on was driven back on the mere fact, which must always have been
tough for him. He had blinked it thus far, as I suppose was his weakness
to blink and to spin all manner of sanguine threads about the naked nubs
of things. But if he meant to tell, he had here to tell outright, though
I saw him wince....

"I found him in an awful hole down there," he faltered, "a kind of a
chandoo shop. And the stuff he's smoking now is--opium!"

* * * * *

I cannot say that either Raff or myself had arrived at any clearness
when we headed away into the maze of Colootullah that night. It was all
a bad dream, and it began badly, in a dog kennel of a ticca gharri that
racked us in tune to our own jarring thoughts.

We huddled together on the one bench, we two, though, dear knows, the
captain would have been a fare by himself. Sutton sat opposite quite
stiffly with his knees drawn aside, and the journey long said never a
word. And this was the next aspect we had of him, you will note: a
strained and silent presence and a pallid face glimpsed now and then by
the brief flicker of some street lamp. For he had seen what we had
not--Chris Wickwire alive, but Chris Wickwire transmogrified out of all
belief, the inmate of a hideous den in the city's vilest slum--and
somehow it set him sharp apart from us....

You must know there had been something very special in the bearing of
all hands toward the chief engineer of the _Moung Poh_. Every ship has
her social code. We had been a good deal of a family craft, as they say,
and in the curious way of such traditions this had come to center on
Chris Wickwire. If Raff was the sturdy patriarch, the chief had been the
prim and formidable maiden aunt of our little household on the high
seas.

I suppose to any outsider he must have seemed no more than a long-boned,
long-lipped stick of a Dumbartonshire Cameronian, as dry as the texts he
was always mishandling. But he had a value to us like a prized domestic
relic; we admired, derided, and swore equally by and after him. His
vast, lean height and face of a hanging judge, his denatured profanity,
and the intimate atmosphere of disaster, hell-fire, and general
damnation in which he moved--these were points of pride and almost of
affection.

"See that eye?" said a Newcastle collier cove newly translated third
engineer--we sampled some odd specimens for third up and down the
ports--"Ol' Chris, 'twas 'im done it. 'You red, raw,