Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/354

540 "I thought Mr. Pratt had killed the man, which he didn't."

"Will you promise to turn to and do your work, and obey orders civilly, if I let you out?"

"Yes, sir."

"Unlock him, Mr. Pratt."

Tom was released. Rising to his feet, he said, respectfully: "Will I go on deck, sir?"

"Go on," answered the captain.

But Tom was not to escape so easily. As he passed them, Captain Millen's sledge-like fist shot out, and he fell in a heap.

"On deck with you," thundered the captain, whose eyes had not ceased to twinkle during the performance. Tom rose again, sneaked up the ladder and passed forward, where he showed his shipmates an eye that in ten minutes was blacker than the captain's.

Captain Millen and Mr. Pratt stooped over and examined the remaining prisoner, now unconscious and breathing heavily, and the mate asked, uneasily:

"Think I've done for him, sir?"

"Can't tell; he's all blood and the cut's hidden, and I wouldn't touch him with a fish-pole. I never shipped this hoodlum; the runners kept back a man and sent him."

"The Englishman says he's crazy—the men forrard, too; might be, or his yarn about owning the ship's just the bluff of a tramp."

"Possibly he's daft; but he didn't know the ship's name or the owner's name till the men told him, so Mr. Barker says; and when I told him in the cabin that the owner was a gray-headed man, it threw him out. Guess it's only a bluff. Have you logged him?"

"Yes, sir. Wrote him down just after I ironed him."

"I'll put him in the official log as a maniac; evidence enough even without the men's testimony—forces himself into my cabin and claims to own the ship, and orders me to run back to New York and land him; unprovoked assault on an officer, and display of maniacal strength. You see, Mr. Pratt, if he dies it'll look better for us, and particularly you, to have him crazy; extra severity is necessary and excusable in dealing with dangerous lunatics. But we don't want him to die—we're too short-handed."

"Shall I have the steward down to fix him up, sir?"

"Yes, and tell him to get what he wants from the medicine-chest; and better be more careful, Mr. Pratt; it don't pay to get the law after you. I know it was