among the curtains. Sutton had closed the
door, to lean there. It was very still. Except for the leering joss and
the monstrous embroidered things on the walls the rooms showed empty.
And the plaint began again, monotonous, muffled:

"Whaur's that pipe o' mine?"...

Raff was first to break the spell that held us. With a brusque gesture
he set us in motion, and we followed on from curtain to curtain down the
gallery, and at the end near the joss we found him we sought. He lay
propped on a charpoy in a nest of squab blue cushions. On a stand beside
him glowed a tiny lamp, and a yellow Eurasian lad was tending him as
perhaps the imps tend the damned. Evidently the pipe had been found; he
held the length of polished bamboo ready for the fuming pellet, and he
raised himself on an elbow as we three drew silently near and stood by.
"Chief!" said the captain, and stopped dead.

He looked up at us then, and it was Chris Wickwire, his very self. He
looked and looked and made no sign.

I think I might have been less shocked to see some change, some altered
trait to veil the normal image of him. But there was none. He was the
same, the same weather-beaten old tinker with the lean, long face and
hard-set jaw and the dour eye that could quell a mutinous stokehole at a
glance. In the midst of this evil and fantastic luxury he still wore the
same old shiny alpaca too, his regular shore-going and Sunday garb, and
a ragged bit of ribbon at his throat. Somehow that cut me all up.

"Wickwire!" began Raff again. "Come away out of that. What are y' doin'
here?"

No answer; the smoker's concern was for his pipe.

"Chief, d'you hear me? You're needed on board." The captain shook him
gently, and then not so gently.

"Drop it. We've come to bring you away. For any sakes quit that
devilment, now, will y'!"...

The figure on the couch made a languid effort.

"I'll grant ye--I'll grant ye the siller's weel enough for a change.
Aye, it makes a change." He wagged his head at us confidentially. "But
the bamboo's the best. It smokes sweet--varra sweet it smokes. An' that
unhandy thief of a boy--" He paused to draw lazily at the mouthpiece and
loosed a slow gout of vapor. "He's always mislayin' it somewhere--"

Raff cried a round oath and snatched the pipe from him; flung it down.
But the chief only sank back among the pillows and closed his eyes, even
smiling a little to himself, as one accustomed to the vagaries of
phantom guests....