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His cook was Chinese; his head diver a Manilaman: the delicate lemon of Macao mingled with the saddle tints of the Coromandel Coast about his decks, and for mate he found a stranded West African negro who bore, in pathetic loyalty to some ironic crimp, the name of Buttermilk. Still, such a mixture was ordinary enough at Thursday.... Ordinary too was the fact--which again nobody noticed--that they were all opium users, who do not talk, rather than drunkards, who do. This honest man had brought his honesty to the proper shop for face value. His story began with that startling gesture at the Portugee's. It continued in the epic strain of a halfpenny serial. The hero himself might have filled a whole illustration; thewed like a colossus, crop black hair in a point over the brow of a student; a smooth, long jaw always strangely pallid, and gray eyes, inscrutable and ageless. With his jungle step, with his thin ducks molded to the coiling muscles underneath by the press of the southerly buster, when he came swinging along the front the crowd parted left and right before him. Most crowds must have done so; probably many had. But at Thursday he was almost an institution.... "'Im? Cap'n of the _Fancy Free_, that flash little lugger out beyond. 'Ardest driver and str'itest Johnny in the fleet." Thus the inevitable informing larrikin, eager to cadge a drink from the tourist on shore leave. "E'd chyse you acrost the Pacific to p'y you tuppence 'e might ha' owed you--that's 'is sort. And--my word!--'e's got a jab to the boko you don't want to get p'id at no price! Wetherbee, they call 'im. 'Honest Wetherbee'--that's 'im." For he lived to the title. If it is honest to abide by every hampering regulation that makes you solid with the authorities; to split prices over a bit of inferior shell; to lose two weeks with your outfit in quarantine, voluntarily--that happened when the _Opalton_ brought a hot cholera scare and her passenger list camped on Friday Island--to share your stores with starving lighthouse keepers; to drink a set of hard cases blind and stiff and then, departing clearheaded, settle the whole damage yourself; to pay all bills square: in short, if it be the part of honesty to give the cash and take the credit every time, Cap'n Wetherbee played it. Amazingly--as a man might play an arduous game! Within six months Port Kennedy and all thereabout would have sworn by him; he had dined with the sub-collector and the h
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