he had received.

He provided himself now from the purser with a suit of seaman’s clothes in lieu of the rather damaged cloth ones which he wore; and the sailmaker gave him out hammock clothes, to be paid for out of his wages.  He proceeded then to hang his hammock from one of the beams between decks; and while he was doing so observed another man in a canvas suit like his own, similarly occupied, not far from him.  He couldn’t be mistaken—­it was Federigo.

The latter had, as Salve afterwards heard, been taken by the police during the affair in the tavern.  He had seen how Salve had been rescued by the boatswain of the Stars and Stripes; and having managed to escape from his captors on the way to the guard-house, he had sought a similar refuge.

Salve’s indignation at his sister’s baseness was still too fresh for Federigo’s reappearance to be in any way agreeable to him, although he believed him to be innocent of any complicity in that business.  At the same time, the latter’s conscience was apparently not entirely clear in the matter, for there was a certain conscious sense of humiliation in his expression, combined with something which made Salve feel that he must be upon his guard.  Neither spoke to the other, and it might have been supposed from their bearing towards one another that they had never met before.