had too much influence in the employ. All the same, they had to
give him a good character. He made bold to say there was nothing in the
world against him, and, as he had happened to hear that the mate of the
Sofala had been taken to the hospital that morning with a sunstroke, he
thought there would be no harm in seeing whether he would not do. . . .

He had come to Captain Whalley freshly shaved, red-faced, thin-flanked,
throwing out his lean chest; and had recited his little tale with an
open and manly assurance. Now and then his eyelids quivered slightly,
his hand would steal up to the end of the flaming mustache; his eyebrows
were straight, furry, of a chestnut color, and the directness of his
frank gaze seemed to tremble on the verge of impudence. Captain Whalley
had engaged him temporarily; then, the other man having been ordered
home by the doctors, he had remained for the next trip, and then the
next. He had now attained permanency, and the performance of his duties
was marked by an air of serious, single-minded application. Directly
he was spoken to, he began to smile attentively, with a great deference
expressed in his whole attitude; but there was in the rapid winking
which went on all the time something quizzical, as though he had
possessed the secret of some universal joke cheating all creation and
impenetrable to other mortals.

Grave and smiling he watched Massy come down step by step; when the
chief engineer had reached the deck he swung about, and they found
themselves face to face. Matched as to height and utterly dissimilar,
they confronted each other as if there had been something between
them--something else than the bright strip of sunlight that, falling
through the wide lacing of two awnings, cut crosswise the narrow
planking of the deck and separated their feet as it were a stream;
something profound and subtle and incalculable, like an unexpressed
understanding, a secret mistrust, or some sort of fear.

At last Sterne, blinking his deep-set eyes and sticking forward his
scraped, clean-cut chin, as crimson as the rest of his face, murmured--

"You've seen? He grazed! You've seen?"

Massy, contemptuous, and without raising his yellow, fleshy countenance,
replied in the same pitch--

"Maybe. But if it had been you we would have been stuck fast in the
mud."

"Pardon me, Mr. Massy. I beg to deny it. Of course a shipowner may say
what he jolly well pleases on his own deck. That's all right; but