, leaving a
long pale scar like a streak of dawn's light falling athwart the dark visage. It
was on account of that scar and the affair in which it was known that he had
received it, as well as from his blue-peppered complexion, that the Dansker went
among the Indomitable's crew by the name of Board-her-in-the-smoke.
    Now the first time that his small weasel eyes happened to light on Billy
Budd, a certain grim internal merriment set all his ancient wrinkles into antic
play. Was it that his eccentric unsentimental old sapience, primitive in its
kind, saw, or thought it saw, something which in contrast with the warship's
environment looked oddly incongruous in the Handsome Sailor? But after slyly
studying him at intervals, the old Merlin's equivocal merriment was modified by
now. For now when the twain would meet, it would start in his face a quizzing
sort of look, but it would be but momentary and sometimes replaced by an
expression of speculative query as to what might eventually befall a nature like
that, dropped into a world not without some man-traps and against whose
subtleties simple courage lacking experience and address and without any touch
of defensive ugliness, is of little avail; and where such innocence as man is
capable of does yet in a moral emergency not always sharpen the faculties or
enlighten the will.
    However it was, the Dansker in his ascetic way rather took to Billy. Nor was
this only because of a certain philosophic interest in such a character. There
was another cause. While the old man's eccentricities, sometimes bordering on
the ursine, repelled the juniors, Billy, undeterred thereby, would make
advances, never passing the old Agamemnon man without a salutation marked by
that respect which is seldom lost on the aged, however crabbed at times, or
whatever their station in life. There was a vein of dry humour, or what not, in
the mastman; and whether in freak of patriarchal irony touching Billy's youth
and athletic frame, or for some other and more recondite reason, from the first
in addressing him he always substituted Baby for Billy. The Dansker, in fact,
being the originator of the name by which the foretopman eventually became known
aboard ship.
    Well then, in his mysterious little difficulty going in quest of the
wrinkled one, Billy found him off duty in a dog-watch ruminating by himself,
seated on a shot-box of the upper gun-deck, now and then surveying with a
somewhat cynical regard certain of the more swaggering promenaders there. Billy