t, ostentatiously reading a month-old copy of the London _Financial
News_. It was this incessant urge to inspire wonder which led him to
hint, indirectly, that he had been at school at the Charterhouse. Risky?
Of course it was risky; and I should never have plumbed the mystery but
for a most unimpressionable London purser who informed me there was a
ragged school for slum children in the Charterhouse district in the
city. Not that it mattered. We were not Macedoine's game. It was the
bishops and colonels and eminent surgeons who made the round trip of the
West Indies with us whom he wished to impress. Whether he was a fraud
or not, he certainly had acquired a way of ignoring common people such
as we who go to sea. I knew he would regard good old Jack from such a
lofty pinnacle that Jack would appear to him no more than one of the
Greek labourers who shoved the little wooden cars along and tumbled
their contents into the ship with a terrific clang of ironstone on iron,
and clouds of red dust. I followed up this digression in my mind and
arrived at the fascinating conclusion that if my recollection served me
sufficiently well, he would not recognize me. He never had recognized
me. I once had the pleasure of telling him that if his men didn't keep
my room clean and tidy I would knock his head off. He never looked up
from his desk until my grip on his collar tightened and his body began
to rock to and fro. He complained to the Commander, who had been told of
the incident by the Chief. 'Is this the engineer who assaulted you, Mr.
Macedoine?' says the Captain. Macedoine examined me with a distant,
preoccupied air, pressing his lips together and his eyebrows raised. He
shrugged his shoulders, opened his lips with a slight smacking noise,
and after quite a pause, a most imposing pause, he said he 'really
couldn't say; these workmen were all so much alike when they were
dirty....' Old Pomeroy--he was the first decent skipper the Maracaibo
Line ever had--swung round on his chief steward and retorted: 'Then
what the devil are you wasting all our time for?' He swung back to
his desk again, muttering and slapping papers here and there.
'Preposterous--doesn't know who assaulted him.... Never heard....' I was
standing as stiff as a stanchion waiting for the Old Man to say I could
go, when he saw Macedoine pussy-footing it to the door. 'Oh, and
Macedoine,' called the Old Man. Macedoine stopped but did not look
round. 'I expect the engine