They resumed their pacing, Kieran with head high in the air, inhaling deep breaths of the fresh salt air.

The passenger came out of a deep meditation.  “Kieran, you can do a good work for us.  Is there any berth with this line you’d like to have?  If there is, say so.  You can have it.  You can have that head clerk’s job if you want it.  And I think that after a while I could get you mine, for I’m only there to fill a gap.”

Kieran shook his head.  “It wouldn’t do.”

“Why not?  You’re the man for the job.”

“No, I’m not the man.  You haven’t got me quite right.  I can point out errors, but I’m not the man to correct them.  I’m not a good executive.”

“You certainly were the good executive in the bosun’s case.”

“N-no, no.  You mustn’t count him.  If he was a John L. Sullivan, say, in his good days, it would prove something.  Besides, I don’t care for fighting—­for beating people up.  I do hate though to see a bully or a faker getting the best of it, and maybe having had time to knock around and study people, I can pick out a bully or a faker quicker than most people, and seeing somebody getting too much the best of it, why, sometimes I can’t help butting in.”

“And because of that faculty of seeing things, once you made up your mind to settle down to it, you’d make good on this job I’m offering you.”

“No, you’ve got me wrong again.  I’m not a reformer, and never will be, I hope.  Reformers, or most that ever I met, are only men who first tried to play politics and got licked at it.  I’m only an observer.”

“But you like a fight?”

“M-m-m-n not me.  And I never did.  Any man, of course, likes the excitement once he’s into it, but what man enjoys smashing another man in the face?  What fights I’ve been into I couldn’t side-step—­not without crawling, I mean.  No, no, I wouldn’t make good on your job.  I’d go along all right in your office back in New York for awhile,—­for a month, two months, six months,—­who knows, maybe a year, and then one day I’d look out the window, take a look down on the Battery, say at the elevated railroad or the Aquarium Building, and the Coney Island steamer dock with the barkers yelling and gesturing, and the loafers on the benches in between, and from that I’d look down the bay and see the Statue of Liberty—­some morning that would be, maybe, when the sun was lighting up New York Bay as it does some mornings, or maybe it would be on a late afternoon, with the sun setting over on the Jersey shore, the dark smoke from a hundred chimneys smooching across the pink and purple of it, and, if ’twas summer, a haze like a bridal veil over it all, and between that and the Battery the life of a hundred craft—­ferry-boats, tow-boats, lighters, windjammers, steam-yachts, ocean-liners, harbor, coastwise and foreign bound, a hundred different kinds coming and going, the Lord knows where, but to where no four walls will bound ’em for a