“To you?” thundered the seaman, in a voice that made Mr. Atkins drop into his chair as if he was shot. “To you? And who are you? You damned lubberly, purse-proud aristocrat, do you want me to take you by the heels and throw you out of that window? Call me that name again, and I’ll do it as soon as I’d eat. _You_, indeed? You’re the Lord High Brown, aint you? You’re the Lord Knows Who, you blasted old money-grubber, aint you! _You_, indeed!” In all his life, Mr. Atkins had never been so spoken to. He sat in a sort of horror, gazing with open mouth and glassy eyes at the sturdy face of the seaman, on which a brown flush had burned out, and the firm, lit eyes of which held him spell-bound. Bangham, too—horror-stricken, wonder-stricken, thunder-stricken—sat staring at Jones for a minute, then burst into a short, rattling laugh, and jumping to his feet, cried, “Oh, he’s mad, he’s mad, he’s mad, he’s got a calenture, he’s got a calenture, he’s mad as a March hare,” capering and hopping and prancing, meanwhile, in his narrow confine, as if he would jump out of his skin. “You, too, Bangham,” said the mate, making a step toward him, with a menacing gesture, at which the captain stopped capering, and shrank, while Mr. Atkins slightly started in his chair, “you just clap a stopper on that ugly mug of yours, and stop your monkey capers, or you’ll have me afoul of you. I haven’t forgot your didoes with the men aboard the Soliman. Just you say another word now, and I’ll put in a complaint that’ll lay you by the heels in the State Prison, where you ought to have been long ago, you ugly pirate, you!” The captain evidently winced under this threat, which Mr. Jones delivered with ominous gravity, slowly shaking, meanwhile, his clenched fist at him. “And now look here, you brace of bloody buccaneers,” continued the irreverent seaman, “short words are best words with such as you. I untied that poor old moke of a nigger last night, and rowed him ashore. What are ye going to do about it?” Evidently a question hard to answer. Merchant and captain, stupefied and staring, gave him no reply. “Hark you, now, Atkins,” he went on. “We found that man half dead in the hold when we were three days out—a sight to make one’s flesh crawl. The bloody old pirate he’d run away from, had put a spiked collar on his neck, just as if he was a brute, with no soul to be saved. I’m an old sea-dog—I am; and I’ve seen men ill treated in my time, but I’m damned if I ever seen a man ill-treated like that God-forsaken nigger. He’d run away, and no blame to him for running away. He’d been livin’ in swamps with snakes and alligators, and if he hadn’t no right to his freedom, he’d earned one fifty times over, and it’s my opinion that a man who goes through what he did has more right to his freedom than two beggars like you, who never done the first thing to deserve it. Mind that now, both of ye!”