profit! What will pay! What
would you?"...

He had all those violent adjuncts to speech we Western Europeans have
abandoned, shruggings of the shoulders, waving of the arms, thrusting
out of the face, wonderful grimaces and twiddlings of the hands under
your nose until you wanted to hit them away. Day after day it went on,
and I had to keep any anger to myself, to reserve myself for the time
ahead when it would be necessary to see the quap was got aboard and
stowed--knee deep in this man's astonishment. I knew he would make a
thousand objections to all we had before us. He talked like a drugged
man. It ran glibly over his tongue. And all the time one could see his
seamanship fretting him, he was gnawed by responsibility, perpetually
uneasy about the ship's position, perpetually imagining dangers. If a
sea hit us exceptionally hard he'd be out of the cabin in an instant
making an outcry of inquiries, and he was pursued by a dread of the
hold, of ballast shifting, of insidious wicked leaks. As we drew near
the African coast his fear of rocks and shoals became infectious.

"I do not know dis coast," he used to say. "I cama hera because
Gordon-Nasmyth was coming too. Den he does not come!"

"Fortunes of war," I said, and tried to think in vain if any motive but
sheer haphazard could have guided Gordon-Nasmyth in the choice of these
two men. I think perhaps Gordon-Nasmyth had the artistic temperament and
wanted contrasts, and also that the captain helped him to express his
own malignant Anti-Britishism.

He was indeed an exceptionally inefficient captain. On the whole I was
glad I had come even at the eleventh hour to see to things.

(The captain, by-the-by, did at last, out of sheer nervousness, get
aground at the end of Mordet's Island, but we got off in an hour or so
with a swell and a little hard work in the boat.)

I suspected the mate of his opinion of the captain long before he
expressed it. He was, I say, a taciturn man, but one day speech broke
through him. He had been sitting at the table with his arms folded on
it, musing drearily, pipe in mouth, and the voice of the captain drifted
down from above.

The mate lifted his heavy eyes to me and regarded me for a moment.
Then he began to heave with the beginnings of speech. He disembarrassed
himself of his pipe. I cowered with expectation. Speech was coming at
last. Before he spoke he nodded reassuringly once or twice.

"E--"

He moved his head strangely an