A couple of tons of water in the shape of a small sea chased Scoot back down the ladder. A spry one, Scoot. He got out of the way, holding Confucius and the pants high in the air. The back of William T's neck happened to be about the middle of the region where most of that sea landed below. After he'd coughed up what he could from his insides, William T. had a word to say. Scoot had rigged up a bilge-pump which worked from the hold. William T. was told to work that as well as shovel the coal. What he wanted to say was that he'd shovel the coal or he'd stand by the pump, but not both. "What did I ship for--what for?" he demanded of Scoot. Scoot was a little man, and he used to rig up a pair of big black horn-rimmed spectacles he owned and talk with care before strangers, but he wasn't so safe as he looked. His father, a delicatessen man, had intended him for a chemist, and then died in time to save him from it. Scoot had other notions, and only he met a Barbados negro with a head made of the same mixture as two parts in five Portland cement after it'd had two days to set--only for him Scoot said he might have been a light-weight champion riding around in his own auto. After that fight he said he'd never raise his hand to a man again. No, sir; it would be a meat-axe for him--also he was going to draw the color line. And the higher life for him thereafter. "Only in toilsome essays to climb the heights Does man from his baser nature rise," Scoot used to say. And he did essay to climb, but every once in so often his foot would slip and down he'd come and begin to claw around like anybody else. "That big brute that toted me aboard here, and that other big brute up on deck, mebbe they c'n lick me," said William T. now; "but no red chin-whiskered, toothless runt like you kin." Scoot wasn't shy any teeth. It was the way his under jaw was hung. When he'd take to chewing with his front teeth, that lower jaw used to come up outside the upper one. But it was true about his chin-whisker, and he didn't like it. "That so?" says Scoot, and stows his big horn spectacles in their case and selects a nice long spanner; and when William T. came at him wide open he tapped him--once, twice--neatly. When William came to, Scoot was waving a full-sized twenty-pound shovel before his eyes. Says Scoot: "Observe, please, this instrument. You insert the forward end of it under this pile of coal--so; and you elevate it--so: a hand here and a hand there; and you project it into the firebox--so. And so on and so on, repeating ad noshum. You savvy?" says Scoot. "Cause if you don't, then you hear me, son; I'll whale the everlastin' livers 'n' lights outer your debased hide." "You-all are sure a bunch o' tough guys," says William T.; and thereafter Scoot went around applying Leakitis to the worst spots in peace.