Instantly he resumed his loud and abusive tone. "Well, if dey gwine send a boy heah foh wateh, wateh he's gotta have. Heah, you wuthless boy, git! Git out of heah!" Filling a bucket with boiling water, he thrust it into my hand and shoved me half across the deck so roughly that I narrowly escaped scalding myself, then returned to his work, muttering imprecations on the whole race of boys. He was too much of a strategist for me. When I took the bucket to the forecastle, I found the captain and Mr. Kipping looking at poor old Bill. "Dip a cloth in the water," the captain said carelessly, "and pull his clothes off and lay the cloth on where it hurts." I obeyed as well as I could, letting the cloth cool a bit first; and although Bill cried out sharply when it touched his skin, the heat eased him of pain, and by and by he opened his eyes for all the world as if he had been asleep and looked at Captain Falk and said in a scared voice, "In heaven's name, what's happened?" The captain and Mr. Kipping laughed coldly. It seemed to me that they didn't care whether he lived or died. Certainly the men of the larboard watch, who were lying in their bunks at the time, didn't like the way the two behaved. I caught the word "heartless" twice repeated. "Well," said Captain Falk at last, "either he'll live or he'll not. How about it, Mr. Kipping?" The mate laughed as if he had heard a good joke. "That's one of the truest things ever was said aboard a ship," he replied, in his slow, insincere way. "Yes, sir, it hits the nail on the head going up and coming down." "Well, then, let's leave him to make up his mind." So the two went aft together as if they had done a good day's work. But there was a buzz of disapproval in the forecastle when they had gone, and one of the men from Boston, of whom I hitherto had had a very poor opinion, actually got out of his blankets and came over to help me minister to poor Bill's needs. "It ain't right," he said dipping the cloth in the hot water; "they never so much as gave him a dose of medicine. A man may be only a sailor, but he's worth a dose of medicine. There never come no good of denying poor Jack his pill when he's sick." "Ay, heartless!" one of the others exclaimed. _"I could tell things if I would."_ That remark, I ask you to remember. The man who made it, the other of the two from Boston, had black hair and a black beard, and a nose that protruded in a big hook where he had broken it years before. It was easy to recognize his profile a long way off because of the peculiar shape of the nose. The remark itself is of little importance, of course; but a story is made up of things that seem to be of little importance, yet really are more significant by far than matters that for the moment are startling.