Page:McClure's Magazine volume 10.djvu/356

542 as a dangerous lunatic. If you raise any row aboard my ship, you'll be shot, and your character and record will excuse it. Understand?"

"I do. I accept the warning, the name, the nationality, and the conditions—even the lunacy. Only, Captain, as I am officially insane, I cannot be punished if I kill you all three—remember that." The weary eyes were sparkling.

"Oh, that's your game, is it? Want to get out to kill somebody? Down you go in my log as threatening my life and the lives of my officers, and here you stay in double-irons on bread and water."

So he was logged again, and another pair of manacles fastened to his wrists, with a foot of chain connecting the center links to the stanchion. This gave him scope to lift from the deck to his mouth the one biscuit allowed him each day, and to drink from his tomato-can, which had been saved for him. But it was not the diet that broke him down. The water was good; and the biscuit, though not the soft, fluffy morsel eaten at tea-tables on shore, was the cleanest and sweetest food on the forecastle menu, and one a day was as much as he could masticate during his waking hours. It was the confinement and double-irons. After three weeks, pale and emaciated, he sent up another plea for liberty, in which he relinquished the privileges of the insane, and to Captain Millen, when he appeared, he promised a line of good behavior while on board which debarred him the right to return a blow. He made this promise on his honor, which he said was all they had left him. As the ship was short-handed, the captain accepted the promise and his services. Then, with his tomato-can in his hand, able-seaman Hans Johanne Von Dagerman, as we must now know him, went forward, a member of the starboard watch. At the end of the first day he had proved his incapacity and was disrated to ordinary seaman, at eleven dollars a month. This did not trouble him, until, having heard of the "slop-chest"—the store of clothing which captains lay in to sell to sailors at sea—he learned that he could not purchase until out of debt to the ship. His pay had stopped when he became a prisoner, and the time required to work off the fourteen dollars advance charged against him brought the ship, bound to Shanghai, well into the chilly weather to the south of Cape of Good Hope before he could draw from the slop-chest; and then he bought, not clothing, but salt-water soap, with which he washed his own