istantly.

"Der Kerl!" he cried. He was sorry he had not refused. He was indeed.
The damage! The damage! What for all that damage! There was no occasion
for damage. Did I know how much damage he had done? It gave me a certain
satisfaction to tell him that I had heard his old waggon of a ship crack
fore and aft as she went by. "You passed close enough to me," I added
significantly.

He threw both his hands up to heaven at the recollection. One of them
grasped by the middle the white parasol, and he resembled curiously
a caricature of a shop-keeping citizen in one of his own German comic
papers. "Ach! That was dangerous," he cried. I was amused. But directly
he added with an appearance of simplicity, "The side of your iron ship
would have been crushed in like--like this matchbox."

"Would it?" I growled, much less amused now; but by the time I had
decided that this remark was not meant for a dig at me he had
worked himself into a high state of resentfulness against Falk. The
inconvenience, the damage, the expense! Gottferdam! Devil take the
fellow. Behind the bar Schomberg with a cigar in his teeth, pretended
to be writing with a pencil on a large sheet of paper; and as Hermann's
excitement increased it made me comfortingly aware of my own calmness
and superiority. But it occurred to me while I listened to his
revilings, that after all the good man had come up in the tug. There
perhaps--since he must come to town--he had no option. But evidently he
had had a drink with Falk, either accepted or offered. How was that? So
I checked him by saying loftily that I hoped he would make Falk pay for
every penny of the damage.

"That's it! That's it! Go for him," called out Schomberg from the bar,
flinging his pencil down and rubbing his hands.

We ignored his noise. But Hermann's excitement suddenly went off
the boil as when you remove a saucepan from the fire. I urged on his
consideration that he had done now with Falk and Falk's confounded tug.
He, Hermann, would not, perhaps, turn up again in this part of the world
for years to come, since he was going to sell the Diana at the end
of this very trip ("Go home passenger in a mail boat," he murmured
mechanically). He was therefore safe from Falk's malice. All he had to
do was to race off to his consignees and stop payment of the towage bill
before Falk had the time to get in and lift the money.

Nothing could have been less in the spirit of my advice than the
thoughtful way