le of guessing Ah Moy's reason for bunking always on the
opposite side from Kwaque.

"I changee," the little old cook explained, with anxious eyes to please
and placate, in response to Daughtry's direct question. "All the time
like that, changee, plentee changee. You savvee?"

Daughtry did not savvee, and shook his head, while Ah Moy's slant eyes
betrayed none of the anxiety and fear with which he privily gazed on
Kwaque's two permanently bent fingers of the left hand and on Kwaque's
forehead, between the eyes, where the skin appeared a shade darker, a
trifle thicker, and was marked by the first beginning of three short
vertical lines or creases that were already giving him the lion-like
appearance, the leonine face so named by the experts and technicians of
the fell disease.

As the days passed, the steward took facetious occasions, when he had
drunk five quarts of his daily allowance, to shift his and Kwaque's bunks
about. And invariably Ah Moy shifted, though Daughtry failed to notice
that he never shifted into a bunk which Kwaque had occupied. Nor did he
notice that it was when the time came that Kwaque had variously occupied
all the six bunks that Ah Moy made himself a canvas hammock, suspended it
from the deck beams above and thereafter swung clear in space and
unmolested.

Daughtry dismissed the matter from his thoughts as no more than a thing
in keeping with the general inscrutability of the Chinese mind. He did
notice, however, that Kwaque was never permitted to enter the galley.
Another thing he noticed, which, expressed in his own words, was: "That's
the all-dangdest cleanest Chink I've ever clapped my lamps on. Clean in
galley, clean in steerage, clean in everything. He's always washing the
dishes in boiling water, when he isn't washing himself or his clothes or
bedding. My word, he actually boils his blankets once a week!"

For there were other things to occupy the steward's mind. Getting
acquainted with the five men aft in the cabin, and lining up the whole
situation and the relations of each of the five to that situation and to
one another, consumed much time. Then there was the path of the _Mary
Turner_ across the sea. No old sailor breathes who does not desire to
know the casual course of his ship and the next port-of-call.

"We ought to be moving along a line that'll cross somewhere northard of
New Zealand," Daughtry guessed to himself, after a hundred stolen glances
into the binnacle.