The mate looked at us. He opened his mouth as if to bawl some order, or hurl some epithet at the men of his watch who had witnessed the brutal assault. Suddenly he turned round, and looked into the door of the lamp locker, a small room in the after end of the forward house. "Get a bucket of water and clean up this mess. It's a lucky thing you didn't bust them lights when you dropped them." He was addressing Chips, who came out of the door a moment later, hobbling to his room. The mate went aft, washing off his hands in a bucket of water that stood on the main hatch. No one said anything, even in a whisper, but when we went below at eight bells and were assembled around the kids, one of the boys spoke up. "Chips is cleaning up the lamp locker." "I hope he reports Mr. Zerk to the Shipping Commissioner," I said. "If he does enter a complaint he has plenty of witnesses. It will mean jail for that bully, and he deserves it." "Sure, he deserves to be hung," said Brenden. "But Chips will keep his mouth shut." "Why?" I asked. "If he makes a squeal, this will be his last ship. Chips has seen worse than he got, and should have kept his mouth shut. He gets forty dollars a month, ten more than the second mate. The Squarehead's no fool." "Well, I call it a dirty piece of work." "Righto!" agreed Australia. "That rotten bull ought to be hung by his thumbs." While little was said about this particularly raw piece of brutality, it made a great difference to us in so far as we seemed to realize, of a sudden, that the fo'c'sle was apart from things aft, and that it was just as well that we felt a little more agreeable toward each other. The constant rubbing noses over the stinking grub, and the continued driving, with no rest in the afternoons, made life anything but pleasant while we lingered in the tropics. But the blood spilled by the mate, as I have said, clarified our atmosphere forward. Talk of the days to come again waxed plenty, and plans were gone over and over in the night watches. In calm, we fretted and fumed, watching and whistling for a breeze as though our very lives depended upon the blowing of a gale. Hitchen, one calm Sunday afternoon, cut a cross in the mainmast in order to bring on a wind; as this piece of vandalism was done in the second mate's watch, and in a place where it could not be seen without a search, no evil consequences ensued. As on Sunday we got our watch below in the afternoon, word was passed to us of the port watch, about the cross on the main mast, and in the first dog watch I went aft and inspected it, pretending to hitch up a coil of rope that hung inside of the fife rail. We lay with our head yards sharp up to starboard, and the after yards back against the starboard rigging, on the other tack, the courses were guyed out by slap lines, and as the ship yielded to the gentle roll of the swell, the reef points would ripple against the canvas in a way that sounds different from anything else in the world.