* * * * *

All the time I was keeping a diary of my adventures ... in a large, brown copybook, with flexible covers.  I carried it, tightened away, usually, in the lining of my coat, but occasionally I left it under the mattress of my bunk.

Nippers observed me writing in it one day.

That night it was gone.  I surmised who had taken it.

Seeking Nippers, I came upon him haltingly reading my diary aloud to an amused circle of cattlemen, in his quarters aft.

“Give me that book back!” I demanded.

He ignored me.

“Give him a rap in the kisser, Skinny!”

I drew back, aiming a blow at Nippers.  He flung the book down and was on me like the tornado we had just run through ... he was a natural-born fighter ... in a twinkling I was on the floor, with a black eye, a bleeding mouth.

I flung myself to my feet, full of fury ... then something went in my brain like the click of a camera-shutter ...  I had an hallucination of Uncle Landon, coming at me with a club....

I plumped into a corner, crouching.  “Don’t hit me any more ... please don’t, Uncle Lan!”

“He’s gone crazy!”

“Naw, he’s only a bloody, bleedin’ coward,” returned another voice, in surprise and disgust.

Someone spat on me.  I was let up at last....  I staggered forward to my bunk.  My book had been handed back to me.  It’s a wonder I didn’t throw myself into the sea, in disgust over the queer fit that had come over me.  I lay half the night, puzzling ... was I a coward?

Not unless an unparalleled change had occurred in me.  I had fought with other children, when a boy ... had whipped two lads at once, when working in the Composite factory, that time they spit into my book.

* * * * *

One day a fishing-junk hove into sight, just as if it had sailed out of a Maxfield Parrish illustration,—­swinging there in the mouth of a blood-red sunset ... then, like magic, appeared another and another and another....

“Fishing-junks,” ejaculated the mate, “—­pretty far out, too, but a Chink’ll risk his life for a few bleedin’ cash ... and yet he won’t fight at all ... an’ if you do him an injury he’s like as not likely to up an’ commit suicide at your door, to get even!”

“That’s a bally orful way to get even with a henemy!” exclaimed a stoker, who sat on the edge of the forward hatch.

“I should say so, too!”

Then, far and faint, were heard a crew of Chinese sailors, on the nearest junk, singing a curious, falsetto chantey as they hauled on a bamboo-braced sail....

“A feller wot never travelled wouldn’t bloody well believe they was such queer people in the world,” further observed the philosophic coal-heaver.

* * * * *

Next morning the coast of China lay right against us, on the starboard side ... we ran into the thick of a fleet of sampans, boats fashioned flat like overgrown rowboats, propelled each by a huge sculling oar, from the stern ... they were fishers who manned them ... two or three to a boat ... huge, bronze-bodied, fine-muscled, breech-clouted men ... as they sculled swiftly to give us sea-room each one looked fit to be a sculptor’s model.