men and women. A clean, stiff collar was to Billy as a red

rag to a bull. Cleanliness, success, opulence, decency, spelled

but one thing to Billy--physical weakness; and he hated

physical weakness. His idea of indicating strength and manliness

lay in displaying as much of brutality and uncouthness

as possible. To assist a woman over a mud hole would have

seemed to Billy an acknowledgement of pusillanimity--to

stick out his foot and trip her so that she sprawled full

length in it, the hall mark of bluff manliness. And so he

hated, with all the strength of a strong nature, the immaculate,

courteous, well-bred man who paced the deck each day smoking

a fragrant cigar after his meals.

Inwardly he wondered what the dude was doing on board

such a vessel as the Halfmoon, and marveled that so weak

a thing dared venture among real men. Billy's contempt

caused him to notice the passenger more than he would have

been ready to admit. He saw that the man's face was handsome,

but there was an unpleasant shiftiness to his brown

eyes; and then, entirely outside of his former reasons for

hating him, Billy came to loathe him intuitively, as one who

was not to be trusted. Finally his dislike for the man became

an obsession. He haunted, when discipline permitted,

that part of the vessel where he would be most likely to

encounter the object of his wrath, hoping, always hoping, that

the "dude" would give him some slight pretext for "pushing

in his mush," as Billy would so picturesquely have worded it.

He was loitering about the deck for this purpose one

evening when he overheard part of a low-voiced conversation

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