These, on the deck, I concluded, were the hopeless ones. Up aloft, from sounds and cries, I knew were other men, undoubtedly those who were at least a little seaman-like, loosing the sails. But on deck! Twenty or thirty of the poor devils, tailed on a rope that hoisted a yard, would pull without concerted effort and with painfully slow movements. “Walk away with it!” Mr. Pike would yell. And perhaps for two or three yards they would manage to walk with the rope ere they came to a halt like stalled horses on a hill. And yet, did either of the mates spring in and add his strength, they were able to move right along the deck without stopping. Either of the mates, old men that they were, was muscularly worth half-a-dozen of the wretched creatures. “This is what sailin’s come to,” Mr. Pike paused to snort in my ear. “This ain’t the place for an officer down here pulling and hauling. But what can you do when the bosuns are worse than the men?” “I thought sailors sang songs when they pulled,” I said. “Sure they do. Want to hear ’em?” I knew there was malice of some sort in his voice, but I answered that I’d like to very much. “Here, you bosun!” Mr. Pike snarled. “Wake up! Start a song! Topsail halyards!” In the pause that followed I could have sworn that Sundry Buyers was pressing his hands against his abdomen, while Nancy, infinite bleakness freezing upon his face, was wetting his lips to begin. Nancy it was who began, for from no other man, I was confident, could have issued so sepulchral a plaint. It was unmusical, unbeautiful, unlively, and indescribably doleful. Yet the words showed that it should have ripped and crackled with high spirits and lawlessness, for the words poor Nancy sang were: “Away, way, way, yar, We’ll kill Paddy Doyle for bus boots.” “Quit it! Quit it!” Mr. Pike roared. “This ain’t a funeral! Ain’t there one of you that can sing? Come on, now! It’s a topsail-yard—” He broke off to leap in to the pin-rail and get the wrong ropes out of the men’s hands to put into them the right rope. “Come on, bosun! Break her out!” Then out of the gloom arose Sundry Buyers’ voice, cracked and crazy and even more lugubrious than Nancy’s: “Then up aloft that yard must go, Whiskey for my Johnny.” The second line was supposed to be the chorus, but not more than two men feebly mumbled it. Sundry Buyers quavered the next line: “Oh, whiskey killed my sister Sue.” Then Mr. Pike took a hand, seizing the hauling-part next to the pin and lifting his voice with a rare snap and devilishness: “And whiskey killed the old man, too, Whiskey for my Johnny.” He sang the devil-may-care lines on and on, lifting the crew to the work and to the chorused emphasis of “Whiskey for my Johnny.” And to his voice they pulled, they moved, they sang, and were alive, until he interrupted the song to cry “Belay!”