‘I will ask you not to question my courage,’ said Mr. Johnson, looking at me with a face whose paleness was not a little accentuated by his black eye. ‘I believe when it came to the scratch I should be found as good as another. _You_ would have fought, of course,’ he added, with a sarcastic sneer at me. ‘Yes; I would have fought then, just as I am ready to fight now,’ said I, looking at him. ‘Gentlemen, gentlemen,’ exclaimed Mr. Prance, in a subdued reprimanding voice, ‘the ladies will be hearing you in a minute.’ ‘You have been a sailor, Dugdale, you know,’ remarked Mr. Emmett in a satirical tone, ‘and might, therefore, have guessed yesterday that either the brig was a harmless trader, or that, supposing her to have been of a piratical nature, she would not attack us.’ ‘And what then?’ cried I, eyeing him hotly. ‘Well,’ said he, with a foolish grin, ‘of course, under those circumstances, a large character for heroism might be earned very cheaply indeed.’ Johnson lay back in his chair to deliver himself of a noisy laugh. His seat was a fixed revolving contrivance, and its one socketed leg might have been injured during the night. Be this as it may, on the journalist flinging himself back with a loud applauding ‘Ha! ha!’ of his friend Emmett’s satiric hit at me, the chair broke, and backward he went with it with a knife in one hand and a fork in the other. Old Keeling started to his feet; the stewards came in a rush to the prostrate man. Those ladies who were near gathered their gowns about them as they watched him plunging in his efforts to extricate himself from the chair, in which his hips were in some manner jammed. For my part, having breakfasted, and being half suffocated with laughter, I was glad enough to run away out on deck. Indeed, the disaster had cooled my temper, and this occurrence was something to be thankful for, since one thing was leading to another, and, for all one could tell, the journalist and I might have come to blows as we sat side by side. He and Emmett cut me for the rest of the day. My own temper was sulky for the most part. I spent the whole of the morning on the forecastle, smoking pipe after pipe in the ‘eyes’ of the ship, yarning in a fragmentary way with the boatswain, who invented excuses to come into the ‘head’ to indulge in a brief chat with me, whilst by his postures and motions he contrived to wear an air of business to the gaze that might be watching from the poop.