ed the cream of
the joke, for he certainly read. Thereafter one heard them in a quiet
hour, a harsh voice like the rasp of an ash hoist rising now and then to
protest and a lighter response, droning a line or perhaps breaking over
into merriment....

"Where's the chief?"

"Prayer meetin' on the after 'atch."

"Saved anybody yet?"

"Give 'im 'is chawnce," said the third. "Give 'im 'is bleedin' chawnce.
He'll fetch that myte to glory if 'e 'as to spatchcock 'im!"

But it ended as, of course, it was bound to. The one grew weary or the
other too insistent; their sittings were suspended.

For a time they were not even on speaking terms, and the very day we
were coaling at Calcutta--seven weeks before, you remember--they broke
suddenly on an open quarrel. What it was about none could say, but all
that afternoon the mate went strutting with a very pink face, while
Christopher kept bobbing up the scuttle to glower after him with a
long-drawn lip over his pipe.

"Did he say he's gaun ashore the nicht?" he asked me once, in a whisper.
"Aye, there it is, ye see," he added to himself. "Wae's me for the fool
in his heart! He's young--he's ower young. What he needs is to come to
gripples with raw, immortal truth for one moment. What he needs is a rod
an' a staff to comfort him--an' by this an' that," he breathed through
the pipestem, "I'd like to have the layin' on o' it!" The same night we
lost Wickwire....

* * * * *

Perhaps you can see now how hard it came for us to believe, as we
hastened on his rescue toward Colootullah, that this kind of a man, that
this particular man, had fallen the victim to a loathsome vice.

By what we could piece out from Sutton's report, at the time of the
accident, Wickwire had never dropped into the river at all. He must have
landed in one of the empty coal barges alongside--there had been one
missing next morning which later was picked up near the Howrah
Bridge--and so reached shore.

"He got hisself shook in his wits," said the captain, breaking a
silence. "Is that how you make it?"

"Something of the kind," I agreed, and recalled a lad from Milford Haven
I once was shipmates with who took a clip over the head from a falling
block and for a month thereafter was dumb, though otherwise hale enough.

"It'd be an almighty clip over the head would strike the chief dumb,"
said Raff simply-- "or anything like it."

Sutton said nothing.

Meanwhile we went p