I fix 'em, they make fool
with me."
And yet there is not the slightest evidence of foul play. Nobody
knows what happened to the carpenter. There are no clues, no traces.
The night was calm and snowy. No seas broke on board. Without doubt
the clumsy, big-footed, over-grown giant of a boy is overside and
dead. The question is: did he go over of his own accord, or was he
put over?
At eight o'clock Mr. Pike proceeded to interrogate the watches. He
stood at the break of the poop, in the high place, leaning on the
rail and gazing down at the crew assembled on the main deck beneath
him.
Man after man he questioned, and from each man came the one story.
They knew no more about it than did we--or so they averred.
"I suppose you'll be chargin' next that I hove that big lummux
overboard with me own hands," Mulligan Jacobs snarled, when he was
questioned. "An' mebbe I did, bein' that husky an' rampagin' bull-
like."
The mate's face grew more forbidding and sour, but without comment he
passed on to John Hackey, the San Francisco hoodlum.
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