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Billy hated everything that was respectable. He had hated the smug, self-satisfied

merchants of Grand Avenue. He had writhed in torture at the sight of every shiny,

purring automobile that had ever passed him with its load of well-groomed 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 between the object of his wrath and Skipper

Simms--just enough to set him to wondering what was doing, and to show him

that whatever it might be it was crooked and that the immaculate passenger and

Skipper Simms were both "in on it."

He questioned "Bony" Sawyer and "Red" Sanders, but neither had nearly as much

information as Billy himself, and so the Halfmoon came to Honolulu and lay at

anchor some hundred yards from a stanch, trim, white yacht, and none knew,

other than the Halfmoon's officers and her single passenger, the real mission of

the harmless-looking little brigantine.

The Mucker