As Man’el came up from his oil bath, I heard laughter behind me, and other sounds of merriment and gaiety, and I turned to see the cause. There was the small, from which the blubber had been stripped, lying raw and ghastly. Some half-dozen men were gathered behind it, on the side away from the gangway, and as I looked, they began to push. It was like a game of push-ball, with the raw, red small of a whale for the ball; too heavy to be {89} much like the real push-ball, of which, of course, I had never heard at that time. Nobody had heard of it in 1872. The ship was rolling gently, and while they had to push uphill they made little or no progress, but when she rolled to starboard, the small got to going pretty fast. The deck was slippery, and each man was pushing as hard as he could for his chuckling, hoping, I supposed, to swing it around so that it would not go out of the gangway, for which it was aimed. In that purpose they were successful. The small struck hard against one of the stanchions at the corner of the opening, swung around, and as the ship rolled back, it started for the port rail, knocking a man down. Then the laughter bubbled forth, led by the blacks and the Kanakas. I had some fear that the sliding small might break out the rail on the port side; but the jaw was there, and the men collected strength enough to stop the slide, although it carried very nearly across the deck. The discipline was not strict, for it does no harm to have a laughing crew; but the pushing rapidly developed into horse-play. Then Mr. Brown stopped it with a curt word, and the men fell to very industriously, but their faces were merry still, and gushes of laughter bubbled out now and then. At the next roll of the ship, the small shot from the gangway as from a catapult, and into the water nearly a couple of fathoms from the side with a tremendous splash, which wet the men at the gangway. Of course it had to be Mr. Brown who stopped that horse-play, and I felt an admiration for his way of doing it, with two or three words, although I did not hear what he said. Mr. Baker would have stopped it sooner and more violently. I think the men were all afraid of Mr. Baker, which was, no doubt, the feeling which he wished to inspire. As for Mr. Wallet, he could not have done it in a thousand years, and it would never have occurred to him {90} to try; but Mr. Brown stopped it at just the right point, and left the men feeling gay and high-spirited. The whole thing, while unimportant in itself, showed the feeling of the men toward our third mate, and his way of dealing with them. {91} CHAPTER X