make me out to be. You have been careless of late--leaving everything
to that Serang. Why! I've seen you letting that old fool of a Malay
take bearings for you, as if you were too big to attend to your work
yourself. And what do you call that silly touch-and-go manner in which
you took the ship over the bar just now? You expect me to put up with
that?"

Leaning on his elbow against the ladder abaft the bridge, Sterne, the
mate, tried to hear, blinking the while from the distance at the second
engineer, who had come up for a moment, and stood in the engine-room
companion. Wiping his hands on a bunch of cotton waste, he looked about
with indifference to the right and left at the river banks slipping
astern of the Sofala steadily.

Massy turned full at the chair. The character of his whine became again
threatening.

"Take care. I may yet dismiss you and freeze to your money for a year. I
may . . ."

But before the silent, rigid immobility of the man whose money had come
in the nick of time to save him from utter ruin, his voice died out in
his throat.

"Not that I want you to go," he resumed after a silence, and in an
absurdly insinuating tone. "I want nothing better than to be friends
and renew the agreement, if you will consent to find another couple of
hundred to help with the new boilers, Captain Whalley. I've told you
before. She must have new boilers; you know it as well as I do. Have you
thought this over?"

He waited. The slender stem of the pipe with its bulky lump of a bowl at
the end hung down from his thick lips. It had gone out. Suddenly he took
it from between his teeth and wrung his hands slightly.

"Don't you believe me?" He thrust the pipe bowl into the pocket of his
shiny black jacket.

"It's like dealing with the devil," he said. "Why don't you speak? At
first you were so high and mighty with me I hardly dared to creep about
my own deck. Now I can't get a word from you. You don't seem to see me
at all. What does it mean? Upon my soul, you terrify me with this deaf
and dumb trick. What's going on in that head of yours? What are you
plotting against me there so hard that you can't say a word? You will
never make me believe that you--you--don't know where to lay your hands
on a couple of hundred. You have made me curse the day I was born. . . ."

"Mr. Massy," said Captain Whalley suddenly, without stirring.

The engineer started violently.

"If that is so I can only beg you to forgive me."