“Right you are, my lad ... we are that!”

The men went on with their arguing.  They were fighting the Boer War all over again with their mouths.  Some of them had been in it.  Many of them had tramped in South Africa.  They shouted violently, profanely, at each other at the tops of their voices, contending with loud assertions and counter-assertions, as if about to engage in an all-round fight.

Several personal altercations sprang up, the points of the debate forgotten ...  I couldn’t discover what it was about, myself ... only that one man was a fool ... another, a silly ass ... another, a bloody liar!

* * * * *

The launch which was to carry them to the South Sea King at this moment started nosing into the dock, on a turbulent zig-zag across the harbour; and the men forgot their quarrelling.  It brought up at the foot of a pile and made fast.

“Come on, Skinny,” Nippers urged me aggressively, “it’s front seats or nothing.  Act as if you owned the boat.”  We thrust ahead of the others and swarmed down the ladder ... heaping, swearing, horse-playing, the cattlemen filled the launch from stern to bow.

Nippers had been a professional stowaway since his tenth year.  He had gone all over the world in that fashion, he had informed me.  He was now sixteen.  I was almost eighteen.

His six years of rough life with rough men had brought him to premature manhood, taught him to exhibit a saucy aplomb to everybody, to have at his finger-ends all the knockabout resourcefulness and impudence that the successful vagrant must acquire in order to live at all as an individual....

* * * * *

We were the first on deck.

“Where are the cattlemen’s bunks?” Nippers asked of an oiler who stood, nonchalant, somewhat contemptuous, looking over the side at the seething, vociferous cattlemen.

Not wasting a word on us, the oiler pointed aft over his shoulder, with a grimy thumb.

We found a dark entrance like the mouth to a cave, that led down below.  In our hurry we lost our footing on the greasy ladder and tumbled all the way to the bottom.

We had not time to rub our bruises.  We plumped down and under the lower tier of bunks ... just in time ... the men came pouring down helter-skelter ... the talking, arguing, voluble swearing, and obscenity was renewed ... all we could see, from where we lay, was a confusion of legs to the knee, moving about....

They settled down on the benches about the table.  They slackened their talk and began smacking their lips over ship-biscuit, marmalade, and tea.

* * * * *

Still we lay in silence.  The screw of the propeller had not started yet.  We dared not come out or we would be put ashore.

* * * * *

We were hungry.  We could hear their tin plates clattering and clinking as the cattlemen ate supper, and smell the smell of cornbeef and boiled potatoes.  Our mouths ran from hunger.