During the supper, and after, I found myself watching and studying my companions.  For I feared that my youth might later cause someone to question my cockship, and I meant to fight for it in that event.  But my scrutiny satisfied my natural confidence.  There was no man in my watch I could not handle in either a rough-and-tumble or stand-up go, I thought, with the exception of Newman.  He would not interfere with me—­his interest lay aft, in the cabin, not in the foc’sle.  In the port watch were two fighting men, my eyes had told me, the Cockney and the Nigger.  If they disputed my will in foc’sle affairs, I was still confident I should prove the best man.  I felt my tenure of office was secure, and that new, delicious feeling of power quite effaced, for the moment, the memory of the day, and reconciled me to the ship.

This scrutiny I gave my companions was the first chance I had to fairly size them up, and I afterwards discovered that my first impressions of them, individually and collectively, were quite correct.

We were, as you know, thirty men before the mast, fifteen to a watch.  More than half of the thirty were of that class known to sailors as “stiffs.”  This is, they were greenhorns masquerading on the articles as able seamen.  And such stiffs!  The Knitting Swede must have combed the jails, and stews, and boozing kens of all San Francisco to assemble that unsavory mob.

In my watch, Newman, myself, and four square-heads could be called seamen.  But the squareheads knew not a dozen words of English between them.  The other nine were stiffs, various kinds of stiffs, broken men all, with the weaknesses of dissolute living stamped upon their inefficient faces.

Except two men.  These two were stiffs right enough, and their faces were evil, God knows, but they plainly were not to be classed as weaklings.  I noticed them particularly that first watch below because they sat apart from the wrangling, cursing gang, and whispered to each other, and stared at Newman, who was lying in his bunk.

They were medium sized men, as pallid of face as Newman, himself, and their faces gave one the impression of both slyness and force.  A grim looking pair; I should not have cared to run afoul of them on the Barbary Coast after midnight.  I already knew the names they called each other—­the only names I ever knew them by—­“Boston,” for the blond fellow with the bridge of his nose flattened, and “Blackie” for the other, a chap as swarthy as a dago, with long, oily black hair, and eyes too close together.

Even as I watched, they seemed to arrive at some decision in their whispered conversation.  Blackie got up from the bench and crossed over to Newman’s bunk.  The latter was lying with his face to the wall.  Blackie placed his hand upon Newman’s shoulder, leaned over, and whispered into his ear.

I saw Newman straighten out his long body.  For an instant he lay tense, then he slowly turned his head and faced the man who leaned over him.  On his face was the same expression of deadly menace he had shown the Cockney, back in the Swede’s barroom.