Page:The Cannery Boat.pdf/34

24 although it was only three o’clock. With their numbed hands tucked in under their coats and their backs arched they got up. The boss began hunting through the workers’ cabins, the fishermen’s, the sailors’, even the firemen’s. He dragged everyone out regardless of whether they had colds or were ill. There was no wind, but as they worked on the deck their fingers and toes lost all power of feeling. The foreman, cursing in a loud voice, drove fourteen or fifteen of them into the factory. There was a leather thong on the end of his bamboo whip.

“Just now he was kicking that Miyaguchi fellow he dragged out last night, and telling him he’s got to start work again from this morning, even though he can’t speak,” said one weak-looking fisherman who had become friendly with the students, eyeing the foreman as he spoke. “But he seems to have given him up at last because he couldn’t get a move out of him.”

The boss appeared pushing along with vigorous prods from behind another worker, whose body was trembling all over. Through being made to work in the cold rain he had caught a cold, which turned to pleurisy. Even when it was not cold he shivered all the time. With his thin, bloodless lips strangely contorted, his eyes had an expression of intense timidity in spite of the furrows between the brows. He had been discovered wandering about in the boiler-room, tired of enduring the cold.

The fishermen at the winches, lowering the boats to put out fishing, followed with their eyes the two