“Trubiggs is a lobster.  You don’t want to let the bosses bluff you aboard the Merian.  They’ll try to chase you in where the steers’ll gore you.  The grub’ll be—­”

“What grub do you get?”

“Scouse and bread.  And water.”

“What’s scouse?”

“Beef stew without the beef.  Oh, the grub’ll be rotten.  Trubiggs is a lobster.  He wouldn’t be nowhere if ’t wa’n’t for me.”

Mr. Wrenn appreciated England’s need of roast beef, but he timidly desired not to be gored by steers, which seemed imminent, before breakfast coffee.  The streets were coldly empty, and he was sleepy, and Morton was silent.  At the restaurant, sitting on a high stool before a pine counter, he choked over an egg sandwich made with thick crumby slices of a bread that had no personality to it.  He roved forlornly about Portland, beside the gloomy pipe-valiant Morton, fighting two fears:  the company might not need all of them this trip, and he might have to wait; secondly, if he incredibly did get shipped and started for England the steers might prove dreadfully dangerous.  After intense thinking he ejaculated, “Gee! it’s be bored or get gored.”  Which was much too good not to tell Morton, so they laughed very much, and at ten o’clock were signed on for the trip and led, whooping, to the deck of the S.S. Merian.

Cattle were still struggling down the chutes from the dock.  The dirty decks were confusingly littered with cordage and the cattlemen’s luggage.  The Jewish elders stared sepulchrally at the wilderness of open hatches and rude passageways, as though they were prophesying death.

But Mr. Wrenn, standing sturdily beside his suit-case to guard it, fawned with romantic love upon the rusty iron sides of their pilgrims’ caravel; and as the Merian left the wharf with no more handkerchief-waving or tears than attends a ferry’s leaving he mumbled: 

“Free, free, out to sea.  Free, free, that’s me!”

Then, “Gee!...  Gee whittakers!”

CHAPTER IV

HE BECOMES THE GREAT LITTLE BILL WRENN

When the Merian was three days out from Portland the frightened cattleman stiff known as “Wrennie” wanted to die, for he was now sure that the smell of the fo’c’sle, in which he was lying on a thin mattress of straw covered with damp gunny-sacking, both could and would become daily a thicker smell, a stronger smell, a smell increasingly diverse and deadly.

Though it was so late as eight bells of the evening, Pete, the tough factory hand, and Tim, the down-and-out hatter, were still playing seven-up at the dirty fo’c’sle table, while McGarver, under-boss of the Morris cattle gang, lay in his berth, heavily studying the game and blowing sulphurous fumes of Lunch Pail Plug Cut tobacco up toward Wrennie.

Pete, the tough, was very evil.  He sneered.  He stole.  He bullied.  He was a drunkard and a person without cleanliness of speech.  Tim, the hatter, was a loud-talking weakling, under Pete’s domination.  Tim wore a dirty rubber collar without a tie, and his soul was like his neckware.