Seven days the liner lay in New York—­seven days of early autumn heat, of blistering decks, of drunken and deserting trimmers, of creaking gear and grime of coal-dust.  The cabin which held the Red Un and the Purser’s boy was breathless.  On Sunday the four ship’s boys went to Coney Island and lay in the surf half the afternoon.  The bliss of the water on their thin young legs and scrawny bodies was Heaven.  They did not swim; they lay inert, letting the waves move them about, and out of the depths of a deep content making caustic comments about the human form as revealed by the relentless sea.

“That’s a pippin!” they would say; or, “My aunt! looks at his legs!” They voiced their opinions audibly and were ready to back them up with flight or fight.

It was there that the Red Un saw the little girl.  She had come from a machine, and her mother stood near.  She was not a Coney Islander.  She was first-cabin certainly—­silk stockings on her thin ankles, sheer white frock; no jewelry.  She took a snapshot of the four boys—­to their discomfiture—­and walked away while they were still writhing.

“That for mine!” said the Red Un in one of his rare enthusiasms.

They had supper—­a sandwich and a glass of beer; they would have preferred pop, but what deep-water man on shore drinks pop?—­and made their way back to the ship by moonlight.  The Red Un was terse in his speech on the car:  mostly he ate peanuts abstractedly.  If he evolved any clear idea out of the chaos of his mind it was to wish she had snapped him in his uniform with the brass buttons.

The heat continued; the men in the stokehole, keeping up only enough steam for the dynamos and donkey engines, took turns under the ventilators or crawled up to the boatdeck at dusk, too exhausted to dress and go ashore.  The swimmers were overboard in the cool river with the first shadows of night; the Quartermaster, so old that he dyed his hair for fear he’d be superannuated, lowered his lean body hand over hand down a rope and sat by the hour on a stringpiece of the dock, with the water laving his hairy and tattooed old breast.

The Red Un was forbidden the river.  To be honest, he was rather relieved—­not twice does a man dare the river god, having once been crowned with his slime and water-weed.  When the boy grew very hot he slipped into a second-cabin shower, and stood for luxurious minutes with streams running off his nose and the ends of his fingers and splashing about his bony ankles.

Then, one night, some of the men took as many passengers’ lifebelts and went in.  The immediate result was fun combined with safety; the secondary result was placards over the ship and the dock, forbidding the use of the ship’s lifebelts by the crew.

From that moment the Red Un was possessed for the river and a lifebelt.  So were the other three.  The signs were responsible.  Permitted, a ship’s lifebelt was a subterfuge of the cowardly, white-livered skunks who were afraid of a little water; forbidden, a ship’s lifebelt took on the qualities of enemy’s property—­to be reconnoitred, assaulted, captured and turned to personal advantage.