Now there was a curious thing.  The decent men in the crew gave Holy Joe unstinted admiration; his bravery that day clinched his authority over the squareheads.  They would have done almost anything for him; aye, they loved the little man, and admired him.  Yet the stiffs were not much impressed by what Holy Joe did to the mate.  I guess they simply couldn’t understand it.  But Cockney’s trying to stick a knife into the mate’s back quite captured their fancy.  Aye, that attempted murder was a great deed; it made Cockney their hero.  I won’t say that the rest of us damned Cockney.  We were, after all, foc’sle savages, and our hatred of Fitzgibbon was very bitter.  But it took the stiffs to honor Cockney for that knife-play.

Well, Newman might dismiss this fellow with a contemptuous word, but I couldn’t.  Cockney had become a rival I must reckon with.  I didn’t like the way he lorded it over the stiffs in my watch, even if the stiffs themselves did like it.  I didn’t like the noise he made in the starboard foc’sle, or the hard case airs he assumed.  I was number one bully in my watch, and intended to remain so.  I was, in fact, cock of the crew (Newman excepted, of course) and I thought that Cockney’s chesty boasting was in a way a defiance of me.

No doubt I was right.  As I discovered in time, Cockney had a good reason behind his blatant tongue.  It was necessary that he accustom some of the crew, even a few stiffs if no more, to follow his leadership.  But he couldn’t blow big in his own foc’sle, because Holy Joe wouldn’t allow it; and he didn’t dare lay a curse or a finger on the little parson because he knew if he did the squareheads would jump him in a body.  So he ventured into my bailiwick, hoping, I suppose, that the open support of Boston and Blackie, his size, which matched my own, and his newly got reputation as a bad man with a knife, would bluff me.

It didn’t.  His dirty and violent talk sickened and wearied me, and just as soon as I had a reasonable pretext I ordered him out of the foc’sle.  This wasn’t as high-handed as it sounds, for Cockney had the gall one afternoon to leave the deck during his watch out, and break into my watch’s rest with his obscene gabble.

He was disposed to dispute my order, and the stiffs backed him up with talk.  So I turned out and turned to.  I slapped a few stiffs, and threw Cockney through the door.  He invited me out on deck, and of course I accepted.  We had a nice set-to before all hands.  Even the tradesmen came forward to see the sport.

Well, Newman’s estimate of the man was correct.  Cockney was scum, yellow scum.  His fighting methods were as foul as his tongue; he tried all of his slum tricks, the knee, the eye-gouge, the Liverpool-butt, and when he found I was up to them, and the stronger man in the clinches, he wanted to call enough.  But I was too incensed by this time to let him escape easily, and I battered him all about the foredeck.  Finally he turned tail and fled aft.  Of course I did not pursue beyond the deck-house.  His fleeing the battle really pleased me more than knocking him out.  I felt sure that such an ignominious defeat would cook his goose with the stiffs.