"--"Captain Gooding, I know you 'most too well to
want to sail under you," answered Jonathan. "I might go if I hadn't been
with you one voyage too many already."
"And then the men!" said Jonathan, "the men coming aboard drunk, and
having to be pounded sober! And the hardest of the fight falls on the
second mate! Why, there isn't an inch of me that hasn't been cut over or
smashed into a jell. I've had three ribs broken; I've got a scar from a
knife on my cheek; and I've been stabbed bad enough, half a dozen times,
to lay me up."
Here he gave a sort of desperate laugh, as if the notion of so much misery
and such various mutilation were too grotesque not to be amusing. "Well,
what can you do?" he went on. "If you don't strike, the men think you're
afraid of them; and so you have to begin hard and go on hard. I always
tell a man, 'Now, my man, I always begin with a man the way I mean to keep
on. You do your duty and you're all right. But if you don't'--Well, the
men ain't Americans any more,--Dutch, Spaniards, Chinese, Portuguee,--and
it ain't like abusing a white man.
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