McGarver cheered, for such kicks were a rule of the game.

“Good work,” ironically remarked Tim, the weakling hatter.

“You go to hell,” snapped Wrennie, and Tim looked much more respectful.

But Wrennie lost this credit before they had finished feeding out the hay, for he grew too dizzy to resent Tim’s remarks.

Straining to pitch forkfuls into the pens while the boat rolled, slopping along the wet gangway, down by the bunkers of coal, where the heat seemed a close-wound choking shroud and the darkness was made only a little pale by light coming through dust-caked port-holes, he sneezed and coughed and grunted till he was exhausted.  The floating bits of hay-dust were a thousand impish hands with poisoned nails scratching at the roof of his mouth.  His skin prickled all over.  He constantly discovered new and aching muscles.  But he wabbled on until he finished the work, fifteen minutes after Tim had given out.

He crawled up to the main deck and huddled in the shelter of a pile of hay-bales where Pete was declaring to Tim and the rest that Satan “couldn’t never get nothing on him.”

Morton broke into Pete’s publicity with the question, “Say, is it straight what they say, Pete, that you’re the guy that owns the Leyland Line and that’s why you know so much more than the rest of us poor lollops?  Watson, the needle, quick!” [Applause and laughter.]

Wrennie felt personally grateful to Morton for this, but he went up to the aft top deck, where he could lie alone on a pile of tarpaulins.  He made himself observe the sea which, as Kipling and Jack London had specifically promised him in their stories, surrounded him, everywhere shining free; but he glanced at it only once.  To the north was a liner bound for home.

Home!  Gee!  That was rubbing it in!  While at work, whether he was sick or not, he could forget—­things.  But the liner, fleeting on with bright ease, made the cattle-boat seem about as romantic as Mrs. Zapp’s kitchen sink.

Why, he wondered—­“why had he been a chump?  Him a wanderer?  No; he was a hired man on a sea-going dairy-farm.  Well, he’d get onto this confounded job before he was through with it, but then—­gee! back to God’s Country!”

While the Merian, eleven days out, pleasantly rocked through the Irish Sea, with the moon revealing the coast of Anglesey, one Bill Wrenn lay on the after-deck, condescending to the heavens.  It was so warm that they did not need to sleep below, and half a dozen of the cattlemen had brought their mattresses up on deck.  Beside Bill Wrenn lay the man who had given him that name—­Tim, the hatter, who had become weakly alarmed and admiring as Wrennie learned to rise feeling like a boy in early vacation-time, and to find shouting exhilaration in sending a forkful of hay fifteen good feet.

Morton, who lay near by, had also adopted the name “Bill Wrenn.”  Most of the trip Morton had discussed Pete and Tim instead of the fact that “things is curious.”  Mr. Wrenn had been jealous at first, but when he learned from Morton the theory that even a Pete was a “victim of ’vironment” he went out for knowing him quite systematically.