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said Tiny, walking off sore.
    A moon had come up red from behind the fringed hills. The bananabunches the women were carrying up the gangplank made a twisting green snake under the glare of the working lights. Joe suddenly got to feeling disgusted and sleepy. He went down and washed himself carefully with soap and water before crawling into his bunk. He went to sleep listening to the Scotch and British voices of his shipmates, talking about the tarts out back of the wharfhouse, ’ow many they’d ’ad, ’ow many times, ’ow it stacked up with the Argentyne or Durban or Singapore. The loading kept up all night.
    By noon they’d cleared for Liverpool with the Chief stoking her up to make a fast passage and all hands talking about the blighty. They had bananas as much as they could eat that trip; every day the supercargo was bringing up overripe bunches and hanging them in the galley. Everybody was grousing about the ship not being armed, but the Old Man and Mr. McGregor seemed to take on more about the bananas than about the raiders. They were always peeping down under the canvas cover over the hatch that had been rigged with a ventilator on the peak of it, to see if they were ripening too soon. There was a lot of guying about the blahsted banahnas down in the focastle.
    After crossing the tropic they ran into a nasty norther that blew four days, after that the weather was dirty right along. Joe didn’t have much to do after his four hours at the wheel; in the focastle they were all grousing about the ship not being fumigated to kill the bugs and the cockroaches and not being armed and not picking up a convoy. Then word got around that there were German submarines cruising off the Lizard and everybody from the Old Man down got short tempered as hell. They all began picking on Joe on account of America’s not being in the war and he used to have long arguments with Tiny and an old fellow from Glasgow they called Haig. Joe said he didn’t
see what the hell business the States had in the war and that almost started a fight.
    After they picked up the Scilly Island lights, Sparks said they were in touch with a convoy and would have a destroyer all to themselves up through the Irish Sea that wouldn’t leave them until they were safe in the Mersey. The British had won a big battle at Mons. The Old Man served out a tot of rum all round and everybody was in fine shape except Joe who was worried about what’d happen to him getting into England without a passport. He was chilly all the time on account of not having any warm clothes.
    That evening a destroyer loomed suddenly out of the foggy twilight, looking tall as a church above the great wave of white water curling from her bows. It gave them a great scare on the bridge because they thought at first it was a Hun. The destroyer broke out the Union Jack and slowed down to the
Argyle’s
speed, keeping close and abreast of her. The crew piled out on deck and gave the destroyer three cheers. Some of them wanted to sing
God Save the King
but the officer on the bridge of the destroyer began bawling out the Old Man through a megaphone asking him why in bloody f—g hell he wasn’t steering a zigzag course and if he didn’t jolly well know that it was prohibited making any kind of bloody f—g noise on a merchantship in wartime.
    It was eight bells and the watches were changing and Joe and Tiny began to laugh coming along the deck just at the moment when they met Mr. McGregor stalking by purple in the face. He stopped square in front of Joe and asked him what he found so funny? Joe didn’t answer. Mr. McGregor stared at him hard and began saying in his slow mean voice that he was probably not an American at all but a dirty ’un spy, and told him to report on the next shift in the stokehole. Joe said he’d signed on as an A.B. and they didn’t have any right to work him as a stoker. Mr. McGregor said he’d never