No one reached quickly enough.  The Union Jack went off with the body, like a floral decoration flung after....

* * * * *

We drank the coffee brought to us before dawn, in grouchy, sleepy, monosyllabic silence.  Immediately after, the cattle were to water and feed ... and a hungry lot they were ... but despite their appetites, with each day, because of the excessive heat of the tropics, and the confined existence that was theirs—­such an abrupt transition from the open range—­they waxed thinner and thinner, acquired more of large-eyed mournfulness and an aspect of almost human suffering in their piteous, pleading faces....

* * * * *

If the big chap who succumbed to heart failure that night had lived a few days longer, he would have wondered still more at me or anyone else surviving a day’s work in the hold.

For the thermometer ran up incredibly ... hotter and hotter it grew ... and down there in the hold we had to shovel out the excrement every morning after breakfast.  It was too infernal for even the prudish Anglo-Saxon souls of us to wear clothes beyond a breechclout, and shoes, to protect our feet from the harder hoof.

Our eyes stung and watered from the reek of the ammonia in the cattle-urine.  What with the crowding, the bad air (despite the canvas ventilators let down) and the sudden change from green pasturage to dry, baled food, most of the beasts contracted “the skitters.”  This mess was what we had to shovel out through the portholes ... an offensive-smelling, greenish, fluidic material, that spilled, the half of it, always, from the carefully-held scoop of the shovel.

Cursing, with the bitter sweat streaming off our bodies and into our eyes, and with an oblique eye to guard from heat-maddened, frantic steer-kicks,—­each day, for several hours, we suffered through this hell ... to emerge panting, like runners after a long race; befouled ... to throw ourselves down on the upper deck, under the blue, wind-free sky and feel as if we had come into paradise....

* * * * *

“I wish I had never come back to this hell-ship, at Brisbane!”

“I wish I had never come aboard at all at Sydney!”

* * * * *

At such times, and at other odd ends of leisure, I brought my Westcott and Hort’s Greek New Testament from my bunk, and with the nasty smell of sheep close-by, but unheeded through custom—­I studied with greater pleasure than I ever did before or since.

* * * * *

As I said before, it was not long before these poor steers were broken-spirited things.

But there was one among them whose spirit kept its flag in the air, “The Black Devil,” as the cook had named him fondly ... a steer, all glossy-black, excepting for a white spot in the center of his forehead.  He behaved, from the first, more like a turbulent little bull than a gelding.  The cook fed him with tid-bits from the galley.