And I was frightened when I became conscious of the trend of my thought. The continual brutality around me was degenerative in its effect. It bid fair to destroy for me all that was best and brightest in life. My reason dictated that the beating Thomas Mugridge had received was an ill thing, and yet for the life of me I could not prevent my soul joying in it. And even while I was oppressed by the enormity of my sin,—for sin it was,—I chuckled with an insane delight. I was no longer Humphrey Van Weyden. I was Hump, cabin-boy on the schooner _Ghost_. Wolf Larsen was my captain, Thomas Mugridge and the rest were my companions, and I was receiving repeated impresses from the die which had stamped them all. CHAPTER XIII For three days I did my own work and Thomas Mugridge’s too; and I flatter myself that I did his work well. I know that it won Wolf Larsen’s approval, while the sailors beamed with satisfaction during the brief time my _régime_ lasted. “The first clean bite since I come aboard,” Harrison said to me at the galley door, as he returned the dinner pots and pans from the forecastle. “Somehow Tommy’s grub always tastes of grease, stale grease, and I reckon he ain’t changed his shirt since he left ’Frisco.” “I know he hasn’t,” I answered. “And I’ll bet he sleeps in it,” Harrison added. “And you won’t lose,” I agreed. “The same shirt, and he hasn’t had it off once in all this time.” But three days was all Wolf Larsen allowed him in which to recover from the effects of the beating. On the fourth day, lame and sore, scarcely able to see, so closed were his eyes, he was haled from his bunk by the nape of the neck and set to his duty. He sniffled and wept, but Wolf Larsen was pitiless. “And see that you serve no more slops,” was his parting injunction. “No more grease and dirt, mind, and a clean shirt occasionally, or you’ll get a tow over the side. Understand?” Thomas Mugridge crawled weakly across the galley floor, and a short lurch of the _Ghost_ sent him staggering. In attempting to recover himself, he reached for the iron railing which surrounded the stove and kept the pots from sliding off; but he missed the railing, and his hand, with his weight behind it, landed squarely on the hot surface. There was a sizzle and odour of burning flesh, and a sharp cry of pain. “Oh, Gawd, Gawd, wot ’ave I done?” he wailed; sitting down in the coal-box and nursing his new hurt by rocking back and forth. “W’y ’as all this come on me? It mykes me fair sick, it does, an’ I try so ’ard to go through life ’armless an’ ’urtin’ nobody.” The tears were running down his puffed and discoloured cheeks, and his face was drawn with pain. A savage expression flitted across it. “Oh, ’ow I ’ate ’im! ’Ow I ’ate ’im!” he gritted out.