looked around the deck. In a bucket of water by the rail the bosun was
bathing his battered features. "The bosun reminds me. To-day I promised
him I'd finish my Flying Walrus song."

"Go ahead and finish it--that first verse was pretty good."

"The second's better--or I think so. And"--he grinned at the
passenger--"I composed it myself, too, to an air running in my head. And
I suppose I ought to finish it. And yet"--the bosun was pouring, very
quietly, his bucket of wash water into the scuppers--"that would be
sort of rubbing it in, wouldn't it?"

"What of it? It will do them all good."

"I don't know about that. If it"--and just then three bells struck, and
three bells on the _Rapidan_ meant supper for the watch below.

Kieran left to go to supper, and the passenger noted the deference of
the crew toward him. Not one who found himself in his way but hopped
swiftly aside to give him gangway.

"How conducive to high judgment, how accelerating to respect is
success," mused the passenger. "Two hours ago hardly one of them who did
not set him down for a half-crazy, or, at least, an over-sanguine
visionary--but now--they bound like stags before him, and none more
propitiatingly agile than the former satellites of our deposed bosun. A
Don Quixote"--murmured the passenger--"maybe, but a 20th century Don
Quixote--with a wallop in each hand. If the Don Quixotes generally had
his equipment, it would not be windmills alone which would suffer, and
some joy then for honest men to watch the tilting."