"Laugh as much as you like, Bolton, but that won't change my opinion. Every day, when I pass his cabin, I take a look through the key-hole, and you see if I don't come and tell you some day what he looks like, and how he's made."
"Plague take him," said Pen; "I suppose his timbers are no different from other people; and if he's going to try and force us where we don't want to go, he'll soon show us what stuff he is made of."
"That's pretty good," said Bolton. "Here's Pen, who doesn't even know the man, wanting to pick a quarrel with him directly."
"Doesn't know him?" returned Clifton; "that remains to be proved."
"What do you mean?" asked Gripper.
"I know what I'm saying."
"But we don't," was the common exclamation.
"Why, hasn't Pen quarreled with him already?"
"With the captain?"
"Yes, with the dog-captain, for it comes to the same thing."
The sailors gazed dubiously at each other, hardly knowing what to say or think.
At last Pen muttered between his teeth, "Man or dog, as sure as I'm alive, I'll settle accounts with him one of these days."
"Clifton," asked Bolton, seriously, "do you actually profess to believe that the dog is the real captain? Johnson was only fooling you."
"I firmly believe it," said Clifton, with an air of perfect conviction, "and if you were to watch him as I have done, you would have seen his strange behavior for yourself."
"What strange behavior? Tell us about him."
"Haven't you seen the way he marches up and down the deck, and looks at the sails, as if he were on watch?"
"Yes, that's quite true; and one evening I positively caught him, with his fore-paws up, leaning against the wheel."
"Impossible!" said Bolton.
"And doesn't he leave the ship now every night, and go walking about among the ice, without caring either for the bears or the cold?"
