y as other types of unemployed and
hopeless men fall back on vagrancy and crime. Her crew was picked from
the dregs of scattered ports. They were Lascars, Kanakas, Chinese and
non-descripts from here and there; haled forth and signed from dives
where human garbage trickles down to the sea. At first they interested
me as new and roughened types of men, yet as I say, I was more than
grateful for the shoulder touch of at least one being of my own sort.
From our arrival, none of them except the captain and officers took the
slightest pains to conceal that they regarded us as unwelcome
interlopers and even the courtesy of the after-guard was short-lived
enough. In that desert of taciturnity Mansfield babbled like a brook and
overflowed with young sentimentality.

The first leg of our journey ended at Borneo, leaving us as unacquainted
with officers and seamen, save in the surface details of personal
appearance, as we had been at Port Said. Now we were dropping Sandakan
harbor over the stern. Already the sprawling, hillside town, framed in
its mangrove swamps, was lost around the buttress of the harbor's
sentinel rock. Ramparts of sandstone were burning with a ruddy glow in
the sunset.

A sense of isolation settled on us. As we had nosed our way outward
Mansfield had been leaning silently on the after rail. His eyes had
dwelt lingeringly on the green gardens and white walks of the British
Consulate which sits upon its hill. Now we had seen the last of that and
of the bay's flotilla of matting-sailed junks. Off the port bow were
only beetling sandstone and the countless gulls, flashing white as they
tilted the snowy linings of their wings into the sun. He talked for a
time, in low tones of the girl in Sussex as men will talk when they are
homesick, and then he rather shamefacedly produced from somewhere and
opened at random a much battered blank-book, written in a woman's hand.

"I dare say," he hesitantly told me, "I have no moral right to read
this. It's quite personal, yet it's unsigned. Invasion of privacy can't
apply to anonymous persons, you know." He paused for a minute and
indolently watched the screaming hordes of Sandakan birds as if awaiting
my agreement, but I said nothing.

"You see," he continued, "I've been living lately in a cheap _pension_
at Cairo and, before that, in beastly Soudan inns, so when I drew a bit
in advance I resolved to treat myself to a day or two at Shepheards. You
remember how full the ho