ago went on; "an' de black woman dat brings it smiles wiz big
white teeth."

He paused, seeing it all the tropic languor and sweetness of the life
he had conjured up, so remote, so utterly different from the
rough-hewn realities that surrounded him.

"Shove that beef-kid down this way, will yer?" called Bill.

"You wait," answered Dan. He jogged the Dago with his elbow. "Now,
lad," he said, "that's talk enough. Get yer grub."

The Dago, recalled from his visions, smiled and sighed and leaned
forward to take his food. From his seat by the ladder, Bill the
Cockney watched with mean, angry eyes to measure the size of his
helping.

It was at Sourabaya, in Java, that he had been shipped to fill, as
far as he could, the place of a man lost overboard. The port had been
bare of seamen; the choice was between the Dago and nobody; and so
one evening he had come alongside in a sampan and joined the crew of
the Anna Maria. He brought with him as his kit a bundle of broken
clothes and a flat paper parcel containing a single suit of clean
white duck, which he cherished under the straw mattress of his bunk
and never wore. He made no pretence of being a seaman. He could
neither steer nor go aloft, and there fell to him, naturally, all the
work of the ship that was ignominious or unpleasant or merely menial.
It was the Dago, with his shrug and his feeble, complaisant smile,
who scraped the boards of the pigsty and hoisted coal for the cook,
and swept out the fo'c'sle while the other men lay and smoked.

"What made ye ship, anyway?" men would ask him angrily, when some
instance of his incompetence had added to the work of the others. To
this, if they would hear him, he had always an answer. He was a
Portuguese, it seemed, of some little town on the coast of East
Africa, where a land-locked bay drowsed below the windows of the
houses under the day-long sun. When he spoke of it, if no one cut him
short, his voice would sink to a hushed tone and he would seem to be
describing a scene he saw. His jerking, graphic hands would fall
still as he talked of the little streets where no one made a noise,
and the sailors stared curiously at his face with the glamour of
dreams on it.

From a life tuned to that murmur of basking waters a mishap had
dragged him forth. It took the shape of a cruise in a fishing boat,
in which he and three companions "t'ree senhores, t'ree gentilmen"
had run into weather and been blown out to sea, there to be res