It was the mate’s voice from the poop, robust and peremptory.  Conroy, one of the two Englishmen in the port watch, laid down the bucket he was carrying and moved aft in obedience to the summons.  As he trod into the slip of light by the galley door he was visible as a fair youth, long-limbed and slender, clad in a serge shirt, with dungaree trousers rolled up to the knees, and girt with a belt which carried the usual sheath-knife.  His pleasant face had a hint of uncertainty; it was conciliatory and amiable; he was an able seaman of the kind which is manufactured by a boarding-master short of men out of a runaway apprentice.  The others, glancing after him while they continued their work, saw him suddenly clear by the galley door, then dim again as he stepped beyond it.  He passed out of sight towards the lee poop ladder.

The silent, hurried sailors pressed on with their work, while the big barque purred through the water to the drone of wind thrusting in the canvas.  The brooms were abaft of the galley when the outcry began which caused them to look apprehensively towards the poop without ceasing their business of washing down.  First it was an oath in explosive German, the tongue which puts a cutting-edge on profanity; then the mate’s roar: 

“Is dat vat I tell you, you verfluchter fool?  Vat?  Vat?  You don’t understand ven I speak?  I show you vat——­”

The men who looked up were on the wrong side of the deck to make out what was happening, for the chart-house screened the drama from them.  But they knew too well the meaning of that instantaneous silence which cut the words off.  It was the mate biting in his breath as he struck.  They heard the smack of the fist’s impact and Conroy’s faint, angry cry as he failed to guard it; then the mate again, bull-mouthed, lustful for cruelty:  “Vat—­you lift up your arm to me!  You dog!” More blows, a rain of them, and then a noise as though Conroy had fallen or been knocked down.  And after that a thud and a scream.

The men looked at one another, and nods passed among them.  “He kicked him when he was down on the deck,” the whisper went.  The other Englishman in the watch swore in a low grunt and dropped his broom, meeting the wondering eyes of the “Dutchmen” and “Dagoes” with a scowl.  He was white-haired and red-faced, a veteran among the nomads of the sea, the oldest man aboard, and the only one in the port watch who had not felt the weight of the mate’s fist.  Scowling still, as though in deep thought, he moved towards the ladder.  The forlorn hope was going on a desperate enterprise of rescue.

It might have been an ugly business; there was a sense in the minds of his fellows of something sickening about to happen; but the mate had finished with Conroy.  The youth came staggering and crying down the ladder, with tears and blood befouling his face, and stumbled as his foot touched the deck.  The older man, Slade, saved him from falling, and held him by the upper arm with one gnarled, toil-roughened hand, peering at him through the early morning gloom.