"Cut the officer stuff!" He threw his cap on the deck. He took off his coat and threw that on the deck. "Now I bear no mark of the officer--come on now and beat me up! And you'll have to beat me till I can't speak or see again--and then you can leave me here, and I'm telling you now no one will ever know who did it. You're many pounds heavier and half as strong again as when you licked me before, but go ahead and turn yourself loose at me. There's no alibi left you now--go ahead, turn yourself loose at me!" I was all that he said--a brute that felt equal to ripping the three-inch planking off the quarterdeck, and he wasn't himself near the man he had been when I fought him before--he had never got well over the burning in the handling-room fire; but he stood there telling me what some one should have told me long before. "Jack Meagher," I said, "Mary Riley made no mistake--you're a better man than I am." And I left him and ran up the ladder--up to where winds were blowing and seas singing and the stars rolling their eternal circles. All night long I walked the deck. It did me good--what he had said to me. But a man doesn't change his ways overnight. I stopped maybe to have a backward look more often than I used to, and friendly deck officers maybe didn't have so often to look hard at the liberty lists; but being in the same ship with Meagher did me good. I used to take to watching him, to studying his ways--the ways of the man Mary Riley had married. He used to come out of the after turret and look out on the sea, when maybe he'd finished up his work for the afternoon. He was there one afternoon late; and we were in the China Sea, a division of us, bound up to Cheefoo for a liberty. A monsoon was blowing, and there we were, pitching into it, taking plenty of water over ourselves forward, but so far very little aft. Meagher was in rain-coat and rubber boots, leaning against a gypsy-head, when this big sea rolled up over our quarter-deck. She had a low quarter, our ship, and the solid water of this sea rolled turret-high. When it had passed on, Meagher and four others were gone. I was in the lee of the superstructure. I ran onto her quarter-deck. I saw an officer's cap and took a running high jump over the rail. While I was still in the air I said to myself: "You're gone! Her starb'd propeller will get you--you're gone! ... "And if I am, what of it?" I recalled later saying to myself; but before my head was fairly under I was kicking out hard from the ship's side. Meagher was the only man of the five to come up. When I saw him he was struggling to unhook the metal clasps of his rain-coat. I reached him and kicked out for the life-buoy that the marine sentry had heaved over. We made the buoy and I shoved him up on it--he still trying to clear himself of his heavy rain-coat.