The ’longshoremen and loafers grinned and winked at one another, but forbore to interfere.  Plainly the spectacle was a familiar one.

The man was not altogether repulsive; pitiable, rather; a small, lean fellow, with a grey-white face drawn into wrinkles about the jaw, and eyes that wandered timidly.  He wore a suit of good sea-cloth—­ soiled, indeed, but neither ragged nor threadbare—­and a blue and yellow spotted neckerchief, the bow of which had worked around towards his right ear.  His hat, perched a-cock over his left eye, had made acquaintance with the tavern sawdust.  Next to his drunkenness, perhaps, the most remarkable thing about him was his stick—­of ebony, very curiously carved in rings from knob to ferrule, where it ended in an iron spike; an ugly weapon, of which his tormentors stood in dread, and small blame to them.

While he stood hesitating, they swarmed close and began to bay him afresh.

“Captain Coffin, Captain Coffin!” “Who killed the Portugee?” “Who hid the treasure and got so drunk he couldn’t find it?” “Where’s your ship, Cap’n Danny?” These were some of the taunts flung; and as the urchins danced about him, yelling them, the passion blazed up again in his red-rimmed eyes.

Amongst the crowd capered Ted Bates.  “Hallo, Brooks!” he shouted, and, catching at another boy’s elbow, pointed towards me.  Beyond noting that the other boy had a bullet-shaped head with ears that stood out from it at something like right angles, I had time to take very little stock of him; for just then, us Captain Coffin turned about to smite, a stone came flying and struck him smartly on the funny-bone.  His hand opened with the pain of it, but the stick hung by a loop to his wrist, and, gripping it again, he charged among his tormentors, lashing out to right and left.

So savagely he charged that I looked for nothing short of murder; and just then, while I stood at gaze, a boy stepped up to me—­the same that Ted Bates had plucked by the arm.

“Look here!” said he, frowning, with his legs a-straddle.  “Doggy Bates tells me that you told him you could whack me with one hand behind you.”

I replied that I had told Doggy Bates nothing of the sort.

“That’s all right,” said he.  “Then you take it back?”

He had the air of one sure of his logic, but his under lip—­not to mention his ears—­protruded in a way that struck me as offensive, and I replied—­

“That depends.”

“My name’s Stokes,” said he, still in the same reasonable tone.  “And you’ll have to take coward’s blow.”

“Oh, indeed!” said I.

“It’s the rule,” said he, and gave it me with a light, back-handed smack across the bridge of the nose; whereupon I hit him on the point of the chin, and, unconsciously imitating Captain Coffin’s method of charging a crowd, lowered my head and butted him violently in the stomach.

I make no doubt that my brain was tired and giddy with the day’s experiences, but to this moment I cannot understand why we two suddenly found ourselves the focus of interest in a crowd which had wasted none on Captain Coffin.