In a great fury the Old Man came in person to investigate. But he very soon had the rights of the matter; the boy's cheek was bleeding freely, and the nigger was more frightened than hurt. "Get below you," said the Old Man savagely to the nigger. "I'll have you in irons. I'll larn you to throw boots." That was all the satisfaction the nigger got out of the affair, but from then boots were not thrown lightheartedly at Sailor. XVII After many days of ocean tramping with an occasional discharge of cargo at an out of the way port, the ship put in at Frisco. Here, after a clean up, a new cargo was taken aboard, also a new crew. This was a pretty scratch lot; the usual complement of Yankees, Dutchmen, dagoes, and an occasional Britisher. For a long and trying fifteen months, Sailor continued on the seas, about all the oceans of the world. At the end of that time he was quite a different boy from the one who had left his native city of Blackhampton. Dagoes and niggers no longer did as they liked with him. He still had a strong dislike, it was true, to going aloft in a gale, but he invariably did as he was told to the best of his ability; he no longer skulked or showed the white feather in the presence of his mates. Nevertheless, he was always miserably unhappy. There was something in his nature that could not accept the hateful discomforts of a life before the mast, although from the day of his birth he had never known what it was to lie soft. He was in hell all the time. Moreover, he knew it and felt it to the inmost fiber of his being; the soul of Henry Harper was no longer derelict. The sense of the miracle which had happened off the Island of San Pedro abided with him through gale and typhoon, through sunshine and darkness, through winter and summer. It didn't matter what the sea was doing, or the wind was saying, or the Old Man was threatening, a miracle had happened to Henry Harper. He had touched bed rock. He had seen things and he had learned things; man and nature, all the terrible and mysterious forces around him could do their worst, but he no longer feared them in the old craven way. Sailor had suffered a sea change. The things in earth and heaven he had looked upon none could share with him, not even Mr. Thompson, that strange and sinister man of the sea, to whom he owed what was called "his life"; nay, not even the Old Man himself who had lived six weeks on shellfish on the Island of San Pedro.