“As I can’t help pleasin’,” he retorted, “bein’ what I am an’ so made for the little flash between the darknesses which men call life. Now why couldn’t I a-ben a butterfly, or a fat pig in a full trough, or a mere mortal man with a straight back an’ women to love me? Go on an’ smash the boats. Play hell to the top of your bent. Like me, you’ll end in the darkness. And your darkness’ll be—as dark as mine.” “A full belly puts the spunk back into you,” I sneered. “’Tis on an empty belly that the juice of my dislike turns to acid. Go on an’ smash the boats.” “Whose idea was the sulphur?” I asked. “I’m not tellin’ you the man, but I envied him until it showed failure. An’ whose idea was it—to douse the sulphuric into Rhine’s face? He’ll lose that same face, from the way it’s shedding.” “Nor will I tell you,” I said. “Though I will tell you that I am glad the idea was not mine.” “Oh, well,” he muttered cryptically, “different customs on different ships, as the cook said when he went for’ard to cast off the spanker sheet.” Not until the job was done and I was back on the poop did I have time to work out the drift of that last figure in its terms of the sea. Mulligan Jacobs might have been an artist, a philosophic poet, had he not been born crooked with a crooked back. And we smashed the boats. With axes and sledges it was an easier task than I had imagined. On top of both houses we left the boats masses of splintered wreckage, the topaz-eyed ones working most energetically; and we regained the poop without a shot being fired. The forecastle turned out, of course, at our noise, but made no attempt to interfere with us. And right here I register another complaint against the sea-novelists. A score of men for’ard, desperate all, with desperate deeds behind them, and jail and the gallows facing them not many days away, should have only begun to fight. And yet this score of men did nothing while we destroyed their last chance for escape. “But where did they get the grub?” the steward asked me afterwards. This question he has asked me every day since the first day Mr. Pike began cudgelling his brains over it. I wonder, had I asked Mulligan Jacobs the question, if he would have told me? At any rate, in court at Valparaiso that question will be answered. In the meantime I suppose I shall submit to having the steward ask me it daily. “It is murder and mutiny on the high seas,” I told them this morning, when they came aft in a body to complain about the destruction of the boats and to demand my intentions.