calmly.
"You have a good name out here, though," he growled savagely without
looking at me.
"I am very glad to hear it from you, sir," I said.
"Yes. But you are not on the spot when you are wanted. You know you
weren't. That steward of yours wouldn't dare to neglect a message from
this office. Where the devil did you hide yourself for the best part of
the day?"
I only smiled kindly down on him, and he seemed to recollect himself,
and asked me to take a seat. He explained that the master of a British
ship having died in Bangkok the Consul-General had cabled to him a
request for a competent man to be sent out to take command.
Apparently, in his mind, I was the man from the first, though for the
looks of the thing the notification addressed to the Sailors' Home was
general. An agreement had already been prepared. He gave it to me to
read, and when I handed it back to him with the remark that I accepted
its terms, the deputy-Neptune signed it, stamped it with his own exalted
hand, folded it in four (it was a sheet of blue foolscap) and presented
it to me--a gift of extraordinary potency, for, as I put it in my
pocket, my head swam a little.
"This is your appointment to the command," he said with a certain
gravity. "An official appointment binding the owners to conditions which
you have accepted. Now--when will you be ready to go?"
I said I would be ready that very day if necessary. He caught me at my
word with great alacrity. The steamer Melita was leaving for Bangkok
that evening about seven. He would request her captain officially to
give me a passage and wait for me till ten o'clock.
Then he rose from his office chair, and I got up, too. My head swam,
there was no doubt about it, and I felt a certain heaviness of limbs as
if they had grown bigger since I had sat down on that chair. I made my
bow.
A subtle change in Captain Ellis' manner became perceptible as though
he had laid aside the trident of deputy-Neptune. In reality, it was only
his official pen that he had dropped on getting up.
II
He shook hands with me: "Well, there you are, on your own, appointed
officially under my responsibility."
He was actually walking with me to the door. What a distance off it
seemed! I moved like a man in bonds. But we reached it at last. I opened
it with the sensation of dealing with mere dream-stuff, and then at the
last moment the fellowship of seamen asserted itself, stronger than
the difference of
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