But Dunk Butts did not appear to warm to greetings nor to rejoice over his salvation from the sea.  He squinted sourly at the Cap’n, then at the men of Smyrna, and then his eyes fell upon the figurehead and its fatuous smile.

With a snarl he leaped on it, smashed his knuckles against its face, swore horribly while he danced with pain, kicked it with his heavy sea-boots, was more horribly profane as he hopped about with an aching toe in the clutch of both hands, and at last picked up a good-sized hunk of ledge and went at the smiling face with Berserker rage.

Cap’n Sproul had begun to frown at Butts’s scornful slighting of his amiable greeting.  Now he ran forward, placed his broad boot against the second mate, and vigorously pushed him away from the prostrate figure.  When Butts came up at him with the fragment of rock in his grasp, Cap’n Sproul faced him with alacrity, also with a piece of rock.

“You’ve knowed me thutty years and sailed with me five, Dunk Butts, and ye’re shinnin’ into the wrong riggin’ when ye come at me with a rock.  I ain’t in no very gentle spirits to-day, neither.”

“I wasn’t doin’ northin’ to you,” squealed Butts, his anger becoming mere querulous reproach, for the Cap’n’s eye was fiery and Butts’s memory was good.

“You was strikin’ a female,” said Cap’n Sproul, with severity, and when the astonished Butts blazed indignant remonstrance, he insisted on his point with a stubbornness that allowed no compromise.  “It don’t make any difference even if it is only a painted figger.  It’s showin’ disrespect to the sex, and sence I’ve settled on shore, Butts, and am married to the best woman that ever lived, I’m standin’ up for the sex to the extent that I ain’t seein’ no insults handed to a woman—­even if it ain’t anything but an Injun maiden in front of a cigar-store.”

Butts dropped his rock.

“I never hurt a woman, and I would never hurt one,” he protested, “and you that’s sailed with me knows it.  But that blasted, grinnin’ effijiggy there stands for that rotten old punk-heap that’s jest gone to pieces out yender, and it’s the only thing I’ve got to get back on.  Three months from Turk’s Island, Cap’n Sproul, with a salt cargo and grub that would gag a dogfish!  Lay down half a biskit and it would walk off.  All I’ve et for six weeks has been doughboys lolloped in Porty Reek.  He kicked me when I complained.”  Butts shook wavering finger at the shred of sail in the distance.  “He kept us off with the gun to-day and sailed away in the yawl, and he never cared whuther we ever got ashore or not.  And the grin he give me when he done it was jest like the grin on that thing there.”  Again the perturbed Butts showed signs of a desire to assault the wooden incarnation of the spirit of the Polyhymnia.

“A man who has been abused as much as you have been abused at sea has good reason to stand up for your rights when you are abused the moment you reach shore,” barked a harsh voice.  Colonel Gideon Ward, backed by the faithful Eleazar Bodge, stood safely aloof on a huge bowlder, his gaunt frame outlined against the morning sky.  “Are you the commander of those men?” he inquired.