You would
have expected some of the men to find it hard to give old Davie Paine quite
all the respect to which his new berth entitled him, and for my own part I
liked Kipping less even than I had liked Mr. Falk. But although my own
prejudice should have enabled me to understand any minor lapses from the
strict discipline of life aboard ship, much occurred in the next
twenty-four hours that puzzled me.
For one thing, those men whom I had thought most likely to accord Kipping
and Mr. Falk due respect were most careless in their work and in the small
formalities observed between officers and crew. The carpenter and the
steward, for example, spent a long time in the galley at an hour when they
should have been busy with their own duties. I was near when they came out,
and heard the cook's parting words: "Yass, sah, yass, sah, it ain't
neveh no discombobilation to help out gen'lems, sah. Yass, sah, no, sah."
And when, a little later, I myself knocked at the door, I got a reception
that surprised me beyond measure.
"Who dah," the cook cried in his usual brusque voice. "Who dah knockin' at
mah door?"
Coming out, he brushed past me, and stood staring fiercely from side to
side. I knew, of course, his curiously indirect methods, and I expected him
by some quick motion or muttered command to summon me, as always before,
into his hot little cubby-hole.
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