“Eh, mon,” he said, and smiled, “I’m aye a bit severe.  Don’t ask me to punish the bairns.”

The Captain sniffed.

“Severe!” he observed.  “You Scots are hard in the head, but soft in the disposition.  Come, Chief—­shall they walk the plank?”

“Good deescipline,” assented the Chief, “but it would leave us a bit shorthanded.”

“True,” said the Captain gloomily.

“I was thinkin’,” remarked the Chief diffidently—­one hates to think before the Captain; that’s always supposed to be his job.

“Yes?”

“That we could make a verra fine example of them and still retain their services.  Ha’ ye, by chance, seen a crow hangin’ head down in the field, a warnin’ to other mischief-makers?”

“Ou-ay!” said the Captain, who had a Scotch mother.  The line wavered again; the Captain’s boy, who pulled his fingers when he was excited, cracked three knuckles.

“It would be good deescipline,” continued the Chief, “to stand the four o’ them in ship’s belt at the gangway, say for an hour, morning and evening—­clad, ye ken, as they were during the said infreengements.”

“You’re a great man, Chief!” said the Captain.  “You hear that, lads’?”

“With—­with no trousers’?” gasped the Doctor’s boy.

“If you wore trousers last night.  If not——­”

* * * * *

The thing was done that morning.  Four small boys, clad only in ship’s belts, above which rose four sheepish heads and freckled faces, below which shifted and wriggled eight bare legs, stood in line at the gangway and suffered agonies of humiliation at the hands of crew and dockmen, grinning customs inspectors, coalpassers, and a newspaper photographer hunting a human-interest bit for a Sunday paper.  The cooks came up from below and peeped out at them; the ship’s cat took up a position in line and came out in the Sunday edition as “a fellow conspirator.”

The Red Un, owing to an early training that had considered clothing desirable rather than essential, was not vitally concerned.  The Quartermaster had charge of the line; he had drawn a mark with chalk along the deck, and he kept their toes to it by marching up and down in front of them with a broomhandle over his shoulder.

“Toe up, you little varmints!” he would snap.  “God knows I’d be glad to get a rap at you—­keeping an old man down in the water half the night!  Toe up!”

Whereupon, aiming an unlucky blow at the Purser’s boy, he hit the Captain’s cat.  The line snickered.

It was just after that the Red Un, surmising a snap by the photographer on the dock and thwarting it by putting his thumb to his nose, received the shock of his small life.  The little girl from Coney Island, followed by her mother, was on the pier—­was showing every evidence of coming up the gangway to where he stood.  Was coming!  Panic seized the Red Un—­panic winged with flight.  He turned—­to face the Chief.  Appeal sprang to the Red Un’s lips.