To a great extent, I suppose, it counted against me that I was the son of a gentleman. But if I was left alone forward, so Roger, I learned now and then, was left alone aft. Continually I puzzled over the complacency of the men. They would nod and smile and glance at me pityingly, even when I was getting my meat from the same kids and my tea from the same pot; and chance phrases, which I caught now and then, added to my uneasiness. Once old Blodgett, prowling like a cat in the night, was telling how he was going to "take his money and buy a little place over Ipswich way. There's nice little places over Ipswich way where a man can settle snug as you please and buy him a wife and end his days in comfort. We'll go home by way of India, too, I'll warrant you, and take each of us our handful of round red rubies. Right's right, but right'll be left--mind what I tell you." Another time--on the same day, as I now recall it--I overheard the carpenter saying that he was going to build a brick house in Boston up on Temple Place. "And there'll be fan-lights over the door," he said, "their panels as thin as rose-leaves, and leaded glass in a fine pattern." The carpenter was a craftsman who aspired to be an artist. But where did old Blodgett or the carpenter hope to get the money to indulge the tastes of a prosperous merchant? I suspected well enough the answer to that question, and I was not far wrong. The cook remained inscrutable. I could not fathom the expressions of his black frowning face. Although Captain Falk of course had no direct communication with him openly, I learned through Bill Hayden that indirectly he treated him with tolerant and friendly patronage. It even did not surprise me greatly to be told that sometimes he secretly visited the galley after dark and actually hobnobbed with black Frank in his own quarters. It was almost incredible, to be sure; but so was much else in which Captain Falk was implicated, and I could see revealed now in the game that he was playing his desire to win and hold the men until they had served his ends, whatever those ends might be. "Yass, sah," black Frank would growl absently as he passed me without a glance, "dis am de most appetizin' crew eveh Ah cooked foh. Dey's got no mo' bottom to dey innards dan a sponge has. Ah's a-cookin' mah head off to feed dat bunch of wuthless man-critters, a-a-a-a-h!" And he would stump to the galley with a brimming pail of water in each hand. I came sadly to conclude that old Frank had found other friends more to his taste than the boy in the forecastle, and that Captain Falk, by trickery and favoritism, really was securing his grip on the crew. In all his petty manoeuvres and childish efforts to please the men and flatter them and make them think him a good officer to have over them, he had made up to this point only one or two false steps.