But the mate was not acquainted with Billy Byrne of Kelly’s gang.  Billy’s brain was befuddled, so that it took some time for an idea to wriggle its way through, but his courage was all there, and all to the good.  Billy was a mucker, a hoodlum, a gangster, a thug, a tough.  When he fought, his methods would have brought a flush of shame to the face of His Satanic Majesty.  He had hit oftener from behind than from before.  He had always taken every advantage of size and weight and numbers that he could call to his assistance.  He was an insulter of girls and women.  He was a bar-room brawler, and a saloon-corner loafer.  He was all that was dirty, and mean, and contemptible, and cowardly in the eyes of a brave man, and yet, notwithstanding all this, Billy Byrne was no coward.  He was what he was because of training and environment.  He knew no other methods; no other code.  Whatever the meager ethics of his kind he would have lived up to them to the death.  He never had squealed on a pal, and he never had left a wounded friend to fall into the hands of the enemy—­the police.

Nor had he ever let a man speak to him, as the mate had spoken, and get away with it, and so, while he did not act as quickly as would have been his wont had his brain been clear, he did act; but the interval of time had led the mate into an erroneous conception of its cause, and into a further rash show of authority, and had thrown him off his guard as well.

“What you need,” said the mate, advancing toward Billy, “is a bash on the beezer.  It’ll help you remember that you ain’t nothin’ but a dirty damn landlubber, an’ when your betters come around you’ll—­”

But what Billy would have done in the presence of his betters remained stillborn in the mate’s imagination in the face of what Billy really did do to his better as that worthy swung a sudden, vicious blow at the mucker’s face.

Billy Byrne had not been scrapping with third- and fourth-rate heavies, and sparring with real, live ones for nothing.  The mate’s fist whistled through empty air; the blear-eyed hunk of clay that had seemed such easy prey to him was metamorphosed on the instant into an alert, catlike bundle of steel sinews, and Billy Byrne swung that awful right with the pile-driver weight, that even The Big Smoke himself had acknowledged respect for, straight to the short ribs of his antagonist.

With a screech of surprise and pain the mate crumpled in the far corner of the forecastle, rammed halfway beneath a bunk by the force of the terrific blow.  Like a tiger Billy Byrne was after him, and dragging the man out into the center of the floor space he beat and mauled him until his victim’s blood-curdling shrieks echoed through the ship from stem to stern.

When the captain, followed by a half-dozen seamen rushed down the companionway, he found Billy sitting astride the prostrate form of the mate.  His great fingers circled the man’s throat, and with mighty blows he was dashing the fellow’s head against the hard floor.  Another moment and murder would have been complete.