It did.  Boston and Blackie stopped grooming Cockney for mob leader; they had seen that he lacked guts in a pinch, and that finished him with them.  The other stiffs still welcomed and admired him (for, although he was a good sailor, he was one of them at heart, and, after all, hadn’t he tried to stick the mate?), but he was no longer their hero.  Aye, it was quite a fall for Cockney; he lost a lot of face when he ran away from my fists.  He kept out of my foc’sle thereafter.

I mentioned that this fight started because Cockney came into our foc’sle during his watch on deck.  Now, that illustrates the surprising slackness of discipline in the port watch.  Just a few days before the mate was ready to shoot Holy Joe for going below during his watch on deck, but he never bothered his head about Cockney’s much worse offense.  In fact, during these strange days he seemed not to bother his head about anything his men did.  He promenaded on the poop during his watches on deck, alone, or arm-in-arm with the captain, and just about left the ship to sail herself.  No wonder the stiffs commenced to believe they could take liberties; in fact, they could take them in the mate’s watch, and get away with it.

But they couldn’t take liberties in the second mate’s watch.  You bet they couldn’t!  Bucko Lynch curbed his vocabulary and stopped using his fists, as the captain ordered, but he didn’t stop working his men.  There was no slackness in his watch; he kept us up to scratch.  That made the starboard stiffs especially bitter against him.  They felt themselves cheated of the easy times Fitzgibbon’s men were having.

But the sailors didn’t feel that way about it.  They were worried, just as I was.  The sailors knew ships as the stiffs did not.  They could feel ships.  Those dumb squareheads could not reason it out as I could (with Newman’s assistance), but they could feel the undercurrent of intrigue.  They were glad to escape the thumpings to which the mates had accustomed them; but they were not satisfied with the new order for they could feel that this strange peace was unreal, unhealthful.  Aye, the calm before the typhoon.  They felt it just as I felt it, just as Nigger felt it.  As for pessimistic Nigger, so strictly did he mind his own business these quiet days he was like a dumb man, a silent brown shadow.  But he went on sharpening his knife.

To heighten the squareheads’ foreboding, and to scare the wits half out of us all, Nils’ ghost visited the ship.  You know what sort of men we were in that foc’sle; save Newman and the parson, we were ignorant men, and superstitious.  We all believed implicitly in ghosts, I, and the squareheads, Nigger and Cockney, and even the stiffs who had not the sea in their blood.  Aye, even Blackie and Boston believed in haunts.  It seemed reasonable to us that Nils should come back to the scene of his earthly misery.  Reasonable, and fearsome.