The lady was doing what she could to aid us.  She held, every morning, a levee in the cabin for the lame and sick, all who could drag themselves aft, and tended them skillfully.  But this did not help the bedridden ones.  It did not help young Nils.

But nothing could have helped Nils.  The bucko had done his work too well.  Not once did the boy rally; daily and visibly his life ebbed.

You must understand the callous indifference of the afterguard to realize its effect upon the foc’sle.  The boy lay dying for weeks, and not once did the Captain come forward to look at him.  Medicines and opiates were sent forward by the lady, but, though they eased the chap, they were powerless to salvage his wrecked body.  Newman said Nils’ ribs were sticking into his lungs.

Lindquist went aft to ask permission to move the boy to the cabin, where the lady could nurse him.  Swope blackguarded the man, and Fitzgibbon kicked him forward.  Lynch ignored the very existence of Nils—–­the lad was not of his watch, and the whole matter was none of his business.  But Mister Fitz came into the port foc’sle every day, to make sure Nils could not stand on his feet and turn to; and on deck he would sing out to his watch that Nils’ fate was the fate of each man did he not move livelier.  “Jump, you rats!  I’ll put you all in your bunks!” he would tell them.

The sight of their young landsman in agony stirred the berserk in the squareheads of the crew.  It made them ripe for revolt, drove them to lawless acts, as their shanghaiing and the brutality of the officers could not have done.

These squareheads were no strangers to each other.  They were all friends and old shipmates.  The Knitting Swede had crimped them all out of a Norwegian bark, plied them with drink, and put them on board the Golden Bough after he had promised to find them a high-waged coasting ship.

Young Nils was a sort of mascot in this crowd.  He was making his first deep-water voyage under their protection and guidance.  Most of them were his townsmen; they had known him from babyhood.  As Lindquist said to me, his blue eyes filled with pain and rage, “I know his mudder.  When Nils ban so high, I yump him by mine knee.”  So it was that rage over the pitiful fate of their dear friend fanned into flame a spark of rebellion in the squarehead’s disciplined souls, and caused them, eventually, to leap the barriers of race and caste prejudice and make common cause with the stiffs.

Now, I do not wish to idealize those stiffs.  No use saying they were honest workingmen kidnaped to sea.  They were not.  They were just what the mates called them—­dogs, scum, vile sweeps of jail and boozing-ken.  With the single exception of the shanghaied parson, there was not a decent man in the lot.  Bums and crooks, all.