The yells broke off. We went to work again. For a half hour, there was silence in the cabin. We wondered what had happened. Slim might have been murdered for all we knew. Finally Slim emerged and went silently forward. We noticed a large shaved spot on the top of his head where two long strips of court-plaster formed a black cross. The first thing Slim did after getting back to the forecastle was to take one of his blue flannel shirts and, while none of the officers was looking, shin up the ratlines and hang it on the fore-lift. This is an old-time sailor sign of distress and means trouble aboard. The mate soon spied the shirt swinging in the breeze. "Well, I'll be darned," he said. "Jump up there one of you and take that shirt down." No one stirred. The mate called the cabin boy and the young Kanaka brought down the shirt. Slim told us at dinner time all about his adventure in the cabin. "I goes down in the cabin," said Slim, "and the captain is standing with his hands in his pants pockets, smiling friendly-like. 'Hello, Slim,' he says. 'Sit down in this chair.' I sits down and the captain says, 'Well, my boy, what's the matter with you?' 'I'm sick,' says I. 'Where do you feel bad?' he says. 'I ache all over,' says I. He steps over in front of me, still with that little smile on his face. 'I've got good medicine aboard this ship,' he says, 'and I'll fix you up in a jiffy, my boy,' says he. With that he jerks one of his hands out of his pocket and he has a revolver clutched in it. 'Here's the medicine you need,' he says and he bats me over the cocoanut with the gun. "The blood spurts all over me and I jumps up and yells, but the captain points his pistol at me and orders me to sit down again. He storms up and down the cabin floor. 'I'll teach you who's master aboard this ship,' he shouts and for a minute he was so purple in the face with rage, I thought he was going to murder me for sure. By and by he cools down. 'Well, Slim,' he says, 'I guess I hit you a little harder than I meant to, but I'm a bad man when I get started. You need tending to now, sure enough.' "So he has the cabin boy fetch a pan of warm water and he washes the blood out of my hair with his own hands and then shaves around the cut and pastes sticking plaster on. That's all. But say, will I have the law on him when we get back to Frisco? Will I?" It was a long way back to Frisco. In the meantime we wondered what was in store for the luckless Irish grenadier.